Military Ring Info

Our top man in Afghanistan has conceded that we will need to come to some sort of peace agreement with the Taliban before we can end the war. He is not saying anything here that he has not said in the past but the best time to make this announcement is now.

Part of the strategy of the troop surge was to let our custom military ring customers put a fair amount of heat on the backsides of the insurgents to make them realize that they don’t want to fight forever. Once this was accomplished the next step was to open the door for negotiations to end the war. I believe that negotiations have been ongoing for a while between President Karzai and some factions of the Taliban.

According to Petraeus there are some factions of the Taliban who are ready to lay down their arms and pledge alleigance to the new government. it is good that we are fracturing the Taliban from within as well as bombing them.

We have probably gotten farther along in this endeaver than the world realizes. We can allow the Taliban to save face by negotiating with them for victory but they need to have no doubt in their minds that we have the power and the resolve to beat them.

I believe in the back of my military mind that we are at a critical point in the war in Afghanistan. As a matter of fact we are at the most critical place possible. I am a tactician of sorts and I believe that I am right. There has been heavy fighting in the Kandahar Province as we continue to fight the insurgents in that part of Afghanistan. They don’t want to give up that part of the country to our control and we are obligated to the Afghan people to take it and get it under Afghan control. The outcome of this battle is crucial.

The latest news from the region is that Afghan forces have conducted a raid which resulted in the deaths of at least twenty of the Haqqani Taliban members. The Afghans conducted the assault in an area in which the Taliban forces were well entrenched in fortified positions. Both sides are deadly serious and the consequences are deadly also.

The good thing about this raid is that it was conducted by the Afghan Army with US forces backing them up. This indicates to me that the Afghan forces are improving in their ability to take control of their country and hopefully to remain in control once our military ring customers leave. Our military ring customers in all branches of service are no doubt the best trained in the world and if anyone can help the Afghans to become proficient enough to secure their country our troops can.

The 10th Special Forces group has added another battalion on Fort Carson Colorado. This is one of a number of additional units that the army has added to posts across the nation.

The army isn’t telling us much about these Spec Ops troops as is their nature but I know that I blogged a while back that the military would have to increase it’s number of these type troops because of the nature of operations in the ongoing war on terror.

I see a future trend for the army to maintain higher numbers of Special Forces ring customers for future operations because it seems to me that the majority of future military operations will be conducted in assymetrical type operational areas. The special skills of these operators will be needed more than ever on the modern battlefield.

Due to the fact that al-Qaida is spreading all over the world it will be impossible to stop them with a conventional force. Conventional troops are good against other armies. They can be used to fight terrorists in small skirmishes but that really is not what they are designed to do.

I will also predict that future spec ops troops will have to be used for mission types that most people have never heard of. I believe that the days of large force on force battles between major armies are almost gone.

The bad news in this case is good news to me. What the press is publicizing as bad couldn’t be better but you have to have a military mind to understand it. So grasshopper sit back and listen and allow the military ring man drop some knowledge on you.

The news is that heavy fighting is taking place in the vicinity of Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. When the plan for the summer offensive was made it made the assumption that the Taliban would choose to not engage our forces directly but the exact opposite has happened. Kandahar is the birth place for the Taliban so who ever owns it will get a major propaganda victory. We did not know that keeping this area would be so important to the Taliban. They are throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the battle so it will take us a while longer to take control of the area.

All of our custom military ring customers are aware that plans are made to be changed and that very few things go according to plan during combat. In order to win you must be flexible, innovative, and able to adapt and change quickly. You also need to recognize opportunities when they arise and take advantage of them. This is a grand opportunity to eliminate a large number of the enemy without having to chase them all over the country. It actually makes our job infinitely easier.

It just isn’t possible for them to win in this kind of combat. Yes it will take more time to gain control of Kandahar, but once we do we will take control of the other areas very quickly. The prediction of the military ring man is this; Once we take Kandahar the Taliban will quickly lose control of the other areas that they control. Kandahar will be the first domino in the chain to fall. Once we take Kandahar we will have taken out most of their assets. If you are an opportunist you will see that they are playing right into our hands.

If there were a motto to this post it would be darned if you do. The reason that I make this statement is because Tariq Aziz who many of you might remember from the days of the first offensive of Operation Iraqi Freedom is critical about the US withdrawal. Now I’m a bit confused here because I thought the Iraqi people wanted us out of their country. This just goes to show that no matter what you do someone won’t be pleased.

Mr Aziz thinks that we are leaving Iraq to the dogs. In his opinion we have torn the country down and left it in a demolished state. He went on to say that Saddam Insane spent many years building the country before we came in and destroyed his work.

He goes on to say that the Iraqi people are the victims of the US and the British and that President Obama is a hypocrite because he isn’t leaving the troops longer. Well I don’t think that he would have been able to say those things to Saddam and live if Saddam were still the President of Iraq.

You know my military ring customers some people would complain even if we had passed out one hundred dollar bills so what can you do?

I like to think of myself as a man of the truth so I have to call it like I see it and this is an unfortunate incident. There were a large number of Afghan civilians reportedly killed in a nighttime raid in Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan. Now I want to ask the question; Why were so many civilians located in a known Taliban compound? The Taliban routinely uses innocent civilians whom it forces to act as human shields. Now I am not saying that this is in fact what happened because I wasn’t there. I want to believe that this is the case.

US and Afghan forces had targeted a Taliban compound in the action and killed about twenty insurgents, two of which were known Taliban commanders. Civilians should not have been there.

The assault force came under fire as they withdrew which also indicates that the raid took place in a Taliban stronghold. There have also been civilian deaths in areas where NATO and US forces say that they have not conducted operations so something is fishy here.

Now there probably are more precautions that our military ring customers need to take, but when I post about these types of incidents I speak from experience. I know the precautions that our military ring customers have to take in order to not harm innocents because I once trained to perform wartime missions.

Now don’t get all excited about this news because it is no big deal. It does not mean that the US is going to attack Iran. We have probably had an attack plan for quite a while. We must always plan for every contingency. It’s not a big deal. As a matter of fact I can guarantee you that whatever the plan is it has been revised many times over. The purpose of having a plan is to not be caught short when the time for action comes. Once again this does not mean that we will attack Iran.

Any preemptive attack on Iran would have to be very carefully thought out and precisely executed. I will guarantee you that if such a strike were to become necessary the military ring units which would be involved have rehearsed the plan many times already. There would be absolutely no room for error.

Another reason that we would be slow to attack Iran is that we don’t know what the aftermath of the action would be. The region is highly unstable and such an attack could very well plunge us into a world war. There is also the question of: What if we miss? If we attacked we would have to be sure to make sure that we took out every possible weapon that they have. If such an attack were to be conducted it would have to be done by the United States. If the Israelis were to do so it would certainly plunge the region into total chaos. Our Air Force ring customers, and our Special Operations ring customers would have to be the troops used to execute the mission.

Although you really don’t hear a lot about ongoing US and NATO operations in Afghanistan there has obviously been some pretty heavy fighting in the Northeast part of the country along the border with Pakistan. I don’t know but I believe that this is a planned part of the troop surge. The problem is that the terrorists conduct their business in Afghanistan and fade back and forth across the border with Pakistan as often as they need to do.

Our military ring customers could do a whole lot better if we could get some more help from the Pakistanis. I personally think that this is the biggest hindrance to our progress in the war.

The US and Afghan forces say that they are searching for Qai Zir Rahman who is the leader of the Taliban in the area. I don’t believe that they will find him but this is a good way to conduct an offensive operation without calling it an offensive. We know that we can’t kill off the Taliban or al-Qaeda for that matter but we need to let them know that we can hit them and hurt them whenever we want to. If we can put enough pressure on them hopefully we can make them realize that it would be much easier to just cooperate with us.

Marine Corps ring customers are not filling out the surveys about the don’t ask don’t tell policy that the armed forces now has. There needs to be a certain number of the surveys done before the powers that be can conduct some kind of evaluation to determine how effective the policy is and what needs to be changed. I can tell them though that it will not happen.

Let the military ring man drop a little knowledge on you about the situation. I was once a young officer in an Artillery Battalion where one such survey was passed out for us to fill out. This particular survey was about our Battalion Commander who’s real name was James B. It asked us what we thought about him and supposedly our information would remain anonymous to the commander. Even though the entire Officer’s Corps talked about him like a dog behind his back I was the only fool honest enough to say what I really thought. Now as you can see I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means and I wouldn’t do the same thing if it happened today, but I did at the time and paid for it dearly. The survey was set up so that he could find out who said what as everyone else had sense enough to know.

Once I got myself put on his hit list there was no amount of butt kissing that would get me back in his good graces. I didn’t try to kiss his butt to get there because it would not have worked anyway. This was the lesson that cost me my career because I never did recover from the pen whipping that that colonel (small c) put on me.

These Marine Corps ring customers and everyone else in my unit had a whole lot more sense than I did so let me tell the powers that be this; even if you coerce them into filling out the surveys you won’t get accurate results because they know better than to tell you the truth. Can you handle the truth?

The US Government has asked wikileaks to discontinue posting the classified information that was given about US and NATO operations in Afghanistan to its web site. I am personally appalled that they would even consider placing this information on its web site. This is the reason that the military has been so skeptical of dealing with the press. Our military has a good relationship with the American press and I know that our press would never do anything to jeapordize the lives of our countrymen and allies as wikkileaks has done. They have got to know that the information that they have published puts the lives of many troops, and civilians who have cooperated in danger.

The Taliban has this material and has said that they will punish any who have provided information to the US in the war. It will be very difficult now for us to get any future cooperation from the citizens from that country. I wouldn’t blame them whatsoever although our military ring customers desperately needs the information that they provide in order to root the enemy out.

Since this is my blog I can say this: Both the soldier who provided the information, and the person who made the decision to publish it should be executed with extreme prejudice.