“Did you notice, too, that the story is a) by a woman and b) “to be continued”?”
Yeah, I did notice that. There’s some knee jerk pity party playing in the piece, but that’s to be expected from any journo who’s only real understanding comes no higher than tourist level.
Y’all might want to gird up your girdles because Distributed Ops is how things are going to be. Not because we’re short on men, but because communications, weapon and support technology make it possible.
Smaller units working larger areas with command pushed downward as far as functionally possible to the smallest element. This is a pretty big development.
Also, all wars have their ebb and flow, priorities shift and reshift as situations develop. Don’t let the tourists confuse you with post card quality communications.
Still, remember the SAS motto: "The mission first, but your people always." The "people always" part sounds like it might be flagging here. This guy's how many weeks on deployment, and he's got a morale problem with his guys just wanting to start wasting people? Which would be one thing the bad guys want -- an information warfare win. Like the moo's who I think set up Haditha as a IW operation, making sure the good guys saw them by "turkey-peeking" at them and then running into the house where all hell broke loose. And later on the family went to the press, making sure everyone heard about it.
BTW, did you see there's going to be/has been a Frontline story about Haditha?