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Originally Posted by LetsTalk
You are comparing Ted Kaszynski to Osama, do you actually think that the two are of equal importance?
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You missed the boat on this one. If we can't find someone on our home turf living in plain daylight (I had a soldier who used to snowmobile on the Unabomber's property), then it's certainly much harder to find someone when they have the homecourt advantage on some of the most rugged terrain in the world with tried and true paths from decades of conflict and bunkers engineered by modern engineering equipment and plans.
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Originally Posted by LetsTalk
You are telling me that they had and have the equipment they needed, and I have friends and have read more than enough new reports of US soldiers buying their own vests, equipment, using material from junk yards....
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Other than the first seven months of the war, the Army has provided the best vests that money can buy (and the reality is that months prior to December 2003 the soldiers that really needed the armor would have already had it). Subsequent tests of shown body armor solutions such as Dragonskin to be snakeoil to an extent. As new requirements have arisen, the Army has adapted and fielded the equipment as necessary. In fact, because of the political hot potato that body armor had become, officers were pressured to make soldiers wear too much armor, making them less effective (see the second slide in this
brilliant operational plan - as a news junkie, I'm sure that you'll immediately know what city this is the operational plan for).
While there has been some criticism of the pace of fielding, the Dragonskin non-controversary has vindicated the Army and Marine Corps in their decision to not wholesale forego the necessary rigorous testing to make sure that it doesn't field equipment because Congressperson X or Senator Y wants to make a splash in the headlines about how they care about the troops (but made sure that the Army paid the peace dividend and therefore the Army didn't have the R&D and/or procurement dollars to have already fielded some of this equipment prior to 9/11).
However, as I stated earlier, equipment is a red herring when it comes to speaking to the major mistakes of OIF. As much as I found SecDef Rumsfeld to be a detriment to OIF, he was right about going to war with the Army and equipment that you have. Unfortunately, we went to war with the doctrine that we had (and more importantly didn't have), and that is where the crux of the matter lays.