Nom de plume: Rivrdog

The Bundy Militia after a month - Stalemate

In a word: stalemate.

All those who will be convinced by Bundy and his merry little band have been convinced, and all those dead-set against Bundy, his work and his merry little band will never be convinced.

What happens in conflict situations when a true stalemate develops? Let's look at a few conflicts from a historical viewpoint:

WW1: The static warfare of no movement resulted in HUGE casualties, as both sides registered their artillery accurately and emplaced their machine guns carefully to have overlapping fields of fire. The trench systems that resulted killed almost as many troops as the bullets, as the living conditions in them were atrocious. Note that when the USA came into the war, and the allies developed the first tanks, as crude as the tanks were and as green as the American troops were, mobility finally developed, Germany was soon moving backwards, and the war was over within a few months.

WW2: The start of the war. The "sitzkrieg" (translation: "sitting war") developed, as Hitler's army was not prepared to take objectives on two fronts simultaneously. After finishing up in the East by crushing Poland, Hitler was able to bring his forces to bear against Belgium and France, and the Sitzkrieg was soon over and the entire Continent was soon in German hands.

Korea: The stalemate of THAT war of movement only developed when the strong forces of China and the US were limited in their warfare by political concerns. The Democratic Administration of Harry Truman did not want to widen the war with the objective of defeating China, because he feared that the USSR would intervene, with perhaps the use of nuclear weapons. China was limited politically by Russia, who supplied their military hardware and the technicians to run it.

Vietnam: Stalemate developed early, despite the US' development and quick perfection of airmobile envelopment. We owned the day skies, they owned the night ground. That, combined with a Democratic Administration's reluctance to actually win the war, resulted in first, stalemate, then defeat for the USA.

War on Terror: May not even BE winnable, but if it is, we have made no proper moves to win. If you include Desert Storm, yes, we won the battlefield in that limited-objective operation, but no, we failed to consider the role of defeating Saddam himself, so all that brilliant battlefield work went for naught. In today's fighting, 25 years later, we have ZERO desire or strategy to win at all, and lacking such, should not be at war.

Back to Harney County, Oregon.

With stalemate the condition of the conflict, little can be done, and there are signs that the resolve of the militia is weakening. Today's paper mentions that the militia might abandon the Malheur Refuge and move over to Grant County, which puts them 150 miles closer to Portland, which will make the liberals West of the Cascades VERY nervous. Grant County is barely East of the Cascades, and parts of it are less than a two-hour drive from Portland. Imagine the Janet Reno wannabe, Temporary Governor "Korrupt" Kate Brown may get nervous enough to actually employ force against the militia, and if she does, they have won the day, whether they survive, are jailed, or die in battle. Korrupt Krackpot Kate already tried to steamroll the FBI into attacking the militia out in Harney County, but they wisely refused her screamy demands.

Stalemate ALWAYS favors the side with the best logistics, and that is NOT the militia. They have had supply problems since Day One. The FBI knows this. KKKate ought to know this, but she is handicapped in the same way Gauleiter Janet Reno was: they both are gender-confused people.

War Story from 1970

The Rivrsis, dear to my heart, remembered that I did some "trash hauling", navigating C-141s during the Reserve part of my commissioned military career (1978-1979), so she sent me this link from the DailyKos, a leftoid Internet 'Zine which I usually avoid. For some reason, I read the article, and it was pretty good. The article is a compilation of jet-era Trash Haulers, with some commentary, written by a former USAF trash-hauling pilot. There is interesting comparison in the article between military and civilian trash hauling.

I read through, especially interested by the author's commentary on the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, or "FRED", aka "aluminum overcast", aka "national aluminum scrap repository". His negative commentary fits history, though, and it did jog my memory, so here goes:

 I was stationed TDY at Andersen AFB, Guam in 1970, navigating B-52s, when the first operational C-5 flew in, supposedly on a demonstration mission. It had 70 Lockheed engineers and techs on board, but was flown by a USAF (test) aircrew. Most of the plane's vast cargo room was taken up by it's own spare parts. As soon as they shut down the engines, it was announced that the next leg of it's "combat zone tour" had been postponed, so it's 17 pallets of actual cargo were moved to 2 C-141s for delivery to the forward area. The mission cancellation was due to an engine problem, we learned form our Command Post. I was standing SAC nuclear alert (counter-Kimmy mission) and we were out on the flightline, returning from maintenance on our nuke-loaded bomber while the techs were trying to fix the bad engine in the C-5 (turned out they couldn't, but they had a spare on board, so they installed that). Now, Andersen AFB WAS a SAC B-52 base, so military protocol demanded that visiting outfits display courtesy. We stopped our Alert vehicle by the C-5 and I sidled up to the C-5 Loadmaster and asked him if he could demonstrate the Kneeling Drive, a hyper-complex system that lowers the aircraft on it's landing gear about 3 feet closer to the tarmac to make for less-steep ramp angles in loading/unloading oversize cargo. He said sure, and fired up the on-board Auxiliary Power Unit to power up the (notoriously, it's mentioned in the article) unreliable hydraulic system. He kneeled the aircraft, but when he tried to get it back up from kneeling level, the hydraulic system broke. He got on the radio to call the mission commander, and I heard him say, "Yes sir. Well I was demonstrating kneeling for some bomber guy who wanted to see it work." That aircraft was still there two weeks later, and the Lockheed and Airlift Command people were probably still blaming the "bomber guy" (me) for ruining their "combat demonstration mission". The truth, of course, was that the C-5 was NOT mission-ready, but clauses in the delivery contract called for a demonstration mission, so they did one. We heard through the grapevine later that the failed mission had caused HUGE problems for Lockheed back in the US of A.

This was probably the second biggest impact I had on the Vietnam War. The biggest was, as you might surmise, another aircraft maintenance FUBAR, but one which might have ended the war before it actually WAS ended. I have to think twice about relating it though, because it would trample on some 4-star toes. I don't think the story has ever been told publicly before. Some other day on THAT war story.