Note. We wondered if ISIS had the skill to operate the equipment they captured. Obviously they do. I think they just became one of the richest "nations" in the region and certainly are better equipped than a few countries.
Well-trained artillery crews with all the breaks, doing everything right, have trouble putting any two non-guided iron rounds in a row on the same target right away, even with dedicated forward observers to shift fire.
Doing it by pointing off in the distance, and having Hadji's cousin with the walkie talkie try to adjust fire, is an exercise in achieving a CEP of minute of Province. The only thing they can assuredly do twice in a row is hit the ground, at some point. The M198 system has a range of 14+ miles with conventional rounds; The Allahu Akbar Battery is lucky if their walkie talkie works at 5 miles' distance.
So what they're doing is Retard's Direct Fire: Shoot. Look at the blast. Jiggle the spinny wheels. Repeat.
Anything beyond that level of expertise is like trying to explain quantum physics to Schroedinger's cat.
And looking at the pics, they didn't even emplace it right, so with every shot, it's settling awkwardly and unevenly, which throws the next round in a new place even if they make no new other adjustments.
These are thus merely monkeys with high explosives. No more, and no less.
True that most 'insurgent' type uses of artillery are point and shoot in general direction and range ,i have jet to hear of one that could call in an artillery barage onto point targets.
Spray and pray Red Leg style? Hell just loading the thing can take your arm off if ya fuck up. Maintenance is the devil, they may capture, buy and shoot, but maintaining the weapon system is beyond them. let's consider these clowns attacking a 1st rate, trained military formation that understands the capabilities of counter battery fire and a radar to back track incoming fire.
Mr T: Oh it's quite effective, A towed battery of guns cannot displace fast enough to evade counter battery fire. Operation Desert storm saw it used quite effectively. The Radar array around Hue, Danang and Khe Sanh were quite effective. There just haven't been any big arty duels since these events due to the improvement of, counter battery fire. Just what do you think Iron Dome is? Interception and retaliation of Palestinian rockets, missiles, mortars with countery battery fire, which is Air, Arty missiles or rockets. I wasn't an Arty man but at 29 stumps I partied with a few Red Legs.
MrT: Now for that video, Yes that can be done, I was trained to take two 2" x 4" boards, nail them together into a 90 degree angle trough like a V and lay a 3.5" Super Bazooka rocket on them aimed across a road attached to batteries with comm wire as an anti mechanized IED ambush. It could be manned or with a trigger plate in the road set off by the vehicle. Used in conjunction with a 55 gallon drum of NaPalm with a booster charge to blow it out of a hole on the other side of the road and explode it mid air. ------------------------------------- Don't forget Saipan, A Sherman tank crew drove along a dirt road and were stopped by a road block, while awaiting Engineers to blow the block they powered down, instantly becoming aware of a metallic banging underneath the tank, pulling back they discovered a Highly Motivated, well trained and determined anti tank man with a hammer in a hole with an eight inch artillery shell. He waited till their tank parked above him due to the road block then began beating on the shells nose with the hammer. Lethal, effective and no artillery piece to fire it. There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men with brains.
TrT: I'll try to explain. Marine infantry are in the 0300 MOS. 0311 is a rifleman, a rifleman can be handed a Machine gun, LAAWS/AT-4 and be able to use it effectively, Likewise a Mortar, assault and Machine gunner can be handed the rifle and MG and use it the same. How ever the dedicated anti tank missile man has a job that requires some extra training to be effective and those weapons are specialized. You do not hand a long range back blast dangerous direct fir weapon to just anyone, safety and cost effectiveness out weighs the benefits of a kill. Like wise you do not hand a mortar to just anyone, loading is a snap but screw that up and people are gonna die.Aiming a mortar is harder than direct fire, the shell has to be set with it's charges at the right amount or the round goes too far, or worse, too short, "ie: " HIT THE DECK SHORT ROUND!" it takes a man or men with the skill set of a surveyor to obtain kills in the right area and the rigth target, not everyone can set out aiming stakes,locate their position on a map down to minutes and seconds and not drop mortars on his own men. A good mortar man can hand aim and fire a mortar with out a base plate, an untrained man cannot safely aim the thing at a target on the other side of the hill and out of view. An 81 mm mortar M 821 is able to put death CEP 131 ft/diameter on a target unseen for 6490.6 yards 19471.8 feet or 3.7 miles. A Howitzer is more complicated mortar, air temperature wind speed and direction and longer range added to surveyor level of expertise, an on board computer and a range table to plot down range target areas. Specs for the M 198 are, 155 mm, 9 man crew, the M-107 round HE has a CEP, kill/wound zone of 50/100 meters or 165 feet/ 330 feet Range 22.4 Km or 14 miles. There are nine different warhead packages each has to have it's own ballistics factored in. Screw up any one step and the gun jams, hang fire, or worse, screw up the co-ordinates of the fire mission and anyone down range can die. A mortar is complicated, a Howitzer is even more so and is five times more lethal inside a 28 miles diameter circle. The fact they have fired these on target presumably, allegedly possibly means they have a crew trained to do the job or at least one man in charge who is familiar with and trained by First world power military forces, or he and they are mercenaries hired to do the job. Not every snuffy/Haji can just pick up a howitzer and go to shooting, without fucking up, not for long anyway. Former or ex US Forces perhaps British or Russian are doing this.
P/S A Battery of these bad boys normally requires a weatherman/meteorologist as well as a surveyor with a weather station and a transit for sure a GPS unit..
I recall ITR circa 1970 when a mortar crew added too many increments to a round fired in the area that was not inside the max range of the round and put a smoke round into the Verona Loop areas little village. It landed the other side of the road in a field and forest. Nobody died but WTF it scared hell out of Gunny!
0811/0812 here, and Section Chief on the M198 (the type pictured in the above video).
Yeah, they've figured how to stuff a projectile into the thing with the pointy end forward (and hopefully with a PD fuse on the front end instead of the shipping plug), shove in a powder bag right-way forward, and prime the thing, then pull the string. And that's about it.
But as evidently they're making no effort to man the Gunner and A-gunner positions on the thing, (let alone staff an actual Fire Direction Center, with computers/calculators/slide rules, meteorological capabilities, firing tables, charge weights, etc.) or any sort of understanding of military grid mapping and adjusting fire, they're clearly and inevitably using the Inshallah method of adjusting fire - the only one they know - which boils down to pointing it in the general direction of the target, adjusting fire based on SWAG as far as azimuth and deflection, mildly clued in by walkie talkie report, and figuring that anyone who happens to be wherever the rounds land was obviously someone Allah wanted to die, whether they hit their vaguely intended target or not.
They are thus the best equipped retarded monkeys trying to mate with a football in the region, but their actual IDF capabilities would not be appreciably increased nor diminished if those M198s were swapped out 1:1 with 12 pdr. Napoleon black powder cannons from the US Civil War, except that the Napoleons have shorter range but a lighter towed weight.
If someone ever teaches them how to count without removing their sandals, and they get advisors who can explain to the brighter ones the finer points of fire direction and actual indirect fire cannon gunnery, it will be a different story. That's roughly on a probability level of pigs flying anytime between now and next New Year's, IMHO.
As they probably lack the ability or functional understanding of why they need to be able to displace at a moment's notice, those guns are simply the juiciest targets for tactical air strikes, and rather simple to target by any Predator or similar UAV in the vicinity, something the 1st RPV Platoon demonstrated to us with secondhand Israeli Styrofoam UAVs live and in person at Swamp Lejeune as early as 1985, almost 30 years ago.
For all anyone knows, those rounds are simply shelling empty houses and random locations, and mainly serve as mobile fireworks and morale units to keep the monkeys revved up until someone needs to blow a wall or gate open with direct fire.
The second easies way to solve the problem of ISIS having them would be to simply arrange for a few shipments of booby-trapped instant-detonating 155 rounds be left somewhere ISIS will find them, and then let nature take its course.
Introducing the 1 C4 round-per-box AK-47 ammo into Hadji's supply pipeline should be happening as well. It takes a lot of the ardor out of front line troops when your buddies' AK-47s and heads explode randomly every day.
If someone's version of SAS/SF/SEALs isn't on that already, I miss my guess.
King don't Hump, Fer sure, and there is a reason, Brains they got them, Howdy Red Legs! I wonder what they would do if they had a hang fire? open the breech pull the round out and bang on it with a hammer?
As I said, doing it properly is no doubt very complicated, but strip away the muzzle velocity (radar?), the wind speed adjustments, the air pressure modification and all that jazz. Can it be stripped away?
Just how complicated is it to put in the shell and charges? If you wanted (accepted) a CEP of 500m say?
Maybe they started with an artillery regiment and trial and erred down to this gun? No?
Well, it could be done, but as Aseop said above, they might just as well be shooting an 1865 model black powder cannon for all the deliberate effective steel on target they might do. If their target was an entire city it would be deadly. Notice the gunner, when he pulled the cord to fire he more or less yanked, that alone speaks volumes. If they can not fire the gun correctly, then loading would be a nightmare. Did you see the Boko Haraam carrying shells out of the ASP? Fo' shizzle! That right there is the way you commit large scale suicide! Now extrapolate ISIS stacking shells danger close to the Howitzer and tossing them about like potato sacks, did they check the bore after they shot? Perhaps you are right, they started with a Regt and these are the only survivors of OJT.
Someone needs to kill these ISIS fuckers. I'm now convinced that it's possible they have some personnel trained to operate Abrams tanks. We trained several people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia how to use the Abrams. If they've got the funds and the training all they need are the spare parts for the tanks.
It's scary to think of what ISIS could be like as a country with fighter jets, tanks, and later possibly their own warships if they dare acquire some.
Terrorists groups are starting to become like those in the Tom Clancy games.
About the M1 they got... Pretty soon those tanks will need some serious maintenance, since they (probably) don't know how to fix it, they will scrap the tank and do something else with the armor plate.
That's just my point. We trained people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia how to maintain Abrams tanks. It's only a matter of if ISIS can get them organized and get the spare parts they need.
An Abrams is easy to drive, a bit harder to fire accurately, but even if they can do both, even giving them 200 of them doesn't mean they've got the capabilities of an armored brigade, to the same degree that handing them 20 pairs of ice skates doesn't mean that ISIS is going to sweep the next Winter Olympics hockey and figure skating rounds.
Giving them first-world artillery and tanks generally means they'll use them with the finesse of semi-retarded monkeys until they break, and provide a plethora of targets for better-trained combined arms opponents in the interim. cf. every war fought by Arab armies with modern arms from 1900-now, inclusive.
Its funny to see everyone write of these guys, half of them, probably more are university students or graduates flooding in from the west. They got caught producing sarin gas in Iraq months ago. And they have massive ammounts of support from arab industrialists and magnates. I am sure they can maintain the tanks, bring in some people from the vast country they control.
Unless they went to university at Fort Knox, KY, USA, having college credits taught them jack-all about how to operate and maintain a multi-million dollar turbine-engine first-world main battle tank. That would be true even if they were rocket scientists and brain surgeons.
Most of the people in the "vast country they control" are lucky to get the equivalent of what would be a high school diploma in the rest of the world.
The average total years of schooling in Iraq for males is 11 years. In Syria, it's 12 years. In the UK and the USA, it's 16 years. In New Zealand, it's 19 years. And those numbers were based on a time in Iraq when guys in ski masks driving HiLuxes weren't driving into town and beheading all the educators for apostasy.
So unless you want to contend that ISIS somehow scooped up every single college student there, the very academic pride of Jihadi Community College, it's a pretty safe bet that these are the guys who'd need a maintenance manual with a lot of big pictures, large red arrows, and short, simple sentences.
http://raedwald.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-friday-people.html They have no shortage of well educated enlistees
Dont get me wrong, they will not be able to keep these operable for long, or possibly operate them effectively at all. Spares will see to that, no supporter is going to be mad enough to ship their spare parts to ISIS, the blowback would be intolerable.
But get serious: they have a massive shortage of well-educated enlistees, but worse, a near-total dearth of anything approaching actual command and strategy, and their tactics are essentially that of little more than an armed mob.
Which mainly underlines how pathetic was the Iraqi armed force we left behind, when ISIS decided Iraq was easier pickings than Assad's Syrian Army, and such estimation has proven to be exactly the case.
Much like the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, it's difficult to avoid rooting for both sides, but let's not confuse any of them with anything approaching a traditionally competent army.
Is it a complicated thing to operate?
ReplyDeleteNot so much operate well, but to point and shoot at a general area? Correcting visually and sequentially?
Well-trained artillery crews with all the breaks, doing everything right, have trouble putting any two non-guided iron rounds in a row on the same target right away, even with dedicated forward observers to shift fire.
DeleteDoing it by pointing off in the distance, and having Hadji's cousin with the walkie talkie try to adjust fire, is an exercise in achieving a CEP of minute of Province. The only thing they can assuredly do twice in a row is hit the ground, at some point.
The M198 system has a range of 14+ miles with conventional rounds; The Allahu Akbar Battery is lucky if their walkie talkie works at 5 miles' distance.
So what they're doing is Retard's Direct Fire:
Shoot.
Look at the blast.
Jiggle the spinny wheels.
Repeat.
Anything beyond that level of expertise is like trying to explain quantum physics to Schroedinger's cat.
And looking at the pics, they didn't even emplace it right, so with every shot, it's settling awkwardly and unevenly, which throws the next round in a new place even if they make no new other adjustments.
These are thus merely monkeys with high explosives. No more, and no less.
True that most 'insurgent' type uses of artillery are point and shoot in general direction and range ,i have jet to hear of one that could call in an artillery barage onto point targets.
ReplyDeleteSpray and pray Red Leg style?
DeleteHell just loading the thing can take your arm off if ya fuck up.
Maintenance is the devil, they may capture, buy and shoot, but maintaining the weapon system is beyond them.
let's consider these clowns attacking a 1st rate, trained military formation that understands the capabilities of counter battery fire and a radar to back track incoming fire.
Counter battery fire is old stuff but even sophisticated forces rarely if ever demonstrate it effectively in war.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mumt5M0gusE
Mr T: Oh it's quite effective, A towed battery of guns cannot displace fast enough to evade counter battery fire.
DeleteOperation Desert storm saw it used quite effectively.
The Radar array around Hue, Danang and Khe Sanh were quite effective.
There just haven't been any big arty duels since these events due to the improvement of, counter battery fire.
Just what do you think Iron Dome is?
Interception and retaliation of Palestinian rockets, missiles, mortars with countery battery fire, which is Air, Arty missiles or rockets.
I wasn't an Arty man but at 29 stumps I partied with a few Red Legs.
MrT: Now for that video, Yes that can be done, I was trained to take two 2" x 4" boards, nail them together into a 90 degree angle trough like a V and lay a 3.5" Super Bazooka rocket on them aimed across a road attached to batteries with comm wire as an anti mechanized IED ambush. It could be manned or with a trigger plate in the road set off by the vehicle.
DeleteUsed in conjunction with a 55 gallon drum of NaPalm with a booster charge to blow it out of a hole on the other side of the road and explode it mid air.
-------------------------------------
Don't forget Saipan, A Sherman tank crew drove along a dirt road and were stopped by a road block, while awaiting Engineers to blow the block they powered down, instantly becoming aware of a metallic banging underneath the tank, pulling back they discovered a Highly Motivated, well trained and determined anti tank man with a hammer in a hole with an eight inch artillery shell.
He waited till their tank parked above him due to the road block then began beating on the shells nose with the hammer.
Lethal, effective and no artillery piece to fire it.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men with brains.
TrT: I'll try to explain.
ReplyDeleteMarine infantry are in the 0300 MOS.
0311 is a rifleman, a rifleman can be handed a Machine gun, LAAWS/AT-4 and be able to use it effectively,
Likewise a Mortar, assault and Machine gunner can be handed the rifle and MG and use it the same.
How ever the dedicated anti tank missile man has a job that requires some extra training to be effective and those weapons are specialized.
You do not hand a long range back blast dangerous direct fir weapon to just anyone, safety and cost effectiveness out weighs the benefits of a kill.
Like wise you do not hand a mortar to just anyone, loading is a snap but screw that up and people are gonna die.Aiming a mortar is harder than direct fire, the shell has to be set with it's charges at the right amount or the round goes too far, or worse, too short, "ie: " HIT THE DECK SHORT ROUND!" it takes a man or men with the skill set of a surveyor to obtain kills in the right area and the rigth target, not everyone can set out aiming stakes,locate their position on a map down to minutes and seconds and not drop mortars on his own men. A good mortar man can hand aim and fire a mortar with out a base plate, an untrained man cannot safely aim the thing at a target on the other side of the hill and out of view.
An 81 mm mortar M 821 is able to put death CEP 131 ft/diameter on a target unseen for 6490.6 yards 19471.8 feet or 3.7 miles.
A Howitzer is more complicated mortar, air temperature wind speed and direction and longer range added to surveyor level of expertise, an on board computer and a range table to plot down range target areas.
Specs for the M 198 are, 155 mm, 9 man crew, the M-107 round HE has a CEP, kill/wound zone of 50/100 meters or 165 feet/ 330 feet Range 22.4 Km or 14 miles.
There are nine different warhead packages each has to have it's own ballistics factored in.
Screw up any one step and the gun jams, hang fire, or worse, screw up the co-ordinates of the fire mission and anyone down range can die.
A mortar is complicated, a Howitzer is even more so and is five times more lethal inside a 28 miles diameter circle.
The fact they have fired these on target presumably, allegedly possibly means they have a crew trained to do the job or at least one man in charge who is familiar with and trained by First world power military forces, or he and they are mercenaries hired to do the job.
Not every snuffy/Haji can just pick up a howitzer and go to shooting, without fucking up, not for long anyway.
Former or ex US Forces perhaps British or Russian are doing this.
P/S A Battery of these bad boys normally requires a weatherman/meteorologist as well as a surveyor with a weather station and a transit for sure a GPS unit..
DeleteI recall ITR circa 1970 when a mortar crew added too many increments to a round fired in the area that was not inside the max range of the round and put a smoke round into the Verona Loop areas little village.
ReplyDeleteIt landed the other side of the road in a field and forest.
Nobody died but WTF it scared hell out of Gunny!
0811/0812 here, and Section Chief on the M198 (the type pictured in the above video).
ReplyDeleteYeah, they've figured how to stuff a projectile into the thing with the pointy end forward (and hopefully with a PD fuse on the front end instead of the shipping plug), shove in a powder bag right-way forward, and prime the thing, then pull the string. And that's about it.
But as evidently they're making no effort to man the Gunner and A-gunner positions on the thing, (let alone staff an actual Fire Direction Center, with computers/calculators/slide rules, meteorological capabilities, firing tables, charge weights, etc.) or any sort of understanding of military grid mapping and adjusting fire, they're clearly and inevitably using the Inshallah method of adjusting fire - the only one they know - which boils down to pointing it in the general direction of the target, adjusting fire based on SWAG as far as azimuth and deflection, mildly clued in by walkie talkie report, and figuring that anyone who happens to be wherever the rounds land was obviously someone Allah wanted to die, whether they hit their vaguely intended target or not.
They are thus the best equipped retarded monkeys trying to mate with a football in the region, but their actual IDF capabilities would not be appreciably increased nor diminished if those M198s were swapped out 1:1 with 12 pdr. Napoleon black powder cannons from the US Civil War, except that the Napoleons have shorter range but a lighter towed weight.
If someone ever teaches them how to count without removing their sandals, and they get advisors who can explain to the brighter ones the finer points of fire direction and actual indirect fire cannon gunnery, it will be a different story. That's roughly on a probability level of pigs flying anytime between now and next New Year's, IMHO.
As they probably lack the ability or functional understanding of why they need to be able to displace at a moment's notice, those guns are simply the juiciest targets for tactical air strikes, and rather simple to target by any Predator or similar UAV in the vicinity, something the 1st RPV Platoon demonstrated to us with secondhand Israeli Styrofoam UAVs live and in person at Swamp Lejeune as early as 1985, almost 30 years ago.
For all anyone knows, those rounds are simply shelling empty houses and random locations, and mainly serve as mobile fireworks and morale units to keep the monkeys revved up until someone needs to blow a wall or gate open with direct fire.
The second easies way to solve the problem of ISIS having them would be to simply arrange for a few shipments of booby-trapped instant-detonating 155 rounds be left somewhere ISIS will find them, and then let nature take its course.
Introducing the 1 C4 round-per-box AK-47 ammo into Hadji's supply pipeline should be happening as well.
It takes a lot of the ardor out of front line troops when your buddies' AK-47s and heads explode randomly every day.
If someone's version of SAS/SF/SEALs isn't on that already, I miss my guess.
King don't Hump, Fer sure, and there is a reason, Brains they got them, Howdy Red Legs!
DeleteI wonder what they would do if they had a hang fire?
open the breech pull the round out and bang on it with a hammer?
Zebra
ReplyDeleteI followed, some, of that.
As I said, doing it properly is no doubt very complicated, but strip away the muzzle velocity (radar?), the wind speed adjustments, the air pressure modification and all that jazz.
Can it be stripped away?
Just how complicated is it to put in the shell and charges?
If you wanted (accepted) a CEP of 500m say?
Maybe they started with an artillery regiment and trial and erred down to this gun?
No?
Well, it could be done, but as Aseop said above, they might just as well be shooting an 1865 model black powder cannon for all the deliberate effective steel on target they might do.
DeleteIf their target was an entire city it would be deadly.
Notice the gunner, when he pulled the cord to fire he more or less yanked, that alone speaks volumes.
If they can not fire the gun correctly, then loading would be a nightmare.
Did you see the Boko Haraam carrying shells out of the ASP?
Fo' shizzle! That right there is the way you commit large scale suicide!
Now extrapolate ISIS stacking shells danger close to the Howitzer and tossing them about like potato sacks, did they check the bore after they shot?
Perhaps you are right, they started with a Regt and these are the only survivors of OJT.
Someone needs to kill these ISIS fuckers. I'm now convinced that it's possible they have some personnel trained to operate Abrams tanks. We trained several people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia how to use the Abrams. If they've got the funds and the training all they need are the spare parts for the tanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's scary to think of what ISIS could be like as a country with fighter jets, tanks, and later possibly their own warships if they dare acquire some.
Terrorists groups are starting to become like those in the Tom Clancy games.
DeleteAbout the M1 they got... Pretty soon those tanks will need some serious maintenance, since they (probably) don't know how to fix it, they will scrap the tank and do something else with the armor plate.
That's just my point. We trained people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia how to maintain Abrams tanks. It's only a matter of if ISIS can get them organized and get the spare parts they need.
DeleteAn Abrams is easy to drive, a bit harder to fire accurately, but even if they can do both, even giving them 200 of them doesn't mean they've got the capabilities of an armored brigade, to the same degree that handing them 20 pairs of ice skates doesn't mean that ISIS is going to sweep the next Winter Olympics hockey and figure skating rounds.
ReplyDeleteGiving them first-world artillery and tanks generally means they'll use them with the finesse of semi-retarded monkeys until they break, and provide a plethora of targets for better-trained combined arms opponents in the interim.
cf. every war fought by Arab armies with modern arms from 1900-now, inclusive.
Its funny to see everyone write of these guys, half of them, probably more are university students or graduates flooding in from the west. They got caught producing sarin gas in Iraq months ago. And they have massive ammounts of support from arab industrialists and magnates. I am sure they can maintain the tanks, bring in some people from the vast country they control.
ReplyDelete@Jacobite.NZ:
ReplyDeleteUnless they went to university at Fort Knox, KY, USA, having college credits taught them jack-all about how to operate and maintain a multi-million dollar turbine-engine first-world main battle tank.
That would be true even if they were rocket scientists and brain surgeons.
Most of the people in the "vast country they control" are lucky to get the equivalent of what would be a high school diploma in the rest of the world.
The average total years of schooling in Iraq for males is 11 years.
In Syria, it's 12 years.
In the UK and the USA, it's 16 years.
In New Zealand, it's 19 years.
And those numbers were based on a time in Iraq when guys in ski masks driving HiLuxes weren't driving into town and beheading all the educators for apostasy.
So unless you want to contend that ISIS somehow scooped up every single college student there, the very academic pride of Jihadi Community College, it's a pretty safe bet that these are the guys who'd need a maintenance manual with a lot of big pictures, large red arrows, and short, simple sentences.
http://raedwald.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-friday-people.html
DeleteThey have no shortage of well educated enlistees
Dont get me wrong, they will not be able to keep these operable for long, or possibly operate them effectively at all. Spares will see to that, no supporter is going to be mad enough to ship their spare parts to ISIS, the blowback would be intolerable.
But they arent all uneducated fools.
Of course they "all" aren't.
ReplyDeleteBut get serious: they have a massive shortage of well-educated enlistees, but worse, a near-total dearth of anything approaching actual command and strategy, and their tactics are essentially that of little more than an armed mob.
Which mainly underlines how pathetic was the Iraqi armed force we left behind, when ISIS decided Iraq was easier pickings than Assad's Syrian Army, and such estimation has proven to be exactly the case.
Much like the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, it's difficult to avoid rooting for both sides, but let's not confuse any of them with anything approaching a traditionally competent army.