Replies

I guess I am a bit surprised that nobody has commented on this article. I read about this on athread started several weeks ago but there were no details. I have participated in similar war games before and they can be quite arbitrary but Piper threw them a curve and they swung and missed. He is correct in asserting that conventional wisdom is a pile of manure. BTW, John Pike, the career sniper from the sidelines, is full of it as usual.

People around here don't want to comment, because if they allowed themselves to believe it for even one instant, it would scare them sh*t-less.

$250 million, and the powers-that-be (those idiots in uniform still left from the Clinton era, who are more political knee-padders than soldiers) refuse to learn from it. Any outrage out there? Hello? Is this thing on?

Oh, yeah, I just can't wait to send my kid into the military.

The war games were run by perfumed princes.

In real life, the grunts would have blown the small craft out of the sky. Remember when grunts took down a civilian Iranian airliner by mistake?

One reason US troops are better in tactics than Arabs is that low rank individuals are allowed to think...Which is why, in every war since the revolution, the "generals" who are good on paper are quickly fired and replaced with officers good at war.

I've been on "war games". Our unit was wiped out an hour before the games started. The next year, one of my med techs (a 89 lb female) wiped out the enemy trying to infiltrate the medical unit. War games are to learn, and learn you do, despite this naive article.

The reason for no freeper comment is that we figure this is anti american propaganda.

Heck, if even a lowly ex national guard soldier like myself can figure that out, imagine freepers who actually are soldiers.

I hardly consider this anti-American propaganda but there are several crucial facts here:

The overseers of the exercise presumed that Saddam is not creative. Saddam's cozy relationship with Russia and China may have earned some tactical advice for his defense. Further, the exposure of this exercise could be a ruse to make Saddam attempt to emulate Piper's strategies. Hopefully our tacticians a taking that into account AND the fact that Saddam might do something completely different per recommendations he may or may not have received.

Fortunately amphibious landings will be unlikely to take place. Most likely the soldiers will stage in Kuwait and Turkey and march or ride across the borders.

Additionally, Saddam runs a secular regime with unprofessional soldiers who are not driven by devout nationalism. I think it unlikely that his soldiers would kamikaze although it would be impossible to rule out him contracting with al Qaeda or other lunatics to handle his extraterritorial dirty work. The tenebility is dubious.

It may be the prevailing assumption that getting into Iraq will be easy and driving the enemy out of the fortified positions in the cities will be the hard part. Piper exploited the assumption to the fullest (making the assumption a very bad one). Hopefully we won't be making any more bad assumptions when the real thing comes along.