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Today's Bird HERE


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IT's NOT WHERE YOU DIE, BUT FOR WHAT . . .

Consider the pathetic meaninglessness of our current military engagement over Libya.

Three of the world's mightiest military powers - countries with legitimate axes to grind against Moammar the Mad - instead quibbled and dithered for years - decades even - before the spectacle of a popular uprising being brutally crushed at last shamed us into doing something, anything . . . and even then we approach it half-heartedly.

It's not as if the self-proclaimed Modern-Day Hannibal hasn't given us enough reason already; the bombing of the LaBelle Disco and Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie were but his most visible crimes.

In December 1988, the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 was strewn across fields near Lockerbie, Scotland, after a Libyan-supplied bomb exploded on board killing 270 people.

Gaddafi is a legitimate sponsor of international terrorism, and he's a total nutjob on top of it all. ODDYSEY DAWN could also be known as "Operation Long Over-Due".

Our President had to be coerced into committing by an openly mutinous Secretary of State, and on Day Three of combat operations objectives anything resembling a plan, stated objectives, or an exit strategy have yet to be described.

And yet this miniscule engagement over the Gulf of Sidra is enough to fascinate the world, and to pull the media off a truly significant event; an earthquake and tsunami of epic, biblical proportions, and a subsequent nuclear accident involving six reactors.

And it is miniscule; we're going to crush this guy and blow his forces to smithereens - more than likely within the space of a fortnight. And yet the so-called "experts" in the media dish up comparison after comparison to Iraq & Afghanistan; as if huge land engagements involving hundreds of thousands of forces against countries that harbored legitimate physical threats against the people of the Free World can be compared to this maritime adventure. I say adventure for this is hardly a war.

Of course, by historic standards, Iraq itself was a microscopic war.

Consider - in the first eight years of Iraq, we lost as many people as we lost in a single day at Normandy.

By the same standards, Vietnam was a low-intensity conflict. Over the course of ten years we lost just under fifty thousand; we lost that many in three years in Korea, and in three days at Gettysburg.

This is the illusion of body count math, of course - to the single soldier who is killed, wounded, maimed or taken captive, what he is involved in is very real, very legitimate war - even if it only lasts for fifteen minutes.

Nowadays the sheer lethality of modern weapons preclude the requirement for clashes between huge armies a la Waterloo or the Somme; an Infantryman with a shoulder-fired weapon negates a 55-ton tank.

A shoulder-fired, man-portable anti-aircraft defense (MANPAD) missiles allowed a bunch of religious zealots of a 13th century society - the Mujahadeen - to defeat one of the largest, most powerful militaries in the world - the Soviet Union. While at the same time the amplifying effect of the modern media allows tiny symbolic conflicts - such as we are witnessing now - to gain great meaning.

Endless war? Yes, of course. Meaningful significance of these wars? Less and less. Consider this Libya thing - he's a tin horn dictator sitting on top of a huge puddle of oil. Yet nobody even pretends its about the oil - because it really isn't. For more than a decade we chose not to buy our oil from Gaddafi, at cost and sacrifice to ourselves. Now, we can buy from him or we can go through this unpleasant business, expend huge amounts of treasure (which we haven't got), shed the precious blood of our best and our brightest (for what? for whom?) to buy it from the next crowd who take over. We don't even know if we LIKE them or not - for all we know, they're WORSE than the current management - if such a thing is imaginable.

Let it be shown for the record: since that September morning in Tokyo Harbor 67 years ago, on the deck of the USS Missouri . . .

. . . there hasn't been a single day on this Earth without a war going on somewhere, not a single day of total, complete peace anywhere on Earth . . . the shooting never stopped.

- SEAN LINNANE SENDS



Today's Bird HERE



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WAR BY OTHER MEANS

- Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

"War is diplomacy by other means." - Clauzwitz


The first strikes of the British-French-US coalition have at last taken place against the Gaddafi regime. Given the intensity of the attacks and the hardware involved, it is predictable the situation be proclaimed "War #3".

To proclaim this a 'war' is premature, however. What we are engaged in over Libya is to War what driving your daily highway commute is to NASCAR. I will explain this analogy:

In his announcement approving US missile strikes on Libya, President Obama warned Muammar Gaddafi that "actions have consequences", while at the same time stressing that no US ground troops would deploy to the region. This self-imposed constraint tells the world that the United States has limited objectives in the current military actions. More significantly, this encourages Gaddafi to hang in there; we're not coming after him.

This is not War; there is no causal series of events, no clear objective. This is your typical United Nations episode choreographed by committee with the intent on freezing events at a single historic period of time - now - like every other United Nations success story around the world; Korea, Cyprus, Iraq . . . no, wait; the UN bolted out of Iraq and then and only then did any progress occur toward defeating Evil and liberating the population.

Again, Clauswitz: "War . . . is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will."

Unless our will is to allow Gaddafi to remain in power and to continue his reign of terror, there is no evidence yet that we have committed ourselves to war in North Africa. Instead, what is taking place are war-like actions; the international military version of a SWAT team. In other words, a police action.

Critics of my analysis will say that Libya is sparsely populated, there are few targets - we will bomb the tyrant to smithereens within a few weeks. In professional military circles, this is referred to as "underestimating your enemy".


"You are a professional, but the world is full of dangerous amateurs." - Murphy's Law of Combat


Consider Vietnam. We dropped more ordinance on that tiny country than we did over the entire European Theater of Operations during World War II, so much so that we ran out of targets to bomb. And yet the Communist leadership knew that unless we were willing to invade and occupy the North, all they had to do was hang in there and sooner or later we'd tire of the effort, take our bat and ball and go home.

But Vietnam had a worldwide Communist Bloc backing it up, with direct lines of supply from Red China straight down to the southern battlefields; Libya does not have this. Au contraire - Libya is backed by the entire continent of Africa - an amazing continent of unfounded natural resources and almost limitless manpower - and Gaddafi has spent forty years investing in those assets.

It will be interesting to see how and when mission creep evolves toward assisting the rebel forces toward a genuine war of movement, and what other players appear on the battlefield. Reminder - the Muslim Brotherhood holds tenuous sway over the street mobs of Cairo, a day's drive across the desert to the East. A principle of war is Momentum. Will a power vacuum develop, such as took place in Iraq in the spring of '03?

Whether or not this is how it plays out in Libya, today Gaddafi listens to Obama's words and what he hears is that he's been given breathing room. Consider Gaddafi's actions of the past week - the man has nothing to lose. He realizes there is no villa waiting for him in the south of France; this is it - all or nothing. If Gaddafi has to pack his bags and go, his next stop is a cell in the Hague. To Hell with that - Gaddafi is a Satanic bazillionaire with an evil army and air force at his disposal. From his point of view, all Gaddafi had to do was give the UN a little lip service and keep on slaying his opponents; the rat infestation in his barn had gotten so out of hand the only way to control it was with a flamethrower.


- SEAN LINNANE SENDS



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LIBYAN ORDER OF BATTLE

On paper, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has an army of 76,000 soldiers and 40,000 paramilitary troops. He also has 260 attack aircraft (mostly MIG 25 and 23s), 650 tanks, 2,300 artillery pieces and more than 100 helicopters (figures from Israeli site Middle East Military Balance).

Mig 23 FLOGGER (above) and Mig 25 FOXBAT (below)

These are the official figures. The reality is Libya's forces have suffered double cuts; a state of decay due to poor maintenance and upkeep of already obsolete equipment, and mass defections of men, weaponry and materiel due to the struggle which is becoming a full-fledged civil war.


Obsolete Weaponry

Most of Libya’s heavy equipment was bought from the former USSR in the 1970s (the country was subject of an international arms embargo for most of the last four decades). Most of this equipment can now be considered obsolete compared to other modern armies. His best weapons, especially the anti-aircraft weapons and aircraft, have always been run and maintained by foreign troops, including Syrians, Koreans and East Europeans, among others. The Libyan soldiers are almost incompetent with this superior technology.


Desertions

If the official estimations of Gaddafi's forces were correct, there wouldn’t be any insurgents left in Libya right now. Instead, a significant number of towns (including most of the country’s eastern coastal strip) have fallen to the opposition without fighting, attack aircraft have been missing their targets by considerable margins (often intentionally) and Libyan soldiers have deserted in droves.

Ever since he came to power Gaddafi has looked to reduce the strength of the regular Libyan army in order to reduce the risk of a potential rival emerging from his own forces.


Gaddafi's parallel security services include the Revolutionary Guards, people’s militias and his Islamic Pan-African Legion. These paramilitary forces, as well as the favored members of Gaddafi’s own clan, have always been the best trained and best equipped.

Gaddafi relies extensively on family and clan ties to ensure absolute loyalty. But now he can only really rely on the most loyal of the loyal, those who have absolutely nothing to lose. Of his personal forces; half of his mercenaries have decamped, the conscript Libyan army has joined the insurgents and many senior figures have defected.



Friday Bird HERE


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ISRAELI YOUTUBE SPOOF OF GADDAFI CATCHES ON IN ARAB WORLD

Muammar Gaddafi - Zenga Zenga Song - Noy Alooshe Remix





Monday Bird HERE


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