Posted on 02/22/2008 12:45:02 PM PST by Dawnsblood
An answer to the question of why Hillary hasn’t gone after him over it: Because, like me, she’s heard enough old stories of troops being underequipped not to doubt any new ones too strenuously. Even the Pentagon is skeptical but Jake Tapper was put in contact with the captain by Obama’s campaign and corroborated most of the details with him. The guy commanded the platoon back when he was a lieutenant, which explains the odd incongruence between rank and unit; the ammo shortages were related to grenade launchers and to .50 caliber machine guns, although only during training (problems with finding replacement parts for the weapons persisted into the theater); and they were short on humvees from day one and sometimes had to rely on pick-up trucks.
As for the Messiah’s essential claim that “they were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief,” that’s a little more nuanced:
“The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or “Dishka”) on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.
Stuart Koehl acknowledged this morning that troops do, as they always have, occasionally scrounge for weapons when they’re in a spot but mooching off the enemy isn’t regular practice, and even Obama’s source doesn’t suggest that it was. We’ll chalk up the exaggeration to, shall we say, audacity.
Milbloggers, everything squared away here?
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Of course the shortage of weapons and ammo among our servicemembers is nothing compared to the shortage Barak envisions for our populace at large.
What are Obama’s vote tallies on funding the troops?
Somehow this doesn’t have much traction when your party has been trying to cut off funding for the war and generally been a pain in the B...over funding the military.
We know that Osbama will tie the hands of the military and give them even more difficult rules of engagement..and send more lawyers into the field.
He has voted for all of the funding bills.
1. That the platoon was split up between Afghanistan and Iraq. The officer in question says guys transferred out of the unit in ones and twos and weren't replaced, and that he isn't sure how many of them went to Iraq.
2. (and this is the more important one) That they had to scrounge for Taliban weapons. That's explained above.
Thanks
Obama claims the troops are not given enough equipment by the commander in chief. So Mr Bush is supposed to be on the ground with them personally handing out weapons? Unreal.
Ain't true, that.
Oh, but they ARE all in favor of the Afghanistan action, they say.
It’s just that damn Iraq war that’s causing all the problems with supplies, deployment, and the world’s view of us.
Wow. Sounds like my first year in the Army under Jimmy Carter in 1979. We didn't have ammunition to train with and it was PEACETIME let alone war!
True or not that is beside the point...the POS O’Bama led the American people last night to believe it had just happened recently...
And if Obama wins, we can relive those good old days.
Quartermaster in Chief?
Which funding bill did he not vote for?
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