{"id":39245,"date":"2014-01-11T07:43:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-11T12:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=39245"},"modified":"2014-01-11T07:43:47","modified_gmt":"2014-01-11T12:43:47","slug":"boot-on-the-ground-in-somalia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39245","title":{"rendered":"Boots on the ground in Somalia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chief Tango sends us a link to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/us-has-deployed-military-advisers-to-somalia-officials-say\/2014\/01\/10\/b19429f2-7a20-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html?hpid=z3\">Washington Post<\/a> article which reports that there have been US &#8220;boots on the ground&#8221; in Somalia since October.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A cell of U.S. military personnel has been in the Somali capital of Mogadishu to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia, an Islamist group whose leaders have professed loyalty to al-Qaeda, according to three U.S. military officials.<\/p>\n<p>The previously undisclosed deployment \u2014 of fewer than two dozen troops \u2014 reverses two decades of U.S. policy that effectively prohibited military \u201cboots on the ground\u201d in Somalia. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While I agree that al Qaeda and all of it&#8217;s off-shoot organizations should be confronted where ever they pop up, I shudder at the thought of US troops depending on our allies for their protection, because that was what caused the &#8220;Blackhawk Down&#8221; disaster &#8211; when our troops needed armor to help extract them from a firefight, the US had no armor in the country and they had to depend on Pakistanis in the UN operations. And the Pakistanis weren&#8217;t particularly motivated to drive their armor into the fire storm. US Army armor for Somalia were sitting on the DRF pad in Fort Benning, Georgia.<\/p>\n<p>But this administration has half-assed every military operation it launches. So now that the world knows US troops are in Somalia, I&#8217;m pretty sure that there are targets on their chests now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chief Tango sends us a link to a Washington Post article which reports that there have &hellip; <a title=\"Boots on the ground in Somalia\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39245\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Boots on the ground in Somalia<\/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":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39245","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=39245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}