Friday, December 24, 2004

 
Crusadering They Want?
Or: "Have Gun, Will Travel(To Iraq)" -Paladin?

-won't spend much time on a subject about which I know little, but wonder if building and deploying several hundred of the canceled "Crusader"(designed to replace the Army's "Paladin" system) mobile artillery pieces would have made at least as much sense as trying to turn Humvees, Bradleys, and for all I know, Chev-ees into M1 Abrams...
VDH writes: "Does anyone think the now-defunct Crusader artillery platform would have saved lives in Iraq or helped to lower our profile in the streets of Baghdad?"
Gee, Vic, if you were crawling out of a burning vehicle while a crowd of armed and unarmed ululating assholes were closing to "cut up your remains" you just might appreciate the ability to call in fire support from a 155 mm gun capable of inflicting serious hurt to a distance of 40 km. Granted, while the Crusader doesn't have a "low profile," this might not be the chief concern of those who face a real danger of going to their "Gawd like a soldier" in something "transformed" by technology which one suspects is not far removed from the cable series, "Pimp My Ride."[No dissing intended of any Yankee, Homie, military contractor or in-theatre scavenger ad hoc ingenuity here. And Professor Google just informed me that the above program did "do" a Humvee on Dec. 18th.]
I haven't the foggiest about the armor thickness of the Crusader vehicles, but pictures suggest it's more robust than many of the targets that our troops ride around in-let alone the walls of a tent. I also don't know how current(and prospective Crusader)artillery response times compare to those provided of late by air power, and suspect that its use might be similarly
constrained by political considerations.
It was argued that the air transport required for deploying the Crusader would be better used for rapid insertion of more lethal stuff for the conquest of Iraq. Well, just as others have noted that we've had plenty of time since the Clinton presidency to rebuild our armed services, we've had plenty of time to move heavy stuff into occupied Iraq.
VDH also makes the point made by others: "Offensive action, not troop numbers alone, creates deterrence; mere patrolling and garrison duty will always create an insatiable demand for ever more men and an enormously visible American military bureaucracy — and a perennial Iraqi dependency on someone else to protect the nascent democracy." However, apart from noting that it was a mistake to call off the first assault on Fallujah, he seems to have little to say. Also, it should be noted that the out-of-uniform war criminals of Fallujah exacted a relatively high number of coalition casualities in proportion to their own. It would have been far better to use our air power(and artillery) to make the rubble bounce than to have used it in dribs and drabs. This might have taken a little longer, but considering the political opinions of most Fallujans, as exemplified by an Iraqress "bitch-slapping" one of our Marines (as was reported today) because of damage done to her house, the husband(age 54) of that barbarian fedayeeen "Barbara Frietchie" should have died "like a dog," and her "yon gray head" should have been put on a pole.
Running out of time, and will only say that we should leave Iraq after we use some rolling thunder to give millions of Iraqi Sunnis a fate equal to or worse than that suffered by the ethnic Germans who left their homelands forever in the closing months of WWII.