Jump to content

Royalfan5

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    1571
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Royalfan5

  1. So my step-dad had back surgery here in Lincoln today, should just be an overnight stay. It also doesn't look like there are going to be any available rooms for him so they just have him hanging out in one of the visitors sitting areas for now. Apparently everything went well enough that he'll go home in the morning, but I don't think that it's an overall good sign here, especially since he's in the main trauma hospital for a pretty big area. 

    • Like 1
  2. I’m still shocked that he outright said that they had to throw out their game plan vs. Illinois because they came out in a 4 man front and they were expecting a 3 man. Every fucking 8-man school in the state is better prepared than that. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  3. 3 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

    I agree with “Fuck Eric Clapton” over his anti-vaccination stance. But come on. It’s okay if you don’t remember him from The Yardbirds. But Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos? That’s to say nothing about his solo career. He also played guitar on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Kind of a legend. Doesn’t mean he knows shit about medicine.

    Also, you should own Disraeli Gears, Blind Faith, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and Derek and the Dominos Live at the Fillmore. They’re all classics. 

    Counter point, all those albums are boring as fuck

    • Haha 3
  4. 4 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

    The contractors who were assigned had plenty of time to leave?  This is fucking absurd.  Being in country is their job.  This newest talking point of victim blaming to try and absolve the administration from stranding them is disgusting

    From what I've been told, we're pretty hard up for help back home, so I'd think they'd of landed on their feet if they had quit and headed back. 

  5. 5 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    That's not what's going on.  We knew we were leaving, but just left everything here like it wasn't gonna fall into the Talibans hands at some point no more than a year down the road ? 

    No one said the Afghan gov't WASN'T going to fall, they (the experts) all said it would, but that it would last a while, like maybe a year. 

    So you might wanna re think that thought.

    So we were just going to disarm the troops we allegedly trained for the Afghan govt before we left? 

    • Hook 'Em 4
  6. Just now, Mrs Whiggins said:

    Wow, yeah, I ran a lot on the Wilderness Park trails which were pretty isolated back in the day, and at Pioneers Park. Sorry that the childrens' case counts are so high, but wow, awesome on the total vax rate though. Our area is still below 50%.

    My office is right next to wilderness park at 1st and Van Dorn. Parts are still isolated though. They brought back the mask mandate today, my fiancé was already wearing them since she works with life skills kids in middle school. 

  7. Just now, Mrs Whiggins said:

    We haven't been back in ages, I don't think I'd recognize some of our old haunts. They opened up a hs near where I used to train/run XC and I bet that what used to be nothing but pasture is all homes now. I lived on A street up the street from the IGA--is the Zesto still around? We also lived in a little place near Havelock.

    Zestos is still trucking along, at least on South Street. I don’t think it’s changed much. I’m guess you ran where Southwest is now. It’s filled in pretty good with residential now, and our Costco, plus the South Beltway is finally being built. 

  8. 16 minutes ago, Hmbre97 said:

    The makers of ivermectin need to put that shit in a giant livestock-sized suppository. Then we'll see who's really about it when they have to jam a monster energy can up their ass.

    Run’em all through hydraulic squeeze chutes to do it to

  9. 20 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

    Did you read the linked article?  It goes into a lot of details on what was wrong. This paper was written by a boots on the ground commander and is a pretty good forecast on what was coming if/when we pulled out. This is all specific to Afghanistan, so if you’re looking for some blanket template to apply to all future nation building, it’s not helpful. I think that’s largely our problem. We try to apply a generic freedom/democracy templates to complicated ethnic and cultural issues and expect to money whip the outliers into place. In case you are a TLDR guy, the highlights I took from it were:

    - A laughable 8 week training course to train illiterate poppy farmers to become the entire structure of their military, including NCOs. We purposely denied entry for the mujaheddin, which starved the new fighting force of what little functional fighters the country had, and handed them to the Taliban. 
    - Trying to force diversity to unit structure in a ham fisted attempt to overcome centuries of ethnic and cultural issues. This further broke unit cohesion and also starved units of qualified bodies because guys from the north couldn’t even speak to guys in the south, too many of one tribe volunteered so they sat unused because unit x already had met that quota, etc. 
    - Never addressing infrastructure beyond the big cities. Volunteers struggled to get to training centers. Trained soldiers struggled to get home on their vacations, so they just went home and never bothered to come back. Supplies and facilities in the remote areas (the places where the taliban was) were starved of resources, which led to further attrition. 
    - Grossly overpaying volunteers in an effort to juice recruitment to achieve goals, despite the Afghan gov’t telling the US not to do it because they would never be able to maintain it. Coupled with the above it became a “go to a training center for 8 weeks and get a fat check” program that didn’t remotely impact retention. Guys got paid and went AWOL. 
    - Providing resources that the illiterate army could never hope to maintain, which meant they had to rely on contractors to keep their army running. Of course, those contractors will GTFO the second the US pulls up their stakes, so this well trained, well equipped army was dead from the jump. 

    While there are a lot of failures here, is it even possible to build a cohesive armed force there? If you did the exact opposite of the above deals, I don't think you necessarily end of closer to a useful national army. 

×
×
  • Create New...