Flash Gordon Left Me The Keys

John McCain said it best: When once asked to describe his heroism as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the former Navy flier deadpanned, “It was nothing, really. I hit a missile with my airplane.” Someday, I trust, 19-year-old Jessica Lynch will have an opportunity to say something similarly droll.



But for now, the silence surrounding the injured Army private is getting pretty deafening.



More than two months have passed since that convoy from the Fort Bliss-based 507th Maintenance Co. drove down the wrong road into Nasiriyah, Iraq, and into an Iraqi ambush where American 11 soldiers died and Lynch and five others were taken prisoner. In that time, the Iraqi regime fell, major combat operations in Iraq ended, a large number of troops have come home, and the Bush administration has moved on to other issues, primarily the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.



But Lynch – and more curiously, the Defense Department – remain Sphinx-like in their silence.



What’s going on here?



The official rationale that the Nasiriyah ambush remains under investigation is wearing a bit thin. It is especially curious because while there was loss of life in the ambush, the normal elements that can gum up an after-action probe such as highly-classified equipment or procedures, or politically-sensitive aspects such as an incident involving the U.S. and an allied government, were clearly not a factor.



What we can say about the Lynch story is that the absence of facts has spawned rumor, speculation and even some malevolent spinning aimed at tarnishing the image of the entire U.S. military force that took down Saddam Hussein. Consider:



* The first in-depth report on the incident, appearing in The Washington Post on Apr. 3, and obviously fed to the newspaper by DoD sources with an axe to grind, portrayed the young soldier as Col. William Barrett Travis at the Alamo:



“Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday. Lynch … continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. … ‘She was fighting to the death,’ the official said. ‘She did not want to be taken alive.’ ”



As we now know, the Post’s sources were smoking their socks. Lynch suffered injuries to her head and broken bones in both legs and her back when the supply truck in which she was riding flipped over during the ambush. Iraqi doctors who treated her at the Nasiriyah hospital told reporters she was unconscious when Iraqi soldiers brought her there. Hospital staff members later said they tried to return Lynch to U.S. troops but the ambulance carrying her was fired on, so the driver returned to the hospital.



The dramatic nighttime rescue of Pvt. Lynch by a joint Special Operations rescue team, filmed by a DoD combat camera crew, dominated world headlines when it occurred and made the injured soldier one of the most famous images of the entire campaign. It also spawned a prolonged backlash in the news media:



* On May 7, ABC news followed up on an earlier Toronto Star newspaper report alleging that U.S. forces knew they would face no Iraqi opposition, and unnecessarily frightened the hospital staff and caused a lot of unnecessary property damage. ABC anchor Peter Jennings cracked that the rescue raid “may have been less dangerous and maybe even less challenging than Central Command first told us,” clearly impugning the mission.



* Several weeks later, the BBC charged that the entire mission was a sham: That the U.S. commandos had actually fired blanks rather than live ammunition. And the BBC added that the U.S. command actually knew that the Iraqi officials and Fedayeen fighters who had been using the hospital as a headquarters had already left the scene. The British network also hinted that the troops had abused the hospital staff by handcuffing them.



Again, the Pentagon was silent. And DoD sources now told reporters that Lynch was suffering amnesia.



Thanks to NBC news, a slightly more nuanced account of the hospital raid has emerged. Rather than firing blanks, the commandos were using “flash-bang” stun grenades, and did not discharge their weapons inside the building. And hospital staffers both confirmed that Iraqi regime thugs had been using their facility as a military headquarters, and clarified that they were not abused by the rescue force.



* Lynch’s father told reporters on May 30 that his 19-year-old daughter did not, after all, suffer from amnesia. “We're really not supposed to talk about that subject,” Greg Lynch told The Los Angeles Times, although he later said they were not under a formal gag order.



* Democratic Party presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich on June 3 called on the Pentagon to release the unedited recorded footage of the rescue mission.



Why allow this issue to become a major distraction and political ammunition for irresponsible news media and politicians?



Bring forth a Pentagon official who can fully brief the press on the events of the ambush in Nasiriyah, warts and all. Allow Pvt. Lynch herself to say what happened that horrible night her unit was attacked. End this corrosive silence. Release the facts.

In battle for truth you will do constant about face with misinformation...

Military staffers are busier than BX cashiers on payday, evaluating the lessons learned from the recent fireworks in Iraq. And that process is important. The stakes are too high not to get this long-term fight with terrorists dead right.



A case will soon be made for smart hardware and weapons to at least partially replace the current level of active-duty soldiers. While the right smart stuff is, of course, the way to go, if Cold War submarines and fighters such as the F-22 aren’t culled from the weapons cache, it might well be goodbye ground troopers and the continuation of contracts for too many obsolete, gold-plated war toys. And it will be happy days for the war merchants, their always-available-at-the-right-price porker pals and the bean counters, who are more into systems than warriors.



Hopefully, our system of checks and balances will kick in, and Congress will ask if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are correct models to use for drastic changes to our force structure before SecDef Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian slashers seriously weaken the time-tested force that defends our country.



Let’s face it: Not only were both ragtag enemy armies incapable of really fighting back, vast money transfers also convinced many Afghani and Iraqi senior commanders to cut and run. And with Iraq, it wasn’t just a 30-day bombing campaign that prepared the field. So many missions – more than half a million – were flown over that country in the decade before we pre-empted Saddam Hussein from doing whatever he planned to do with his infamous inventory of yet-to-be-found doomsday weapons, it was a surprise to some that there were any targets left to “Shock and Awe.”



But, as always after major operations, there are scores of basic lessons that must not be ignored, no matter what surgery the Pentagon bureaucrats and dilettante reformers ultimately perform. And one critically important lesson that has nagged at me for years is the inability of our Joes and Jills who bring up the rear to fight as infantry.



Since George Washington, all U.S. Army soldiers have always been trained first as riflemen. That skill has kept a lot of people in the rear with the gear alive and won a lot of fights, from our War of Independence to Korea – where then-Lt. Lloyd “Scooter” Burke led his unit’s cooks in a counterattack that saved his company – to Vietnam – where then-Lt. Col. Hank “The Gunfighter” Emerson dispatched his battalion’s clerks and mechanics to save a company of besieged paratroopers.



In Iraq this time around, there were no neat front lines. The guerrilla enemy was everywhere – ambushing convoys and striking hard at our Army’s soft underbelly. And many of these attacks proved the fallacy of one of the U.S. Army's frequently touted maxims: “We fight as we train.”



Too large a number of Army rear-echelon folks failed the course when put to the test because they weren’t trained to fight as grunts in Initial Training or when they joined their regular units. In many non-combat units today, this kind of live-or-die training gets brushed off by leaders who say: Who needs this grunt stuff – we’re ordnance, maintenance or transportation. Even during large training exercises, these vital survival skills are too often given only lip service.



No question the 507th Maintenance Company could’ve used the “more sweat on the training field, less blood on the battlefield” infantry training on that shameful day when its nine-vehicle convoy of ordnance troops took a wrong turn and bumped into a small enemy force in two pick-up trucks. Gun for gun, the 507th outnumbered the Fedayeen but still got clobbered to the tune of nine dead and five prisoners of war. Few 507th soldiers fired back because their weapons were clogged with dust. Hello? A soldier’s weapon on a battlefield clogged with dust?! And those who weren’t killed or captured straightaway ran liked scared jack rabbits – led, sadly, by their fleet-footed captain.



Congress is presently investigating this sorry display of cowardice and incompetence. Let’s hope it has the smarts to conclude that the Army must return to the standard where every soldier truly is a rifleman first.



The Marines still follow this rule, and when their support units in Iraq bumped into stay-behind fanatics, they did what Marines have been doing well since 1775: killed the suckers and moved on.

Tough Talking for Marines in Iraq
Don't tell the members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force about information overload. They already know all about it.

During Gulf War II, members of the force often had to use a helmet headset, four radios and two laptops at once to communicate with their comrades and commanders -- all while crammed into light armored vehicles crawling across the Mesopotamian desert.

An analysis of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force's experience in central Iraq has yielded a number of important lessons about what gadgets worked and what high-tech equipment flopped in Gulf War II.

The primary finding, according to the field report (PDF) by Marine Corps Systems Command: "Marines were overwhelmed with the high number of varied communications equipment they were expected to use."

During the war, U.S. chieftains and military analysts talked with wide-eyed wonder about how quick and how perfectly seamless communications between U.S. troops had become. In a matter of minutes, they crowed, a tip about Saddam Hussein's location became an assault on a Baghdad restaurant.

Now, it seems, that flawless network is at least equal parts Rube Goldberg and Henry Ford.

"They had a communication system for every eventuality, and for every issue," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with the defense think tank Globalsecurity.org. "But they really didn't integrate them all together."

Take, for instance, a Marine riding aboard a light armored vehicle. According to the field report, he'd use a headset to talk on the intercom to his buddies inside the vehicle. When his squad leader called, the Marine would have to remove his helmet and grab a hand-held radio to chat. To speak to a group of Marines nearby, he'd have to grab another radio. And to rap with the Navy SEALs, he'd need yet another radio. He would manage all this while keeping an eye on two different laptops showing the positions of friendly and hostile forces.

In "C3" (command, control, communications) vehicles, which relay orders and battlefield intelligence to grunts, the clutter was even worse.

"I personally saw that every 'shelf' was taken up by a radio and seat space and floor spaces were taken up with open computers," the report's anonymous author said.

"When I read this, I got déjà vu," said Jim Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "(The military) has been working since (1983's invasion of) Grenada on these issues. I thought they had made more progress."

The problem may be more about logistics than technology, however. Any single system to talk or share information would have worked fine. But "units never seemed to receive enough of one communications asset, forcing them to rely on a 'hodgepodge' of assets," according to the report.

Marine Corps Systems Command did not respond to repeated calls to comment on the report, found by Wired News on Col. David Hackworth's website, Soldiers for the Truth.

To share text messages and digital files, one unit of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force would have the Blue Force Tracker communications system. Another would have the MDACT (Mobile Data Automated Communications Terminal) program. The two have the same functions, essentially. But they can't talk to each other. So when the Marines sent reconnaissance photos to their commanders, they often would use a courier with a Memorex hard drive to carry the pictures by hand to headquarters.

MDACT has other problems as well. Like many of the Marines' communications systems, it relies on UHF and VHF radio frequencies. But these are "line-of-sight" bands. So if a hill or the curve of the horizon keeps two people from seeing each other, they can't talk. And in the quicksilver push to Baghdad, units often lost sight of one another.

Satellite-based systems, on the other hand, don't have such limitations. Rather than send their signals directly, these systems bounce them off of "birds" in space. As the war progressed, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force increasingly turned to Iridium satellite phones to talk. They also used Blue Force Tracker for text messaging and positioning information. They were the "only consistently reliable means of communication," according to the report.

"Satellite phones proved to be the big winner," Garrett said. "If I had money, I'd drop some of it into Iridium."

However, Iridium and all of the other military communications systems eventually are supposed to be replaced. The Joint Tactical Radio System (called JTRS or "Jitters" in military circles) is a software-based package for voice, data and images. It's supposed to work across every slice of the spectrum used by the armed forces and talk to every sort of old-school military radio now in use.

The idea, Lewis said, is that the Jitters operator "won't have to switch (frequencies). The system will do that for him."

A team of defense contractors, led by Boeing, is developing Jitters. It's supposed to be ready by 2005.

"It's in the works, but it's been in the works for years," Lewis noted.

Until then, Marines will have to rely on a patchy, cumbersome, jury-rigged system to keep in touch.