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To: Former Military Chick

This is a never ending battle I'm afraid. There will always be someone playing the "one upsmanship" game trying to kill or maim our troops. We are "up" right now thankfully.


15 posted on 03/15/2006 8:18:08 PM PST by SouthTexas (Hillary supported! UAE defeated! Thanks guys.)
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To: All
On the whole, Bush & Rumsfeld have done a good job at running this war and letting the military men run the show. But it seems to me Rumsfeld has made one signifiant mistake in not putting more manpower and effort into stopping the IED problem by seizing explosives and heavy ammunition from the insurgents. After three years, we should have been able to locate and seize almost all of the IED explosives used by insurgents. I'm sure these explosives are dispersed all over the country, but Iraq isn't that big and we should have been able to find and seize this material by now.

Rumsfeld is a great leader and manager, but he's also a former corporate executive who likes to get the job done with a minimum amount of manpower and expense and it really looks like he hasn't put enough manpower into the IED problem. This is a key strategic issue in Iraq and we have to solve this problem right now. Solving the IED problem strengthens political support for the war in the US, reduces the leverage of the insurgents and makes them more willing to work with us to form a unified, non-sectarian government.

It looks like we've been putting a little too much emphasis on the "soft" military effort of rebuilding schools and infrastructure at the expense of inadequate manpower employed on the IED prolbem. We need more men getting into these insurgent areas and pulling up floorboards to find these explosives. We can't do all this investigative work with high-tech methods like UAVs and satellites. We need more boots on the ground who are searching and destroying the explosives and ammunition used to kill our troops with IEDs. A sharp reduction in all the bombings in Iraq will go a long way towards improving Bush's approval ratings and sustaining support for the war at home.

18 posted on 03/19/2006 11:14:10 AM PST by carl in alaska (The raven watching news of the Florida recounts stirred and spoke. Quoth the raven..."NeverGore.")
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To: SouthTexas
Yeah, we need to put more effort into stopping this problem at its source by seizing the explosives and ammunition used to build these IEDs. If we don't solve the problem at its source, then we're going to be stuck in endless rounds of tactical adjustments by both sides that do not produce a decisive strategic win for our side.


19 posted on 03/19/2006 11:18:42 AM PST by carl in alaska (The raven watching news of the Florida recounts stirred and spoke. Quoth the raven..."NeverGore.")
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