Horses and Bayonets.

Posted on 10/23/2012 by quilly

“we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

We may have fewer horses, but we still use bayonets, Mr. President. Soldiers still need them because war is stil up close and persopnal you ignorant bastard.  Just ask Lieutenant James Adamson.

The 24-year-old officer, a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted “have some of this” before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.

Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man’s chest.

Lord save us from four more years of this empty suit.

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14 Responses to Horses and Bayonets.

  1. Registered User says:
    10/23/2012 at 10:27 am

    In fairness to Obama, maybe he is talking about lower numbers of infantry manpower. I mean, surely peak infantry manpower during WWII would be greater than for today?

    This time I’m joking. Even my my sense of charity doesn’t extend so far.

    Infantry is still the queen of battle.

  2. TimC051170 says:
    10/23/2012 at 10:36 am

    The problem is, this shows a lack of understanding of what is needed to win combat. No matter how high tech weapons get, to truly win we must get in the face (bayonet range) of the enemy. This is a lesson we learned in Vietnam, and politicians keep trying to forget. Politicians love being able to push a button and send a missile. It is quick and clean with no possibility of body bags coming home. Their next favorite is SF missions because, they limit the number of body bags that can come home. The problem is, all to often these can not solve the problem. We often need the boots on the ground to have a long term solution to problems.

  3. Marcus says:
    10/23/2012 at 11:48 am

    Obama’s comments are the same old tired shit I’ve been hearing for the last twenty years. “Doing more with less,” and “leveraging technology.” That’s why we didn’t significantly expand the size of our military after September 11th, because the generals and the defense industry had convinced our leadership that this was the case. And then an insurgency broke out and we discovered that all our little gadgets mean nothing when you need dudes with rifles patrolling the streets.

    This applies to the Navy as well. Fewer ships and sailors means more deployments for those that are left, and more strain on precious little equipment. It gets to the point where it is unsustainable and you’ve stretched your lean technological force to the breaking point. Not to mention that the Chinese are just beginning to present us with the first real naval challenge to us in over sixty years… and we are reducing our capability rather than expanding it.

    This is how the big wars start. When up-and-coming powers perceive the established powers as weak. And that is how we are perceived right now.

  4. Registered User says:
    10/23/2012 at 12:54 pm

    Whatever the real physical results of the anti-war left here in the United States, whatever messages it sent inside America, and inside nations, like some of the European ones, that processed the messages similarly, to nations without that cultural background it tended to signal weakness. Without realizing it, Americans who tolerated such messaging are and were communicating to certain nations the way a sick or injured deer tells a wolf that it is prey.

    When Obama won, I knew that between the messages he sent, and the decisions he made, that he would increase the consequences of the inevitable future wars, as compared to a stuffed mannequin, much less someone like McCain.

    At least he only has another three months, or if we screw up, four years and three months, with the matches trying to set as much of the world as possible on fire.

    The nicest spin on this that my sense of fairness and charity can honestly come up with is that he is so stupid and poorly educated , or drug addled, that he honestly does not realize enough about the US Military to tell the difference between the Army and the Coast Guard.

    As far as harsher takes, I have so many lines of argument that I don’t know what to do with them.

  5. Severus says:
    10/23/2012 at 1:18 pm

    “O” came across as ignorant and petty. He came across as a man who is losing and knows it. Anything and everything to score a point; any point and look as if he is waging a comeback. Its pathetic.

    Do I wish “R” had been more agressive? You bet your knickers I do but then again, this last debate wasnt about winning or losing for him, it was simply about not producing that one single damning “gaffe” that sinks Presidential hopefuls every four years.

    “O” looked, for lack of a better term, “pissy” and churlish. “R” looked presidential; he discussed his plans for the future while the other tried to explain his foreign policy that hasnt existed for the last four years. Again, pathetic.

    As for the “horses and bayonets” comment, I can only echo what has already been said. The silk suited bastards along the Potomac and their over-ranked gilded lackeys have shied away from what real war is all about since “91” and that will not change until a determined enemy is running through the American streets slaughtering all in their wake. What then will be the excuse or better yet, what then will be the answer…more technology?

    All we can do at this point is hope and vote while clinging to our guns and religion….

  6. Registered User says:
    10/24/2012 at 2:15 pm

    After having slept on it, read today’s diplomad and the linked Gaffney piece, I’m thinking we might still be being too charitable to Obama here. Arming Al Queda to fight Al Queda or whoever, would seem to be a level of military genius beyond ‘oh we just need this military hardware and we can skip on infantry, and maybe we don’t need so much of the hardware either’.

  7. quilly says:
    10/24/2012 at 6:39 pm

    I didn’t know Diplomad was blogging again. Have to put him back in the Worthy Blogs column.

  8. Pissed Off Tree Rat says:
    10/26/2012 at 6:47 pm

    Was I the ONLY one forced to read all that “Interwar Period” shit. The President’s retreading a conceptual argument proved to be strategically naive to the extreme, and disastrous to the military, decades ago.

  9. quilly says:
    10/26/2012 at 10:10 pm

    POTR, he’s rereading Jimmuh Carter. In all senses of the memory, except the super high inflation.

  10. caohaoim says:
    10/26/2012 at 11:20 pm

    Obama even has the anti-antisemitism down just like Jimmuh. Which I have been reliably informed is why he was “allowed” to leave the submarine service so early.

  11. Registered User says:
    10/27/2012 at 9:51 am

    Quilly,

    I have to disagree with your model of historical parallels for Obama. I submit that Jefferson Finis Davis is a much better fit.

    Caohaoim,

    Don’t you mean an odd number of ‘anti’s rather than an even number?

  12. caohaoim says:
    10/27/2012 at 11:59 am

    Any odd number will do.

  13. Severus says:
    10/29/2012 at 11:11 am

    Quote by POTR: “Was I the ONLY one forced to read all that “Interwar Period” shit. The President’s retreading a conceptual argument proved to be strategically naive to the extreme, and disastrous to the military, decades ago.”

    Yes, as a matter of fact you were the ONLY one tasked to read this drivel. The rest of us just played along and said we were reading it. Its the best doctrinal joke we have pulled since Westmoreland. But never mind all that, what we really need to start thinking about, doctrine wise, is how we are going to use our P38 can openers as a viable substitute for a bayonet.

    Opening comments….anyone….anyone at all…..(crickets).....

  14. Registered User says:
    10/29/2012 at 12:51 pm

    Insert joke about how the movie Toys, with I think Robin Williams, also argued against the President’s apparent model.

    I didn’t read any of the Interwar Period stuff, but then I’ve never been in the military, much less an officer, and I’m not anywhere near as well read as I should be. Most of my professional training has been in the hard sciences.

    All I can really say on the military side of things is that history strongly suggests that infantry will always be important. On the engineering side of things, I am extremely skeptical of anyone proposing to replace infantry with ‘woohoo technology, woowoo human systems finesse enhanced with tech and advancements in the social sciences’.

    At the moment I’m really wanting to talk about today’s XKCD. I’d do up a full post here if I could, but I can summarize it easy enough.

    http://xkcd.com/1127/

    Anyway, whoever writes this may well have earned himself a position as a ‘rightwing partisan hack’, no matter how far to my left he is.

    Which is to say that this quantification of history supports things that I have been saying, seriously, about the Democratic Party, for years. It also supports an idle counter argument I threw together, partly in jest, a couple of years back and then didn’t really follow up on. Look at the section matching the 1860s, that portion that shows a huge gap in the left? Those were the Confederates.

    I guess I was more serious than I thought I was about Barack Hussein Obama being Jefferson Finis Davis, Jr. I just hope Barry doesn’t run off in drag soon.

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