We Need To Change Strategy In Iraq
July 12, 2006
Jake Collier
(AP Photo/Brian Cassella, Pool) |
I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of jumping into the cold black The Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina with an M60 machine gun where I was lost for three nights. It was toward the end of training to be in Special Forces, popularly called Green Berets.
I'm a big fan of Special Forces. As part of Special Operations, they literally won the Afghanistan part of the war we're now calling the war on terror. Navy Seals, and Air Force Special tactics soldiers, as I understand it, make up the rest of Special Ops.
Too often in typical military fashion, the Pentagon planners have their heads up their fourth point of contact (paratrooper slang for posterior and more often said somewhat crudely) in Iraq.
We need to be there with the same sorts of operation we had in Afghanistan as opposed to conventional forces along with National Guard and Reserves. Staying with conventional forces is a formula for failure in almost every situation but trying to fight an urban guerrilla warfare-amazing! I can hardly believe it!
If we want to carry the fight to al Qaeda and the crazies in Iraq, Special ops is the only way to do it. We need to be ripping their asses anew in terms of making them pay.
(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) | The Marines could possibly handle it because they are great at disguising what they do . But, what a good "A Team" of Special Forces could do is make a "cell" pay and pay dearly for what they did-a kind of "I will kill you and all your family." A couple of these and it gets attention. But, unfortunately, we are in a situation where we have to make sure the news media is on the "know" before we are operational.
What most don't realize about the Special Ops folks is that they love what they're doing. Most are a little older and somewhat crazy. They are trained killers, honed to a fineness which makes them tough as nails and as fearless as some movie character where it is all make believe.
WAR AIN'T NO DAY AT THE BEACH. The general public doesn't have any idea overall and politics is so discouraging to the process. In Iraq, we either have to get a handle on it, quickly or get the hell out and give it over to whoever is the strongest.
(AP Photo/Brian Cassella, Pool) | Special Ops is an offensive approach as opposed to what we are doing now as defensive. As long as we sit back and let our asses get kicked and our young soldiers die, picked off literally, nothing is going to be changed. When you are dealing with crazies, you have to have crazies to counter them. We have a "force" in the Special Ops.
I'm reading stuff that looks like we might be getting the message but not sure as long as continue to operate as we are in Iraq. The terrorist network is probably pretty happy. They really don't have to worry about us going after them. We're in a global fight and Spain and other targets surely reinforce this. We have to quickly shift our focus, or quagmire is the only game in town.
I've been advocating this Special Forces approach since Vietnam. We could have handled the Vietnam missteps and probably not be where we are today had we left the Special Forces in place and not introduced conventional soldiers. As soon as we brought in conventional units, it all went to hell, in a sense, because the VC and NVA and mostly Ho knew that they could outlast us.
Special Forces crazies they would have stayed in Vietnam forever because they love the fight. And, Ho would have realized we were not going home and would have sincerely sued for peace. Just my belief. But I am a midget in the system. Who listens to me?
This article was revised from an article written April 03, 2004 entitled "Avoiding The Quagmire In Iraq."
|
