All Alone in the Night

It is time to address some serious problems with the U.S. military. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan having uncertain horizons and the potential need for an effective and deadly military for future conflicts always present, the United States cannot afford to have a military force that is not as close as possible to the top of its game. Chronic issues can no longer be permitted to fester under the surface, as they are simply doing too much damage to the force and undermining the military's ability to accomplish the missions set before it.

I am referring to how the military handles women. As the volunteer force as evolved since its inception, women have played a more and more important role in America's military. The U.S. military long since passed the point where it could operate without women, in fact, which is one of the reasons so many more women are ending up with combat experience, as well as the nature of the Iraq war. This importance has not been accompanied with a cultural shift in the military, however, and this is the problem.

Many male soldiers are decent, upright, honorable men who treat their female comrades with the respect they merit as soldiers. That still leaves plenty of male soldiers who treat women improperly, ranging from relatively mild failings like making the occasional inappropriate remark up to sustained sexual harrassment and in extreme cases, rape and sexual assault. These problems are exacerbated by predominantly male commanders who often simply don't recognize the severity of them or who are sexist themselves and therefore dismiss the complaints of female soldiers. The end result is a military culture that can be exceptionally unwelcoming to women, a result which often drives qualified women out of the service, something the military cannot afford at a time when it needs the best available people filling its ranks.

There will always be some friction between male and female soldiers. The military brings together young people who are often single, puts them into stressful situations, and acts surprised when sex enters the picture. It then exacerbates the problem by laying down one-size-fits all rules and doing very little to educate its leadership about the problems they are likely to face and the right ways to deal with them.

While I won't pretend to know how to solve all of these problems, I think the one thing the military needs to do beyond anything else is to start taking the issue seriously by holding commanders' feet to the fire. This should involve two avenues. First, leader education should involve training in dealing with the problems mixed-sex units are likely to face and how to deal with them, with particular emphasis given to helping men understand just what female soldiers are dealing with. The military tends to be a place where you are expected to deal with problems on your own if at all possible, which often leads to female soldiers keeping their problems to themselves or not being treated seriously if they do raise a stink because there is a perception of weakness. Add to that the fact men just aren't well equipped to comprehend the world women live in and some detailed education would go some distance in helping commanders to nip sexual harrassment problems in the bud.

That won't be enough, because too many senior personnel came up in the old school, where women aren't supposed to be in the military unless they're tough enough to take it as it is. That attitude discourages women from reporting problems, and encourages men who should know better that they can get away with inappropriate activities. Solving the problem is going to require a cultural change that needs to start with commanders making it clear that female soldiers will be treated as soldiers, and making it stick.

Doing this won't be easy. It will require the input of the female leadership at all levels to make sure that the education given to commanders and soldiers alike covers the proper topics. Male soldiers need to understand what is inappropriate and why while still understanding that female soldiers are no less tough than the men. Male soldiers should be able to avoid sexually harrassing females without getting the idea in their heads that female soldiers are therefore somehow less capable. It will be a difficult road that will require significant changes in thinking at all levels, and adjustments will have to be made as the culture shifts. But it is absolutely necessary if the military is to become what America needs it to be. No organization can be world-class if it systematically excludes half of the available population, and while military leaders know this in their heads, until their actions match their words, the U.S. military will not be all it can be.

My earlier post about changing how the military treats women included a link to a Salon article about women and war. While much of the article is good, it does include a claim by Janis Karpinski, a former general who was in command at Abu Ghraib when many of the worst abuses there were committed, that female soldiers were dying of dehydration in Iraq because they were afraid to use the latrines. Like every other word that passes Karpinski's lips, that's a lie, and Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has the goods on this one.

That doesn't take away from my piece, nor the rest of the Salon article's accounts of some of the many problems female soldiers face, but I would rather chew my own foot off than even suggest Karpinski might be in any way, shape, or form credible, as I noted in an earlier comment.

I am pleased to see that a DoD investigation of Pat Tillman's death is calling for nine officers to be held accountable for their roles in the aftermath of Tillman's death. Far too often in this war, senior officers have been able to get away scot free while junior officers and enlisted personnel pay the price. This is precisely opposite what we should be seeing. Senior officers are paid to take responsibility, not to shirk it, and when their unit does something wrong, they should be the first to pay the price, not the last.

I am not suggesting that the entire chain of command should be relieved every time a unit does something wrong. But I am suggesting that should be a possibility. When something goes wrong, whether it be the abuse of prisoners or detainees, criminal activities by soldiers, or tactical errors that result in the death of soldiers, part of the investigation should focus on the chain of command and what they did or did not do to prevent such actions. Sometimes the investigation will show that the command took reasonable precautions, even though they failed to prevent the activity. Sometimes the investigation may conclude that the incident was unlikely to be anticipated, although this would be rare. And occasionally the investigation would find that the chain of command failed to put measures in place to prevent a predictable problem, resulting in the breakdown. And when that occurs, the chain of command ought to suffer serious consequences. At Abu Ghraib, the chain of command either knew what was going on or was so wholly inept the abuse could occur behind their backs. In either case, the command bore supervisory responsibility for the abuse and should have been punished accordingly. The same is true of many less well-known incidents as well.

Until now, however, most senior personnel have gotten no more than a slap on the wrist. A few have been relieved of command, which is a good first step, but I'm aware of no serious consequences or prosecutions of any officers above the rank of Captain, a fairly junior pay grade. If the recommendations of this report are accepted and the DoD follows through, it will be a very small step towards reawakening the sense of responsibility and accountability that ought to be a prerequisite for reaching high ranks in the U.S. military.

The United States is executing a show of force mission off the Iranian coast, flying simulated attack missions off two U.S. carriers. While I have seen no formal declarations stating that the purpose of the mission is to demonstrate the U.S.'s ability to project force against Iran, that seems to be a clear basis for the mission. As Iran continues its quest to join the nuclear nations, the U.S. may be getting more desperate to stop them, placing the two nations on a dangerous course.

While I would prefer to see Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons, I do not believe it is worth going to war to stop them. As has been seen in Iraq and North Korea, too many nations believe that they need to have nuclear weapons to forestall an American attack on them. American protestations that they have no intention of attacking any particular nation ring hollow because the United States has demonstrated its willingness to strike anywhere it feels its interests are threatened. To Americans, these attacks may appear judicious and justified, but to an outsider, the attacks underscore the risks other nations face if they do not have a method for deterring U.S. action against them. Hence the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons. While it is possible that Iran will follow through on its threats to strike at Israel with nuclear devices, I'm not at all convinced they're willing to commit suicide no matter how much they may dislike Israel and Jews in general.

This is not a problem that can be solved in the short term. The ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq and threats against Iran provide ample evidence for the rest of the world that the U.S. is capable and willing of attacking other nations when and where they so choose. Even were the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq and cease any belligerent moves against Iran, it would take at least five to ten years of no further bellicosity before the rest of the world might begin to feel comfortable with the U.S. While that comfort level was growing, Iran and nations like it would likely continue to maintain nuclear weapons programs to guard against the U.S. backsliding. Conversely, the problem will remain as long as the U.S. arrogates to itself the right to strike anywhere in the world whenever they consider it in their best interests.

I am not opposed to preemptive warfare akin to that practiced by Israel in 1967, when there was ample evidence the Arab world was going to strike at Israel, so they struck first. If the U.S. were to receive solid evidence of an impending attack against it, it would be within its rights to strike first. But preemptive warfare akin to Iraq is more likely to do harm than good. It forces other nations to seek means to prevent such attacks against themselves, which right now means nuclear weapons. Were the U.S. to renounce such tactics, it would go no small difference in reducing the perceived threat the U.S. poses to the rest of the world.

Readers may be offended by my assertion that the U.S. poses a threat to other nations. The U.S., after all, prides itself on only acting from the highest of motives, and I believe that it has done so more often than not over the past 20 years. But while the U.S. may claim purity of intent, the fact remains it has launched five wars of varying intensity during that time, only one of which could be claimed as justified in defense of the U.S. Regardless of the U.S.'s intentions, what the world sees is a behemoth that holds itself to a different standard than the rest of the world and that all too often lashes out as lesser powers. As long as the perception holds, the U.S. will face greater difficulties than it should. Given how easy it would be to reduce and eventually eliminate that perception, perhaps it's about time the U.S. began.

A good start would be ending shows of force like the one mentioned above.

"Why can he not fight for those he loves?"
Eowyn, The Return of the King

As a general rule, when the particularly odd types suggest that the right is in some way comparable to the fanatics in the Muslim world the west is currently fighting, I tend to tune them out. Then I read Kathleen Parker and wonder if there isn't some small justice to that argument.

Ms. Parker has an opinion piece up in today's Washington Post arguing that Iran is in some way morally superior to the west because they dress their women up in hijabs rather than letting mothers of young children go to war. "When a pretender to sanity such as Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we've effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders." That may be how Ms. Parker sees the world, and she is probably correct that much of the Muslim world will concur with Ahmadinejad's opinion, but the fact that much of the world relegates women to second- (or third-) class citizenship is no indicator that they're right.

Let's begin with the obvious. The average woman shouldn't be a frontline soldier. Modern combat requires a degree of physical strength that most women (and some men) simply don't possess. As I prepare to go to Iraq, I have to accustom myself to wearing 30 pounds of body armor, plus a pistol and a carbine and ancillary gear that adds another ten-plus pounds. Assuming an average woman comes in at 5'5" and ~140 pounds, that's 28% of her body weight. Running around in all that will wear down bodybuilders, and physiologically, women start out with less muscle mass and so are going to wear down faster, on average. But not everyone is average. The U.S. Army used to require strength tests for certain specialties, and it would be wise to go back to that, as some men really shouldn't be on the frontlines any more than the average woman, and some women probably could pass muster if given the chance. Combat arms would still be predominantly male, but testing based on ability rather than gender would probably make the Army better off in the long run.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things that the Army needs done that don't require physical strength. In today's Army, the ratio of tooth to tail is extremely low; most soldiers are involved in supporting the small number of fighters. While many combat arms types like to think that makes the others lesser soldiers, the fact is that without that tail, the tooth would fail in short order. An M1A1 tank will run out of fuel in a day, and ammunition even faster in heavy combat. An infantryman carries only enough supplies to sustain himself for a few days at best. The Army does thousands of things every day that don't directly involve combat, but are no less vital to accomplishing its mission of defeating America's enemies. And for the vast majority of those jobs, women can do them just as well as men. Since it seems safe to assume that both men and women's abilities are normally distributed, preventing women from serving means the Army ends up with less-qualified men doing some of those jobs. That is no way to run national defense.

Further, while I may be in the minority, I believe that everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they want to do with their life. Like the U.S., Britain uses only volunteers in its military. I don't know why Seaman Faye Turney joined the British Navy. Maybe she just needed a job. Maybe she wanted to be part of the great tradition that marks the Royal Navy. Maybe she wants to see the world and sees the Navy as a path to that end. Whatever her reasons, her presence among the 15 captured British sailors in Iran strikes me as an indication of the strength of the west, not our weaknesses. An Iranian woman would never have the chance to choose the life Faye Turney has chosen. No, she would not have left her child behind while she went off to war, either, as Ms. Parker notes with no small outrage. But men have been leaving their children behind to go to war since the first group of cavemen decided it would be easier to steal another tribe's stuff than to make their own. That's not a good thing, but I fail to see why women should be denied the right to fight for what they believe in simply because their plumbing is different.

Would Seaman Turney's child be better off if she were there to raise him all the time? Maybe, but it seems to me that Seaman Turney is teaching her child a pretty important lesson by being away: that the important things in life are worth making sacrifices for. Many may disagree with what she has chosen to sacrifice for, but I hope we can agree that she should have the right to make those decisions.

Which of our societies is stronger? The one that forces women to stay home and raise children, or the one that allows (if not yet encourages) women to choose their own fate and to do what they do best?

This seems like an opportune moment to introduce myself, since it gives me an easy starting point for my first post. It's not something I really like to think about, but it is much on my mind right now.

I am an officer in the U.S. Army. I am preparing to go to Iraq for a year or longer as part of a Military Transition Team or MiTT. Our purpose will be to support a battalion of the Iraqi Army, helping them to become more effective soldiers so that they can secure their own country. I will be leaving sometime in late June or early July after I complete training at Fort Riley, Kansas. I have been in the Army in some capacity for almost 19 years, although I still have almost six years until my retirement. I have served as a tank platoon leader, tank company executive officer, company commander and in more staff positions than I would care to count ending most recently with a tour as a battalion executive officer. Now I will serve as a team leader for an eleven-man team.

I'm sure everyone can imagine the reaction to the news about extending combat tours to 15 months. That's a tough blow, as it means that we'll all be away from our families for about 18 months when you add in our training time here at Fort Riley. We'll see divorce numbers going up, although I don't know what this will mean for retention. The assumption would be that people will be more likely to get out, but people don't always react the way we would expect. Since I'll be down to about four years until retirement, I certainly won't get out over this, although I do hope it won't cost me my marriage. But it's going to be a real hardship on soldiers and their families.

Conversely, this may help the war effort, as one of the keys to counterinsurgency is knowledge of the enemy, and the twelve month rotation policy meant that people were generally only getting truly comfortable with their area of operations about the time it came for them to leave. I don't think it's a coincidence that we haven't really won a real war since we started sending soldiers into combat for a tour rather than for the duration. People have a very different outlook when they know they don't go home until they win, although that's a challenging thing to ask of soldiers in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan. But it's something to think about.

In any case, I'll be talking about my experiences here, both in training and once I get into theater. I can't promise to tell the whole truth here; certain details will be omitted for security reasons. But I do promise that what I do say will be the truth as I see it. I hope people will take advantage of the opportunity to hear about what we're doing in Iraq, as I don't think this is the kind of story the media is good at reporting, primarily because it is a slow process and therefore doesn't fit the normal story templates. Feel free to ask questions and I will answer what I can.

Monday we start our real training for Iraq. The last two weeks we have been doing preparatory training, so I'm going to take a little time to talk about that.

When we arrived at Fort Riley, we were put up in barracks on Custer Hill, which is the part of Fort Riley where most units work, including the one responsible for preparing us for training. They are accustomed to having large groups come in to be trained, which means that their schedule was too expansive for our smaller class; there was a lot of open space on the schedule, which meant a lot of time where we didn't really have anything to do. There's not much the unit can do about that directly, but it would have helped had we known that going in so we could have done a little more work preparing opportunity training for our teams during dead space in the training.

One of the things that make this training much more challenging and I think useful is that we have a lot more responsibility for our training. Most Army schools involve a lot of being in receive mode: students all have roughly similar experiences, the program of instruction is very precise and the classes are designed to ensure that everyone comes out knowing what they need to know. But for the MiTT mission we are bringing together 10-15 soldiers from across the Army with varying degrees of experience. So the instruction can't be designed as one-size-fits all, because the types of soldiers being trained are too diverse to allow for a simple training solution. Instead the Army determines what people need to know as minimums, and it is the responsibility of the team commander to figure out where they need to focus in order to get to that point, plus to identify other areas where the team needs to train in order to be as successful as possible with the mission. It's a challenge, but that makes being a team commander a lot more fun because you are ultimately responsible for deciding how to train your team.

Having said that, it would have been helpful to know that going in so we could have set up some training for quiet moments so we could have taken advantage of the slack time in the training. It can be rightly argued that I should have figured that out on my own, but it would have been nice to have some one point that fact out to me anyhow, since even the best of us drop the ball from time to time.

Still, I was impressed with the efficiency of the process. We drew a lot of equipment for the trip: uniforms, boots, body armor, helmets, elbow and knee pads, eye protection, ear protection, gloves, weapons...three-plus duffel bags full of gear, to be precise. That could have been a very painful process, but the draw was laid out very intelligently and we were able to execute each draw about as quickly as anyone could expect. Having been through more than one equipment draw that was far more painful than necessary, this experience has been a pleasant surprise.

The one disappointment I have had has been the mandatory training. There are a number of classes that every soldier must take before going into theater, from Equal Opportunity/Prevention of Sexual Harassment (this may sound dumb, but this is particularly important going into a combat zone because when other restrictions are lifted, some people forget that others need to stay in place) to country briefings and lots of information on how to address the IED threats. The briefings were all conducted with a large number of soldiers in a theater environment using what we call 'Death by Power Point': one briefer standing at the front of the room reading slide after slide after slide. Most of the instructors were pretty good, but the amount of real learning that takes place in that environment is pretty low. The training would have been a lot better if we had simply been given the slides and a place where we could go through them as teams. This would have allowed us to conduct group discussions drawing on our experience and knowledge and would have resulted in a lot higher level of learning for all concerned. But it would also have required a lot more resources: rooms, computers to show the slides, etc., so it's not overly surprising they did the training the way they did.

Friday we moved from Custer Hill to Camp Funston. Camp Funston dates back to World War I. It's where American troops trained prior to heading to Europe to help the French and British win the First World War. Now it's also known as FOB (Forward Operating Base) Army Strong, and it's where all MiTT teams live and train prior to deploying to theater. It allows us to get some of the experience of living on a FOB in Iraq, and also provides a lot of space for training to be conducted. We'll be here for two months, and by the time we leave the team will be a lot better integrated and ready to deploy to Iraq. It promises to be an exciting ride, as we start out Monday with language training and cultural immersion training.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller

I note that quote as I realize that our first week of training is over and we're already about one-eighth of the way to jumping on a plane to Kuwait. And while a part of me looks forward to getting this training behind us so that we can get on to our mission, there is so much for us to learn in such a short time it is also mildly disturbing to know that the training is flying by so quickly.

We closed out the week preparing for qualification ranges on Monday and Tuesday. Friday night we hit the simulators and practiced firing our weapons for the first time wearing all of our body armor. It was an unpleasant experience. I'm quite happy to have the body armor, since I know it markedly increases my odds of surviving my trip to Iraq, but it is bulky and heavy and inflexible and wearing it for a full day is going to sorely test me. Saturday we conducted Preliminary Marksmanship Training, or PMI, which involves practicing firing our weapons, rehearsing the fundamentals of marksmanship, and preparing our various sights for live fire. Having grown up in an Army where iron sights were the only option, the new sights we have on our weapons make me feel like I'm suddenly fighting in the future. I won't get into the details, but suffice it to say we've come a long ways from iron sights.

Earlier in the week we spent three days on Iraqi language and culture. Arabic is a tough language and we only scratched the surface in our initial training, but at least we had an opportunity to start learning some basic phrases. The cultural training was more in-depth and should help to ensure that we avoid some of the more common mistakes made by newcomers in a foreign society. Although it should be noted that due to the Army's rotation policy and our ongoing presence in Iraq, the Iraqis are a lot more culturally aware than we are. Part of the training included a cultural immersion dinner where we all dressed up in dishdashas and ate some nominally Iraqi food (they substituted beef for lamb because lamb is too expensive) and conversed with some of the Iraqi-speakers the Army has working here.

I should mention those as well. The Army has contracted for a lot of Iraqi-speakers, most of them former Iraqis who since moved to the U.S., to actually live and work on the FOB with the trainees. They play Iraqi commanders, police, local nationals, and so on, and provide us with excellent opportunities to learn more about Iraqi culture and language. The best training we had all week came on Saturday afternoon with a meeting with two of them playing an Iraqi battalion commander and his second-in-command. A third played my interpreter and I had to role-play my initial meeting with my Iraqi counterpart. It was incredibly challenging; working with an interpreter requires a lot of concentration, and the flow and rhythm of the conversation is very different from what you're accustomed to in conversation with someone you share a language with. Add to that the cultural differences (I introduced my XO as an intelligence officer, forgetting that in Iraq 'intelligence' is associated with Saddam's internal security services) and it was a draining but very illuminating experience. We'll get seven more of those meetings, and I'm quite confident they will be a huge benefit in preparing for our mission, not to mention motivating me to learn more Arabic so I can rely less on my interpreter.

All in all it was a good week, albeit a very tiring one, and I'm quite pleased they give us Sundays off to try and recharge our batteries.

We started the week with weapons qualification. Every MiTT team member is armed with an M4 carbine and an M9 pistol, and some members also carry the M203 grenade launcher. Throw in our grenades and crew-served weapons and we're remarkably well-armed for our size, but since we travel on our own most of the time, we've got to be ready to take out anyone who decides to come after us alone until another force can come to our aid. It's therefore incumbent on each of us to learn as much as possible about our weapons and how to use them, even though if we do our jobs right, we won't ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Monday was the M4 range. It was a challenge for me because I hadn't shot an M4 in more than eight years. The first step for M4 qualification is zeroing your weapon, which is a miserable process. Zeroing involves moving your sights to the strike of the round. In other words, you fire the weapon, see where your shots are hitting, and move the sights so that when you aim at something, that's where the bullet goes. It isn't difficult in theory, but if you haven't fired in a long time, you may screw up and fail to maintain your sight picture, which means that your adjustments will be countered by aiming the weapon differently between rounds. Add to that the problem of firing in full body armor, something I'd never before done, and zeroing took a lot longer for me than it should have. Still, I got the job done and moved over to the qualification range.

That wasn't much more fun, as I still hadn't mastered the techniques of firing while wearing body armor. I did qualify, but only barely, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to reach out and touch the enemy at long ranges. Fortunately, a lot of my team members shot much better than I did, so at least I know that they're capable of getting the job done if we see a triggerman in the distance.

That evening we fired the night tables. These were actually easier than the day tables, first of all because our night sight was already zeroed so you could go right into the table. It also helped that you can fire the night tables from a seated position, which was far more comfortable and stable for me. I failed to qualify the first time because I fired from the kneeling position and because it took me some time to get used to the technique (it's markedly different from day fire). My second time I shot 36 of 40 targets, though, so I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to reach out and touch someone in the dark, particularly as we'll have better night vision equipment in country than we have here in training.

We got back from the range around 0100 Tuesday morning after offloading our vehicles and performing some maintenance, so it was less than four hours later we were getting up to head to the pistol range. Firing pistols is a lot easier than firing rifles for several reasons. They're lighter, so the fatigue factor is much less, and you don't try to engage anyone further away than perhaps 25 meters with a pistol, so the targets are much, much closer. (The Army's furthest target on the rifle range is 300 meters, and the Marines shoot out to 500 meters.) I hit 26 of 30 targets on the pistol range, and just about all of my guys did well with their pistols, including one of my Navy guys who shot 30 for 30.

Next up was the M203 range. The M203 fires 40mm grenades and is a huge force multiplier for a small team, as it allows us to engage targets who are difficult or impossible to engage with direct fire. Having the ability to rain high explosive grenades on enemies several hundred meters away is a big help. While my M203 gunners engaged their targets, the rest of us went back to the rifle range to get some more practice with our M4s. That was a very good idea, as we fired 80 more rounds, this time from more difficult positions, but shot better than we had the day before. As with anything, the more you do, the better you get, so we'll do a lot of weapons fire en route to Iraq to ensure we're as proficient as possible before we ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Thankfully, we closed out the M203 range around 1500, so we were able to get back to our barracks at a decent hour and get some good sleep that evening, recharging our batteries for the rest of the week's training.

With the ranges behind us, we transitioned to a more sedate classroom pace for most of the rest of the week. Wednesday morning we got to go to the Leader's Reaction Course, a kind of obstacle course that requires each team to get through various obstacles while giving them odd limitations. For example, the last obstacle we had to traverse was a ~20 foot high cargo net with a six foot wide platform on top. We had to get the entire team across, plus a 'wounded' soldier (a dummy) on a stretcher. To do this we had a stretcher, a back board, and three ropes. That was a rather straightforward challenge: we tied the ropes to the stretcher and pulled the casualty up one side and lowered him down the other. Some of the others were more esoteric, requiring us not to touch the ground and so on. The purpose of the course is to help the team learn to work together while challenging them to be creative, and it worked pretty well. It was a good time.

Most of the rest of the week was classes on communications and various other technical systems. They're good classes, but the instructor-to-student ratio is so high that it's hard to get as much out of the classes as you should. Given the Army's current financial woes, it's unlikely things will get any better.

Saturday we had a great time, as we went out to a range to practice reflexive fire. As the name implies, reflexive fire involves learning how to fire your weapon rapidly. You start at 25 meters from the target and bring up your weapon as quickly as you safely can and put two rounds in the target before returning the weapon to the low ready. You do this while facing the target and while turned left and right from the target. Then you move in to 20 meters and fire from the kneeling position, still bringing the weapon up to fire two rounds and returning it to the low ready. Then the real fun begins: you walk towards the targets, stopping when a target is presented. We burned about 200 rounds per man and had a great time, as it's a lot more challenging than simply engaging targets on a qualification range. Better yet, we then took the rest of the weekend off, so I was able to spend a little time with Delenn.

This week is all classes. Yesterday we trained on calling for fire, including artillery, rotary wing, and fixed wing. I've done artillery before, but calling in air support is a whole new ballgame and the training was interesting and challenging. Explaining target location to a guy moving at at least 100 mph is a lot different from telling a fixed artillery piece to fire at a target, to put it mildly. Today we had two hours of Iraqi before moving on to personnel recovery, which helps to train you on what to do if you are cut off or captured. That's valuable training, but the execution was horrid. Hopefully the rest of this week's classes will be much better done.

Holding grudges is, sadly, a quintessentially American trait, and it seems bureaucracies are no less prone to the malady than individuals. Case in point, the decision by the Army to deny Joan Baez the chance to sing during a concert at Walter Reed.

Yes, Baez opposes the war. So? Baez seems intelligent enough not to try and turn a concert for soldiers into an antiwar rally. More likely than not Baez would have sung a few songs, perhaps entertained a few soldiers, and moved on without incident. Why the soldiers should be denied the opportunity to hear her sing simply because she holds views diametrically opposed to those of some fraction of the Army is beyond me. Soldiers hold a lot more diverse views than the media tends to portray.

What is supposed to make America great is that people are free to disagree. Granted, Baez isn't really being punished by not being allowed to sing to soldiers; that's a loss for the soldiers. But the notion that the service is going to vet artists based on their political views is anathema to what the U.S. is supposed to stand for and is a disturbing trend.

Apparently Wonkette's take on the Fort Dix six's plan to attack soldiers at Fort Dix is becoming the accepted wisdom about the attack.

Ok. So, the plot was: six dudes from New Jersey buy some guns and storm Fort Dix. The Fort Dix that is full of lots and lots of Army reservists with way, way more guns. And, like, extensive military training and shit. Yes, thank god these terrorists have been caught and locked up before they could be killed within minutes of deciding to carry out the dumbest fucking terrorist plot we’ve ever heard of.

It is not my intent to blow up the attackers beyond their means. They were clearly not too bright, and the incident serves as an important reminder that law enforcement and intelligence are critical tools in this war. (BTW, would these men have been caught pre-Patriot Act? I'm pretty sure they would have, but I'm not certain of that. If I'm right, that's a good reminder of how little the act really did to further secure the U.S. against attack.) But slightly more competent terrorists could have done a lot more damage than people who've never served seem to realize.

Yes, Fort Dix is filled with soldiers, as are all military posts. Contrary to what a lot of people appear to believe, however, soldiers don't wander about 24/7 with weapons, and even soldiers who are armed only have live rounds when they're on a range, with the exception of on-duty military police. So six men with weapons and live rounds could pose a non-trivial risk to a lot of soldiers, depending on how they executed their attack. Again, I'll note that these individuals in particular don't strike me as too likely to have done their due diligence, so they probably wouldn't have been overly effective, but they certainly could have killed at least a few people before they were brought down, and a more intelligent bunch could kill a lot more than a few people.

As Ann Althouse properly notes, the September 11 attacks would have sounded preposterous if someone had suggested them ahead of time, yet they worked disturbingly well. The price of living in a free society is having a lot of places where people can kill effectively. Personally, I'd rather live in that society than one where my safety is guaranteed by taking away most of my rights, but poo-pooing the threats strikes me as an ignorant response to the problem.

Update: Edited for clarity. In the immortal words of Ralph Wiggum: "Me fail English. That unpossible!"

First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., son of BU professor and author Andrew J. Bacevich, is dead. He was killed by an IED in Salah ad Din province on Sunday while serving with 3-8 Cavalry.

His father is the author of the excellent book The New American Militarism and has argued against the war for some time now. Our thoughts go out to the Bacevich family.

On the one hand, campaigns like the VoteVets, which attempt to undermine support for the Iraq War by having former generals speak out against it, seem like logical moves. Generals, after all, have a great deal of training in war and the military art, so if they say that the war is lost, their words should carry some weight.

On the other, some of them seem an awful lot more interested in getting in the news than in really helping. Via Mudville Gazette comes this exercise in compare and contrast from retired Army Major General Paul Eaton.

Last year, pre-surge (pre-US elections) retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton appears before congress, excoriates the Bush administration and demands a surge of troops for Iraq.

Batiste and his colleagues offered their solution: more troops, more money and more time in Iraq. "We must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge," Batiste warned. "We better be planning for at least a minimum of a decade or longer," contributed retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes.

"We are, conservatively, 60,000 soldiers short," added retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of building the Iraqi Security Forces.

This year, in television advertisements for his political group "VoteVets", he says:

President Bush says he listens to his military commanders.
Well, Mr. President, I was one of those commanders, and you weren't listening when we warned you of the dangers we would face invading Iraq. Now our military is overcommitted, and America is less secure.

Mr. President, you're being told we need serious diplomacy, not escalation, and you're still not listening.

If the president won't listen, Congress must.