Posted on 11/13/2009 7:14:59 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army says morale has fallen among its forces in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war.
A new battlefield survey taken several months ago found instances of depression, anxiety and other psychological problems about the same as in 2007 — but there was a significant drop in unit morale. The Army also says there is a shortage of mental health workers to help soldiers, partly because of the troop buildup started this year by President Barack Obama.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
I think you’re right. Kind of like when the media talked us into a recession back in the Bush years. I saw morale decrease a little while I was there, but not as much as this article tries to make it sound. Turn our guys loose and let them win, and morale will go through the roof. Not like that would ever happen though.
And yes, I think that was a run-on sentence.
Unofficially, do you think these rules of engagement are a good idea, long term? You guys are obviously seeing some short term pain in the form of higher casualties. I read a media article that said GI's aren't allowed to shoot enemy spotters unless fired at.
(I personally think the whole softly-softly counter-insurgency stuff isn't all it's made out to be. In my view, it's putting the cart before the horse. The surge in Iraq worked because the tribes were exhausted. The reason we were able to work on protecting the population was because the population wanted to be protected - the alpha males among them who were interested in holy war had been mostly killed off, and al Qaeda was pushing on a string in trying to get the remaining zero-testosterone non-warrior types to fight Uncle Sam. In trying to engage and hand out free stuff to the Afghan tribes before they're exhausted, we are merely subsidizing the Taliban, who will surely extract this new-found surplus from every tribe we help.
It's sort of like giving civilian aid to the Gaza Strip, which is Hamas-controlled territory. Hamas doesn't have to spend as much on social services and reallocates this cut in the social services budget to the weapons budget).
I would say the majority of the people over there just want to be left alone to do their thing. Some of them want to come to the West and make it big, some of them want to live a simple life in the mountains like their families have for the last 3,000 years. We don’t want to piss those people off, and we should do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties. This isn’t WWII, where we can bomb enough civilian targets (Dresden, Hiroshima, etc) to eventually convince the enemy leadership to surrender. But at the same time, I think we’ve gone so far in our attempts to avoid any collateral damage that we aren’t allowing our guys to find and kill the bad guys.
Turn ‘em loose and let ‘em win.
Doesn't being a street organizer/thug in Chicago count for anything ? ;-)
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
I love that quote!
Miliant
They must be concerned about the potential loss of their ‘diversity’. Like that idiot, Gen. Casey. s/o.
President Diddle-de-Doo calls medical corpsmen "medical corpsemen" for crying out loud.
If ever there was a president who should defer to his military in regard to military decisions, it would be President Barak Diddle-de-Doo.
“U.S. Army: Troop morale falls in Afghanistan”
Another chapter in Obama’s Plan to lose Afghanistan.
When the last US helicopter lifts off from the roof of our embassy in
Kabul, only then will Obama say “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” to all his
Muslim admirers.
Other than, "I don't want to hear this shit about dying for your country! Let that other poor bastard die for his!"
Sadly, though, WWII now seems to have been fought to assure the survival of Josef Stalin and the USSR. Thomas Fleming does a good job of describing this in his book, The New Dealers War; the war within WWII
Patton wanted to fight the Russians right away while we were still armed for war and strong. Truman and the Democrats said no and much of what followed has led us to where are today.
US Troops’ morale may be falling, but after reading stuff like this, you can bet the Taliban’s morale is heading way up.
The war in Europe certainly was. The US government was deeply infiltrated with Soviet agents at the policymaking level. Why was the US Army held back from taking Berlin? Whose idea was "Operation Keelhaul" (as it was called)?
Japan was also a threat to Stalin from his east, meaning he had to keep troops available to fight on that front also. The U.S. took much of that pressure away. Had Japan conquered China, which they were well on the way to doing before we got involved, that would have been a continuous threat to Stalin no matter what happened to Hitler.
Very unfortunately our terrorist enemies have been greatly emboldened because of Obama cowardice, defeatism, indecision, and total incompetence.
I'm more interested in a poll taken after 0 and the media defended the Texas Jihadi, came up with new excuses to continue dithering on troop deployment, and decided to try 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and friends right there near ground zero in NY of all places!
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