{"id":15320,"date":"2009-10-28T12:48:10","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T17:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=15320"},"modified":"2009-10-28T12:48:10","modified_gmt":"2009-10-28T17:48:10","slug":"why-ap-doesnt-fight-our-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=15320","title":{"rendered":"Why AP doesn’t fight our wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press<\/a>, in trying to show how smart they are and how incompetent the US military points out;<\/p>\n

There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn’t led to anything close to victory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What AP hasn’t noticed is that the Taliban knows where they are and they know where the US troops are, generally. That’s kind of an advantage – especially since COIN requires that we protect civilians and create an environment of security for them, and the Taliban isn’t required by doctrine or international opinion to provide a measure of security for anyone – except themselves.<\/p>\n

I guess AP envisions some sort of man-to-man defense.<\/p>\n

Of course, you have to read almost to the end to read where AP admits it’s 12-1 ratio is a bit misleading;<\/p>\n

The 12-1 ratio may be misleading because two-thirds of the Allied force is made up of Afghans, who lack the training and experience. The Taliban usually fight in small, cohesive units made up of friends and fellow clansmen. A more meaningful ratio, then, might be 4-1 or 5-1.<\/p>\n

Historically in guerrilla wars, security forces have usually had at least a 3-1 advantage.<\/p>\n

At the height of the U.S. ground involvement in South Vietnam in 1968, the 1.2 million American troops and their allies outnumbered the Communist guerrillas by about 4-1. French forces in the 1945-54 Indochina war numbered about 400,000 men, only a slight numerical advantage against the rebels.<\/p>\n

In a more recent campaign, Russia’s Chechen war in 1999-2000, Russian troops held a 4-1 advantage over the insurgents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But 5-1 doesn’t make good headlines like 12-1 does. I guess they’re lobbying the Obama Administration to keep our presence in Afghanistan lower. That won’t encourage the Taliban, will it? If you read even further, you’ll notice they admit that they don’t even know the number of Taliban that they use in their ratio anyway.<\/p>\n

Why did they even bother to write the article?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press, in trying to show how smart they are and how incompetent the US … Why AP doesn’t fight our wars<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-media","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}