Obama is a babe in the woods

Barack Obama just lost any chance to be president. This clip will haunt him from now until November;

The jist of it comes from Curt of Flopping Aces;

OBAMA: You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.

And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough Humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Now, I know what vacuous point he’s trying to make; because of the war in Iraq, our troops’ resources are stretched too thin, but let’s look at this thing.

First of all, An Army captain running a platoon must be one dicked-up captain. A platoon sergeant lets a second lieutenant pretend to run a rifle platoon, not a captain.

Secondly, a rifle platoon (my full Bradley rifle platoon was 35 men with a forward observer and a medic attached, so I’m wondering about the 39-men thing) would NEVER split it’s troops to different theaters – something about command and control, small unit leadership and unit cohesiveness just makes that stupid right from the git-go. What would the Army have to gain by sending parts of units to different missions hundreds of miles apart instead of just sending one intact unit of the size it needs?

The “using Taliban weapons” story is a crock, too. Maybe they used the weapons they captured for a myriad of reasons (the AK is virtually indestructible and impervious to dirt, the distinctive sound can confuse the enemy as to who they’re exchanging fire with for a moment, the AK makes a good club, etc…) but not because they couldn’t get supplies.

Obama makes it sound like the Army just swaps out rifles when they run out of bullets. Now it may be possible someone in an extended exchange grabbed up an AK when they burned through their basic load (about 200 rounds in my day), but that’s not the fault of poor supply – that’s an over-abundance of targets.

A commenter at Flopping Aces makes the excellent point that if Obama is so concerned about supplying our troops in theater, why did he vote against supplying them?

Honestly, this sounds like the old Viet Nam war stories I used to hear from people who repeated stories they heard from other people who weren’t “there” either.

But, then, we can’t expect Obama to know a thing he’s talking about because he’s never been fitted for a pair of combat boots, he’s never fired an AK or an M16 and he probably couldn’t spot a Humvee unless it was alone in a parking lot of BMWs. He wouldn’t know how First Sergeants and Sergeants Major turn over rocks looking for the stuff their troops need to survive in combat.

And no mission even starts if the troops don’t have what they need to win the day.

Obama is a babe in the woods – a very stupid, gullible, ignorant babe in the woods.

Confederate Yankee writes;

This leaves us with two possibilities.

Barack Obama is a liar. He (or someone he plagiarized) simply made the tale up out of the whole cloth.

Barack Obama is a rube. Anyone with any sense of how the military works at all would immediately sniff this out as a series of false stories. Perhaps Barack Obama, the man who would be Commander in Cheif, is so ignorant of all matters military that he could be easily fooled by a fraud.

Neither possibility says anything good about Obama.

Crotchety Old Bastard gets his licks in;

He is either a pathological liar or dumb as a frigging stump. In either case, he is totally unfit for any office and especially the Presidency.

Stuart Koehl at The Weekly Standard Blog;

Overall, I think Obama would be better sticking to his “message of hope”–hope that nobody will ever ask him to make any substantive statements on military affairs, ever again.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Politics, Terror War