Wehrwolfen
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Dems Clueless about Combat
By Russ Vaughn
February 21, 2013
Warfare has progressed geometrically since I was a young sergeant on the ground in Vietnam. The huge advances in computers and electronics have given our American forces capabilities never before possessed in any of our previous wars. Among the most widely known of these is drone warfare, wherein an unmanned, armed, aerial vehicle enters enemy airspace, guided by an office-based pilot somewhere many thousands of miles from the actual conflict, and launches lethal missiles against detected targets.
To this old infantryman's way of thinking, that is a great concept. The idea of being able to win wars from the air goes back to WWI; the concept was used to great effect in WWII, when strategic bombings in Germany and Japan greatly degraded the fighting ability of both those countries and undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of American servicemen's lives. I can't begin to express my gratitude to those Air Force and Naval aviators who flew over my ground positions and delivered lethal ordinance on my enemies in the hills, mountains, and rice paddies of South Vietnam. But for them, I might not be writing this.
So keep all that in mind when evaluating my take on this new Defense Department medal for those who pilot the drones. We are going to create a new class of combat award for a group of technicians who, through the incredibly complex inter-connections between their U.S.-based control centers in the docile deserts of Nevada or some other undisclosed remote location and the combat zone, are able to provide close air support for our ground troops or air strikes deep within enemy territory.
Let's picture this:
Somewhere in Afghanistan, a small team of American soldiers, commanded by an Army captain, occupies a forward outpost. They are so far into hostile country that they must and can only be supplied by helicopter. That means then that they get only the minimum necessities. They have no running water source, so they are persistently and continually hungry -- and hygienically ripe, indeed.
At 2:00 am on a cold morning, they get hit by a large enemy force that has every intention of overrunning them and killing them to the very last man.
At 2:00 am on a cold morning, they get hit by a large enemy force that has every intention of overrunning them and killing them to the very last man.
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Articles: Dems Clueless about Combat