People have forgotten how war works

I haven’t com­mented on the Afghanistan chop­per crash or the casu­al­ties, not on the radio, not on the blog, and not on com­ments on any­body else’s blog.
Why, because we are fight­ing a war.

To those who only expo­sure to it is an X-​Box 360 let me explain some­thing; a war involves fight­ing, fight­ing involves killing and on occa­sion dying. Although I’m loath to use it as a source take a look at the Wikipedia page of ships sunk by the Japan­ese Navy dur­ing World War II. Count the num­ber of ships listed, it’s over 100. That doesn’t count ships sunk fight­ing the Ger­mans or the mer­chant marine. It aver­ages out to about two ships a month, how many peo­ple do you think died dur­ing those fights?

You could likely pick any sin­gle day of the civil war after 1861 and find more casu­al­ties than we suf­fered over the week­end in Afghanistan, and we won’t even com­pare it to world war 2.

In a long war you are going to have reverses, this is one of them, it no more indi­cates defeat in the war than Cold Har­bor did.

I wouldn’t even com­ment­ing on this now, but there are two mes­sages from this event that annoy me and need to be addressed:

This is not a “tragedy” it is a bat­tle, a bat­tle we may have lost but a bat­tle. When we reduce this to a “tragedy” we turn war­riors who were bravely fac­ing the enemy into vic­tims plunged in a sit­u­a­tion over which they have no con­trol. I think it insults their mem­o­ries. These guys know the risk every time they enter the fight and they go in any­way. That’s not a vic­tim in my book, it is in fact the type of thing that the “great­est gen­er­a­tion” used to asso­ciate with man­li­ness before our soci­ety decided that was a for­bid­den word.

Con­trari­wise when the media vol­un­teers infor­ma­tion about secret units and spe­cial ops to sell papers or t-​shirts, when you use the loss of a bat­tle (and that’s all this is) as a polit­i­cal foot­ball to call for with­drawal and retreat, when you argue for a draft in the hopes of cre­at­ing dis­sent among the peo­ple and the troops. Then you are aid­ing the other side. You may not under­stand it, you might not even mean to (although some of the left frankly are) but when you do this, you aid the enemy in time of war.

The longer we play up this up, the more we do the pro­pa­ganda work of the enemy for them.

My sug­ges­tion, lets get out of the way and let those charged with fight­ing the war get on with it.

Update: When Mika says: “We’ve got to push this story” on Morn­ing Joe it makes me sick. That she doesn’t under­stand what is wrong with that state­ment is amazing.