Archive for the ‘Military’ Category

General Norman Schwarzkopf, RIP

Thursday, December 27th, 2012

News outlets are reporting that retired four-star General Norman Schwarzkopf has died at age 78.

Schwarzkopf oversaw the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm, crushing Iraqi forces in a mere four days. American forces were comprehensively better equipped and better trained than their opponents, and enjoyed unquestioned air superiority, but Schwarzkopf’s plan for liberating Kuwait, including the “left hook” into Iraq, was cleverly conceived and well-executed. If George H. W. Bush had only let him take Baghdad in 1991, much deadly and expensive unpleasantness could probably been avoided.

Syria and Guns

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

OK. Thanksgiving break over.

I’ve come across a couple of blogs from the world of international conflict you may want to take a look at:

  • Brown Moses tracks developments in the Syrian civil War, with a special focus on the ordinance expended and captured there.
  • The Gun follows the more general word of international military arms, including transfer and use in combat.
  • Both are worth checking out.

    Your Top Stories, All Mashed Together

    Friday, November 16th, 2012

    To much going on. Here’s a sampler:

    First up, Unions kill Hostess. By calling a strike against a company that was already in bankruptcy, against the advice of the Teamsters, who had already taken a look at the Hostess books, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ensured that instead of a 6% pay cut, unionized workers would take a 100% pay cut. Way to go, unions!

    Israel still seems to be gearing up for a ground offensive in Gaza. And by firing rockets at Tel Aviv, Hamas pretty much guarantees that the only faction in Israeli politics urging restraint will retink their position. “I get a lot less liberal when you want to kill me.”

    Lefties are trying to boycott Papa Johns for daring to lay people off because of ObamaCare. “If this is anything like the Chick-fil-A buycott, and you want Papa John’s for dinner, you’d better get your order in now.” It’s amazing that any business in America ever has to declare bankruptcy, given there are so many liberals around who can tell them exactly how much profit they “need”…

    Former general and former CIA head David Petraeus testifies on Benghazi. He says his report said the attack was launched by al Qaeda, but higher-ups in the Obama Administration deleted the reference. The more we hear about Benghazi, the more it appears that Fox News was right.

    Considerations for an Israeli Ground Assault on Gaza

    Thursday, November 15th, 2012

    Stratfor considers the implications of an Israeli ground assault on Gaza, concluding that it would look an awful lot like Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza.

    The biggest difference is that that back then, Egypt wasn’t run by Islamist assclowns.

    This also gives me a chance to link to this totally off the hook article on Israel’s urban warfare tactics in Nablus in 2002. As far as I know, it’s the only useful application of French postmodern literary theory in the history of mankind…

    Israel Pounds Hamas

    Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

    Today Israel launched strikes at multiple Hamas targets in Gaza, including one that took out Hamas military commander Ahmed Al-Jabari. This follows a weekend in which Hamas launched more than a hundred terror rockets into Israel.

    Russia Today provides video of that particular strike:

    Yeah, that’s going to ruin your whole day.

    In retaliation, Hamas fired off 13 more rockets at Israel…all of which were intercepted.

    There’s at least some indications that Israel is about to launch a major ground offensive into Gaza.

    Stay tuned…

    Sexy Girls (With Bad Judgment), Sexy Guns

    Monday, November 12th, 2012

    So it turns out that Paula Broadwell, purported mistress of (now) former CIA director David Petraeus, used to moonlight as a machine gun model:

    While not my favorite of the genre, who doesn’t like a woman who can handle a firearm? (Though she’s more in the “wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers” than “jaw-dropping gorgeous” category; then again, this seems sadly common in today’s Democratic sex scandals.)

    As for the video itself? Whenever a gun manufacturer starts talking about “revolutionary” designs, I start rolling my eyes. It’s an obvious PR/grant bait reel, and should be viewed as such.

    Barack Obama Stands Down Throughout History

    Saturday, October 27th, 2012

    “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
    For he today that stands down with me
    on Crispian’s day shall be my brother”
    — King Obama V, October 24, 1415, the day before the English surrender at Agincourt


    “Come and take it. No, really, come and take this cannon off our hands. It’s just cluttering up the place. We’ll just stand down while you haul it away.”

    — Colonel John Henry Obama, commander of Texas forces at Gonzales, before handing over the town’s cannon to Francisco de Castaneda, October 2, 1835, ending the Texas Rebellion


    TO PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
    FROM FT SUMTER STOP
    UNDER BOMBARDMENT BY REBELS STOP
    REQUEST PERMISSION TO COUNTERATTACK STOP

    TO FT SUMTER STOP
    FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
    STAND DOWN STOP
    STRIKE COLORS STOP
    SURRENDER FORT STOP

    — Telegram exchange, April 12, 1861, a month before the United States government recognized the Confederate States of America.


    General George S. Patton, Commander, U.S. 3rd Army: Request permission to relieve 101st Airborne surrounded by Germans at Bastogne.

    General Dwight D. Obama, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in Europe: Attack two German armored divisions? That’s just nuts! Stand down.

    — Field message exchange December 23, 1944, three weeks before the Roosevelt-Hitler Peace Treaty was signed


    Gen. Douglas MacArthur: Pusan perimeter now stable. Request permission to launch Inchon landing under Operation Chromite.

    President Harry Obama: There’s no way we can defeat so many red Chinese. Stand down, withdraw from Pusan, and evacuate all U.S. personnel from the Korean peninsula.

    — Message exchange, September 8, 1950


    Gen. William F. Garrison, Commander UNOSOM II: Two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters have crashed in central Mogadishu following raid on Aidid compound. Request permission to send rescue force in to retrieve survivors.

    President William Jefferson Obama: Stand down. Our troops could never hope to survive such a hostile urban combat environment. We’ll just have to leave those men behind.

    — Message exchange, October 3, 1994, three days before the American withdrawal from Somalia

    The Obama Administration’s Response to Benghazi, In Easy-to-Understand Graphic Form

    Monday, October 22nd, 2012

    Some devastating critiques of the Obama Administration’s non-response on American officials in Benghazi.

    Bing West:

    A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why?

    Snip

    Our diplomats fought for seven hours without any aid from outside the country. Four Americans died while the Obama national-security team and our military passively watched and listened. The administration is being criticized for ignoring security needs before the attack and for falsely attributing the assault to a mob. But the most severe failure has gone unnoticed: namely, a failure to aid the living.

    Snip

    For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve.

    Mary Steyn:

    Obama, Biden, and Panetta met in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. We know Charlene Lamb at the State Department was watching events in real time. It seems likely Panetta was, too — and perhaps even Obama.

    When something bad happens at a consulate on the other side of the world, very few nations have the technological capability to watch it in real time.

    Even fewer have fighter jets and special forces within less than 500 miles — or about the distance from Boston to Washington.

    Yet the commander-in-chief chose to do nothing. He chose to let the enemy determine the course of events, how long the battle would last, how many Americans would die. The only choice he made was to hold a photo-op at their coffins.

    Many Obama partisans continue to downplay the attacks in Benghazi as though they were indeed a mere bump in the road of no particular importance. Therefore, I’ve decided to put the incident in a graphic form that perhaps even they can grasp:

    Mark Steyn Lays Waste to the Obama Adminstration’s Libyan Lies

    Saturday, October 13th, 2012

    Mark Steyn’s comprehensive takedown of all the Obama Administration lies and incompetence in the Benghazi terrorist assault and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens is so righteous it deserves a link of its own.

    “The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

    Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

    She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets.

    Snip.

    Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.

    Snip.

    For most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12.

    Snip.

    Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

    Snip.

    Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.

    Read the whole thing.

    So What Was It Romney Said About Libya, Again?

    Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

    So remember right after assault on our Libyan embassy in Benghazi, Mitt Romney issued a statement, then clarified those statements the next day?

    Let’s roll the video, shall we?

    Remember how the press jumped all over him, said it was a potentially campaign-ending gaffe?

    Since then we’ve learned that:

  • The Obama Administration lied about embassy assaults being the result of riots over an anti-Islamic YouTube video.
  • In fact, they now admit that there were no protests at all.
  • The Libyan embassy had repeatedly asked for additional security and were refused In fact, their security was reduced. “We couldn’t even keep what we had.”
  • That the American embassy was being guarded by an unpaid militia made up of shopkeepers.
  • That UN Ambassador Susan Rice was still peddling the “protest” line long after the Administration knew it was a terrorist attack.
  • This video timeline might help:

    Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?

    Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.