"Hey, potential refugees of Europe and Africa, the UK is going to stop checking all the trucks and ships coming into our ports, but only temporarily. So remember a couple of years ago when you tried to get to the UK but were stopped at the big migrant camp in Calais? Well, now that the UK is no longer in the EU, the French no longer have an incentive to stop you, and the UK won't have the infrastructure in place to do it, either! So hurry! The ships full of bricks to build the new border stations are steaming their way across the Atlantic right now!"
There are a lot of untended consequences in your various glibly tossed off plans.
Yeah, I know, you tell us in just about every post. I was in the military, but I got out in 1999. Nonetheless, your and my military service does not give us some exclusive permission to discuss military matters. Ours is a civilian led military, and most of the issues we're discussing have been written about in great length by journalists and historians for the expressed purpose of keeping civilians informed about what their military is doing.
That's funny, because I remember the first President Bush cutting back drastically in 1989 after the Soviet Union dissolved, and I remember Rumsfeld firing General Shinseki when he suggested a number of troops that didn't fit in with Rumsfeld's vision for how easy the 2nd Iraq war was going to be. Good to know all of that was Bill Clinton's fault.
And how many soldiers were killed and injured in vehicles which were unsuited to the mission they'd been assigned to accomplish while they were forced to dig through Iraqi trash to find the scrap metal to protect themselves? Are you seriously suggesting this failure of leadership to properly prepare to invade another country was an example of American triumph?
Jesus man, I don’t have all day to respond to this stuff. You’re clearly not going to convince me of anything.
There are already zero customs checks on goods inbound from the EU, and there are already UK border officials checking those trucks. None of that will change no matter the deal. The only question is how long it’ll take to get customs officials there to also collect the right amount of taxes.
Armor is a great thing. The survivability built into my Apache saved my life a few times. But more soldiers die from too much weight slowing them down and then being outmaneuvered than from lack of adequate protection. I don’t know about you, but driving around a war zone at 30mph cause the overloaded truck catches on fire faster than that is not my idea of a good strategy.
What you need for an armored cav invasion is a crap load of APCs and there weren’t enough, so people were rolling in the back with soft skin trucks. But then artillery & support elements have always been behind the line of advance in soft skin vehicles. And the strategy has always been for the lead element to wipe out any heavy weapon in their path so they’re no threat to follow on elements. That doesn’t stop irregular troops and AT teams from waiting for the lead elements to pass and hitting the softer tail. Which happened. You can reduce that risk by detailing pointy elements to protect the train, but it reduces your hitting power forward. And you can combat it by going forward like a bat out of hell to cut the head off the snake and then see what fight is left in your rear. They did the latter, and tactically it was very successful with reasonable casualties regardless of what trucks they had to work with. It took years and years after that before proper vehicles were developed for the COIN level faced. It would have been better to have those at the start, but honestly, nothing survives a 155 round detonated directly under or near it.
Overall that conflict went okay. Our casualty numbers throughout were low. It was effective in drawing foreign fighters away from Afghanistan and other parts of the world and concentrating them in one place on terrain where we could kill the hell out of them. The partisan militias from home grown extremists and the intervention of Iran were not helpful, but we managed through it and AQ globally is pretty well suppressed today as a result. With the help of outside pressure from JSOC and drone strikes. You may not like it, but that largely was a successful war.
If civilians want to comment on things like that, I really don’t mind, but they’d be better served if they understood the tactics and strategy employed, why, and what it achieved.
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