Posted on 08/25/2014 12:12:46 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Says who? In 1965-66 I huddled at night inside my dug-in defensive perimeter and watched the flickering lightning of the explosions of Operation Arc Light, an aggressive use of American heavy bombing capabilities against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemies we faced. The sky-lighting flashes accompanied seconds later by muted rumbles gave only the barest hint of the unbelievable violence being unleashed upon our enemy a few kilometers distant.
Days later, our ground patrolling into the bombed areas gave us an awed appreciation of the power of America’s Air Forces. The former jungle terrain was a scorched and scarred moonscape with the only visible life being the green shoots pressing an inch or two upward to the tropical sunlight, testament to the eternal renewability of life.
But those green sprigs were it. Every other thing in that landscape was dead. Irregularly spaced craters, several yards across and several feet deep depending on what the original topography had been, covered the area where the bombs had impacted. There was the occasional indication that humans had once been there, small bits and pieces of weaponry and the various metal accouterments of any infantry force, helmets, canteens, and so forth. Of human remains my patrols found none, at least none that were recognizable as such, nor did we find the remains of the indigenous animals like monkeys and water buffalo that we knew had lived there, possibly even tigers.
[SNIP]
That’s a long preface to get to the premise of my piece about the issues challenging America and other Western democracies today. We are facing Muslim insurgencies throughout the areas where the teachings of Mohammed have poisoned millions of minds into believing that the only way they can survive is to dominate the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Possibly they can be bombed into extinction
Ask Japan.
Can’t Bomb Them into Submission?
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We’ll never know unless we try.
Some large fuel/air bombs will give them both a preview and their ticket to hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dW1qkBg8sM
Problem is finding them and targeting them.
Especially if they hide among the civilian population.
That was the real problem with these guys 2003-2009.
Right now they are operating in the open, more or less, but when the table turns they will hide. Can’t Arclight every hamlet in northern Iraq.
Unfortunately, FIRST you need a Commander in Chief who wants to erase the threat, and we certainly don’t have that.
The author is a Vietnam Vet and makes the following observation about ISIS:
In order to become a fully functional cohesive military threat, capable of seizing territory and holding it, these ragtag jihadi revolutionaries must assemble their military assets into a cohesive force capable of effective offensive operations that result in the seizure and occupation of the sovereign territories needed to make up their Islamic caliphate.
As every marauding tyrant in history has known, it requires concentrations of forces in key positions to attack, overrun, and then hold that portion of the world you intend to make part of your empire. That rule is indelible; it doesn’t change, as America, with her mighty air and naval armadas, has so recently learned; you cannot hold geography without sufficient forces in place on the ground.
But, America is not interested in seizing and holding any Middle Eastern geography; our goal is to deny that capability to others by not allowing them to build and assemble forces sufficient to be dominant. To the naysayers, military and civilian, who claim on television and in op-ed pieces that a determined and unrelenting, heavy bombing campaign can’t reduce any assembled forces of ISIS to rubble, I say, talk to infantry veterans of Vietnam who surveyed the results of B-52 strikes in that battleground.
With the intelligence capabilities we have today we most assuredly can monitor ISIS activities to determine when and where they are marshaling their forces for a major assault.
When our intel indicates they are engaged in that process, we allow them sufficient time to gather as many of their forces as possible before their planned assault and then we send in the BUFFs at that critical moment to turn their marshaling areas and massed forces into nothing more than many, many large, smoking holes in the sand filled with nothing but memories of the atomized, wannabee soldiers of Allah.
RE: How bout we just bomb them till so many of them are dead that they can’t find enough of each other to be a problem.
Yes, I can live with that (But they won’t ) :)
Just think, that was before cluster bombs/ smart bombs too.
The B52 is an amazing aircraft.
So is the B2.
Compelling them into a false and ephemeral submission shouldn’t be the goal of any military campaign. Bomb them to destroy them. period.
Why not? What makes Iraqis any more special than Vietnamese?
We don’t even have to bomb them into submission. We could do that I am sure but it is unnecessary. We beat the crap of them from the air and the Iraqi and Syrian army finish them off.
This is real simple guys. We let the native muslims do the dirty work on the ground.
General Giap in meeting with (former LTC, A Shau) Hal Moore stated that the American weapon feared most by the NVA was the B-52.
Dig up Curtis Lemay, run some electricity through him, then brief him and give him bomber command.
RE: General Giap in meeting with (former LTC, A Shau) Hal Moore stated that the American weapon feared most by the NVA was the B-52.
So, how the hell did we lose Vietnam again? /s
We could bomb them into the 21st Century......................
In 1965, there were not 10 million North Vietnamese in the United States, having arrived in the past two decades and clinging to Ho Chi Minh’s ideology.
No Vietnamese were blowing themselves up on US Streets or killing Americans in their own cities. There was no fear in the US Government of asymmetric attacks in the US homeland.
in 1965, North Vietnamese had no influence within the US Government, nor did any members of the US Government have a strong belief in for their ideology.
None of the above is true with regards to our present difficulties in Iraq and the M.E.
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