There’s been all sorts of stuff just begging to be ballgunned (TM) lately. I won’t play catch up, if you read the Ball Gunner then you’re obviously a person of refining cast among the common rabble. Congratulations.

But I simply can’t pass up what is currently happening in Afghanistan. It has sneezed rigor on to these arthritic bones of mine. Plastered across Fox News even as I type is “NATO and Afghan troops to take back villages from the Taliban.” I doubt Taliban commander Mohammed Omar himself could have picked a better line to set the stage for what’s coming.

What the gulls in Washington haven’t figured out is that the front has shifted from Iraq back to Afghanistan. Iraq is done for by any and all estimates. The hapless goobers in the big media have snuggled up to the “security gains” of late, except nobody has really let slip the slimy truth that we are paying all sides to play nice and behave for awhile. No one is asking, because once that question gets asked someone is just going to be FORCED to ask, “Well, what are they spending the money on?” and the short answer is that they are making down payments on dead Americans, collaborators and rivals with our own money. The British financed their own defeat in Afghanistan long back when Kipling was writing about it. Now, we’re doing the same in Iraq.

But since we’re feeding our own flames in Iraq, the folks we’re fighting, the ones we still believe are some clueless ‘tards with an AK and an RPG, are shifting funding, logistics and operations to Afghanistan. The story is that the Taliban has “seized” a bunch of small towns around Kandahar, the Ball Gunners speculation is that there wasn’t any “seizing” like when the Germans “seized” Stalingrad (however briefly) or the French “seized” Dien Bien Phu. These sorts of “seizings” imply that you fought your way in, I’d imply the Pashtun “seizing” the area around Kandahar is more like Raiders fans “seizing” the Oakland Colliseum, except that the Pashtun have fewer guns and are better mannered.

Simply put, you can’t seize something that’s yours to begin with. This is something the U.S. grapples with - you can’t liberate a place from the people who live there. After the liberators are gone the people are still there, except now they hate you.

Speaking of things the U.S. grapples with, how about diversity? The Afghan army is held up as a model of people from different tribal regions and groups and ethnicities palling around like they’re the A-Team. Which is great, and gets you about 5 feet outside the military base before it breaks up. What it means for current operations can be pretty well summed up.

I. An army full of Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks and a half dozen other groups is going to be sent into the heart of Pashtun country to fight. 

For settling down a region, this strategy would rank right up with sending in the Klan to calm down the L.A. street riots. Which is to say, it will not only not work, it will probably fail spectacularly.
Even assuming the combined armies manages to pacify the area you still don’t get past your first stumbling block - the people you’ve liberated are still there, except now they hate you. You’ve shown the Pashtun that you’re on the side of the people they’ve been fighting since long before the U.S. was even a feeble idea. You’ve shown a proud people that you’re going to make them subservient to others. You’ve, in essence, rammed hell down their throats.

Trying to do anything in Afghanistan has historically been shown to be a pretty pointless venture. Everyone from the Soviets to Alexander can attest to the fact that once you enter that realm everything you know about how people organize and function rewinds about a thousand years. But the one rule, the BIIIIIIG thing you JUST. DON’T. FORGET. is that once you alienate the Pashtun your options are limited to 1) retreat  or 2) a repeat of General Elphinstone’s disaster.

Summer sure got hot early.

Seriously. These guys are the best at what they do. This isn’t some vague term, as in “they are one of the best,” or “they are pretty good,” or “gee, golly, these guys are neat.” The army Special Forces and Delta operators are the best at what they do.
That being said, why someone with a Meritorious Freeway Driving medal, carpal tunnel and fallen arches is allowed to jerk the tools out of these guys’ hands is just a freaking mystery.

Via the Army Times

The Army has stripped the Asymmetric Warfare Group of its weapon of choice - the Heckler & Koch 416 - saying that its mission requires the unique outfit to carry the standard issue M4 carbine.

The decision reverses a policy that allowed the AWG to buy 416s instead of carrying M4s when it was established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.

Members of the AWG have declined to comment on the issue, but sources in the

416s, arguing that they outperform the Army’s

community told Army Times that the unit fought to keep its several hundred M4 and require far less maintenance.

I don’t know who finds themselves qualified to argue with these guys about what weapons work best. I’m more than willing to have a discussion about what I do. But if you try to criticize my writing style while being illiterate, yourself, I’m not likely to take you seriously. The guys of Army Special Operations don’t use their weapons in some vague laboratory setting with such and yon variable to determine functionality in this and that environmental condition, they take their boom sticks to far and nasty places and use them to complete their missions and come home.

Having hauled the M-16 (which, internally is the exact same as the M-4) through Kuwaiti dust storms, I can attest to the fact that the damn thing didn’t work as intended. It jammed, it fouled, it would fire, at most, two shots before remedial action was required to get it to go BANG again. The crappy direct impingement gas system, as opposed to piston-driven, simply lacks the reliability to perform in the field. This has been proven and tested time and time again.

More from the Army Times:

This is the latest round of controversy surrounding the M4 since late November, when the weapon finished last in an Army reliability test against several other carbines.

The M4 suffered more stoppages than the combined number of jams by the three other competitors - the Heckler & Koch XM8, FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle (SCAR) and the H&K 416.

Army weapons officials agreed to perform the dust test at the request of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in July. Coburn took up the issue following a Feb. 26 Army Times report on moves by elite Army Special Forces units to ditch the M4 in favor of carbines they consider more reliable. Since then, Coburn has questioned the Army’s plans to spend more than $300 million to purchase M4s through fiscal 2009 rather than considering newer and possibly better weapons available on the commercial market.

This is the same Army full of fire and brimstone for Rumsfeldian “transformation.” How about we worry less about a go-go gadget army and more about the basics, like functioning rifles.

The Los Angeles Times has published one of the shoddiest editorials I’ve ever read about Afghanistan. It’s pretty bleak in there, and you might want to shield your eyes, but if you’re feeling intrepid you can find the greasy monster here.

“By every measure, the war in Afghanistan is going badly, and NATO is showing the strains.”

I was advised, long ago, to not make statements about “everybody” or “everything” because these statements are really just patently untrue. When you open your editorial with needless hyperbole I’m automatically going to front you all the credibility of a Garfield cartoon.

“That’s because most of the NATO countries don’t want to fight — they believe they signed up for peacekeeping duty, not a “hot war” — and the rest have battle fatigue. The latest casualty is Canada, where antiwar sentiment threatens to bring down the government.”

Following the news is something I do. It’s, you know, my job. But I’ve obviously been watching the wrong channels or maybe surfing the wrong Webs, because these angry hordes laying siege to Ottawa have somehow escaped my attention.

“A high-level panel has recommended that the (Canadian) government insist on the deployment of at least 1,000 combat troops from another country (presumably the United States) to the free-fire zone in southern Afghanistan … Expect a showdown at the next NATO summit in Bucharest in April.”

A free-fire zone? Truly? Considering that there have been more murders in Los Angeles than TOTAL coalition deaths in all of Afghanistan this year, I can only imagine that southern California is some nightmarish Mad Max war zone where grizzled veterans prey on the peasants, rape the livestock and drive off the women.

“To keep NATO from disintegrating, the U.S. must accept that it will have to do more of the military heavy lifting and allow Canada and Britain to do less. In return, Washington should increase its efforts to persuade its partners to spend far more on grass-roots economic, political and infrastructure development.”

Gimme a break. Saying the U.S. is going to do the heavy lifting in NATO is about as radical as saying the sun will rise in the morning.

Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that U.S. policy if Afghanistan has been ham-fisted at times. When you’re surprised that Afghanistan is selling opium it’s pretty obvious that you skipped history. There’s a lot to be said about what we could be doing better, but don’t try to talk to me about problems in the region if you can’t even slip “Pashtun” into a sentence to sound smart.

The Battle Dress Uniform will be officially retired from the Army on April 30 .

WASHINGTON - The Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for G-1 (Personnel) announced this month that the final wear-out date for the Army Battle Dress Uniform and Desert Battle Dress Uniform will be April 30 for both active-duty and reserve-component Soldiers.

The Army began phasing out the woodland and desert-pattered uniforms on June 14, 2004 with debut of the digital-patterned Army Combat Uniform.

“Our Army is always looking to constantly improve on everything we do, both on and off the battlefield,” said Sgt. Maj. Katrina L. Easley, uniform policy sergeant major at G-1. “We took a look the combat usability of what was once a good uniform, and based upon feedback from the field, decided to improve it and fix the many problems reported. There were at least 20 changes made and the result is the current ACU.

I’m not the first one to note that having different uniforms for each branch of service is not a particularly bright idea. Logistically, whoever is in charge of supply will have to worry about undershirt, boots, trousers, jacket and a dozen other branch-specific uniform components. At-tempting to skirt these problems by requiring all unit members to wear the same uniform, even those attached from other branches, has resulted in a DoD uniform war. I expect these things increase in importance the further you get from actual work.

The legacy of the Bush-era transformation was supposed to be an improvement to the joint capabilities of the military. Eight years later, and we’ve done away with the joint uniform - who says there’s no progress?

I am, of course, behind the times. As I remember the Army when only the guys who fell out of airplanes wore berets.