H&I* Fires, 12 May 2007

May 12, 2007 | | Comments (18)

Open post for those with something to share, updated through the day. New, complete posts come in below this one. Note: If trackbacking, please acknowledge this post in your post. That's only polite.

You're advertising here, we should get an ad at your place...

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John (a.k.a. Noonan, the cheater who stole a $9k march on the next charity drive.) at OPFOR makes a definitional argument I largely agree with and have argued over at Alan’s once or twice.

The Fort Dix dix may not be terrorists by the strictest or most accurate definition, but, like LTC P, I think they have passed well out of civilian law into the realm of military law and should be dealt with in said legal realm.
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J over at Armchair Generalist and Warhistorian (Prof Grimsley) seem to think this is a brilliant bit.

I don’t. Anyone care to explain why it isn’t shallow thinking (China and Iran get to see what our military does ergo we lose!) to me in the comments? Really, I don’t get it. It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread the way they talk about it, but I don’t see it that way.
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Mental health for veteran’s story. This isn’t good to hear. Keep talking to Boyda, Armorer. This bulldog needs to fed, stat.
--ry

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Let's have some fun and see who the naval geeks are.

Anybody recognize, and know the source, of the forward gun on this PT boat?

Where'd that forward gun come from, eh?

-the Armorer

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Jules Crittenden has an *excellent* round-up of milblogging, much from in-theater, as a smorgasbord of goodness. -the Armorer

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Ah, crap. A patrol got ambushed, with 5 dead - and three missing, two soldiers and an interpreter. We take casualties in war, I'm fine with that - but in this war, POW status has thus far been meaningless with the enemy, being used instead as an excuse to engage in particularly vile forms of barbarism. Here's hoping we get lucky and find them fast - and in time. Especially for the interpreter, who is probably at greatest risk for being treated horribly. -the Armorer

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*A term of art from the artillery. Harassment and Interdiction Fires.

Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute.

*Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is*

The UAVs (oops, can't call 'em UAVs anymore - they're now Unmanned Aerial Systems... some Colonel got his Legion of Merit for that change...), er, um UAS's we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now.

I call the post that because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to. It's also an open trackback, so if someone has a post they're proud of, but it really isn't either Castle kind of stuff, or topical to a particular post, I've basically given blanket permission to use that post for that purpose. Another term of art that might be appropriate is "Free Fire Zone".

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18 Comments

By John of Argghhh! on May 12, 2007 9:46 AM
Brecher certainly has an interesting view, once you strip out the gratuitous snark that threatens to make his piece unserious. If there's a flaw in it, I think he puts a frisson of planning where has mostly been a conflation of inertia and opportunism, and flavors it with his distaste for Cheney and anything not firmly rooted in RealPolitik. In other words he's almost implying a plan and seeing patterns in chaos - and imputing geopolitical motives where simple economics can also explain. He's seeing faces in the clouds. But that doesn't mean that the *clouds* don't have meaning, and there is value in examining them in and of themselves - because from clouds, rain falls. The rivers are running high where I live, so I have an interest.
 
By Trias on May 12, 2007 12:49 PM
IMO the 'terrorist' term has been grossly misused and was never that firmly defined in the public in the first place. It is an emotional response word used well beyond the widely accepted form in 9/11 where real and obvious terrorism occurred to cover far more dubious areas like opponents in the Iraq war. In the end the terrorist label has been flung all over the place. Every crooked government with an opposition found it fashionable to use the term. Democrats and liberals that didn't fall in line with the war were flung with it. It was even flung on Americans and the military. So now people are desensitized and calling these six terrorists or not doesn't have all that much impact in the public either way. Kinda sad IMO hard to have a 'war on Terrorism' after all if alignment on what a terrorist is, is so very poor. It's an interesting pov from the 'war nerd' article I suppose but I am with the armorer on it being opportunistic not pre planned. I have argued before about a lot of unfortunate unintended consequences of the Iraq war. I suppose his more conspiratorial pov suggests intended consequences to him instead. I do think his basic argument of those that stayed out of the Iraq war winning in a sense rings true though there are limits. Iran may or may not need worry about jihadi nutcases but places like Russia and France are not entirely out of the firing line.
 
By Slick Rick on May 12, 2007 12:59 PM
Re: the deck gun is 37MM. The half-hoop thingy is the magazine.
 
By Big D on May 12, 2007 1:11 PM
I've never been that impressed with the War Nerd. He has a history of sneering at us, and this is just another opportunity to mock. He also fails on grokking causality. If Iran wins, it will be because it intervened in every way except sending troops across the border (oh, wait...) and received no real response, nothing to make it think twice. During the Rush To War(tm) that took basically the entire year of 2002, quite a few people pointed out that Iraq, with its central location and causus belli, was a great beachhead from which we could mess with and hopefully bring down its hostile neighbors. It was looking really good for about 6 months after the statue fell, then we sat on our bayonets.
 
By Rod Thorsen on May 12, 2007 1:19 PM
And that gun came from the P-39.
   
By OlafTheTanker on May 12, 2007 2:49 PM
The 37mm forward gun was originally the nose gun of the Bell Aircobra, modified for PT service.
 
By Albany Rifles on May 12, 2007 5:00 PM
It's a 37mm T9 auto cannon taken from P-39. The first ones came from crashed fighters on Guadalcanal as a field installment and then when P-39s/P-400s were pulled from service the PT Boat guys took them mounted them on the bow of the boats
 
By John of Argghhh! on May 12, 2007 5:44 PM
Very good lady and gents! Maggie gets extra credit for the link! I honestly figured you would get it quickly, and am pleased you met my expectation! I just think it's kewler than the dickens the 'skeeter boat sailors were so inventive in arming their boats! As for War Nerd, as I said in email elsewhere, he has interesting insights, but he spends too much time flailing his politics and it gets in the way of his ideas. Leaving aside his seeing patterns where I suspect none exist.
 
By Maggie on May 12, 2007 6:29 PM
I am a Navy girl!
 
By Blackhawk on May 12, 2007 9:26 PM
Ummm...not to piddle on the parade, but am I the only one for whom the post title says "12 April 07" instead of, say, "12 May 07"?
 
By John of Argghhh! on May 12, 2007 9:40 PM
[whistling merrily] Whatever are you talking about, Blackhawk? [removes stale cheetos from Ry's stash, replaces with rusty thumbtacks dipped in dung]
 
By Richard Hopkins on May 12, 2007 10:13 PM
The deck gun is a 37mm cannon salvaged from a wrecked P-400 (export version of the P-39 Aircobra).
 
By Princesa Malhumorada on May 12, 2007 10:29 PM
Rusty thumbtacks? That is harsh. Hey Ry, here's a fresh bag of Cheetos.
 
By Blackhawk on May 13, 2007 12:28 AM
To John: "he was spurred on by the conviction that the world needed his immediate presence." I often have this...um...conviction. To Ry: "Neither fraud, nor deceit, nor malice had yet interfered with truth and plain dealing." To my sweet, sweet Dulcinea: "Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed". Now if you will excuse me, there are windmills that need tilting...
 
By ry on May 13, 2007 1:25 AM
When I read some of his other stuff I see nuggets, but also pure oddness. I mean, the guy who taught me China watching has reams of evidence that PLA/AF/N learned TONS about us by watching GW and our operations in the Balkans(with the RUMINT I've heard about that Chinese newspaper/Embassy bombing, they would only speak of it off the record, it kinda makes sense why it happened and how it became a media disaster---someone using the Balkans as test bed.). If we take his argument seriously, that getting involved with a tangential enemy learning from us, we should never go anywhere because an observer or less than neutral party will learn about us and how to exploit revealed weaknesses. That element just strikes me as silly. ANd yet, certain parts of his 'Myths of WW2' piece make a lot of sense(with others being well, rants I would make on too much Mountain Dew, too little sleep, and too little ability to think clearly.). I really didn't want to make this about Brecher, in this space. More about the individual piece. I see some 'duh, captain obvious' stuff and some tortured logic in play here. Given that, I wonder why J and the good Prof like it so much? ------ Hmm, Blackhawk's got me tied in a loop. Like the dog from ancient Rome who couldn't choose between two bones. I'm not sure to what he refers(is it advice about how to conduct myself? Does it refer to one of the articles? Which one?). No fair. Shakespeare be nice, but damn it I hate it when it causes an Asimovian robot-like loop.;) --- Hmmm. Real cheetos! Thanks Maggie! I hope you can eat all the M&Ms you want and still pull off that Queen Gorgo thing!(scampers away to hidey hole with cheetos). We may be anemic, John, but not THAT anemic.
 
By ry on May 13, 2007 1:29 AM
Trias. yup. You've basically given words to my thoughts and feelings on that r: the word terrorism. Simply being in opposition to the US doesn't make one a terrorist. It's over used. I'd rather we kept it to a strict def'n, the legal one actually, rather than have it tossed around like it is.
 
By Justthisguy on May 15, 2007 2:51 AM
Actually, I think the current definition is wrong, too. I don't think it possible for a private person to be a terrorist. I think that only government folks can be terrorists. It was the French Revolutionary government which invented "terror" in that sense. What I think you're talking about are people whom I would call "bandits", or "dangerous lunatics" or "pirates". Yup, "pirates", that's it, folks who do kp&r on their own, without protection or acknowlegement by any recognized nation-state. Pirates, hang 'em when you catch 'em. (not to be confused with small-mouthed armed pacifists who mind their own business and think nation-states are pirate conspiracies, of course) I except the USA from the category "pirate conspiracy" because they started out honest and are mostly still so, but I do dread the completion of some trends I think I see.