One thing that never fails to amaze me is the ability of the anti-war side to use anecdotal accounts of spot shortages to argue that our military personnel have not been adequately trained or equipped to fight in Iraq. I suppose that since they assume we are losing, this makes some sort of sense from their point of view. But since many have thought we were doomed from day one, why the level of equipment and training should matter is beyond me.
The key point is that our troops are arguably the best trained and equipped force in history.
Strategypage notes that our years of low casualty rates are really quite amazing:
While every combat death is a tragedy, the war in Afghanistan has been notable for how few of them there have been. We'll use a standard measure of combat losses, the number of troops in a combat division (12-20,000 troops) who are killed each day the division is in combat. Since late 2001, there have been .12 American combat deaths per division day in Afghanistan. During the Vietnam war, the average division lost 3.2 troops a day, which was similar to the losses suffered in Korea (1950-53). In Iraq, the losses have been .44 deaths per division per day. By comparison, during World War II the daily losses per American averaged (over 400-500 combat days) about twenty soldiers per day. On the Russian front, German and Russian divisions lost several times that, and often over a hundred a day for weeks on end.
And while those killed in action are a far smaller percentage of the casualties than in the past, even counting casualties instead of only KIA yields a similar amazing performance:
With the dramatic drop in casualties, came another big shift. In World War II, one in three casualties was killed. In Iraq and Afghanistan, only 12 percent of the casualties were fatal. This does not change the dramatic difference between combat losses then and now. In World War II, U.S. divisions suffered about 60 dead and wounded per combat day, while in Afghanistan there has been one (1) per combat day, and in Iraq, 3.5. So by any measure, U.S. troops have learned how to avoid getting hit. The reasons are better equipment, tactics, weapons, leadership and training than in the past. With an all-volunteer force, the troops are smarter and more physically fit than in the past. Many of the life-saving innovations U.S. troops have come up with in the past seven years have not gotten much publicity. Good news doesn't sell, but in this case, it has definitely saved lives.
And not just avoiding being hit, but hitting the enemy first--which is the best way to avoid getting hit, I suppose. Another reason is that our enemies really aren't that good. For all the Vietnam comparisons made by people who don't understand Vietnam or Iraq, our enemies today don't fight often above platoon level while in Vietnam, organized battalions and regiments, and even divisions took to the field. Today's enemies mostly plant IEDs and kill civilians.
Losing to these guys would be embarassing. But our Left is out to do just that. And criticizing our troops' training and equipment isn't an argument they are using to advocate better training and equipment to win--just an excuse to pull them out under the color of compassion for the troops.
And have no doubt, only our own government and people can prevent our troops from winning this war. I think we will win this war. But that doesn't erase the fact that our most potent foe in the war today is our own side.
