March 29, 2008

Yon on the War

Michael Yon is in Mosul, where we thought the bulk of the fighting in Iraq would be over coming weeks as Iraqi Army units supported by American forces are preparing to route out the last of al Qaeda's significant urban presence.

I shot him an email yesterday to see what he may have heard, and he got back to me this briefly this morning to point me to telephone call he recorded with Glenn Reynolds. You can hear it here.

He's also got a new book coming coming out, and you can follow the links to pre-order it at the link above.

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March 27, 2008

Great Moments in Military Procurement History. Or Not.

I have a pistol made in 1927, and have owned battle rifles and carbines made from 1945 to the Vietnam War-era. In these firearms I've more often fired modern ammunition of recent commercial manufacture, but I've also used surplus military ammunition, decades old. For many collectors of military firearms, shooting aging surplus ammunition is a commonplace proposition, and the results are generally acceptable.

There are however, several wars on, and civilian shooters in the United States are having to compete with government contractors who scrounge up that foreign surplus ammunition in large quantities to provide to U.S. allies under contract. The result is higher prices for quality surplus ammunition, or in some instances, little serviceable ammunition at any price.

The New York Times, God bless them, actually broke an interesting story today about one of those ammunition contractors, a 22-year-old Miami man who now seems to be in a great deal of trouble for selling Chinese ammunition he scrounged up on the world market and repackaged, which is a violation of federal law and his contract.

The relevant parts of this story are how the man in question, Efraim Diveroli, slipped through the cracks of the procurement system to become a supplier, and how some scrap-worthy ammunition was shipped to our allies. I'm sure as details of that SNAFU become available, they'll work to make sure that similar unvetted characters responding to vague RFPs can't game the system again.

I would take minor issue with the Times and other news outlets, however, for suggesting that older ammunition is inherently flawed or obsolete ammunition.

Ammunition can degrade over time based upon the chemical compounds used in its construction and the environmental variables under which it is stored. Ammunition manufactured to high standards and stored in specific, controlled conditions, however, can last almost indefinitely. Ammunition manufactured in the 1960s and properly stored can certainly still be viable and reliable, while ammunition created last week using substandard components may be scrap before it leaves the assembly line.

The author of the NY Times piece who broke the story, C.J. Chivers, deserves respect for some excellent investigative journalism.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:26 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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March 26, 2008

Misreporting the Second Recent Iraqi Offensive

One of the wonderful things about modern communications technologies is that just about anyone can comment about popular culture and breaking news events as they happen. The downside? Just about anyone can comment about popular culture and breaking news event as they happen, and some of them work for news agencies.

The best examples of why this isn't always a good idea are the short-sighted, knee-jerk reactions of some journalists and pundits to the recent crackdown by the Iraqi central government on rogue Shiite militias and criminal gangs supported by Iran that have been operating in Baghdad and southern Iraqi cities.

For months and years we've had critics of the Iraq War whining that American forces would always be forced to take the lead in combat, that Iraqis were lazy and untrainable, and that Iraqi security forces were too corrupt to ever be regarded as a competent stabilizing force against rogue militias, Iranian infiltrators, and criminal gangs.

And yet as Iraqi security forces moved into Basra and elsewhere to combat criminal gangs and militias extorting profits from the nation's oil industry meant for distribution to all Iraqi's by the central government, do we hear anyone critical of U.S. and British involvement in Iraq praising Iraqi government forces as they mount their own major operations with limited U.S. involvement?

No.

Instead we get McClatchy's Washington "Truth to Power" Bureau running a headline that the attacks were "threatening success of U.S. surge." The truth, of course, is the exact opposite of what McClatchy reports.

Because the surge was successful and coincided with the Sawha movement among Sunni tribes, al Qaeda has been pushed into Mosul and the surrounding Ninevah province, where Iraqi security forces took the lead weeks ago in an operation that hopes to surround, cut off, and kill the last significant Sunni terrorist strongholds in Iraq.

Because of the success of the surge and the increasing competence of Iraqi security forces, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decided that it was time to lead an offensive in Basra, a city long controlled by competing Shia militias that are often little more than criminal gangs. Maliki has given the militias 72 hours to lay down their arms or face "the most severe penalties."

Iraqi-led missions are targeting both Sunni and Shia extremists in hopes of asserting the monopoly of force any country must have for stability, moves that should be seen as encouraging for Iraq's long-term future.

Sadly, most reporters and ( like-minded bloggers) seemed bogged down in viewing the still-breaking news stories in Sadr City, Kut, Basra, and other Iraq cities through the prism of short-term U.S. domestic political consumption, an arena in which they would hope to exert a corrupting influence.

For many of these people, success is not an option, initiative is to be panned, and gains made are to be spun away or minimized until a Democrat wins the White House and the war can be properly lost.

Unfortunately for them, the Iraqis seem to be taking an acute interest in determining the future of their nation on their terms, not those terms dictated by the media, Iran and others championing defeat.

The Prime Minister of Iraq is all but publicly daring Muqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian allies to engage Iraqi government forces to determine the future of Iraq, a battle that the Iraq government's forces would win convincingly.

These are moments of growth for Iraq's fledgling democracy worth celebrating... providing of course, you want the nation to succeed.

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March 25, 2008

The Sadrists' Mistake

The Guardian claimed that the "surge" in Iraq was about to unravel because of strike threats from Sunni militiamen they reported last week, but if you head over to a newly-redesigned Pajamas Media today, you'll see that the threats of a strike were resolved weeks before the Guardian stories ran.

The stories were an attempt to grab defeat in the media while the threat of actual defeat on the ground seems ever more fleeting.

Yesterday, left-wing surrogate McClatchy Newspapers—they even has the ridiculous "Truth to Power" tagline—attempted to claim defeat from the opposite perspective, noting that some of the Sadrists in Iraq seem to be feeling a bit rambunctious after a long period of relative silence.

The left side of the blogosphere, always willing to latch on to even the hint of bad news without even pretending to vet their sources, were quick to declare this as reason 6,578,902 that we've already lost the war in Iraq and it is time for our troops to come home, or to at least within spitting distance.

Reality, of course, is another story.

It has long been known that at some point the Iraqi government would have to take on the criminal element that gravitated to the Sadrists, and unfortunately for these Sadrists, they waited far too long to engage. They haven't stood a chance of a military victory against IA forces for at least two years, which is why al Sadr himself continues to issue ceasefires from the safety of Tehran. Recent attempts by Sadrists to use threats and the force of arms for political ends is now likely to consolidate the power of the central government behind a string of Sadrist defeats in Basra and Baghdad.

Those on the left seem to think that any deviation from stasis in Iraq is a sign of failure, but the fact is that for a society to be stable, the government must first establish a monopoly of force.

Part of that involves either incorporating or destroying militias. In Sunni provinces, the Iraqi government is slowly incorporating the Sons of Iraq into both security and non-security positions even as they root-out the remains of al Qaeda. In Shiite areas including parts of Baghdad and Basra, this means eliminating the influence of criminal gangs hiding under al Sadr's banner.

The conflict isn't exactly a welcome development—even a temporary increase in violence will impact the innocent—but the longer-term consolidation of power by the federal government requires an eventual dissolution of Sadr's militia. Most hoped that such a dissolution of al Sadr's power would be purely political in nature, but the Sadrist gangs seem to have made the mistake of engaging Iraq's modernized security forces directly, the resolution of the long-expected inter-sect conflict will likely be more immediate than most expected, and much to Muqtada al-Sadr's dismay.

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March 20, 2008

Not Ready To End the Fight

Via AP at Hot Air, Marine Cpl. David Thibodeaux's stirring response to MoveOn.org and the Dixie Chicks.

Somehow, I don't think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton (or their supporters) will be big fans.

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March 11, 2008

Fallon Gonged in Favor of Petraeus

Admiral William Fallon, Commander, U.S. Central Command, is resigning:


Adm. William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, is resigning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

Gates said Fallon had asked him Tuesday morning for permission to retire and Gates agreed. Gates said the decision was entirely Fallon's and that Gates believed it was "the right thing to do."

Fallon was the subject of an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed him as opposed to President Bush's Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

Gates described as "ridiculous" any notion that Fallon's departure signals the United States is planning to go to war with Iran. And he said "there is a misperception" that Fallon disagrees with the administration's approach to Iran.

"I don't think there were differences at all," Gates added.

I suspect that there will be those on the fringe left who will be screeching about how Fallon's resignation is the prelude to a preemptive war with Iran—probably before I even finish this sentence—no doubt suggested by a certain Esquire article that stated the quite fanciful claim that "it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone..." to keep Dubya from bombing Iran into the stone age.

Barnett seems to have completely overlooked the fact that it has been Tehran, not Washington, that has publicly promised not just war, but genocide (but then, in the same article, it was Burnett that claimed Fallon was "waging peace" with the Chinese in his prior assignment, even as Fallon's replacement expressed concern over massive increases in Chinese military spending, so consider the source), but that probably has little to do with his resignation at this time.

No, as Blackfive rightly notes, Fallon's retirement comes not because of friction with the Bush Administration (though there may have been some), but because General David Patraeus is coming to town, no doubt as the Administration's favored choice to lead Central Command after his implementation of COIN strategy in Iraq.

My guess? Lieutenant General Raymond T. Odierno, who executed the surge so well, backfills Petraeus as Commanding General, (MNF-I).

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March 06, 2008

Homegrown IED Targets Manhattan Military Recruiting Station

The NY Times City Room blog has the latest details:


The police have attributed the blast to an improvised explosive device, and police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the device had been placed in an ammunition box like the kind that can be bought at a military supply store. Mr. Kelly spoke with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a news conference at 9:30 a.m. in Times Square. The authorities are looking into a possible connection to two earlier bombings at foreign consulates in Manhattan, in 2005 and 2007. Official said that in todayÂ’s attack, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle. Subways and traffic are running normally through Times Square.

They also have a useful slideshow of images from the scene, which gives us just enough information to start making some inferences about the bomb and the bomber.

Looking at images 1-3 in the slideshow, you'll note that the damage from the blast seems relatively minor. Image 1 give you a pretty good idea of precisely where the bomb was placed, as you can see how the shrapnel radiated out from a central point, which appears to have been (as we face the building) almost dead-center in front of the plate-glass window.



Slightly enlarging the same photo and cropping it to focus on the recruiting center front helps to see the central radiating point of the blast a bit better.



You'll also note in this closer view, and in the second and third images of the scene, that there was no attempt to make this an anti-personnel weapon, as there is no evidence of there being ball bearing, BBs, or another other sort of shrapnel that would form an intentional secondary blast mechanism.

The time of the blast was around 3:43 AM, when pedestrian traffic in the area is typically light and the recruiting station was closed. From the time of the blast and lack of shrapnel, we can make the guarded assumption that causing casualties was not the bomber's intention.

We can also infer that the bomber had no intention of destroying the targeted building as well, as the blast was small, and the ammunition can that carried the device could have easily held far more explosives.

From the choice of target, lack of shrapnel, and low amount of explosives used, I think it only logical to conclude that the blast was political in nature, a violent though purposefully less-lethal bomb, if you can ever call an improvised explosive device "less lethal." For these reasons, I doubt it was the act of Islamic extremists.

This was an act of domestic terrorism.

I do not, however, feel comfortable blaming any specific anti-war group for this act, or even pinning this as an anti-war act at this point in time.

Anti-war groups, in general, are non-violent in nature, and those that lean towards the anarchist fringe that are violence prone tend towards vandalism, and generally, don't have the technical expertise to manufacture even such a simple device.

Whoever built this bomb may have sympathies towards the anti-war movement and/or anti-military feelings, but I would be surprised to find them affiliated officially with any specific anti-war or anti-military group, and would be even more surprised if anyone inside one of these groups had advance knowledge of the attack.

There are some news accounts noting that there were similar minor blasts carried out against the Mexican and British consulates in New York in recent years, each using blackpowder inside inert hand grenade casings, also carried out by a bomber on a bicycle.

This seems quite plausible, but we won't know more until the FBI announces the findings of their investigation.

Update: A reminder, via Ace-of-Spades, that the peace-loving left isn't always so peace-leaving:


Thirty-Eight Years Ago Today

March 6, 1970 at 11:55 a.m.

Three members of the radical activist group known as the Weather Underground, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, blew themselves straight to hell when the bomb they were building, which was intended to blow up a dance at Fort Dix, exploded in an otherwise quiet New York neighborhood.

Had they been better bomb-makers, instead of killing themselves, they would have killed an untold number of American soldiers. In the name of peace.

Luckily, the Weathermen's expertise at bomb-making left much to be desired.

The Weathermen's hatred of the United States manifested itself in the bombings of the U.S. Capitol building, New York City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the National Guard offices in Washington, D.C. The Weathermen's leader, Bill Ayers summed up the Weathermen's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."

Yes, the Bill Ayer's above is the same man that has had Barack Obama as a dinner guest, and who served with Obama on the board of directors of the left-leaning Woods Fund from 1999 until 2002.

Diana Oughton, one of the deceased, was Ayer's girlfriend until some of the 100 pounds of dynamite they intended to use to bomb a non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix detonated.


Update: Hot Air has surveillance video of the bike-riding bomber approaching the recruiting center, and the NYPD thinks they have his bike.

Was the suspect smart enough to wipe his prints from the bike?

Update: The bomber sent an anti-war manifesto to eight NY Democratic Congressmen.

Update: Coincidence? Authorities are now saying the anti-war activist that mailed the "We did it!" letters to Congress had nothing to do with the recruiting center blast.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:48 AM | Comments (97) | Add Comment
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March 05, 2008

Savages

I've watched for several days the story that has grown out of a short, grainy video that shows a Marine in Iraq throwing a puppy to its death.

The act shown in the video, whether it shows a real sadistic act of animal abuse or a Marine with a warped sense of humor throwing a stuffed animal, is sickening.

Perhaps even more sickening is the mob mentality that has overtaken some of those who have viewed the video, who took it upon themselves to post the names and home address of the Marine alleged to be in the video and that of his family members, inviting other Web vigilantes to commit violent acts against them.

It is understandable to be outraged by the act shown whether is if fake or real, but does any rational human being think that an appropriate response to such an act would be the rape or murder of innocent family members, as some have called for? As for the Marine at the center of the controversy, he is currently under protective custody because of threats against his life.

There seems to be far more outrage over this video of animal abuse than far more sadistic and frequent reports of greater acts of brutality committed against human civilians by militias, terrorists, insurgents, and criminals in Iraq. I wonder why that is.

Where are the Internet detectives on Digg when al Qaeda in Iraq shows video of a car bomb that wipes out innocent families? Why are these Youtube and blog denizens not clamoring to discover the identities and home addresses of Islamic fundamentalist thugs that film decapitations and torture?

Sadly, there is far less outrage for these human victims, and occasionally, there are even attempts to rationalize their inhuman brutality.

I'm sure that if they were asked about it today, every politician in Washington would tell you that they were "shocked and appalled" at the actions of the Marine in the video, and yet, most Congressional Democrats, including Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, would help set the stage for far worse in Iraq with a headlong, unconditional withdrawal that would make such depravity far more possible.

They seek to knowingly and willfully abandon Iraq to those would would do far worse than throw that nation's civilians down a ravine, because they think the war costs too much, or because it is unpopular with their constituents.

So many of the same people who have whipped up so much outrage over a dog are indifferent to greater depredations visited upon Iraqi women and children... and yet they claim that the Marine in the video is the savage among us.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:27 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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