When a drone attack takes out a Taliban or Al Qaeda of Haqannyi network leader and aides, it degrades their capacity in several ways:
1. Kills off experienced top leaders, strategists, armorers and aides.
2. Creates a climate of fear for them. They never know where we are going to strike. That is why they have to move from house to house and camp to camp on a regular basis.
In Vietnam, the SOGs and Nightfighter helicopters/forces claimed that “We rule the night”. They took that advantage away from both the VC and the PAVN. Caused a lot of defections.
The nights in Vietnam are damned dark when you are out in the boonies. Once the VC ruled the night but when we got smart and started in Special Ops counterinsurgency tactics, the game was changed and the Commies lost, big time.
3. Forget about “blood feuds”. Many tribes work openly for our enemies. They are getting what they gave and some are turning away from the extremists because of it.
Those who are going to be Islamic extremists will find a way to be so without us.
4. The war on terrorism is endless because the ideology is endless, unless you hit the enemy so hard that it takes the fight out of them (Ain’t gonna happen under President Messiah).
However, we are winning the fight in the Philippines against the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic fanatics and even the Communist guerrillas are on the run. Looks like it is also happening in Somalia and parts of Yemen.
In my opinion, we are not hitting some of them hard enough. A JDAM or Hellfire missile is nice. A B-52 raid that totally destroys an enemy encampment is much more demonstrative and destructive. Known as “Death From Above”. - Silent and total.
Look and see what the French do in Mali. If they merely liberate towns and don’t root out Al Qaeda in the Magreb and local affinity groups, then it will be a long war.
If they cut off towns and clean them out once and for all, they will win.
The same for hitting AQ and hostile Tuareg columns of trucks. Bombs and rockets are nice. Napalm eliminated them, totally. Most feared weapon we used in Vietnam.
We are losing men and women in ambushes in Afghanistan because we don’t have napalm in our inventory any more. It is the best weapon to destroy enemy ambushes from the tops and sides of mountains and valleys, as well as to destroy buildings on the ground.
From the films I have seen from Afghanistan, we are nickel and diming the war instead of hitting the enemy with everything we have.
War story from Iraq. My son was, among other things, his squad’s M-249 light machine-gunner. A qualified sharpshooter (qualified at 1,000 yards). Killed some Saddam fedayeen who were using women and children as human shields (when he was allowed to fire back).
One day his unit was under sniper fire from an abandoned building several hundred feet away. He had a hard time zeroing in on the sniper because he kept moving from window to window, firing a short burst, and then moving on again.
My son worked over each window with short bursts but couldn’t really see the sniper. All of a sudden, an American tank came by, fired one shell directly into the building, blowing both it and the sniper up. End of sniping.
My son was pissed because he really wanted to take out this guy. However, the tank shortened the threats to our men and ended the battle with one shot. Moral of the story, blow the shit out of the enemy and let them know that they can’t hide, can’t run, and can’t win.
Word gets around after heavy losses.
The Israelis took heavy losses several years in southern Lebanon by trying to root out Hezbullah from heavily fortified positions in a rocky environment. A couple of napalm strikes would have ended the conflict within a day or two. Trust me, nobody wants to get hit by Nap, and even Islamic fanatics know that when it is used, their time is up and those 72 virgins don’t like making it with “Crispy Critters”.
If we are going to wage a war, we should do it right, the first time. Unfortunately our leaders both political and military are cowards, more afraid of “world opinion” than in taking losses, those of our sons and daughters.
I’m with the grunts, not the brass. The grunts know what the war is really about. It is our job to make sure that they have the weapons and the will to win it.
Believe it or not, I think we’re saying a lot of the same things. There’s nothing wrong with drone attacks per se, but they have to be for a clear cut military purpose. Just killing the enemy isn’t enough, even though drone attacks are clearly doing that.
There has to be a military objective. What’s the end game here? It should be compete and total enemy defeat. You could argue it’s OK to kill 10,000 civilians to kill one enemy soldier in their midst. Unless that soldier is very, very important and his death directly relates to achieving victory, then the attack isn’t justified.
That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know the intelligence behind these drone attacks, but I’m definitely disturbed by them. For one, how do we know our intelligence sources aren’t using US drones for nefarious purposes. Are these people really our enemies, or is there something else going on? For another, we’re apparently killing a lot of civilians in the process.
If this was necessary to victory, then drone attacks might be justified, but what are the victory conditions for this war on terrorism? How do we win? Or, are secretive drone attacks just another aspect of US foreign policy from here on out?