Word: ambusher
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...there was little use rushing medicine into hospitals that had been stripped by looters to their last light bulb. Even as the other cities toppled--first Kirkuk, then Mosul--there were still people in Iraq who had nothing to do but fight and look for a chance to ambush a soldier with his guard down. From the comfort of their living rooms, Americans watched NBC broadcast a fire fight outside Baghdad so fierce that one wounded soldier was still firing from his stretcher, and the chaplain had to grab a rifle. Some of the biggest air strikes of the entire...
While attention is diverted to the war in Iraq, hostilities in Afghanistan are on the rise. In the past three weeks, two special-forces men were killed in an ambush, three Afghan soldiers had their throats slit at a lonely checkpoint, and a close ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was gunned down in southern Afghanistan. A former top Taliban chief, Mullah Dadullah, told the BBC in a phone interview that the warrior clerics were coming out of hiding to renew their war against Karzai and the U.S.-led coalition backing him. Dadullah claimed they are taking orders directly from...
...Gettysburg, Normandy and Okinawa. When a military operation departed from those norms--as in Vietnam and at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993--it was dismissed as a mistake, the consequence of political meddling rather than a cool decision by the military to use force. In fact, the ambush in Somalia by armed men indistinguishable from peaceable civilians is more relevant to our future than a full shelf of books on the World War II heroics of the "greatest generation." Given the conventional power of the U.S. military, any probable adversary will choose unconventional tactics. The fighting in Afghanistan...
...either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war--which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. But that was before the invention...
...Robert Carnahan and two six-man squads from White Platoon carrying M16s, heavy SAWs (squad automatic weapons) and 240-Bravo machine guns. Flanking them are three Bradley fighting vehicles. Mitchell, 34, briefs his men that a passing farmer has told a sentry about 10 men sweeping around for an ambush. On his command, the Americans run north through the choking red dust and throw themselves on the ground against a nearby railway track. "Jesus, we can't see s___!" says Carnahan. The squads hold their positions as the bradleys scan the area with thermal imagers. Nothing. Carnahan then gets...