I heard Marcus Luttrell describing the mission on which the rest of his team was wiped out and I thought that it was the stupidest idea I ever heard of. And believe you me, that is saying a lot; I worked in the Pentagon at one time.

That SEAL team apparently was supposed to sit up there on a mostly barren hilltop and monitor the movements of some known hostile leader. Maybe that will work in downtown New York or in some virtually uninhabited dense forest, but based on pictures of the terrain it would seem to be insane at best and a suicide mission at worst. I mean, what were those guys supposed to do, pretend to be from the Fuller Brush Company or Dominos Pizza? I don’t think we have invented a cloaking device yet and that is what it would take.

Admittedly, that was pretty early in our involvement there. I guess the engineer in me is showing but I think that remote instrumentation is the way to go with that. We did quite a lot with that in Vietnam, including along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it was successful to some degree.