Case in point
Last night I was watching this show on the Discovery channel called 'Destroyed in Seconds'. It was a stupid show, but all we have is basic cable and I couldn't sleep. About halfway through the show there was a segment that almost perfectly summed up the war in Iraq for me.
Some US troops found a house that at one point had been occupied by 'Al Qaeda' (because all the bad guys out there are Al Qaeda). The house had been used as a torture chamber. The was clear evidence of it all over the place, pretty awful stuff. So our boys decided to teach those bastards a lesson, and they called in an airstrike... on the empty house. 6 JADAM munitions dropped from a B1 and all that remained of the structure was a smoldering crater 10 - 15 feet deep.
Apparently no one had a cheap satchel charge or C4 on them that could have achieved the same result for a fraction of the cost. We had to drop 6 $75,000+ bombs, plus god knows how much it cost to fly them to the target, to destroy AN EMPTY HOUSE. We could have hired 50 of the locals at $1000/day to tear the thing down with their bare hands, salvaged the material, left the land in an immediately usable state, saved a ton of money, and done more to win over the population.
Instead, we had to send a message to the people of Iraq. That message was; when bad people do bad things the US will show up 6 months late, not even try to catch the people responsible, spend the combined yearly income of your entire village to destroy a perfectly good structure, destroy it in such a way that it will take twice as much work to make the area usable again compared with a more traditional demolition, stand at the edge of the smoldering crater and say a few words about how this represents the 'victory of freedom over terror', and then leave.
As I watched I could hear voices chanting in the back of my head, "USA! USA! USA!"
Some US troops found a house that at one point had been occupied by 'Al Qaeda' (because all the bad guys out there are Al Qaeda). The house had been used as a torture chamber. The was clear evidence of it all over the place, pretty awful stuff. So our boys decided to teach those bastards a lesson, and they called in an airstrike... on the empty house. 6 JADAM munitions dropped from a B1 and all that remained of the structure was a smoldering crater 10 - 15 feet deep.
Apparently no one had a cheap satchel charge or C4 on them that could have achieved the same result for a fraction of the cost. We had to drop 6 $75,000+ bombs, plus god knows how much it cost to fly them to the target, to destroy AN EMPTY HOUSE. We could have hired 50 of the locals at $1000/day to tear the thing down with their bare hands, salvaged the material, left the land in an immediately usable state, saved a ton of money, and done more to win over the population.
Instead, we had to send a message to the people of Iraq. That message was; when bad people do bad things the US will show up 6 months late, not even try to catch the people responsible, spend the combined yearly income of your entire village to destroy a perfectly good structure, destroy it in such a way that it will take twice as much work to make the area usable again compared with a more traditional demolition, stand at the edge of the smoldering crater and say a few words about how this represents the 'victory of freedom over terror', and then leave.
As I watched I could hear voices chanting in the back of my head, "USA! USA! USA!"