Gunner Palace

[Shallon]

Interesting documentary type movie filmed in Baghdad. See the trailer on yahoo, looks interesting.

My favorite quote "As part of our $83 Billion dollar budget for the war we have a wonderful second hand armor on our paper thin humvee. So that if shrapnel hits it, it will slow it down enough so instead of going through you it will stay in you." or something like that.

[superwalrus]

if you don't want to go to fucking war, don't sign up to the volunteer army, fucking morons.

Walrus

[Relbeek Einre]

I guess the other half of that equation is that if you want people to sign up for a volunteer armed forces, don't use the armed forces irresponsibly.

[vaulos]

I'm still amazed that people keep going from "look what we know now" to "why didn't we know it 3 years before the war" without ever bothering to ask whether the situation simply hadn't come up until now. Seriously, do you people really have no sense of historical reference?

[Ddrak]

What are you referring to specifically, Vaulos?

Dd

[vaulos]

The whole "why don't we all have up-armoured humvee's' argument. It just anoys me.

[Ddrak]

All that says is the war was badly planned and not really thought through properly. Not exactly the first war in history to be that way and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Dd

[Burz]

The whole "why don't we all have up-armoured humvee's' argument. It just anoys me.

Ditto, considering Humvees' 'armor' was only designed to stop small arms fire and by no means was it supposed to act as an APC.

[vaulos]

Actually, it doesn't really say anything about "planning", unless you want to argue that plans are suppose to include eventualities which have never occured before in history. Or look at it this way: it wasn't planned for because it wasn't fore-seen. It wasn't fore-seen because it hadn't ever happened before. Is that actually 'someone's' fault?

[Ddrak]

What are you talking about Vaulos? Your statement seems to assume that the US had no choice other than to go to war right when it did.

Dd

[vaulos]

No, my argument has nothing to do with the decision to go to war in Iraq. My statement only says that it is stupid to suggest that the fact that not every humvee was up-armored was due to a "planning error". It wouldn't have mattered who was workings at the Pentagon for the three years prior to Iraq II, those humvee's would have still been a problem.

[Ddrak]

That's a contradiction. You're still presupposing the decision to go to war.

If we had decided not to go to war in Iraq, or pursued the war differently then the Humvees in question may never have been in Iraq at all.

Dd

[vaulos]

*sigh* Seriously Ddrak. We get it: you don't like the decision to go to war. That doesn't have shit to do with this argument. THIS argument is that it wouldn't have mattered who 'planned' the war, that 'plan' would have had the same humvee problem as this one.

How about that, we keep it at the benign planning level, so that you can keep feeling morally superior.

[Ddrak]

Nope - still doesn't fly. War planning involves timing of the campaign. If you rush to war then you pay the price of not being able to prepare the equipment necessary.

All you're saying is that it if things went exactly the same then we'd still have the same problems. Well.. duh.

Dd

[vaulos]

Now you are the one making a false assumption. There was no (read not even a hint) in the long term equipment plan of any US administration to armour all humvee's, until after the end of major combat in Iraq II. Rushing to war didn't have shit to do with it. Had we fought it 10 years from now (or any other war of a similar nature), those humvee's would still be unarmoured. Which is percisely the point I'm trying to make.

[Ddrak]

Unless of course, it was a well planned war where these vehicles were expected to be in the role they found themselves in.

In fact, you shot your own argument:right here:

"There was no[thing] in the long term equipment plan..."

Hence, it was a bad plan given the role of the equipment.
Hence the war needed better planning.

Thanks,

Dd

[vaulos]

*sigh* This is what I was referring to earlier. You have no concept of "why" plans are altered in the ways in which they are. In other words, you have no idea about what motivates an alteration of any military plan.

Your agument rests on the idea that someone other than the current administration, who was in the position of planning for a war post 2000, would have reconized the need to armor humvee's because they would be used under conditions in which they would be dealing with hit and run RPG fire and IED's. Or as you put it "a well planned war where these vehicles were expected to be in the role they found themselves in". This presumes a crystal ball, which military planners use to look to the future to see how wars will be fought in the future, and pre-plan accordingly.

This is of course faulty on the face of it. Wars are not fought based on knowledge of the future, they are fought based on knowledge of past experience. But if you need an example to cement that realization: ask yourself why wasn't Clinton ordering the military to develop high-tech weapons to jam IED's in 1992?

[Ddrak]

What on earth are you talking about? I don't think you're paying attention to my argument at all.

My argument rests on the fact that the timetable of the war was not set in stone. It was possible to plan ahead for this war, which would certainly lead to insurgency of the type we're seeing today. Hell, I was saying it would in 2001/2002 so I see no reason that someone at the Pentagon wouldn't have figured it. Perhaps you're just suggesting they are stupid?

Your argument is faulty because it assumes that plans for equipment are necessarily made independently of the timetables set for a war that we initiated. This is false.

There's no crystal ball involved, just poor planning as a result of a rush to war.

Dd

[vaulos]

No, I am suggesting that long term equipment buys are a result of what the Military preceives as "how wars are fought". That example was merely to point out that the military, going into this conflict, didn't believe that "wars were fought" in a way that required every humvee to be armored.

Moreover, you are suggesting that you predicted this exact problem. Yet, I fail to ever recall (though perhaps you could enlighten me) when you ever said that the military would need up-armored humvees because the enemy would use tons of IED's. (Mind you IED's are the reason for the mass request for up-armor.) Without fore-seeing the IED problem, you can't seriously suggest that the up-armored problem would have been fore-seen.

[Partha]

Why would you NOT foresee an IED problem? IED's have been the weapon of choice for insurgencies the world over for decades now. The only way you're NOT going to suspect IED's become a problem is to believe that there wouldn't be an insurgency. That's poor planning.

It's ESPECIALLY poor planning in light of the fact that Rumsfeld was supposedly remaking the armed forces into something more capable of fighting terrorists.