Subject: txt gwot - heroes -
... The commander in question is the commander-in-chief, who has made it the policy of his administration to reduce troop deployments in the “bad war” (Iraq) while increasing the number of boots on the ground to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. While the President has followed through on the latter, the former has yet to happen in any substantive way and our troops have paid the price for this political sleight of hand...
One of the 5th Stryker’s units, the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment (1-17) has been particularly hard hit since arriving in Afghanistan last fall, suffering twenty-one combat deaths in one battle in the Arghandab district alone. One of the battalion’s company commanders, Capt. Joel Kassulke was replaced after that action, a move that angered some of the Captain’s troops, according to this Army Times article. The problem, some soldiers said, was not their commander, but mismatched training:
The battalion had spent much of the previous two years training for combat, but preparing for the wrong theater — until February, when it got orders for Afghanistan, 1-17 was scheduled to deploy to Iraq.
However, 1-17 soldiers said their training, which had been focused on highly “kinetic” urban warfare drills such as room clearing, did not change much to accommodate the change in mission. “The COIN-intensive fight here … isn’t so much what we trained on,” said 1st Lt. Kevin Turnblom, Charlie Company’s fire support officer.
“We trained [in] urban fighting in Iraq and then they give us Afghanistan,” said Staff Sgt. Jason Hughes, Weapons Squad leader in 1st Platoon, Charlie Company. “The principles are the same but the details are day-and-night different, and we’ve learned that the hard way over the last almost five months.”
The story did not go unnoticed by military bloggers, many of whom expressed disgust over the transfer. Greyhawk, a popular military blogger among veterans and those currently serving in uniform, seethed with contempt:
Those months of training and preparation were scrapped (one example: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan) so the phrase “Barack Obama diverts 17,000 soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan” could appear in newspapers.
Not only was moving the 5th Stryker ill-considered, it was also unnecessary, at least as far as military (rather than political) necessity was concerned...
“Bush lied – people died” was a popular leftist mantra for the better part of the last decade. Given the mismanagement of the current commander-in-chief, perhaps it should be replaced in 2010 with an equally pithy, and more honest, couplet: Obama shilled – soldiers were killed.
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