Are we expecting too much???

[Seiyuuki]

I understand that we're much more technological advance and we expected to do more with these technologies and better training, etc., etc., etc.

But are we expecting too much from our military (don't care if it's U.S. or any other country, it's the same expectation I believe)??? We expect the number of death not to go into the 4 digits area. War, doesn't matter what phase of war, it's suppose to go in months...

All in all, it's not a bad thing to have expectation, but is our expectation too high? War isn't an exact science...and not everything planned will go as plan.

[Seraphim]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/849ienyw.asp


An Army of Lots More Than One
From the July 7 / July 14, 2003 issue: Our military is too small for the jobs it has to do.
by Frederick Kagan
07/07/2003, Volume 008, Issue 42


THE ARMED FORCES of the United States are too small to support the missions required of them in the post-9/11 world. In many of the situations we now face, using troops on the ground is nonnegotiable, and America has too few of them. If that assertion seems counterintuitive given the impressive performance of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, two numbers may help drive it home: Of the 495,000 troops in the U.S. Army, 370,000 are already deployed around the world.

The destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has always been rightly seen as only the first step in a reorientation of America's security policy toward the Middle East. If the United States proves to have eliminated the Baathist regime in Iraq only to replace it with chaos and violence, we clearly will have failed to enhance our security. The threats, to be sure, will be different. The imminence of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens at home and abroad. Chaos in Iraq will pose a less obvious threat, but the danger to Americans will be no less substantial.

We have already seen how chaos and civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s provided the breeding ground for terrorists and a haven for the bases where they trained. If U.S. forces are reduced or withdrawn too soon, similar conditions in Iraq will nurture the al Qaeda operatives of the future. The U.S.-led attack could end up bringing about the very threat that prompted it in the first place--the proliferation of Iraqi weapons to terrorist organizations--if we do not finish what we have begun by establishing a stable and peaceful regime in Iraq.

This will not be accomplished, however, without the prolonged deployment of significant numbers of American ground forces. Smart weapons cannot keep peace. They cannot get schools and hospitals running, or keep electricity and water flowing, or keep hostile neighbors from attacking one another, or provide a police presence to deter looters and criminals, or hunt down and capture individual terrorists, interrogate them, and learn from them the nature of the organizations to which they belong, or find traces of a WMD program hidden carefully in a country the size of California. Only soldiers and marines can accomplish these tasks, and, given the size and complexity of the country, only in fairly large numbers. Given the unrest and political chaos that currently engulf Iraq, it is hard to imagine that the United States will be able to withdraw any significant portion of its 146,000 troops from that country in less than a year without compromising our vital objectives.

The problem is that we cannot maintain such a large force in Iraq for a year without seriously damaging the Army and harming our ability to pursue other critical objectives. Given the normal requirement to have two units at home for every one deployed, the 11-division-equivalent U.S. Army could support a three-and-two-thirds division commitment to Iraq indefinitely--at the cost of having no forces available for operations anywhere else in the world. But the current deployment is the equivalent of more than five divisions (the 101st Airborne, 4th Infantry, and 1st Armored divisions, two brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and elements of the 1st Infantry and 10th Mountain divisions).

In addition, more than 200,000 reservists and members of the National Guard have been called up to support the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the home front. Some of these troops have been deployed for more than a year, many of them earning a fraction of their civilian pay. There is reason to fear that the hardship on them and their families may damage recruiting for the Guard.

Within months the U.S. leadership will face a difficult choice: reduce the commitment to Iraq regardless of whether the country is ready for such a reduction, or extend the deployment of many of these units indefinitely. The first choice is unacceptable because it may well compromise our ability to achieve our objectives in Iraq. The second will do great harm to the Army.

It is not merely that soldiers in Iraq are under strain from having to be peacekeepers and warfighters simultaneously and from coming under periodic attack at the hands of the populations they are trying to police, or that morale in those units will deteriorate as their deployments extend with no clear end in sight. Units engaged in peacekeeping (if it can be called that) in Iraq are not training for war. The more forces we maintain in Iraq, the fewer we have available to face other potential enemies. Right now there is hardly a single division in the U.S. Army that could take the field as a unit without our hurriedly withdrawing important elements from Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan and sending them to war without the opportunity to retrain them. That is an unacceptable situation.

Nor can we look to our allies to help us. All of the European states have cut their armed forces so dramatically over the past decade that they are not capable of deploying large forces to Iraq. The British are already maintaining half of their deployable forces there. Virtually none of the European states has the command, control, and communications facilities required for the job, let alone the strategic transportation capabilities needed to get forces to Iraq and sustain them there. Furthermore, states like France and Germany that vigorously opposed the war have demonstrated an equal unwillingness to support the peace we have imposed on Iraq.

It is time to stop pretending that the United States can prosecute a war on terror, conduct peacekeeping operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and maintain the security of the homeland without a substantial increase in the size of the armed forces. General Shinseki, the recently retired Army chief of staff, warns us to "beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division army"--and even he understates the problem. In truth, the armed forces need an increase in size of at least 25 percent.

The current military structure was designed in the 1990s when all the talk was of a "strategic pause" and a prolonged period of peace. What pause there was has vanished, and it is not peace that now looks likely to be prolonged. Expanding the armed forces to match the missions they must perform is an urgent task.


Frederick Kagan is a military historian and the coauthor of "While America Sleeps."

[Seraphim]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/06/IN267257.DTL


ALL WAR ALL THE TIME

The military game has changed, and the U.S. isn't ready

William S. Lind Sunday, July 6, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Every year, the grand old man of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, hosts a dinner in Washington for other leading conservatives where one key issue is discussed. This year, it was the neo-cons' push to create an American world empire. One of the leading neo-conservatives made the usual pro- empire pitch: Empire is inevitable, we have to make the world safe for democracy, no one can stop us, etc.

A cultural conservative, who wants America to be a republic, not an empire, asked a question: "What is your answer to Fourth Generation Warfare?" No one around the table had ever heard of it -- despite the fact that American soldiers are fighting one Fourth Generation war in Afghanistan, facing another one in Iraq, and getting involved in a third in the Philippines.

Fourth Generation War is the fourth major "turning" in the nature of war in the modern period, the time since the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and gave the state a monopoly on war, first in Europe, and then, as European power spread, throughout the world.

Before that treaty, many different entities fought wars. Families fought wars, tribes fought wars, cities fought wars. So did races and religions, business enterprises (the Grimaldis, who still rule Monaco, got their start renting out war galleys), social classes (knights and samurai), gangs (usually made up of unemployed soldiers). The state itself was a newcomer.

First Generation War, which lasted from 1648 to around the time of the American Civil War, was fought by state armies using line and column tactics --

think of the typical battle in the time of the American Revolution or Napoleon. The battlefield was orderly, more or less, and it gave rise to a military culture of order. Most of the things that distinguish "military" from "civilian" -- uniforms, saluting, promotion systems -- come from the First Generation and are intended to reinforce the culture of order.

Starting in the mid-19th century, with the development of mass armies and weapons such as machine guns and quick-firing artillery, the order of the battlefield began to break down. The result was the central problem that has faced state armies ever since: the growing contradiction between the disorderly battlefield and a military culture of order.

Two solutions emerged, both in World War I: The Second Generation of modern war, which was developed by the French army, and Third Generation Warfare, which was developed by the German army.

Second Generation Warfare relies on firepower to cause attrition; it is war by body count. In the French army in World War I, the firepower came mostly from artillery. In the American military today, the firepower increasingly comes from aircraft and missiles, but the goal is still victory through attrition. The U.S. Army learned Second Generation War from the French during and after World War I, and it remains the American way of war. New technology, in Donald Rumsfeld's strategy, is used, not to move beyond this Second Generation of war, but to make it more efficient or more "precise." The B-2 Stealth bomber and the Predator attack drone are good examples.

Third Generation Warfare was a German product, with roots going back to the Scharnhorst reforms in the Prussian army that followed Prussia's defeat by Napoleon. It is fought more in time than in place. Speed, not firepower, is its main weapon, and firepower is used to create opportunities for maneuver rather than merely to run up the body count. (General Heinz Guderian, who created the Panzer division in the 1930s and led Germany's brilliant campaign against France in 1940, often told his men, "We are not a killing machine.")

Fourth Generation War, which is now killing a few more American soldiers every day in Iraq, marks the end of the state's monopoly on war.

All around the world, state militaries are facing nonstate opponents, groups such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Almost everywhere, the state is losing. Hezbollah defeated the Israelis in Lebanon, and Hamas has been doing the same in the West Bank. Russia's war in Chechnya is not going well. Nor is ours in Afghanistan. Far from securing the Afghan countryside, the United States and other state armed forces are losing control of Kabul.

President Bush's proclamation of victory in Iraq is looking more than slightly premature. The pace of fighting there is picking up, not slowing down,

as American troops face Baathists, gangs of looters, Shiites, Arab fedayeen (who are still coming into Iraq to fight us), Wahabi mujahedeen, and so on. Because these enemies are not states, they have nothing we can bomb, no tanks we can take out, no capital we can occupy. And each one is a Hydra: Every time we kill an enemy, we recruit more.

It is not just conservatives in Washington who do not understand the kind of war we are now engaged in. No one in Washington does. Certainly the Pentagon does not. The high-tech weapons on which it lavishes billions are completely irrelevant to Fourth Generation War. A joke in Israel puts it well: Why does Israel need its own spy satellites? So it can see a 12-year-old Palestinian boy picking up a stone.

Nineteenth Century war scholar Carl von Clausewitz wrote:

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and Commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking: neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into,

something that is alien to nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive . . ."

Today, Washington is not even asking this question. It simply assumes that in its quest for world empire, it will fight only states. As the old saying goes, assume makes an ass of you and me.

William S. Lind is a center director at the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. He writes and lectures internationally on military theory and doctrine.

[Seraphim]

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/World/ntl_martin_military_030707.html


Stretched Out
Liberia Prompts Question: Is the U.S. Military Overextended?

By Michel Martin and Theresa Bradley



July 7— As the Bush administration ponders deploying U.S. soldiers to help secure peace in Liberia, the notion of sending more troops abroad has sparked a political question at home: Is the U.S. military already doing too much with too little?


U.S. forces are 1.4 million strong, and an additional 1.2 million individuals serve in the reserves. But the troops already are committed in 136 countries across the globe — a problem that is most acute for the Army, which is only a third of the U.S. force, but which plays a disproportionate role in peacekeeping operations.

Army commitments include nearly 135,000 still in Iraq, 44,800 in Kuwait, 32,000 in South Korea, 11,400 in Afghanistan, and 2,150 in Kosovo and Macedonia. All of these missions could wind up lasting years, not months.

While current estimates suggest as few as 500 U.S. troops could be sent to the war-ravaged, yet tiny West African nation of Liberia, some analysts are using the prospect of the deployment to raise a general alarm about what they see as an increasingly overextended, exhausted fighting force.

"The Liberia mission is worth doing anyway, because it can be kept very small and relatively short. We've already broken the camel's back," says foreign policy scholar Michael O'Hanlon, "and we're going to have to repair that back with major surgery."


Reluctance Revisited

The potential mission to Liberia also is noteworthy because it appears to mark a real change in President Bush's philosophy on U.S. engagement in world affairs.

Just three years ago, then-presidential candidate George Bush told ABCNEWS' Sam Donaldson he would oppose such use of American force. Even in the case of another Rwanda — where hundreds of thousands were killed by tribal warfare in 1994 — Bush said he "would work with world organizations and encourage them to move, but I would not commit our troops."

"The president must set clear parameters as to where troops ought to be used and when," Bush said at the time. "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in nations outside our strategic interest."

Such reluctance was likely borne of ugly memories — particularly of a failed 1993 mission to intervene in the civil war in Somalia in which 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in just one gruesome incident. The event later was memorialized in the book and movie, Black Hawk Down.

Africa has rarely been perceived as vital to U.S. interests, said Herman Cohen, a 38-year foreign service veteran and former assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

"I found the Defense Department and especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff very reluctant to do anything in Africa," Cohen told ABCNEWS last week. "We want to save what we have for important places," he said of their mentality.

Yet for many Americans, Sept. 11, 2001, changed the definition of "strategic interest."

Today, "one wants to be careful about permitting conditions of failed states to create conditions in which there's so much instability that you begin to see greater sources of terrorism," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said Friday.


Price of Deployment

Some analysts worry that overextension could "break" the military.

"People will quit the army; they'll choose not to re-enlist," predicts O'Hanlon. "It's one thing to be asked to serve overseas every third or fourth or fifth year, but it is not acceptable to put these people overseas more than half the time."

But strategic thinking, O'Hanlon argues, needs to go beyond the question of how many troops go where.

"You need balance in the American military. You do want to push for some new ways of fighting," he said. "You do want to look for ways to win wars with smaller forces. But at the same time, you don't want to cut too far, because there are missions out there that still require a lot of boots on the ground."

The administration last week seemed to settle on terms for its involvement.

"I have made up my mind there needs to be stability in Liberia," President Bush announced Friday. "And one of the conditions for a peaceful and stable Liberia is for Mr. Charles Taylor [the Liberian president] to leave the country."

"Charles Taylor needs to leave, because Charles Taylor is the problem," Rice concurred.

Taylor said Sunday that he has agreed to step down and will accept exile in Nigeria. He also said the United States should send peacekeepers.

The first U.S. military experts arrived in Liberia today, to study the situation in the country and help the administration determine whether to send troops.

Yet few observers have forgotten that the last time the administration took aim at a foreign leader, more than 250,000 American troops were sent to topple Saddam Hussein.

The as yet undetermined outcome of that mission will most likely define the American people's appetite for intervention elsewhere.


http://abcnews.go.com/images/autowirestory/AP/DKB103070310.jpeg


Anti-government demonstrators gather outside the U.S. Embassy in the Liberian capital Monrovia July 3, 2003, pleading for the U.S. to send peacekeeping troops to the war-torn West African nation. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

[Duke]

Our military commitments reflect the era we live, the post Cold War or a Single Superpower. During Second World War reconstruction, we implemented the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine, attempts (with success) to improve or rebuild the world. Today, we are doing the same, rebuilding after the Cold War.
Back in the Cold War the US, to fend off communism, sold part of itself to the devil in the form of dictators/theocrats(Hussein, Noriega, Shah of Iran, Afghan mujhadeins etc). FDR would often say of allied dictators as, "So and so is a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch.". These forces, while not examples of freedom, did stop communist expansion at the cost of democracy. Now we must undo what we created or pay for the cost of the Cold War by correcting the instability that the tyrannts had created.

[Seraphim]

And the use of this motto "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"

[Seiyuuki]

And the use of this motto "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"

But now...it's more like "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, who's now my enemy."

[martinexsquaddie]

Problem is every failed country is now a potential base for terrorists

[vryhpyammoadded]

I can almost hear the truckloads of radical Islamic terrorists heading for their next roach motel. That is, of course, if our guys will be allowed to load their weapons.

[Trident-za]

Damn good "topic" this. Very interesting quotes.

[Seraphim]

Iraq duty puts huge strains
on active forces, National Guard and reserves

http://www.msnbc.com/news/936532.asp?vts=071020030410

http://a799.g.akamai.net/3/799/388/ea22d6584f63a4/www.msnbc.com/news/1951609.jpg

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill Wednesday.





WASHINGTON, July 9 — “When do I get to go home?” Over and over again, that was the question that GIs asked senators who visited Iraq 10 days ago. So that’s the question the senators asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at an Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon was studying whether U.S. troop strength in Iraq should be increased. But for now, total U.S. manpower isn’t enough to promise service members in Iraq early and firm return dates.

THE POLITICAL equation of boosting the overall size of the military — something that some lawmakers are pushing for — is a delicate one indeed.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who was part of the delegation that toured Iraq, struck a note echoed by other members of the committee, “one soldier from Maine told me, ‘I can deal with another three months, I can deal with another six months, but I just need to know’” when his tour of duty would end.
The Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which played a key role in capturing Baghdad, is beginning a pullout from Iraq, Rumsfeld said.

3rd Infantry Division leaving Iraq

‘DANGEROUSLY STRETCHED THIN’
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., was more pointed.
“We are dangerously stretched thin in the Army and the other services also,” Reed told Rumsfeld. “We have to be prepared to increase our Army, the number of brigades in our Army, or activate National Guard divisions and we have to make that decision soon — because of the training these troops will need before they’re deployed.”
Reed insisted that the Defense Department was “rapidly approaching a decision point” about enlarging the military.
Rumsfeld replied that “at the moment, we do not see that that is the case” but acknowledged the strain on those serving in Iraq, saying it was “critically important” that the Pentagon “manage the forces in a way that we can continue to attract and retain the people that we need, that the Guard and reserve ... are not stressed, or called up so frequently or kept there so long that it affects their commitment to serve.”
Rumsfeld and his staff are in the middle of a process of transforming the military to a leaner and more technically adept force — a long-term goal that conflicts with adding thousands of more soldiers and Marines.
Armed Services Committee member Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., told MSNBC.com “when you’re in the midst of transformation, you may not want to be expanding your force. At the same time, you might be able to reduce it based on more specialization and the use of more technology.”
But, given the current strains, he said, “you can make a strong case that there must not be enough end force if you have to rely so heavily on Guard and reserve components.”

RECRUITING AND RETENTION
Nelson added, “if you can’t tell the deployed troops when their deployment is over, then it is going to affect recruiting and particularly retention.”
During Rumsfeld’s four hours of testimony, some senators urged him to emphasize to the American people that reconstructing Iraq would take years.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Rumsfeld that the American people had a sense of “unease — not disaffection, not anger, but unease” about the commitment in Iraq and that Rumsfeld needed to specify how long the task would take and how many troops it would demand.

“I’m convinced without a doubt that when Americans are told what the plan is for post-war Iraq, then I think you will receive overwhelming support on the part of the American people,” McCain said.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told Rumsfeld, “I hope we’re going to be there for a long time — because we have got to be successful.”
Nelson said bringing stability to Iraq would require at least a five-year commitment. “I don’t necessarily see that as a negative,” but the Bush administration needs to persuade the American people that it is committed to “a successful liberation of those people.”
Nelson noted that one of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq this week was a Florida National Guardsman. “Someone slipped up behind him, shot him in the head and then slipped off into the crowd,” Nelson said, calling the killing of U.S. troops since the end of formal combat “premeditated assassination.”
Two hundred eleven Americans have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March, 143 by hostile fire.
Since President Bush declared on May 1 that major combat had ended, 73 American military personnel have killed, 29 by hostile action.
With the imminent prospect of deployment of U.S. troops to help restore order in Liberia — and U.S. troops tied down around the world, from Bosnia to the Sinai to Korea — the strain on American soldiers, sailors and Marines is only growing.
The U.S. has 145,000 troops stationed in Iraq, with some elements of the Army’s Third Infantry Division scheduled to come home this month and the rest by September.
“That footprint (force size) appears to us on the operational side to be about what that footprint needs to look like,” said Gen. Tommy Franks, who has just stepped down as the head of U.S. Central Command and who was testifying alongside Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld told the committee that the United States had asked NATO members and other countries to commit troops to help bear the burden in Iraq. Rumsfeld said 19,000 non-U.S. coalition forces are now on the ground in Iraq, with another 11,000 promised in the months ahead.
But Democratic senators wondered whether Rumsfeld had been personally committed enough to phone French and German leaders to request their help.





“We have reached out to just about everybody I can think of, asking for assistance of various types and it is coming in,” Rumsfeld said. “Is it as much as we’d like, as fast as we’d like? No, it isn’t. But are we hopeful it’ll continue to increase? Yes.”

SEEKING FRENCH HELP?
Rumsfeld said 80 or 90 countries had been asked to send troops to help. But he indicated at one point that he was not certain German and France had specifically been asked to contribute forces.
When Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked whether Germany and France were on the invitees list, Rumsfeld replied, “I’ll have to ask. I suspect they are” — a remark that caused a small ripple of laugher in the audience.
Rumsfeld sparred with Democratic members not only on the question of whether he really wanted France and Germany to help in Iraq but also over whether the Pentagon had done enough pre-war planning for post-war reconstruction and establishment of an Iraqi government.
In a testy exchange with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Rumsfeld said it was “petty and arrogant to think that you can build another people’s nation. I think the Iraqi people are going to build their own nation back and they’re going to build it in a distinctly unique Iraqi way.”
In an interview with MSNBC.com, Nelson referred to one of the many problems with the Iraqis rebuilding their nation: As many as 30,000 Iraqis were Saddam Hussein’s Baath party loyalists who resent losing their privileged status when Saddam was ousted.
“One would hope there could be some rehabilitation — because otherwise you’re going to live with 30,000 rotten apples in the barrel,” Nelson said. “You can’t take the rotten apples out. If you can’t eliminate them, then rehabilitation is probably your only hope.”

[Beowulf]

Rumsfeld said it was “petty and arrogant to think that you can build another people’s nation. I think the Iraqi people are going to build their own nation back and they’re going to build it in a distinctly unique Iraqi way.”

I like that...sounds good.
beowulf

[Sub_Zero]

Technology has brought us many advances on the battlefield, and it's saving the lives of American soldiers, keeping those numbers below your "4-digit" mark. One factor that we need to look at dates back to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" - it's the so-called "Fog of War". This "fog" is the confusion that sets in during a battle. Murphy's law states that "No plan will last more than 5 minutes into a battle," and from there, the fog replaces order, and chaos sets in.

Now that we have satellite capabilities, and HQ can relay information directly down to operations commanders, the next step is to send the same information to NCO's, and even the common grunt slogging it out in the concrete jungles of modern warfare. Whereas 10 years ago, your Sergeant wouldn't have known if there was a bad guy around the corner, now, we're advancing to the point where he can tell you exactly when to pie around and get him before he gets you. These advances are now implemented in armored regiments - a platoon of Abrams M1s can now all be in direct synch with each other, because each tank commander is getting the info direct from HQ, eliminating a lot of the guess work from battle.

The Land Warrior system, if implemented successfully, is more than the OICW weapons system - it's a whole headset that will attach via an eyepiece or set of goggles for our infantrymen. Land Warrior would allow for the kind of co-ordination that we have in bigger computers in our tanks, except shrunk down onto a squad-based infantry setting. This is the direction that warfare is going in- highly informational, and highly mobile. In that light, we may be able to expect to see a shrinking in the numbers of casualties, and a reduction in time needed to win a conflict.

[SABER 2-3]

The above say's it all. The "fog of war" is created by the inability of troops and leaders to process all of the sights, sounds and emotions of direct combat. This "fog" can be counteracted by heavy rehersal (battle drills at all levels) and good prior planning (multi-FRAGO if needed). The addition of more sensory overload (the leading cause of battlefield chaos) via sysems such as Land Warrior are not the answer and only a F-ing REMF staff grade officer would want more HQ direction. Taking your next step at the direction of some no-load sitting in a lazy-boy, watching from command HQ on a monitor is no way to win a fight that has you nose to nose w/ the enemy.