Warbird Information Exchange

You DO realize this was a satire, right?

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

I can barely watch it. I can tell you almost to a GPS coordinate where I was that moment, and much of the rest of the day. The following month or so are blank. Completely.

I think that should be shown in every movie theatre before every movie, to remind people how vulnerable we still are.

[quote="michaelharadon"]If seven years of doing the same things over and over still haven't gotten us the results we want, let alone different results from doing that same thing over and over than we got in, oh, just picking countries out of a hat, say Viet Nam, then it just might be time to try a different approach...

Now, I know it's just me, but I'm just not understanding how we can expect different results by doing those same things over and over and over and over...is there a more enlightened wixer soul that can explain how??[/quote]

First we build a railroad and then we load them all in freight cars and you can guess the rest but the job will get done

Viet Nam was NOT the same thing. Period. That was a war run by remote control from DC by Johnson, and MacNamara, who both demanded to quarterback every move. They kept us from mining the Tonkin Gulf, and bombing Hanoi into the dark ages- we could barely operate above the DMZ, and could not even chase the enemy into Laos and Cambodia for most of the war! All for political reasons. Operation Linebacker II, under Nixon forced the NVN government back to the table in Paris, and brought about some accords. But then Kissinger stepped in, and f'd up the whole thing. Just when we should have pressed home the advantage- and really started dropping bombs to convince them to negotiate, Kissinger said we should stop- and show them we are nice guys. Really worked well. Rather than ending the war there, it just gave us an out, and screwed our ally. Of course, it has been said that with the corrupt government running South VN, that we were on the wrong side... Be that as it may, all any slowdown in bombing did was to allow NVN the opportunity to replenish and strengthen their SAM defenses. Had we held to a hard line of bombing NVN, they would have been more forthcoming at the bargaining table. We could still have exited the war- but leaving SVN in a stronger position to maintain themselves. At the point we stopped bombing, NVN was about out of SAMs, and we would have had a good field of fire for the air war- MiGs not withstanding. It would have been an entirely different ballgame from there. Kissinger was, for an intelligent man, stupid when it came to negotiating a war. Always negotiate from a position of power if possible. Never lighten up and expect to improve your position.

First you monitor the suspected area. Then warn the people that you have strong, credible intelligence that the person you want is there. Then you give them a chance to turn them over, or face the consequences, and offer them the chance to leave. Monitor the traffic out for the guy you want, then level the place. If they left, fine, if they stayed, their problem. Hopefully you got the guy. But the next place will be less likely to afford them hospitality knowing the consequences.

The vietnam war failure. Every single strategic mistake we could make, we made. The bombing of the North was a spit in the bucket. We could have dropped for another 20 years at twice the rate and they would have kept on trudging down the trail, carrying a couple of mortar rounds, and dropping them in the tube, and trudging back. And we were supporting a government that was abusinve, murderd its people, stole from them, and was basically much worse in the eyes of the couth vietnamese in general than the communists. You can win a war when the government is against the people. And you can't win a war if the peopel you are figting for don't want you there. And carpet bombing does not break the natinal will. THis is why it was invented, remember. It was never to break his industry. It was to frighten them with casualties. Hitler was making FAR MORE fighters and tanks after years of carpet bombing than he was at the start of it.
Pinpoint bombing won't win the war either. It still take spome guy with BO and dirt in his underwear to crawl up next to the other people and do the work. ASk Randy how many times he has dropped on a target without someone asking for it. Ask Randy how much good it really does to drop a regular bomb on a target without using such a big on target taht bystander will inevitably get hurt. We do pretty well with guided bombs, and taht extras still die is just a bitch. I don't like it, Randy doesn't llike it, and the American public in gerneal doesn't like it. We do it becaue if we want to win this war, we have to hurt the bad guy. And if the bad guy hides among civilians, then we often have to grit our teeth and deal with it. But that doesn't mean we haev the right or the need or any justification whatsoever, to drop a gazilion bombs on area targets in the hope that one of them will happen to do some good. Hey never do, and we should do it.


This is the stupidest tactic anybody has ever come up with. Ever. You cannot warn the bad guys you are coming. They will leave and all you'll do is kill children and old ladies. You have to hit them, and hit them hard, when they are not expecting it and doing that may very well cause unintended casualties. But to warn them just means taht they are either lying in wait for you on ground of their choosing, or taht they just walk away befor eyou drop. All you can do is choose a time and place where you hope you'll take out less bystanders, and do it anyway. THat's what happens in a war. But to act as if they hae no value is just pathetic, Robbie. To act as if unchained murder wil do our nation a bit of good is just as silly. We are not Russia, What you are suggesting is taht we either murder civilians like teh Russians did (and South Vietnamese Governent did), with predictable results - that they either resist or just won't support you like happened in Vietnam) AND you get branded as a bunch of psycopathic killers lik ethe Russians have been branded. I for one wil resist to my dying breath becoming a nation that would do that.

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

Robbie, it is hard to believe at this time 40 years later you are still selling that same old shuck and jive about Vietnam; that is if those peaceniks in Washington had just let all the John Wayne and Ollie North types do a little more bombing the war could have been won so easily. I don't mean it as a personal attack, and I am trying to use a little humor, but do you have any good deals on an Edsel for us, slightly used of course?

In the Vietnam War, we had complete control of the sea, dominance in the air and sent 3/4 of a million troops there, plus all our modern weapons. Yet we did not win. They key factor is that they were not going to quit. They could either fight on in their country against an invader as they had been doing for hundreds of years, or give up. They aren't the give up type. How many bombs do you think we dropped? How many more to give you that warm fuzzy feeling?

The war was started on a lie, just like our current one, and it seemed to have a life of its own. In about 1963, the CIA gave Lying B Johnson a report that accurately told him a conventional war with Nam would not be won, WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS, and a long stalemate would be the result. If there is anything stupider that our govt, our military, has done to our country and our people in modern times than this war, I can't imagine it. One thing a politician, be it Dem (LBJ) or Rep (Nixon) seems to find impossible to do is to say " I or We were wrong."

Even now when 85% of our people believe that the Nam war was wrong, we have an election where McCain is running mostly on his Nam reputation. There is debate over whether being a POW qualifies him or not, BUT WHAT FEW ARE SAYING, IS WE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN IN THAT WAR, he should not have been bombing there and should not have been shot down or forced to be a POW.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

Bill-
We were not allowed:
To fight outside of set boundaries- the NVA had no such restrictions;
To bomb north of a set line above which was the vast majority of our enemy's capacity to build the equipment they moved south to fight us;
Attack the enemy's lines of supply, just because they were in another country- even though the enemy felt no such compunction to avoid using this "neutral" territory;
Fight the enemy on HIS territory;
To Win a war which could have been won with the resources we had at hand.
You can't win a war with both hands tied behind your back.

The politics of the Viet Nam War has hobbled the USA for 40 years- those "Piss-Ants" as Johnson called them, beat the greatest military power on earth, not because we lost battles- which we vary rarely did there- but because the morons in office refused to allow the military to do their job and run the war. Since then, the US has "lost face" consistently because of the legacy of the Viet Nam war. Part of the imagined legacy is that the US will NOT support its allies if the going gets tough, because we are afraid people may be killed. We hide behind technology- which is often turned against us, of beaten by easy means.(The trail monitor system which was dropped in place in Cambodia & Laos is a good example- the NVA discovered the sensors, and MOVED them, to indicate little or lots of traffic in certain areas where THEY wanted us to believe it!) The war sold to the US was not the war that went on- and that includes EITHER side of the war sold to the US.

I still believe we could have won, and the more I read from the guys who were there, the more I accept that we were screwed there by our own government. I still HATE Jane Fonda, and I still trust John McCain. Ollie North did a lot as a Marine officer there. John Wayne was an actor. If you are going to war, do it to win, otherwise don't frappin bother.

Why do you think I said "monitor"? So when they come out you hit them trying to escape. If they don't come out, you take them out. Please- Quote in context...:"First you monitor the suspected area. Then warn the people that you have strong, credible intelligence that the person you want is there. Then you give them a chance to turn them over, or face the consequences, and offer them the chance to leave. Monitor the traffic out for the guy you want, then level the place. If they left, fine, if they stayed, their problem. Hopefully you got the guy. But the next place will be less likely to afford them hospitality knowing the consequences"

"You can't win a war with both hands tied behind your back."

I would posit that neither can you win a war based on a lie (Gulf of Tonkin or WMD) nor one we had/have absolutely no reason to be involved in in the first place.
And this, my friends, is why, to me, the new way to spell Vietnam is "Iraq".

Who does the monitoring Robbie? Some damned predator? That can't go up and see anything in the rain? Or some grunt? Guess what one of my jobs was as a grunt, Robbie? Monitoring the other people. Don't try and talk tactics with me man. I DID it. A very similar problem we had in Somalia was doing the same old sugar the same old way every single time. I think we did, what, seven grabs? And the eighth they set us up. And they didn't give a flying fart about civilian casualties, and so we wasted a bunch of people just trying to get out of the line of fire. It sucked but we did it to get out of there. And once the little guys were gone WE SMACKED them. Just another example of telegraphing your punch and relying on air assets to tell you what they're doing. It's ONE of many many intel assets and we can't get by with any single one of them. And we can't give nine tenths of them away by telling the other people that we're there. It verges on outright murder. Of OUR people.

The last time we dropped warning was vietnam. And we quit because when we went in the VC thumped us...because they knew we were coming. Lasted about ten minutes before we realized...it's a stupid tactic. They're not stupid, robbie, despite your belief that they're some sort of mongaloids from the stone ages. They're GOING to come looking for your forward people, and at the best your people will get away. At the worst they'll die in place because you warned the other side. That's why we only rarely attempt it any more. Better to put assets in place, and stay vewy vewy qwiet, and slam the piss out of them at an opportune time. Which is what we usually do.

You want to monitor the traffic out? We tried that. Where is Bin Laden now? OMFG! We don't know, because tah DAH! we coudn't monitor him well enough with the assets we had in place, and because the people whose side we were on didn't give a sugar if we won, so long as we paid them well. They also helped old OBL out of there, with an inside track on what we were doing because again, we fought like dopes. Why did we fight like dopes? Because a very few moronic War Hawks decided that we could kick their asses with three SEALS, a donkey or two, and a bunch of Taliban turncoats armed with dental floss and a toothpick. God what war do I seem to remember we kept having trouble with the locals turning against us because the government that we offered them was piss poor and abusing them long before we ever got there?? Oh wait! IT WAS VIETNAM!

We always seem to follow the advice of the armchair quarterbacks, and we always seem to end up body slammed. But when we do it by the book (assets on the ground to FO, and assets in the air to punch holes in the ground only where we need it) we lose far less people and cause far less casualties, which makes us happy, and makes the locals much less pissed off at us. And makes the world more willing to side with us instead of looking at us in horror every time we go thump someone.

Now, I had no trouble invading Afghanistan. I still don't. The men and women there are professionals. They are doing a tough job with not enough assets to win--because again, some asshat WarHawks who thought we could refight the vietnam war and justify their moronic belief in winning the war at 30K wanted to go back and redeem their reputations. The ones that got ruined in vietnam by thinking we could win teh war at 30K, without actually thinking about conditions on the ground--tactically, strategically or politically. And guess wht? ThEy went into Afghanistan on the cheap SO THEY COULD DO IT AGAIN IN IRAQ.

I'm tired of the same old people spouting the same old sugar and trying to refight a war we should never have been in. And that was unwinable unless we had chosen to invade North Vietnam at least and fight the Chinese at worst. You DO remember what happened in Korea when we started pushing over the Yalu? You DO remember that Vietnam was backed by ten gazillion little chinese coolies with funny hats making a fire brigade chain and passing ammunition over the border like a bunch of rednecks in a pissing contest?

And you keep going on about attacking them in Laos and Cambodia. That is total bull too. We WERE doing it, as many here can attest. We did a good job of slowing them down, but at the same time we invaded a neighboring country--who were not belligerents. Another example of your "screw them if they aren't with us they're evil mantra," that is still biting us on the ass in Southeast Asia.

THese things don't work, robbie. The system we are using is the best we have come up with in a hundred years of flight. It still always boils down o the same thing: a guy on the ground with a radio, and a guy up top with a radio, and both of them being sneaky as sugar and willing to do everything they can not to waste innocent lives stupidly and act as if it doesn't matter.

You flat out cannot win a war by giving away the initiative. And you can't win this world war we're in by pissing the rest of the world off by blasting incocent civilians off the planet either. We NEED the rest of the world Robbie, despite your view taht we are the biggest and the baddest and can go out there and shoot the bad man down and kill his wife and kids if they run sreaming offscreen in front of us. We do not have enough men, guns and bombs to take on the whole world. We at least need them neutral. And they haven't BEEN neutral because we've been acting like assholes and waving our peni in their faces. I'm sick and tired of losing, not because our pros don't know what they're doin, but because some individual of questionable judgement in the administration think he knows how to fight a war after not being drafted for a boil on his ass.

You might respond that Clinton was not a vet, but you know what? It killed him when our people died in Somalia because he listened do a guy who didn't know what he was talking about (we needed tanks on the ground and the sec def recommended against it because he was an idiot) And CLINTON CHANGED HIS TACTICS. the man had an incredible learning curve, no matter what else I might think of him. Not once in his administration after that did we leave our guys hanging. It became a number one priority to do the job and get out clean. And you know what? The number of people who supported us grew hugely back then. And then we elected a individual of questionable judgement who appointed morons and they decided to use moronic tactics. And seven years later we're still embedded crotch deep in TWO tarbabies.


meh.

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

Where in the world do you find the time to waste typing such long replys?

Robbie, you wrote. "if you are going to go to war do it to win" My view is that wars are pretty bad, some like Vietnam or terrible, so in my opinion, our theme should be, If you are going to go to war, do it for the right reasons and as a last resort, and if you have the right reasons on our side, you don't have to lie to the American voter or the public, as in the Tonkin Gulf or the WMD baloney.
And if we did, "win the war", in Nam what would that mean? Would it be that our thugs in Saigon were now free to prey on the people instead of the thugs in Hanoi?
I am not an expert on the tech details of the war, but if we did not bomb the North where did McCain and those other guys get shot down and captured? And as for as mining their harbor, why do you think old Lying B did not do it.? Do you think he was afraid of harming the dolphins? Or maybe what are the consequences if a neutral nation or Russian ship is sunk by those mines with loss of life? There isn't much Lying B or Nixon did right, but at least they didn't get us in a war with Russia.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

We had a hurricane. I don't have anything to do just now as the town digs out

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

In California? Did you move?

yah, I'm back home in the south. All I have had to do today was walk the dog and sweep up piles of leave and chainsaw a few logs over the road and pull them out with my truck. All the neighbors think I'm the shiz now

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."