Surgical precision in military operations

 

United States Senator John McCain wants the U. S. to use military force to rescue the more than 200 girls being held by Boko Haram in Nigeria.  



 



 

 



Senator McCain's courage as a prisoner of war is well known, but that doesn't make him an expert in military operations, particularly those that would be done with "surgical precision."  You simply can't run that kind of operation to rescue that large a group of hostages.  Let's go back in time, to the mid/late 1970s.  Not to the fiasco in Iran, but a hostage rescue operation three years earlier.

In 1976, two terrorist groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the German Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France flight and diverted it to Entebbe, the main airport in Uganda.  They had 248 hostages, but many who weren't Israeli or Jewish were released.  Eventually, Israel's Sayeret Maktal, a special forces unit charged with counter-terrorism and hostage rescue was called upon to stage a rescue.

More than 100 commandos of Sayeret Maktal plus dozens of support personnel were involved.  When the dust raised by this surgical strike had settled, the commander of the rescue operation, three of the hostages, all of the hijackers and 45 Ugandan soldiers were dead.  More than a dozen of Uganda's military aircraft had been destroyed.  Yes, the Ugandan troops fought alongside the terrorists and supported their operations.

Boko Haram has undoubtedly dispersed the girls.  Each location where they are holding hostages would have to be identified and proper intelligence gathered to make an operation to take down that specific location planned.  All would have to be executed with split-second precision, to achieve surprise.  Even then, things don't go as planned.  In November of 1970, after months of planning and rehearsal, an operation was launched in an attempt to rescue 61 American POWs being held at the Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam.  The mission went perfectly, except of course for the fact that the prisoners had been moved and there was no one there to be rescued.

Rescuing hundreds of hostages cannot be done "surgically" and we need to learn from the military fiascoes of our past like the Iran Hostage rescue mission, the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. 

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I just watched a video of a guy being ripped off by someone ostensibly trying to help the victim. 

 



What in the world?  The man is "down" and your first thought isn't to take care of him, it is to take his money. 

Lying, cheating, stealing, whatever it takes to get by, without having to put in a hard day's work.  Is that the real American dream?  To get over on others through deception and/or deceit?

I know I wouldn't do this.  If you're on my FB friends list, I know you wouldn't do this.  So why are so many other people doing stuff like this?  Economic downturn?  Easier way to live?  You tell me.

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Ah, the corporate approach to doublespeak is just so endearing.  Here are a few terms that General Motors employees were warned against using in a 2008 presentation: 

Deathtrap
Widowmaker
Rolling Sarcophagus. 
And my favorite - Kevorkianesque.

Now that GM has paid $35 million in fines for delaying the recall of a number of their vehicles for a variety of reasons, it seems like such a tiny little slap on the wrist.

Punish GM as they deserve to be punished.

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Random Ponderings:

I'm very tired from accumulated lack of sleep and stress over the past few days, so please bear with me on this blog.  I'm hopeful the quality bounces back up closer to normal tomorrow.

I had no idea that Joe Francis had been forced to sell his Girls Gone Wild business, or that a restraining order keeping him from coming close than 100 feet from the company's offices had been entered against him.  Heck, I might have put in a bid to buy his business if I'd known it was up for sale.

ABC News reports that Dolly Parton goes to bed at night fully made-up.  I'd have been surprised if that weren't the case.

If the guy sitting next to me at the movies this morning had pulled out his cellphone another time and distracted me, I might have broken one of my rules and said something.  What I fantasized about doing and what I would have said have nothing in common. ;)

Daniel Radcliffe says he absolutely, positively will not do another Harry Potter movie.

I am happy to help out a worthy cause by letting high school kids watch my car, but couldn't they at least pretend to be a little enthusiastic?  Especially when they are supposed to be cheerleaders?

"Blazing Saddles" is on AMC but I can no longer bring myself to watch that heavily censored version of this movie masterpiece.  If I can't see and hear the real thing, it isn't worth paying attention to.

WWE chairman and CEO Vince McMahon lost over $300 million of his net worth in one day, as the price of WWE stock plunged.  He fell out of the ranks of the billionaires.  Is this big news?  If someone's hold on a particular level of net worth is so tenuous that one bad day in the markets can cost the inclusion within that banding of wealth, did they deserve to be included in that group to begin with?

Signing Julio Franco to play in his fifth decade of pro baseball makes as much sense as did the old St. Louis Browns signing a midget and giving him a fractional number for his uniform.

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May 17th in History:

1395 – Battle of Rovine, Wallachians defeat an invading Ottoman army
1521 – Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, is executed for treason.
1536 – George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford and four other men are executed for treason.
1536 – The annulment of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s marriage.
1590 – Anne of Denmark is crowned Queen of Scotland.
1642 – Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve (1612–1676) founds the Ville Marie de Montréal.
1673 – Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette begin exploring the Mississippi River.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: the Continental Congress bans trade with Quebec.
1792 – The New York Stock Exchange is formed.
1805 – Muhammad Ali becomes Wāli of Egypt.
1808 – Napoleon I of France orders the annexation of the Papal States to the French Empire.
1814 – Occupation of Monaco changes from French to Austrian.
1814 – The Constitution of Norway is signed and Crown Prince Christian Frederick of Denmark is elected King of Norway by the Norwegian Constituent Assembly.
1849 – A large fire nearly burns St. Louis, Missouri to the ground.
1863 – Rosalía de Castro publishes Cantares Gallegos, the first book in the Galician language.
1865 – The International Telegraph Union (later the International Telecommunication Union) is established in Paris.
1869 – Imperial Japanese forces defeat the remnants of the Tokugawa shogunate in the Battle of Hakodate to end the Boshin War.
1875 – Aristides wins the first Kentucky Derby.
1900 – Second Boer War: British troops relieve Mafeking.
1902 – Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical analog computer.
1914 – The Protocol of Corfu is signed recognising full autonomy to Northern Epirus under nominal Albanian sovereignty.
1915 – The last British Liberal Party government (led by Herbert Henry Asquith) falls.
1933 – Vidkun Quisling and Johan Bernhard Hjort form Nasjonal Samling — the national-socialist party of Norway.
1939 – The Columbia Lions and the Princeton Tigers play in the United States' first televised sporting event, a collegiate baseball game in New York City.
1940 – World War II: Germany occupies Brussels, Belgium.
1940 – World War II: the old city centre of the Dutch town of Middelburg is bombed by the German Luftwaffe, to force the surrender of the Dutch armies in Zeeland.
1943 – World War II: the Dambuster Raids by No. 617 Squadron RAF on German dams.
1954 – The United States Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
1967 – Six-Day War: President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt demands dismantling of the peace-keeping UN Emergency Force in Egypt.
1969 – Venera program: Soviet Venera 6 begins its descent into the atmosphere of Venus, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by pressure.
1970 – Thor Heyerdahl sets sail from Morocco on the papyrus boat Ra II to sail the Atlantic Ocean.
1973 – Watergate scandal: Televised hearings begin in the United States Senate.
1974 – The Troubles: Thirty-three civilians are killed and 300 injured when the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) detonates four car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, Republic of Ireland. It is the deadliest attack of the Troubles and the deadliest terrorist attack in the Republic's history. There are allegations that British state forces were involved.
1974 – Police in Los Angeles, California, raid the Symbionese Liberation Army's headquarters, killing six members, including Camilla Hall.
1980 – General Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea seizes control of the government and declares martial law in order to suppress student demonstrations.
1980 – On the eve of presidential elections, Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path attacks a polling location in the town of Chuschi, Ayacucho, starting the Internal conflict in Peru.
1983 – The U.S. Department of Energy declassifies documents showing world's largest mercury pollution event in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (ultimately found to be 4.2 million pounds), in response to the Appalachian Observer's Freedom of Information Act request.
1983 – Lebanon, Israel, and the United States sign an agreement on Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
1984 – Prince Charles calls a proposed addition to the National Gallery, London, a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend," sparking controversies on the proper role of the Royal Family and the course of modern architecture.
1987 – An Iraqi Dassault Mirage F1 fighter jet fires two missiles into the U.S. Navy warship USS Stark, killing 37 and injuring 21 of her crew.
1990 – The General Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) eliminates homosexuality from the list of psychiatric diseases.
1992 – Three days of popular protests against the government of Prime Minister of Thailand Suchinda Kraprayoon begin in Bangkok, leading to a military crackdown that results in 52 officially confirmed deaths, many disappearances, hundreds of injuries, and over 3,500 arrests.
1994 – Malawi holds its first multi-party elections.
1997 – Troops of Laurent Kabila march into Kinshasa. Zaire is officially renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo.
2000 – Arsenal and Galatasaray fans clash in the 2000 UEFA Cup Final riots in Copenhagen
2004 – The first legal same-sex marriages in the U.S. are performed in the state of Massachusetts.
2006 – The aircraft carrier USS Oriskany is sunk in the Gulf of Mexico as an artificial reef.
2007 – Trains from North and South Korea cross the 38th Parallel in a test-run agreed by both governments. This is the first time that trains have crossed the Demilitarized Zone since 1953.

Famous Folk Born on May 17th:

Bartholomew Roberts
Edward Jenner
Wilhelm Steinitz
Horace Elgin Dodge
Dorothy Richardson
George Sheldon
Cool Papa Bell
Archibald Cox
Earl Morrall
Dennis Hopper
Grace Zabriskie
Kathleen Sullivan
Bill Paxton
Sugar Ray Leonard
Bob Saget
Jim Nantz
Craig Ferguson
Trent Reznor
Sasha Alexander
Derek Hough