Frontline’s ‘The War Briefing’: Doom, Gloom, and Despair
If the program does not cover how mountain warfare is different from flat land warfare, turn it off. You can throw much of all the wonderful ideas of sea level to low elevation warfare away at high elevations. If the NATO allies had bothered to get their alpen/mountain troops to Afghanistan, we would be much better off. When half of 10MD was given a hot province in Iraq, it calmed down quickly – morale and capability of mountain troops is superior to that of flatland troops. The Canadians demonstrated their waning capability by still fielding the best mountain troops to Afghanistan and the proceeded to stage a winter offensive that mapped out the al Qaeda and Talibani training camps on the border, plus do some odd fighting now and again. That was considered even by the locals as ‘impossible to do’. Not MSM impossible, but people who live up in arid, thin atmosphere areas during the winter.
This is not a numbers game, but a professionalism venue: field solid, mountain and alpine troops and you will succeed. Whenever you see ‘a few brave men’ holding off thousands, you can bet it is usually in the mountains somewhere, where a few, brave men can bottle up regular land armies. I’m getting to think we should ask the Iraqis to lend us one of their two mountain divisions in Afghanistan… bless the Canadians, Brits, Aussies and those willing to stand up and *fight* the right way. The rest of NATO? Put up, or shut up. Fight better, smarter and harder than the natives and their foreign hangers-on and you can and will win. The only ‘diversion’ on mountain troops is not funding them properly… which the US paid for by not doing so in the 1990′s and not having them when Afghanistan opened.
And for that I blame both parties. Especially the people bitching now about the ‘savings’ had back then. Thanks for nothing. Those complaining *now* were the cause of this back in the 1990′s.
