Target Centermass

Author: Gunner

  • Pardons in Sight for WWI Soldiers Shot at Dawn

    For some U.K. families, haunted for decade upon decade, a justice of sort may be pending.

    Dozens of Scottish soldiers who were shot for cowardice or desertion during the First World War are finally set to win pardons, it emerged last night. Defence Secretary Des Browne announced that the government is to seek parliamentary approval to pardon more than 300 British soldiers who were executed during the First World War for alleged “military offences”.

    The announcement came hours after the family of Private Harry Farr, who was shot for cowardice during the conflict aged just 25, revealed they had been told he was to be pardoned.

    Mr Browne said: “Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for decades.

    “That makes this a moral issue too, and having reviewed it, I believe it is appropriate to seek a statutory pardon. I hope we can take the earliest opportunity to achieve this by introducing a suitable amendment to the current Armed Forces Bill.”

    More than 300 Commonwealth troops – including 39 Scots – were shot by their fellow soldiers during the Great War. Their alleged crimes included desertion, cowardice, and sleeping at their posts.

    But campaigners who have fought for years to have the men’s names cleared believe the majority were young and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after months in the trenches and enduring endless artillery bombardment.

    Many of them, including some as young as 17, were sentenced to execution after courts martial lasting less than 30 minutes.

    Pte Farr’s granddaughter, Janet Booth, said the family’s solicitor had been informed last night that their wish had been granted. “We are over the moon,” she added.

    The move will require an amendment to the Armed Forces Bill currently going through Parliament.

    John Dickinson, of Irwin Mitchell, said: “This is complete common sense and rightly acknowledges that Pte Farr was not a coward, but an extremely brave man.

    “Having fought for two years practically without respite in the trenches, he was very obviously suffering from a condition we now would have no problem in diagnosing as post-traumatic stress disorder or shellshock as it was known in 1916.”

    Pte Farr’s daughter Gertrude Harris, 93, added: “I am so relieved that this ordeal is now over. I have always argued that my father’s refusal to rejoin the front line, described in the court martial as resulting from cowardice, was in fact the result of shellshock, and I believe that many other soldiers suffered from this, not just my father. I hope that others who had brave relatives who were shot by their own side will now get the pardons they equally deserve.”

    Some of these men may well have been deserters and cowards. That said, I truly believe this would not be the case for a great many who were courageous but worn individuals, burdened by a long, grinding war that gnawed at the soul while many cases of inept leadership cost needless gallon upon gallon of precious blood. For a good look at the years of poor Allied command decisions that almost certainly contributed to many of the involved cases, I again recommend John Mosier’s The Myth of the Great War.

    Here’s wishing the pardons come that are deserved, as soldiers today would be granted greater understanding after years in the meatgrinder — if any ever again faced such enduring exposure. Here’s also wishing peace for their families.

  • What I’m Reading Tonight

    The School

    On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism.

    It’s quite lengthy, so much so that I haven’t had a chance yet to finish it. Still, I can assure that it is engrossing. Hat tip to LGF.

    Theocracy on the 100-Year-Plan

    When President Bush said we’re at “war with Islamic fascists,” he was referring to Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in London trying to blow U.S. airliners out of the Atlantic skies.

    But America has its own “Islamic fascists” right here at home. Once they amass the numbers, they secretly plan to nullify our Bill of Rights and religious freedoms and create their own Muslim state ruled by Islamic law. They’ve got a 100-year plan, but they’re already making inroads.

    Astoundingly, some of them head the allegedly moderate Muslim groups who protested Bush’s use of the phrase “Islamic fascists.”

    Unsurprisingly, our enemies, those who hope to doom our society, our civilization, our grandchildren’s freedom, are already amongst us. Most of America hasn’t realized that yet. Hat tip to In the Bullpen.

  • Ralph Peters: Lessons So Far

    Ralph Peters looks at Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the most recent engagement against expansionist and radical Islamic terrorists, and his outlook ain’t cheery.

    Israel’s war against the Middle East’s first true terrorist army provides tough military and strategic lessons – old, new, and all too often disheartening. Israel’s been winning on the ground. And still losing the war.

    This bitter conflict – in which most casualties on both sides of the border are civilians – raises troubling questions, too. Some are identical to those confronting us in Iraq. Many have troubling answers. Others have no real answers at all.

    The elementary fact – which far too many in the West deny – is that our civilization has been forced into a defensive war to the death with fanatical strains of Islam – both Shi’a and Sunni. We may be on the offensive militarily, but we did not start this war – and it’s all one war, from 9/11’s Ground Zero, through Lebanon and Iraq, and on to Afghanistan.

    Until that ugly fact gains wide acceptance, we’ll continue to make little decisive progress. American or Israeli, our troops are trying. But the truth is that we’re really just holding the line.

    We have not yet begun to fight. And many among us still dream of avoiding this war altogether.

    It can’t be done.

    Mr. Peters goes on to state and expound upon seven lessons to be taken to heart from the current Israeli-Hezbollah affair.

    • 1. You can win every tactical engagement and still lose at the strategic level.
    • 2. The global media can overturn the verdict of the battlefield.
    • 3. If you start off on the wrong foot in war, you may never recover your balance.
    • 4. Technology alone can’t win 21st-century wars.
    • 5. Never underestimate your enemy.
    • 6. In war, take the pain up front, and the overall suffering will be far less.
    • 7. Terrorism is no longer a limited, diffuse, disorganized threat.

    [hat tip to Chap, who lists the above seven lessons before adding his own thoughts]

    Mr. Peters follows these lessons by asking and answering two key questions, the second of which is the one which could devour many depressing hours of meditation — “Can we win “Eastern” wars with Western values?” I must concur with Mr. Peters answer to his own question:

    I doubt it.

    This question is going to eat at our consciences for years to come – even as we learn to do what must be done.

    […]

    The wars of the future will be won by those with the greater strength of will.

    The emphasis in the last quote was added by me and I want to expand a little on that quote. This is not only true of the wars of the future but also of wars of the past and present and essentially any war that is fought to be won. At some point in time after World War II, Western Civilization took up the notion that wars can be fought in a civilized manner. Actually, that has been a periodic historic flirtation, with such short-lived traditions in the past as not targeting officers, agreed-upon truces to clear casualties from battlefields, etc. Still, after WWII, when the West last took the gloves off to a large degree, we have yet again to pursue war so fully, even though our advances in technical lethality have repeatedly been faced by uncivilized barbarity, cruelty and bloody sacrifice by our enemies. It should be noted that our enemies have happily utilized advances in technology also, but have shown no restraint in their employment against targets from which the West has refrained. And yet, we continue to find our troops facing such foes on the battlefield, foes that would just as well kill our troops, slaughter our civilians or manipulate our seemingly-willing media.

    Western Civilization must stop hitting the snooze button and finally wake up to the threat. It is global. It is primeval. It is not going away via impotent United Nations resolutions and cease-fires.

    [Regarding Mr. Peters, as I’ve said before, I’ll always happily link his work, as previously done here, here, here and here. I’ll also happily plug my introduction to Peters, which was his somewhat-prescient novel, The War in 2020. I first cracked that entertaining adventure in the gunner’s seat of an M1 while waiting on a gunnery range at Ft. Hood, travelling in the way-back machine to May of ’93.]

  • Miscellaneous Links o’ the Day

    The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time [hat tip to Viking Pundit, whom I agree with about the absence of the TI-99/4A, the first computer that sucked away any of my time. To that I add the Commodore 64 to the notably missing.]

    Funny Star Trek motivational posters [hat tip to TexasBestGrok]

    While we’re at it, how about some genuine demotivational posters for sale? They’ve been around for awhile, but I’ve always enjoyed the sarcasm available at Despair, Inc.

    College football is right around the corner — here’s your chance to grab a Texas A&M Hawaiian shirt or a set of A&M scrubs (for those unfortunate souls with ties elsewhere, feel free to check here and here respectively).

    Also around the corner: the best show currently on TV returns for its third season on Oct. 6, less than eight weeks from today.

    Speaking of BSG, Noooooo!!! Say it ain’t so, Trapper, say it ain’t so.

  • Quote of the Week, 14 AUG 06

    Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.

    —Dwight D. Eisenhower

  • John Batchelor: Prelude to War

    Interesting, though not exactly cheerful.

    Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war — the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America’s willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel?

    The most threatening answer is that America waits to be bloodied because it has lost its will to defend itself after five years of chasing rogue-state-sponsored gangsters and after three years of occupation in failed-state Iraq against Tehran- and Damascus-backed agents. A grave possibility is that America is now drained, bowed, ready to surrender to the tyrants of Tehran.

    Then again, perhaps America has been here before, and it is part of America’s destiny as the New Jerusalem that we rarely start wars but that we are unusually good at finishing them.

    There is a strange parallel right now to the first days of December 1941, before the Japanese sneak attack. America was still not in the war in Asia and Europe, but it was busy getting ready for a momentous calamity and was filled with the presentiment of doom.

    Go read the whole article, which actually becomes more of a look back at a moment in time when the U.S. stood on the brink of World War II (hat tip to Smash).

    Something that adds to the intriguing nature of the column is that it’s the second time this week that I’ve linked to someone comparing current events to the Spanish Civil War with expectations of a wider war to follow. The first was by Grim at Blackfive and was included with a couple of other pieces to chew on just two days ago.

  • Police: Plot to Blow up Aircraft Foiled

    Well, the big story today obviously the uncovering of a plan to bring terror once again to the friendly skies.

    British police say they have arrested 21 people in connection with a terrorist plot to blow up aircraft flying from the United Kingdom to the United States.

    The plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson said. The UK’s threat warning level has been raised to “critical” — meaning “an attack is expected imminently.”

    […]

    The plot involved hiding liquid explosives in carry-on luggage, and six to 10 flights would have been targeted, U.S. officials said.

    A senior U.S. congressional source said it is believed the plotters were to carry a “British version of Gatorade” onto the planes and then mix it with a gel-like substance. The explosives were to be triggered by an iPod or a cell phone, the source said.

    Some flights would have been heading from the UK to New York, Washington D.C. and California, the officials said.

    The plot involved Continental, United, and American Airlines, according to an administration official who noted that the list was not exclusive.

    The intelligence that uncovered the plot “makes very strong links to al Qaeda,” a senior U.S. administration official told CNN. The official said it is believed the plot was close to being operational.

    Later, CNN updated the number arrested to 24 and credits the information that led to the raids to infiltration by an undercover agent.

    British and Pakistani authorities teamed up to thwart the attacks, and 24 men were arrested in overnight raids in Britain, authorities said.

    An undercover British agent infiltrated the group, giving the authorities intelligence on the alleged plan, several U.S. government officials said.

    The men had not bought plane tickets, the officials said, but they were in the process of perusing the Internet to find flights to various cities that had similar departure times.

    If you’re playing catch up this story, I’d recommend starting at Outside the Beltway, where James Joyner has put together a wealth of reports, links, videos and updates.

    After that, I’d suggest Texas Rainmaker, where Jason has done some interesting pondering in a one-man attempt to connect some possibly-related dots.

  • Israel-Hezbollah: Media and Psych Op

    Not much tonight again, but I did want to point y’all towards a couple of interesting looks at the propaganda fight around the actual conflict in Lebanon.

    First, the Jawa Report‘s Dr. Rusty takes a look at Yahoo!News and does some photo counting. It seems that the mainstream media are quite content to carry the propaganda water for Hezbollah’s “Oh! The (Lebanese only) humanity!” theme.

    Meanwhile, Debbie at In the Bullpen points out an interesting psych op that Israel is employing in region — the seizure of Hezbollah’s own airwaves twice daily to counter Hezbollah’s message. Chad Evans chimes in on the post with video.

    It’s like SNL’s old Weekend Update Point-Counterpoint, only missing Dan Aykroyd’s exclamation of “Hassan, you ignorant slut.”

  • Tonight’s Good Reads

    We’re Losing World War IV

    The Shiite mullahs who rule Iran and have seized the leadership of the Islamofascist war against us are as dangerous an enemy as America has ever faced. Although we have chosen to be deaf to them, their war aims have never been secret. They have been shouting them out on the world stage to a billion listening Muslims, ever since they handed us the first of many humiliating defeats in 1979. These Persian mullahs and their followers aim to restore Islamic supremacy in the 21st century by leading all Muslims everywhere to victory in a great global jihad against America, Israel, and what is left of the free world. In the time since their first act of war against us — invading our sovereign embassy territory in Tehran and holding our people hostage for 444 agonizing days — they have made enormous progress towards their goal, despite the double handicap of belonging to a minority Muslim sect and a non-Arab ethnic group.

    In the 1980s, Iran’s mullahs created Hezbollah, a Shiite Arab terrorist group in Lebanon, and used it to drive us from that country the way they drove us from Iran, but this time, they didn’t just humiliate us and mock our impotence; they tortured and murdered our embassy people in Beirut, and blew up 241 of our marines. In the 1990s, Iran’s mullahs took control of Syria, turning it into a puppet terror state and transit hub, and transformed Hezbollah from a purely local terrorist army into a sophisticated global terrorist network. In this decade, these Shiite mullahs reached across the great Sunni-Shia religious divide, establishing close ties with Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood; took control of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas; and reached across the world to forge close military ties with nuclear-armed Asian states like North Korea and oil-rich enemies to our south like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Along the way, they pioneered the terrorist arts of airplane hijacking and suicide bombing.

    And all this time, the Iranians — and their ever-growing legion of followers and fans — have been waging an increasingly successful propaganda war against America, Israel, and the West, among Muslims in the Middle East and far beyond it.

    Average Americans — if they remember them at all — consider the series of American defeats chronicled above and a host of others as an unconnected jumble of unfortunate events.

    It’s easy to do: Our media treats them that way. Muslim media do not.

    […]

    Today, Iran’s emboldened mullahs are on a triumphant roll, waging a bloody, three-front proxy war against us, using the Mahdi army to assassinate dreams of peace and democracy in Iraq, using Hezbollah to blow up those same dreams in Lebanon, again, and using Hamas to make a grotesque mockery of them in the Holy Land. Now they threaten to activate Hezbollah terror cells, here in America and throughout the world, to kill and maim us at home and inflict more carnage on our allies. This week, they mocked our efforts to prevent them from becoming a nuclear power, announcing that nothing we do — in the U.N. or elsewhere — will stop them from going nuclear, and sharing their WMDs with other rogue states and Islamofascist terror groups at will. More ominous yet, they threaten to unleash an apocalyptic surprise on us on August 22, the night they believe Mohammed lit up the skies by ascending to heaven from the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

    Despite all this and more, we have yet to admit that Iran is at war with us, or to seriously consider striking back at her, and, in speaking of our own war aims, we never dare use the v-word — victory — anymore.

    Go read the whole thing. In case one is confused by the title, many people, myself included, often choose now to refer to the Cold War and its many, smaller hot wars (e.g. Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan) as World War III.

    Where Are We Going?

    I suspect that we will one day speak of the war in Iraq the way we speak of the Spanish Civil War — that is, rarely by comparison to the greater war that followed it. Peace is not in the cards. Things are going to get worse.

    Normally I would refrain from quoting someone’s closing thoughts in this manner, but the meat of Grim’s piece is in his short-term predictions for the Iraqi theater and his anticipation for the wider war that is bearing down on its heels.

    Hezbollah’s Army Revisited

    We began discussing Hezbollah’s military capabilities on July 21, after it became clear during the ambush of the Golani Brigade forced the unit to retreat near Maroun al-Ras that Hezbollah was not your average militia. On that date we noted “Hezbollah also possesses mortars, RPGs, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, anti-tank missiles and possibly surface to air missiles…. Hezbollah is using infantry tactics and fighting at the squad and platoon level.” The IDF’s slow advance (over two days) into Bint Jubayl and the ambush on a tank unit were clear indications of Hezbollah’s abilities to stand up to the IDF as well as the IDF’s cautious nature on the battlefield. Yesterday we confirmed Hezbollah is fighting at the company level, has specialized units (mortars, antitank, logistics, etc.) in its combat units and is using sophisticated communications equipment, body armor and other gear.

    This is not to say the IDF cannot defeat Hezbollah’s army on the battlefield; the IDF can, and has done so at Maroun al-Ras, Bint Jubayl and elsewhere. But this comes at a cost in casualties, a cost the Israeli government seems unwilling to pay.

    Hezbollah’s actions on the battlefields of southern Lebanon should give the Israelis, the West and neighboring Arab governments reason to worry.

    Are we looking at the next evolution in the conflict with Iran and its proxies? Are we now on the verge of actually seeing somewhat of a stand-up fight or is Hezbollah’s limited degree of success (read success as avoiding crushing defeat) more a matter of Israel’s electing to fight this with practically both hands tied behind its back? My suspicions lean toward the latter, as Israel is hoping for a more lasting victory by slowly wearing down the enemy while focusing tremendous efforts to keeping world opinion and condemnation at bay by minimizing collateral damage.

  • The 21st Century Spartans

    Here’s an absolutely outstanding infantry graduation speech by LTC Randolph C. White Jr. last month at Ft. Benning.

    Take a look on the parade field, ladies and gentlemen, take a long, hard look. What you see standing out there is representative of the noblest strata of our society.

    You’re the latest band of brothers, miles away from the flagpole and making things happen the very best way you can. The techno-wannabes in the corporate world can’t even begin to fathom the vast responsibilities you’ve accepted. You will be scrutinized like no warriors before you, expected to eradicate our enemies, pacify the critics and abide by the rules of land warfare as only we and our true allies seem committed to doing.

    Hooah!!!*

    The fine LTC is harsh on military critics. Appropriately so, in my opinion. Latte, heh. I’ll take coffee, black, just like I learned to enjoy at Ft. Knox.

    * Please note, this is a genuine and enthusiastic Hooah, not the sarcastic, deadpan Hooah I entertained myself by giving as a response to almost all orders while in uniform. Hey, that was my schtick.