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From: munnari!gara.une.oz.au!pmorriso@uunet.UU.NET (Perry Morrison MATH)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Low tech warfare
Message-ID: <12687@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 2 Jan 90 02:47:28 GMT
References: <12539@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12572@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12603@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: munnari!gara.une.oz.au!pmorriso@uunet.UU.NET (Perry Morrison MATH)

In article <12603@cbnews.ATT.COM>, pyrite!peregrin@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu (News Feed) writes:
> 
> Commentary on rev war etc.
> Is it really true to describe the US armed forces as incompetent bumblers
> who have no idea of what to do in a given situation?  I find that hard to
> swallow.
> 
>             David Pipes

	Well, I'm not sure that this discussion has expressed this view.
However, I think that the effectiveness of the U.S. military has been 
questioned after a decade or more of embarrassing bungling. The Iranian
hsotage rescue for example used choppers to fly a mission that exceeded their
mean-time-before-failure. In other words, it was beyond the design limits of
these particular helicopters (Ch-47s?). I believe that each service wanted a
piece of the action and the result was a mish-mash of decision making.
	I guess we could contrast this with the Israelis who rarely put a
foot wrong in covert operations. Didn't they steal an Egyptian radar unit 
during one of the Arab-Israeli conflicts ('67?). Entebbe and several other
operations were also class acts.