New vehicles allow GIs to find, remove hidden IEDs, Roadside Bombs! (GNFI)

Archy is a one-man archive of military history.

Most everything I've picked up along the way I've either survived to tell about because somebody else showed me how, or better, I knew about beforehand by virtue of something imparted me to somebody who knew more about a particular item, situation or possibility than I did, and I had learned enough that it came as no surprise to me.

It's really amazing how well you'll do if you just aren't surprised, or if you are, don't act like you are.

So I owe it to others who showed me the way when I was a pilgrim. And the price of admission is that I do the same, and pass on what I've picked up to those who may profit from it and not find out the hard way at a higher price. It's just a matter of taking care of your partners and pals.

-archy-/-

Well, I didn't mean what I said offensively. :o)

I *DID* say you were the real deal. :o)

Oh, not taken with offense, not at all! And it's certainly true that more of my activities now are more involved with logistics procurement or design considerations, or observations of the changes that have come over the last couple of decades- especially in materials technology- than with door kicking or low crawling in the weeds.

But though age has indeed taken its toll, particularly on my eyes, I can still get off the porch and run with the big dogs every now and again. And I hope to shortly, and hope their conduct is sufficiently noteworthy and professional as to deserve repeating to a general audience with little firsthand knowledge of such things. And if I pick up an affection for one or two bits of equipment similar to if not quite identical to some of that U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan are now using, that too might be interesting.

-archy-/-

I don't like the whole idea of this great hurrah arising from the use - finally - of mineclearing vechiles and robots. These mines are remotely controlled. Our little anti-mine rover detects a mine, and then what happens?

Well the mine can be blown and there goes our little rover. That is a win for the terrorist. Not as big a win as notching some kia and wia stats, but a win nevertheless. And what the terrs will do now is plant two bombs. We can't afford to trade one rover per buried artillery shell.

We must be proactive. Cordon the Sunni triangle off and clear it out! The clearing out process should be linked to the continued resistance of the people in that area. When there is a bomb planted the reaction should be to bulldoze entire blocks and make it public. Those people need to fear the U.S. more than the Mulluhs and terrorist.

All this school building and infrastructure creation has nothing to do with winning the peace and beating the terrs. We could build up Iraq to the level of Saudi Arabia or Turkey - and what would you have. Well those two countries are - in Saudi's case, the nesting place for Islamic terrorism and in Turkey's case a country which democratically stopped our 4Th Division from opening up a Northern Front and shortening the war by half.

You can be a compassionate conservative but not a compassionate combatent.

Heck, I might volunteer for that duty...sounds as exciting and a lot safer than bull-riding at the rodeo!

UNtil the day the bad guys figure out they need to use 21 lbs of TNT....

I'm very grateful to the young soldiers who brave that sort of stuff every day. Our country will be far better off when these guys eventually leave the military and rejoin civilian society.

"We must be proactive."

Johnson and MacNamara screwed up in Viet Nam by being too timid to take the fight home to the commie scumbags. Nixon understood that he had to get tough to bring them to the negotiating table, but by then it was too late to go for a complete victory--he had promised the American people a withdrawal.

It seems to me now that we are in danger of making a similar mistake. The two situations are different in many ways, not least being that the enemy is not centralized in a location as circumscribed as North Viet Nam.

I don't care what Bush says about Islam being a "religion of peace" (barf), Islam is at war with us. The enemy is somewhat amorphous in that it involves several countries, some of which have little in common but Islam and hatred for us. The situation is further complicated by the underground terrorist network, which seems to be able to operate anywhere, and by the infiltration and occupation of Christian countries by Mohammedan fifth columns.

I don't see any "peace process" as having a chance to succeed, except one: expel Mohammedans from Christian countries, kill astoundingly large numbers of Mohammedans in their own countries--in the process depriving them of the capacity to damage us--and then use whatever means are necessary to locate and kill the underground terrorists.

Like a doctor too squeamish to operate on a cancer, I very much doubt that Western Civilization has the stomach to do what is necessary to save itself. Next to sexism, racism, and aversion to sexual perverts, the greatest sin in the liberal lexicon of anathemas is genocide, and any country taking any effective measures to deprive Islam of its capability to attack Christendom would surely be accused of genocide.

I could be wrong, though. I have been saying for a couple of decades that the only way to suppress terrorism is to burn the wasp's nest, but that the US would never have the nerve. Bush proved me at least partly wrong on that one by thumping Hussein. But will he have the nerve to take the next step--Syria--and the one after that--Iran? Egypt is also a cesspool that needs flushing and a severe pruning of the gene pool.

Who will do it?

"We're not talking the Norden bomb sight here; I think they mean "potential bomb sites". Stars and Stripes should have caught this. For some reason the confusion of these two words seems to be getting very common."

This is an error that would easily pass both a spell check and a grammar/context check. It just demonstrates that there is no substitute for proofreading. But I still can't catch the instances where I have revised text and end up duplicating the last word of one line as the first word of the next line.

Tplant that produced these: Lucas-Harold

Several years ago I was visiting someone at a hospital in Elmira, NY. An elderly man who was visiting his wife in the same room mentioned that the Norden bomb sight was manufactured locally. At the time the Elmira area was filled with abandoned plants so my thought was that if the Norden bomb sight was Elmira's last claim to fame, that said a lot about the depressed economic state of the area.

But as you point out Lucas-Harold was in Indianapolis. So perhaps the man I spoke with was not even correct.

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