Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Fast-roping 101 (stolen from about 30 different people on Twitter) (UPDATED)

Off the top of my head, h/t to Chris Albon, Herb Carmen, and Exum.


Awesome. (Ex: "Too soon?")

UPDATE: Schmedlap is, of course, totally right about this:
I'm not real keen on making fun of the [Israeli] troops. I don't think they had much say in the matter and they actually did everything right. It takes a lot of balls to fastrope into an angry mob, knowing that you will likely get your ass kicked, and to respond first with non-lethal weapons and only escalate to lethal force after getting an ass-whooping. What went wrong was not the fault of those troops. What went wrong occurred above the tactical level ... Mock the decision makers, not the guys whose asses were left flapping in the wind (literally).
I can't disagree with any of that. And I hope no one got the impression that we're trying to make light of what happened to these dudes, though I suppose that's pretty obviously what the graphic looks like it's doing.

More than anything, I think the reason this causes a chuckle is that it underlines the absurdity of the situation in which these Israeli troops found themselves. It's an illustration of the timeless military maxim "shit rolls downhill" -- some poor bastard is left hanging on a rope because his government decided to "man up."

That said, Schmedlap is 100% right.

6 comments:

  1. Not to pick on Abu M, and because I have to get lost for the next few days, can any of you explain the back and forth here? Are you taking blog requests?

    http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2010/05/drone-strikes.html

    Okay, that's if for me for a few days....M says before breaking that promise....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am the conscience of the blogosphere.

    And I didn't notice that I omitted the "i" in Israeli. So, I guess I am not the spellchecker of the blogosphere. I'll take what I can get.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great story. Compelling, and rich.


    SNLII

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hmm, the US kid who was found with 4 in the chest and one in the head might have had a word or two of critiscism for the actual soldiers. But the main problem was that it was a policeaction performed by the military AGAIN.

    ReplyDelete
  5. And like most other clueless kids in the US, his criticism would have about as much value as used toilet paper.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's funny, I remember a lot of clueless kids in the US who were dead-on about the need to be invading Iraq at the time.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.