Posted on 12/11/2004 11:26:43 PM PST by Rockingham
British military thinking, Lt Col Bathurst conceded, had changed in Iraq, moving closer to the American concept of overwhelming force. Orthodox peacekeeping would, he said, "fail from the outset. Strength is respected here. If anything, we've shifted more than the Americans."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
we may not have enough troops in Iraq.
but when we go after someone, they know that one American soldier is worth about 50 Iraqis. Just look at the casualty counts.
Of course to the American public, American soldiers are priceless.
/john
Sooner or later they all come around.......
I guess nothing's changed since the confrontation between Coningham and Patton.
Sounds like the Brits were stuck in WWI mode, which lost them a lot of the Middle East and a lot of British troops in the process.
That's the way it works. Just ask a bunch of people in Fallujah. :-)
Hell has officially frozen over.
I imagine writing citations doesn't work too well.
The British like to see themselves as a wise Greece to America as a powerful but inexperienced Rome. But often the British act like a fussy, elderly, out of touch uncle with delusions of grandeur second only to the French. Or as my mostly Anglophile great-grandfather in Dublin is reported to say: "Even when the British are not in charge, they insist on believing that they ought to be in charge."
Nothings changed since the American Revolution......
Agreed.
Must've hurt their pride when they wound up ineffective and exhausted after WW2, while America took the lead.
I keep hearing that remark and we keep kicking their butt. When the war started, we had the 4th ID stuck in Turkey and we still kicked their butts in record time. I remember the quotes that people will be reading about "Franks' plan for a hundred years because it was so successful.We actually had overwhelming force, but half were stuck in Turkey.
When I tell people that we have "only" lost 1000 in the war, they say I'm cold hearted and don't care about the soldiers. That is NOT true, but only a comparison to previous wars. I have to wonder how America would hold up if we lost the kind of numbers we lost on D-Day. I would like to have more troops, but in reality they would just be more targets. The main thing is to let the troops come home when their time is up. Their can't be anything worse than expecting to go home and being told you can't. I also think it's time for the Iraqi's that are joining the army to step up. They can't keep running away when the sheite starts and expect us to take the brunt. That was the problem(1 of them) in Nam. Their was some brave, but most wouldn't fight like they should and we just got weary of loosing men for nothing. The Iraqi's need to be told daily how lucky and blessed they are for this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Let's rock! - Anon US Grunt
BAD TITLE... You should have used the original title
because the story here is much more important than the
petty squabble you focus on.
Another Terrorist Stronghold is about to be Re-taken
by the Brits this time.
Worth a read.
only US troops would be able to handle a job of this size with the numbers on the ground. It is that simple.
Of course it would be ideal to have a few more thousand or so, but the job is getting done either way.
By comparasion, the Soviets would have used about 300,000 troops to do the same job.....
In life or death matters, overwhelming force and an itchy trigger finger is what has kept this great nation alive for over 225 years
The full article was posted earlier, which is how it came to my attention.
The soldiers from Scotland's Black Watch regiment didn't stick around to determine whether the dead driver was an aspiring suicide bomber or just impatient to get through the backed up traffic.
In postwar Iraq, contrasting images have percolated through media coverage of the alliance: the martial Americans looking to crush the insurgency through force and the world-weary British, choosing accommodation over provocation. The inference was that British soldiers were better suited, by tactics or temperament, than Americans to cope with the insurgency here.
The October deployment of the Black Watch to these badlands controlled by Sunni Muslim extremists provided the first chance to compare the two countries' operating styles under the same level of danger.
Until the Black Watch moved north, the British military had been operating exclusively in southern Iraq, where the violence has never matched the mayhem in the American-occupied sector around Baghdad. The relative calm allowed the British to adopt a less bristling posture on patrol, to wear their soft regimental berets instead of Kevlar helmets and keep their weapons lowered rather than peer at Iraqis through gun sights.
It also gave rise to a certain smugness among British officers and media, which cast the contrast as one between the "heavy-handed" American approach and the less hostile tactics of "the lads." There were jokes over beers in Basra that, to an American, the concept of winning Iraqi hearts and minds meant one bullet to the heart, one to the head. The British media even coined a phrase to describe the British style: "softly, softly."
The Black Watch tried to bring that culture north with them when they merged operations with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit based south of Baghdad in a deployment that ended Saturday.
The British began the assignment patrolling in their berets. They handed out leaflets in Arabic explaining they were a "Scottish" regiment in case Iraqis mistook them for Americans, and proclaimed they had only come to help build a safe and free Iraq.
Insurgents responded with two suicide car bombings and a roadside bomb in the first week of operations, killing four British soldiers and gravely injuring two.
The shooting of the Iraqi driver at the checkpoint occurred just an hour after the second car bomb had blown the legs off two of the Black Watch gunner's colleagues.
"The threat here is at the other end of the spectrum from what we faced in Basra," said Black Watch Capt. Stuart MacAulay, sitting on the edge of a bunker at Camp Dogwood with a map of the area spread in front of him.
"After the suicide bombings against us, I went to an American soldier I know here and put my hands up. I said, 'I confess, I was one of those who sat around in Basra criticizing your approach.'
"And I'm embarrassed that I criticized American tactics without ever being here and without having met them."
Excerpted from the LA Times. More here: British Way in Iraq Yields to Harsh Reality
By comparasion, the Soviets would have used about 300,000 troops to do the same job.....
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