Monday, November 03, 2003

The Reason for Inexcusable Casualties

Fred Kaplan at Slate posted a chilling story Friday which served as a grim prophecy of yesterday's highly avoidable shoot-down. For now, I'll just say that the prejudice against human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) in both the armed forces AND the CIA in favor of signal intelligence (SIGINT) is going to get more people killed.

Sunday, November 02, 2003

Inexcusable Casualties

Rantburg has news and commentary on the Chinook shootdown near Fallujah. My giant, economy-sized question is -why- are unescorted, thin-skinned helis like Chinooks flying over the Iraqi "bandit country" during a state of high terror alert? The Army needs to get the brass's heads out of their collective fundaments and start reading the Marine's "Little War" manual instanter, or there will be more needless deaths like this.