So… Some facts to counter your conjecture. 1) The overwhelming casualty ratios enjoyed by the US armed forces now vs. WWII are not a consequence of media participation, they are a consequence of the proliferation of the helicopter. Korea was a turning point in that if you weren't outright dead on the battlefield, you were likely to make it to a field hospital. 2) This, in turn, changed the way war was conducted - a dead soldier needs replacement but a wounded soldier is a logistical logjam. 5.56Nato, the round used in the M16/M4, was designed with maiming in mind, not killing. Whereas 30.06 and .30 carbine were designed with single-shot fatality in mind, 5.56 uses geometry and ballistics to get around Geneva Convention rules against hollow points and flechettes. It takes multiple hits from an M4 to accomplish the same lethality as a single hit from .30 carbine (or 7.62Warsaw, the round used in AK47/74/AKM, a weapon so prolific it's on the flag of Mozambique). 3) Which necessitated a colossal logistics pathway between the quartermaster and the ground troop. Vietnam-era troops carried 70lbs of gear; modern US soldiers carry 40-70. Since Vietnam, the only soldiers who are out for weeks are special forces; everyone else comes home at night. Which means that you can go through 8 mags of 20 rounds in a day and not give a crap; the ratio of bullets-to-fatalities during the Iraq War was 250,000:1. 4) So the actual "troops" - "war fighters" in your parlance - are now the equivalent of the "special forces" during Vietnam. Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan outnumber troops. No more KP duty - that's all Halliburton now. There were over 190,000 contractors in Iraq at the peak. 5) Which means you need to control your message. It was learned during Vietnam that showing coffins on TV is bad for civilian morale, so coffins came home from Iraq in a press blackout. It was learned during the Gulf War that "embedded" reporters say what you want them to say just for the honor of having them tag along, so war reporters that aren't embedded are treated as enemies. So what you're left with for every grunt on the ground is four guys back on base, five contractors to feed and clothe them all, an incomprehensible mountain of ammo and carefully screened press coverage of everything he does. It might as well be reality TV. Meanwhile, the Red Menace is gone and the enemy we're left with fights much the same way he did in WWII - 80 rounds of 30 caliber carbine, one rifle, no support, no helicopters, rudimentary training, no resupply that he doesn't schlep in with him, no press. It's gotten so lop-sided that the US is looking for another caliber other than 5.56 because you have to shoot insurgents a dozen times to kill them - in Falludjah many troops picked up insurgent AK-47s because the bullet goes in and stops. Is the media obnoxious about it? Of course they are. But the media is almost always wrong. Check a casualty count on a newspaper from Dec 7, 1941. They were all off by a factor of 10. A lot of the indignance associated with the August 2011 destruction of a Chinook was related to the following facts: - It was shot down with US-made FIM-92C Stinger Missiles - Provided to the Mujahedeen by US Senator Charlie Wilson - Using tactics taught to them by the then-acting Undersecretary for Defense. …biting the hand that feeds, as it were. Afghanistan in a nutshell...
“So… Some facts to counter your conjecture.” I said the other day that I would not trade venom, so I won’t. But I have to ask -- what exactly do you think this sentence adds to the discussion? Thanks for numbering your points. It does make it easier to reply. #1 - I never said that media participation reduced casualty rates in a given battle of the same size. I said that public expectations (in part produced my media participation since WW2) has put a downward pressure on deployment numbers. Yes, helicopters and improved battlefield medicine have reduced the rate of fatality in battle, and that accounts for some of the difference in total casualties between wars, but you don’t change total deployment numbers for that reason. Beginning in WW2, the US military has been on a steady trajectory of applying more and more effectively targeted force through the relatively low casualty use of air power. That, more than battlefield medicine, has made smaller deployments possible. Many soldiers in the first Gulf War found enemy soldiers ready to surrender as soon as we made contact. They were ready to surrender because their command structure and logistic support had been destroyed well in advance of the ground war. That, chiefly, was the cause of the low casualty rates. #2 – An interesting phenomenon in its own right, and certainly not confined to bullets. Mustard gas is one excellent example of this sort of thing. Mustard Gas in WW1 actually killed a very low percentage of its victims (well, at least on the western front) but it choked the roads and the medical systems with an unmanageable number of blind, sick men. War is not a kind business. #3 – I doubt you can account for our lighter footprint simply by the fact we carry lighter bullets. There are still plenty of M2 HMGs around, and automatic grenade launchers whose ammunition weighs a ton. Add to that the fact that we have people lugging quite heavy missile systems around and you will forgive me for being dubious. On the other hand, it may be that helicopter based supply is a net win – it would eliminate the need for some trucks and the people to drive them. Then again, helicopters need more people to maintain them and more fuel per load mile. I don’t have these numbers at hand. #4 – “War fighter” is not my term. It originated either with the media or with the army. The contractor point is a good one as far as the total deployment goes. I will concede that I didn’t think about that at the time of writing and it is a factor. I should at least give that a footnote. However, it doesn’t badly erode my basic thesis. The media rarely announces contractor deployments, but if 100 (non-mercenary) contractors were killed in one incident there would still be a great public outcry and wringing of hands – which we didn’t get when many times that number of soldiers were killed in WW2. #5 – Again, I agree with most of this. If we become sufficiently totalitarian about information great things are certainly possible… That is sarcasm, of course. But message control for a million troops in a long occupation would still be very problematic. The Soviets owned their press, but the Afghan War still eventually raised resentment that contributed the government’s collapse. The current US 5.56 round (M855) does not have the same nasty terminal ballistics that the old one (M193) did. I think the reason they are casting around for something bigger is to get more effective range. You need that in a dessert. Otherwise, they would just revert to the M193. The indignant report I heard about the helicopter shoot-down came the morning after the event, and was therefore largely unburdened by other factors.
I think you have a nasty habit of presenting your opinions and theories as if they are vetted facts, when in fact, they aren't. This allows you to draw erroneous conclusions and argue they are just as valid as statistics and empirically-derived facts. Your blog post puts forth the argument that public observation has driven troop levels and, as evidence, you put forth a cornucopia of unfounded assumptions. Not to mince words: I'm calling you on it. 1) Your argument is that, quoted directly: "public expectations (in part produced my media participation since WW2) has put a downward pressure on deployment numbers." My every footnoted fact demonstrates this is not the case. Deployment numbers haven't changed all that much, we're just counting them differently. You're now arguing that "air power" had a lower casualty rate than "ground power" when, if you check here, you'll see that it's 2.5 percent vs. 2.8 percent. For the bomber corps, casualties were around 30%. this is what I'm talking about - I can pull these statistics out of the aether because I know sort of what they are and can find the information to back up my arguments. You, on the other hand, put forth a hypothesis and then feel no compulsion to test it. And yes - we bombed the bejeesus out of Iraq in the 1st gulf war. There were still nearly a million coalition troops (650,000 of which were American) on the ground. You could find that out by looking up "Gulf War" on Wikipedia, but you don't feel the need to. 3) What you "doubt" and what can be verified do not overlap. The M2HB is not troop deployed and has not been for lo these many years. As counterpoint, the M60 used in Vietnam, which was chambered for .308, has long since been replaced by the Squad Automatic Weapon - chambered for the same 5.56 as the M4. Besides which, people don't "lug" missile systems around. TOW missiles are generally vehicle-mounted, or at the least vehicle-deployed - there's that logistics chain again. Whereas the 5-kilo M72 LAW was deployed in Vietnam and often deployed by non-specialized troops, the weapon of choice these days is the SMAW-II, sixteen kilos and deployed by specialized two-man teams. Logistics again. Your argument about helicopters is a red herring - the fact of the matter is, our deployment has changed based on how we fight, not how we cover the fight, and any argument you care to put forth undermines your argument. The rest of it isn't worth dickering. It comes down to this - you have theories, and you put them forth without testing or examination. You therefore leave the testing and examination to others, such as myself… and I find them lacking. Thus, the topic sentence. It was a more polite way to say "you are totally wrong, and you would know this if you'd done some cursory research before committing your thoughts to type." It is my firm belief that opinion should have a basis in fact. Yours is largely based in conjecture. Had you posed your thoughts as questions, I would have posed mine as answers. Instead you posed them as conclusions, so I posed mine as refutations. it's that simple.But I have to ask -- what exactly do you think this sentence adds to the discussion?
The FGM-148 weights 22.3 Kg and is current issue. On the air power vs. ground power point, I'm not talking about percentages, I'm talking about absolute numbers. In modern combat, we may lose a pilot now and then, but if we deployed ground forces to achieve the same objectives, we would clearly lose more. I assume you aren't going to dispute that sending a plane to take out a target 100 miles behind the front is just as costly in lives as having the army fight there way there. I am not talking about aircrew casualty rates from WW2. Yes, we had 650,000 troops in the Gulf War, but have not deployed even comparable numbers since. In the main, your objections are of the kind referenced above. You find some fact, or some argument, which, if construed in a certain way might make your case -- or it might simply muddy the water. I just take if for granted that my ideas are open to debate -- in fact I take it for granted that ANYTHING is open for debate. I do not object to criticism based on counter evidence, but I do object to you pointing to an article and essentially saying "here -- see! I have a fact and you have only conjecture." I did some amount of research on this article. No, I did not footnote it all. It's a blog post, intended to make people think. It is not a master's thesis. The previous discussion, frankly, was worse than this one. It was a philosophical topic! If you would like to eliminate all of the philosophy that was not put forward on the basis of controlled, well documented experiments -- you are not going to have much philosophy. It is possible, believe it or not, too arrive are some conclusions on one's own through reason and logic. I actually welcome disagreement, but I don't welcome long sarcastic diatribes of straw-man attacks, fragmentary counter examples and non-sequiturs.
Ray Comfort famously argued that the banana proves the existence of God. After all, it's perfectly shaped to fit the human hand. The existence of God is a pretty hard thing to argue - after all, logic has no power over arguments of faith, and arguments of faith have no power over logic. However, you might as well argue that Nikes prove the existence of God because they fit our feet so well. No less human effort, by way of selective breeding and husbandry, has gone into making bananas "fit" the human hand. What we know as a "banana" is a single example of a Cavendish clone that has been propagated across the world for the past 100 years. It's as perfect a monocrop as exists, and every bit as tweaked as a pair of sneakers. So above and beyond the argument, the method of argument is so flawed that there's really nowhere to go with it. This is where you are. Your initial argument was "public expectations have changed the way America makes war." You used hunches to make your point. I presented facts that were contrary to your hunches. You've now essentially abandoned your argument and are throwing up random factoids about Javelin missiles - which are deployed by two-man specialty teams, the equivalent of your BMG during WWII or a recoilless rifle crew during Vietnam. It proves my point, not yours - that we're counting "troops" differently and that the logistical chain now supports point warriors with drastically increased lethality, and that "the way America makes war" has far more to do with logistics than it does with media. But, like Ray Comfort and the banana, you insist that this one misapplied fact calls all others into question. You see, neither this nor our previous discussion were philosophical in nature. A philosophical discussion would be about the morality of publicity in warfare, or the ethics of asymmetrical combat, or the justness of participating in warfare where the stakes are so imbalanced between combatants. A philosophical discussion is one in which there are no right or wrong answers, there are discussions of intangibles, such as morals and ethics. One can arrive at "facts" through reasoning, but until those "facts" are tested, they have no more veracity than "wild guesses." So frankly, what you welcome or don't welcome is of no consequence to me. You've posted it on a public forum where it can be discussed. You're welcome to mute me, you're welcome to block me. But so long as I have the power to point out that you're using hunches as if they were facts, I shall continue to do so.