Jim Syler’s Reviews > To Fight With Intrepidity: The Complete History of the U.S. Army Rangers 1622 to Present > Status Update

This sounds about right. Rangers are not necessarily more effective in combat than well-trained, well-led, well-equipped regular infantry, but by dint of being specialized, flexible and highly motivated, are suitable for specialized missions that regular infantry may struggle to complete successfully without significant trainup time. [3/3]

resources, there may be some validity to that argument. The counterpoint to that argument, though, is that conventional infantry rarely operate under the greatest set of circumstances. Attrition and the routine tasks associated with traditional conventional warfare preclude these infantry units from devoting time and resources to more specialized operations of the type conducted by the Rangers." [2/N]

Lock seems to fundamentally agree with my conclusion that Rangers are not fundamentally better fighters than regular infantry: “There are those who will argue that there is nothing Rangers can do that cannot be done by good conventional infantry. Given the correct set of circumstances, such as full manning, continuity, adequate training [note that he does not say “specialized” training here], and proper [1/N]

[8/8] And since I'm on the subject: Don't let non-88Ms lead a wheeled vehicle convoy in combat. Just don't. This should have been in the SOP. Rangers have 88Ms in their TOE; they should have brought them and used them. Doing so might have vastly reduced casualties in the Lost Convoy (and just maybe made it not Lost, though that's not at all a sure thing), and would have made the emergency convoy effective.

[7/n] I feel he relied far too heavily on the QRF to extricate his men should anything go seriously wrong. It would seem that he never really considered the possibility of things going seriously wrong. Having some Bradleys in TF Ranger might have made a huge difference. He didn't have anyone prepared to air assault in as a reserve. And, again, he didn't coordinate plans with the QRF, which he could have chosen to do.

[6/n] Again, command and control was the major problem. Honestly, I feel that Howe, not Garrison or SECDEF Aspen, bears the brunt of the responsibility for this whole debacle, on several levels, but he (from what I can tell) suffered hardly a word of criticism, while Garrison took the fall.

The one thing Garrison could, and possibly should, have done differently was to have more reaction forces on hand.

[5/n]As for armor—the QRF had armor. Yes, it was Pakistani and Maylasian, but they had it. The main problem was the delays the coordination caused, but how many lives that time cost is a real question—arguably none ( Bowden p. 341. If this sort of rescue had been planned and coordinated in advance, with a unified multinational chain of command provided by Howe, the problems would have been minimal.

[4/n]—at least without inflicting mass civilian (i.e. non-combatant) casualties. Having more firepower on hand is always a good thing, and I'm the first to say that "limited warfare" is a terrible idea—and yes, this incident is definitely an example of this—but it's really questionable whether the Spectre would have been a good idea.

[3/n]He mentions as greater errors the lack of intel about the influx of RPGs, and the lack of armor and Spectre gunships. Intelligence is a bitch; it's easy to chalk things up to "intelligence failures." At least they weren't given wrong intel. As for the armor and gunships—Bowden makes a good case (p. 340) that the Spectres could have done little more than what the Little Birds were already doing

[2/n] would have brought the QRF into the planning phase, thus preventing the waste of a considerable amount of time spent on the behalf of the QRF planning and preparing for rescue operations that they were on the hook to execute but didn't have a clue about what was involved."

I couldn't agree more, except that I think it was the greatest, not the least, of the errors.