From: Ryan Gill (rmgill@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 22:12:01 PST
At 12:50 AM -0500 11/24/04, Steve Grammont wrote:
>Hi Ryan,
>
>>Heh, tell that to the Marine who's father I work
>>with at CNN. His father related to me Matt's take
>>on the situation in Fallujah in round 1. "they
>>had the city by the nut sack with every
>>intersection locked down and every major point
>>guarded and covered.
>
>True from what I remember.
>
>>They pulled out not because
>>they were too exposed, but because the
>>international community was complaining about the
>>collateral damage.
>
>Not from what I gather. They pulled out because it was hot in there
>(i.e. we were NOT liked) and we couldn't afford to keep that many combat
>troops in that one spot to keep it from boiling over. We had, and still
>have, other fish to fry.
Fred was bitching about the pull out. 1 Because
his son's buddies had fought for the ground and
don't give it up lightly and 2. because he knew
they'd have to go back in again. The Marine unit
didn't re-depoly elsewhere, they setup a
perimeter around the city and monitored it 24/7
with overflights and patrols. The Iraqi Fallujah
brigade went in and set up to pull security, then
got disbanded by the dual action of the torture
death of it's commander and the Marines were back
to covering the city on their own.
I'll ask Fred after thanksgiving to see if his
Son thinks they were out on a limb or not. Will
the indirect word of a Marine that was there sway
your opinion?
>The Marines were held off from retaking Fallujah because they couldn't do
>it on their own (no slight to them!!), we didn't have extra forces lying
>around to draw from (the Brits had to move north to release US forces,
>for example), the collateral damage would be major, and that collateral
>damage works against our mission. No, not just because it makes it
>harder to get some help from our traditional allies, but because
>everytime we do something offensive we get another wave of resentment and
>terrorist strikes. And guess what? The higherups were proven correct.
Some of it's the bravado of the Muj. However,
there's one report via www.thedonovan.com
(indirectly) that the rank and file fallujan
civilians left notes and blankets for our guys to
use their homes while they were away. Literally
"thanks for liberating the town" kinds of notes.
> >Great cost?
>
>Relatively, of course. Fallujah was a major battle in relative terms.
>One can not compare this conflict to WWII in any way shape or form.
>Different epoch, different scale, different enemy, different everything.
Or Vietnam? How about Grozny? It wasn't a Grozny,
either battle. Our guys weren't just equipped
with armor and lots of firepower. They were
trained too. They didn't leave the town, they had
some strict ROE that stopped retaliation on
Mosques unless it was granted from higher
authority, more often than not, they'd pull out
and ING forces would go in and deal with it. One
instance had a Mosque sheltering 70 insurgents.
An observer team observed repeated entries into
the building and a HMMWV with a special
observation system marked the building and they
waited an hour for the authorization to drop 1
building in a mosque complex. The fire mission
was ready to go in 5 minutes.
--
--
Ryan Gill rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
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