Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 27 - August 10, 2025
Even chastened by Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and Savo Island, American MI elements fumbled again and again when they went beyond the numbers game. They insisted that the peasant North Koreans could not be so tough; they were. They were sure that the Chinese Communist regiments could never cross the Yalu River undetected; they did. They believed the North Vietnamese must fold under U.S. bombing; they did not. Any excursions into the cultural stuff tended to reinforce biases. No good intelligence professional dared to chance such errors, nor could America.
In 1944, B-17 bomber formations dropped 9,070 bombs in order to hit one German building. In 1967, F-105 jet fighter-bombers used 176 munitions to knock out a single North Vietnamese building. By 1991, a smart F-16 fighter-bomber could do the job with thirty bombs, or just one, if the bomb was smart too. Similar improvements applied to sea and ground armament enhanced with IT. It meshed smoothly when used by tech-savvy, educated volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
As one former Iraqi general put it: “The American soldiers are very disciplined. They fight like robots and engage and kill everything on the battlefield.” Well, not quite everything—with a very few very sick exceptions, the U.S. troops confined their work to armed opponents. There was no shortage of those around Balad, Iraq, in January of 2004. As for the tough Americans, they were spread pretty thin, and it didn’t seem like they’d stay long, maybe a few months or a few years. Fouzi Younis wasn’t going anywhere.
Hibbert and his men slipped quickly into the gloomy hall and found stacks of RPGs and artillery rounds. Evidently, this was a big cache for the enemy. The Marines began to search the side rooms. In one crawlspace, Hibbert uncovered a bony, chained man, slowly starving to death. The Iraqi had been held since August. In a larger room, Hibbert’s Marines found a makeshift movie studio. The green-and-black Islamic flag on the wall and dried blood on the floor matched the video made when Zarqawi had filmed the awful beheading of captured American contractor Nick Berg back in May. There was even a
...more
He rapidly determined that the NATO allies had given about all they could stand to and that too many seemed to consider the war to be “like summer camp.” The heavy lifting, as usual, fell to the Americans.
In any event, the general believed his conventional forces must become significantly more discriminating. He spoke of the value of “courageous restraint,” the willingness to take ISAF casualties to protect the Afghan people. To tough Pashtun tribesmen, that smacked not of discipline or kindness, but weakness.
