Posts Tagged afghanistan

Green Beret “Involuntarily Discharged” After Assaulting Afghan Pedophille

From The Daily Mail:

Sergeant 1st Class Charles Martland, 33, was serving in the country’s war-torn Kunduz Province in 2011 when he apparently learned an Afghan police commander he had trained had raped a boy.

He and his team leader, Daniel Quinn, confronted Officer Abdul Rahman – who had also allegedly beaten the 12-year-old’s mother for reporting the sexual assault – and ‘shoved him to the ground’.

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Pararescueman Receives Air Force Cross

From Defense Media Network:

On Dec. 10, 2013, Master Sgt. Ivan M. Ruiz, a Pararescueman, was attached as the lone rescue specialist to an Army Special Forces team assaulting a Taliban stronghold. The team inserted into the Mushan village area in no-visibility conditions due to the CH-47 Chinooks creating a dust and sand cloud at the insertion point. Despite this, Ruiz quickly gathered his element of Afghan commandos and moved rapidly to the objective. While they moved, an orbiting flight of AH-64 Apache helicopters observed armed insurgents maneuvering into attack positions, and began engaging with 30 mm cannon fire.

 

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Strategy in Real Time: Dueling with an Enemy That Moves

Strategy in Real Time: Dueling with an Enemy That Moves is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Philip Bobbitt

Strategy is a two-way street. But many commentators act as though formulating a strategy is the same as solving a chess problem. Chess problems are artificially constructed arrangements on a chessboard where the goal is to find a series of moves that leaves the other side no room to evade a checkmate within three or four turns. The sorts of conflicts bedeviling us these days, however, are more like the game of chess itself, in which there is no determinate, continuous series of moves that will guarantee victory every time. Each new contest depends on the actions of the other side, how we react to them, how they respond to our reactions, and so on.

Ignoring this aspect of strategy seems to contribute to the widespread view that victory in warfare amounts to the destruction of the enemy, a facile assumption that is all too unthinkingly held. “Defeating the enemy” may be the definition of victory in football, or even in chess for that matter, but not in warfare. Victory in war is the achievement of the war aim, and if, after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we still think that victory is simply the devastation of our adversaries, we have a lot of reflecting to do. Read the rest of this entry »

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Soldiers Reuniting With Dogs Through Nonprofit

From Wells Fargo:

Turns out, she didn’t have to, thanks to Linda Norwood, a graphic designer with Wells Fargo’s Wealth, Brokerage and Retirement (WBR) team, and The Puppy Rescue Mission ― a Texas-based nonprofit that works to reunite soldiers with the pets they befriend in war zones around the world. Founded in 2010 by a military wife, the organization has since rescued more than 700 animals.

 

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U.S. Born al-Qaeda Member Killed in Pakistan

From CNN:

Pakistan’s army said it killed an al Qaeda operative who grew up in the United States and was on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists.

Shukrijumah, a senior commander, is thought to have served as one of the leaders of al Qaeda’s external operations program, according to the FBI, hatching plots to attack the West.

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Was Afghanistan Worth It For Britain?

From BBC:

The great majority of the ordinary Afghans I have spoken to about this over the years have no doubt about it: the British had helped to shore up this country and make it more stable and prosperous.

‘Now,’ said a man I came across in the north of Kabul, ‘the future is very good, with elections and everything. Before there was nothing like this place here, this road.’

 

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3-Star General On His Book “Why We Lost”

From NPR:

“I am a United States Army General, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism.”

Those are the frank opening words of a new book by retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Bolger continues:

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Taliban Attack Karachi Airport

From The New York Times:

A squad of militant commandos, disguised as government security forces, stormed Karachi’s international airport after dark. They carried food, water and ammunition, apparently in preparation for a long siege, and big ambitions: perhaps to hijack a commercial airliner, government officials said Monday, or to blow up an oil depot, or to destroy airplanes on the tarmac.

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Did We Trade 5 Taliban For A Deserter?

From The New York Post:

One night, after finishing a guard-duty shift, Bowe Bergdahl asked his team leader whether there would be a problem if he left camp with his rifle and night-vision goggles — to which the team leader replied “yes.”

Bergdahl then returned to his bunker, picked up a knife, water, his diary and a camera, and left camp, according to Rolling Stone.

The next morning, he was reported missing, and later that day, a drone and four fighter jets ­began to search for him.

From ABC:

Nathan Bethea, a former soldier who says he served in Bergdahl’s unit, recently wrote that he and his colleagues had been forced to stay quiet about the truth of Bergdahl’s case.

“And that the truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down,” Bethea wrote in The Daily Beast Monday. “Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

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Soldier Survives Gun Shot To The Neck

From The Telegraph:

Doctors told Lance Corporal Simon Moloney the odds of the bullet missing his airway and major arteries were “a trillion to one,” but despite bleeding heavily, he returned to his post and carried on firing at insurgents for 90 minutes before being flown to safety.

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Sniper Kills Sucide Bomber And Five Others With One Bullet

From The Telegraph:

The 20-year-old marksman, a Lance Corporal in the Coldstream Guards, hit his target from 930 yards (850 metres) away, killing the suicide bomber and five others around him caught in the blast.

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Soldier Involved In 17 Bomb Attacks To Receive Award

From The Telegraph:

The soldier, who has been nicknamed “bomb magnet”, has been awarded the Military Cross for his actions after the latest attack, when he helped to coordinate the evacuation of injured soldiers, as well as a senior Afghan general and his men, as he lay wounded on the ground.

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Where Will MRAPs Go After Afghanistan Withdrawl?

From Military Times:

“USFOR-A does not provide or intend to provide any such equipment, including MRAPs, from Afghanistan to Pakistan,” the statement says.

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Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleader Becomes Soldier

From CNN:

The Bronze Star recipient served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, including one as a member of the Army’s new Cultural Support Program.

On Sunday, she was honored as a Hometown Hero by the Philadelphia Eagles, the team she cheered for from 2007 to 2009.

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Black Hornet British Drone

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