NATO: We did not know Libya rebels used tanks

Yahoo ^ | 04/08/2011 | SLOBODAN LEKIC

[Responsibility2nd]

BRUSSELS – NATO acknowledged Friday that its airstrikes had hit rebels using tanks to fight government forces in eastern Libya, saying no one told them the rebels used tanks.

British Rear Adm. Russell Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said in the past, only forces loyal to Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi had used heavy armored vehicles.

Harding says the rebels and government troops are engaged in a series of advances and retreats between the eastern coastal towns of Brega and Ajdabiya, making it difficult for pilots to distinguish between them.

[Responsibility2nd]

NATO.

Hoo boy!

[ComputerGuy]

A billion dollars here and a billion Euros there, and we still don’t know sh!t.

[Sax]

If you have Tank Control, only the bad guys will have tanks, right?

So a few Al Qaeda tanks got smoked. Good.

[D-fendr]

Well, I coulda told him tanks can’t fly...

[dfwgator]

They had “old maps” again?

[556x45]

Even the Russian commies couldn’t have done such a good job of discrediting NATO. That said I suppose its hard to understand the fog of war from a cushy seat in Brussels or wherever it is the heavy heads perform their dog & pony tricks. Quitting NATO would be a great place for us to save a wad of tax $$. Then there’s its equally silly and ineffective sibling the UN. At any rate I think its long over due for the sissies in europe to take on their own security.

[jeffc]

I keep wondering where the “rebels” would get tanks. The “media” don’t seem to be questioning who these “rebels” really are. It’s not like they’re cheap or that you can get them at the local WalMart.

[mylife]

NATO told them to mark the top of the tanks yellow after the first botched attack.
An idiot rebel said so on the news.
Then Gadhaffi had them paint the top of his tanks yellow and they were back to square one LoL

[Red_Devil 232]

I knew they had tanks a couple of weeks ago. News videos showed the rebels hauling disabled Daffy tanks back to be repaired on big trsilers.

[TruthBeforeAll]

Further evidence that our CIA is no longer a functioning entity. There should be several agents on the ground with the “rebels” feeding info back to the decision makers. The fact that we don’t even know the most basic structure of their fighting force tells me we are flying blind and wasting our time.

[SMARTY]

“We did not know Libya rebels used tanks”

But... it’s YOUR business to know!

Fie!!

[ßuddaßudd]

Things that make you go Boom!

[oyez]

Young men make the in they garages. They take an old tank, pull out the engine, bore out the cylinders, install three quater cams and add a turbocharger. The they finish it with competition treads, a custom paint job and NASCAR stickers..

[240B]

The President with no past has now given us the war with no point.

Perfect

(what the hell is this all about? really...what the hell is going on?)

[dfwgator]

Young men make the in they garages. They take an old tank, pull out the engine, bore out the cylinders, install three quater cams and add a turbocharger. The they finish it with competition treads, a custom paint job and NASCAR stickers..

[RicocheT]

NATO commander British Rear Adm. Russell Harding should have had an aide watch BBC World News for the past week or two and he would have got better intelligence information on what the Libyan rebels had as equipment. Rebel forces were clearly shown having captured tanks, other armor and tank transport rigs. To have given the NATO air crews the idea that no tanks were in rebel hands was criminal negligence and caused a huge setback in ousting Qaddafi.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

(with apologies to Zombies everywhere)

Well, no one told me about them
That they had tanks

Well, no one told me about them
We get no thanks

But it’s too late to say I’m sorry
How would I know, why should I care

We were looking for Ghaddafi
He’s not there

[chuckee]

Is the US still flying missions over Libya? Seems Obama said this past weekend we were suspending such missions.But, as usual, the Europeans are not accustomed to heavy lifting and requested that we resume the missions.Seems as if Obama suspended the flights for 5 minutes.

[DaxtonBrown]

[The “media” don’t seem to be questioning who these “rebels” really are. It’s not like they’re cheap or that you can get them at the local WalMart.]

I asked the same thing yesterday. Plus, how do you train a rebel army to drive them, load rounds and actually hit something? Plus plus, how do you maintain twenty tanks much less keep them fueled? The whole thing stinks.

[Red6]

The lie of the supra national organization.

Organization like the UN or NATO only have the power that others give them. There is no such thing as a NATO or UN soldier. Politicians like Obama use these organizations to deflect responsibility or quickly hand it off as in Libya. It's a political maneuver to avoid getting damaged by being involved (i.e Bush and Iraq).

Here's the reality- Most Euro’s don't have the “guts” to fight. It doesn't even matter how big they are, how much high tech they have...... in the end it's just eye candy that checks blocks or pretends to be a deterrent (for those that don't know better) and is involved at best in some peacekeeping or secondary type role.

Risk (The big one): most European nations are so risk adverse that they set the mission up for failure because they avoid doing patrols, avoid having combat controllers or others out there coordinating things from the ground, they don't go after the bad actors to avoid escalation........... They within their forces and political establishment lack the resolve to really take military action. Even politically they will always opt for the low risk course of action as Obama did in Libya....... If you go to war and you want to win, you cannot have a risk and/or casualty adverse thinking. Part of leadership (Which Obama has none) is managing risk and the Euro’s both politically and within their military's crank it down so far that they become impotent, like the Germans of the shore or Lebanon or in Afghanistan........

Cooperation and collaboration: the Euro’s (not all) are about benefiting from the security apparatus but want to do as little as possible because they generally want to avoid the cost economically, politically and in blood. They generally will act unreliably towards each other as they will for us (It's not just us they do nothing for). They tend to be even LESS capable of motivating each other then we are, when we through our weight around. They in addition to the “do nothing” approach have historical and cultural hang ups when working together, and while they have their nice little EuroCorps the truth is they often don't work together very well and we are the congealing force within NATO that brings things together.

Capabilities: the US is the NATO member which brings the ability to deal with high threat environments, we bring in the heavy hitting, strategic, nuclear, large mass, command and control, certain niche capabilities in Psyop etc to the table. When you take out the US from NATO, you have what? Hell, we alone spend more on R&D/test and evaluation in defense than the entire defense budget of Germany, our active duty ground forces are about 751,000 (army and marine), air 330,000, naval 430,000 not counting national guard, reserve or inactive individual ready reserve. The Bundeswehr has 80,000 (1/9 or size) ground, 42,000 air (1/8 our size), and 17,000 naval (1/25 our size). My point is that they lack the mass to do anything substantial which in the case of Iraq required 150,000 ground troops (and that was trying to keep it as low as possible) in country for 8 years. How are you going to do that with 80,000? We give NATO it's teeth.

These supra national institutions are often abused by national politicians trying to deflect responsibility in some form. Obama is the first Euro style US president. It won't work.