That's exactly right. And we're doing just that too!:
We're keeping an eye on you!
You too Osama! Can you feel our
HOT breath on your neck?
Posted on 11/18/2001 4:03:33 PM PST by MeekOneGOP
Sunday Nov. 18, 2001; 7:41 p.m. EST U.S. Special Forces Fighting with Swords on Horseback U.S. Special Forces fighting in Afghanistan have joined with Northern Alliance cavalry units, riding on horseback and brandishing swords, revealed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday. Wolfowitz confirmed the unusual arrangement on CBS's "Face the Nation." "One of the reasons why it took a few weeks before we could make our air power fully effective was we had to get people in on the ground to direct air strikes," he noted, before reading what he said was a dispatch from the front lines as a stunned Bob Schieffer looked on. WOLFOWITZ: I have with me a dispatch that came from one of our Special Forces guys who was literally riding horseback with a sword with one of the Northern Alliance.... SCHIEFFER: With a sword? WOLFOWITZ: With a sword. With a Northern Alliance group of several hundred people who had nothing but horses and rifles. And he said: "I am advising a man on how best to deploy light infantry and horse cavalry in the attack against Taliban tanks, mortars, artillery and machine guns -- a tactic I think became outdated with the invention of the Gatling gun. The Mujahadeen are doing very well with what they have but they couldn't do it without the close air support." And he then goes on to describe how two of his enlisted people, one Air Force and one Army, had called in air strikes possibly - certainly from aircraft carriers, maybe from bombers in Missouri - while Taliban artillery was hitting 15 meters away. (End of Excerpt) Wolfowitz called the effort "a return of the horse cavalry," but added, "no horse cavalry in history before this could call in air strikes from long range bombers." "Do the people in Special Forces know how to ride horses?" an incredulous Schieffer asked. "I mean, there's a difference between jumping on a horse and hanging on and being able to ride it. Are they trained to ride horses?" Wolfowitz said he wasn't sure but explained, "Apparently these guys were. They're trained in an extraordinary range of survival skills and local customs and languages. They're quite an amazing group." Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Did you mention something about the Crusades, Mohammed?
Maybe the Lord allowed him to take a peek because he had finished polishing his bucket of stars.!
I hope the cadets did as well!
Every woman south of the Red River knows that a man riding a horse should be wearing his Ropers, a pair of jeans, and a sufficient amount of leather to make him smell good.
That's exactly right. And we're doing just that too!:
Many posts have an equestrian hobby facility there... I think it is popular at Ft. Carson, CO, (now home of the 10th SF Group) although I have never been there. I know it is popular at Ft. Campbell, Ky. (5th SF Group calls Campbell home).
The guys in SF are selected for adaptability and coolness under fire (under pressure), mostly. If they don't know how to ride horses to begin with (and odds are someone in a given team does and can teach his mates) they will learn very fast, fast enough to shock "real" horse people. (Most of them won't learn it as well as they might if they stuck to it, because they will go on to the next challenge).
You would be astonished at the range of skills, the sheer breadth of them, in an SF Company (83 men on paper) or Battalion (just under 400). And if you're not amazed yet, try a National Guard company where the men are mostly ex-active SF who have since developed anywhere from one to a dozen civilian professions each, also, and the teams stay together for many years. They amaze the active guys sometimes.
It takes ten plus years to make a good SF man. Sure he's useful before that but at that point you start to get a guy who can really get along with anybody in the world and work independently if need be. The Army in general hates to spend the time and the money on SF when there are shiny new armored cars and things to buy. Plus, the regular Army is peppered with resentful guys that either tried and failed, or knew better than to try.
But it's money well spent. Once that "click" comes you really have something. And the average guy in SF is both totally wasted and often too bored to stay in a regular "conventional" unit (that's where the National Guard groups get most of their men, active SF that the army tries to assign to conventional units and would rather fight than switch). Finally, a parting thought: the teams really add up to more than the sum of the parts. It's not "rambo" at all, you might not notice any of these guys if you were standing in the movie line with him, it's about how they think, adapt and react to pressure. And 12 of these guys is not like one SF guy twelve times, it's like that guy to the twelfth power.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
You got it, Lady. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is a very popular book in the SF crowd. SF draws its doctrine largely from the OSS/SOE in World War II which drew heavily on Lawrence as a model.
The hardest ones you have to win over are your own conventional commanders, like Lawrence. And in time you come to identify almost too much with your native (today the politically correct phrase "host nation" is used) counterpart. Like Lawrence.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Recall Lawrence's advice from 7PW to the effect that It is better that they do a thing imperfectly than that you should do it for them perfectly... as to matters of leadership in making command decisions. But that said, target designation for close air support can be particularly costly if done inexpertly, and *El Aurans* did himself take a particularly hands-on approach in the critical planting of explosive *tulips* demolition charges along the Turkish supply line railway tracks.
Somehow, I think that Lawrence's enlisted assistants *Stokes* and *Lewis* would recognize those SF guys and that USAF Combat Controller as kindred fellows, just as the survivors of WWII's *Popskis Private Army* [the British *Desert Rats* 8th Army's jeep mounted recon team operating in Libya, said to have been the *most effective military intelligence gathering unit of the war* by Montgomery] have with members of the SAS mobility troop and certain US vehicle-mounted recon teams.
But of course the SF advisors and USAF air support technicians are NOT cavalry- they're mounted infantry, as were the Australians of the Light Horse who managed that great mounted charge at Beersheeba during WWI.
And fyi, there are still a few infantrymen at Ft. Riley quite capable of serious horsemanship, military and civilian. The term *straight leg infantryman* certainly predates the introduction of the Airborne, and was a term of derision used as much by horse soldiers as by the early paratroopers.
-archy-/-
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