Shameless begging, or: Twitterfighting ain't about who's smarter (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Vanquished. Quandoque bonus dormitat homerus. I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country -- Victory or Death, etc.

Look, I know I said she's really smart. (I know I said she's smarter than you, in fact. And smarter than me.) But twitterfighting ain't about smarts. It's about doggedness. It's about volume. It's about shouting the other guy/gal down, and making sure that your inferior intelligence is drowned out by a wall of nearly-nonsensical words. And when it comes to twitterfighting, @allthingsct -- aka Australian (!) counterterrorism expert Leah Farrall -- well, she can't hold a candle to me.

The tournament of the millennium has been going on for two rounds now, with nary a peep from me. I didn't know when the brackets went up. I didn't gripe when I was a 6 seed. I didn't ask for your votes when I was matched up against global media sensations and darlings of the south Asian twitterverse. And I vanquished opponents with over 15,000 combined followers. Little ol' pseudonymous me.

But now there's a different challenge: Farrall. She's serious. She plays for keeps. She's done with her dissertation, so she's probably got a lot of time to engage with her followers and stamp out idiocy in the twitterverse. She's probably got a lot of time for twitterfighting.

So where is she? Your guess is as good as mine. You know what's important in twitterfighting, just like in global hegemony and military preeminence? Persistent presence. That's what you get from the only legitimately pseudonymous twitterer left in the twitterfightclub bracket. Don't disappoint, followers and readers. Cast a vote for freedom, not for the Taliban's pen-pal. Go Gulliver.

P.S. Leah is awesome, and everything above is a joke. But still: vote for me.

Man, the Air Force loves them some Boyd!

Here's a hilarious photo of a street sign taken by Nick Dubaz, an Army officer who I follow on Twitter (I'm @InkSptsGulliver), during a visit to Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base.

If this doesn't make sense to you, read this and this.

Now this is a totally hilarious quote

Ok, so here I am this afternoon just minding my own business when I see this tweet from @USArmy:

U.S.-Afghan operation in Marja is, "the greatest in the history of counterinsurgency" http://bit.ly/bvx8V6

Uh, ok. So I click on the link, which takes me to an article on army.mil from someone at the American Forces Press Service called Jordan Reimer. The piece starts with this:

The ongoing U.S.-Afghan operation in Marja, Afghanistan, probably is the greatest in the history of counterinsurgency, the United States special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan said in a weekend television interview.

The United States made a concerted effort to introduce combined units from the U.S. and Afghan militaries, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and Afghan government officials to the area as part of its "clear, hold, build, and transfer" policy, Richard C. Holbrooke told CNN's "GPS" host Fareed Zakaria.

Hmm, ok. No quotation marks. Is this a direct quote, or what? And if it is, what the hell does it mean for something to be "the greatest [operation] in the history of counterinsurgency"? A little more digging and I find the transcript from Holbrooke's appearance on Zakaria's show, and then this:

ZAKARIA: How would you describe the operation in Marjah and how would you particularly describe the - the transference of authority from American forces to locals? Do you think that the Afghans who are likely to take charge are going to be able to hold the territories that General McChrystal clears?

HOLBROOKE: Well, that's the test, and I would agree with General Petraeus' comments to you last Sunday on this program. Clear, hold, build and transfer is the shorthand for the strategy. That's why we made a major effort, probably the greatest in - in the history of counterinsurgency, to bring in with the military forces, as soon as the area was secure, civilians. The U.S. government, the State Department, AID put together a small but very high quality team that's been moving into Marjah and, most importantly, accompanied by Afghan officials.

A little more context here. What it looks like Holbrooke is saying is that Operation Moshtarek included the most significant effort in history to emplace follow-on civilian administration after the AO was cleared of insurgents, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than saying that the operation was the "greatest in the history of counterinsurgency."

Hell, it's probably even true.

(Man, that guy who thinks the sole purpose of this blog is to criticize other people's writing is really gonna hate this one!)

Links and Notes

Since I've been doing that day-job thing a lot lately without time to really put together coherent thoughts of my own, I figured I would pass along a couple of things that I've read in the last week that were really good.

First up is from SWJ from the pens of Adam Elkus and Crispin Burke (AKA Starbuck) on Operational Design. This is a great article on the history and nuances of Design. Great stuff.

Second was posted today at al Sahwa. Josh McLaughlin writes on his experience on trying to bomb the correct target in Mosul in 2008 in order to shed some perspective on the rocket attack in Marja that killed a number of civilians. I have to say that I've been his shoes a few times - trying to figure out which building the enemy is holed up in and making sure you blow up the correct one (and the correct people with it). It can be extraordinarily difficult to do in ideal circumstances. I've never bought the maxim that COIN is the graduate school of war. Killing bad dudes, whether insurgents or tank companies, is pretty hard to do in any environment. Especially if you're trying to avoid killing civilians, which you should be doing in COIN or HIC.

And now for some notes. As things finally settle at work a little, I hope to be writing much more here. For those of you in the DC area, a few of us will be at the CNAS event on Thursday (free booze! And you know, policy stuff, too). It should prove interesting at least, if only because my favorite Air Force officer, Charlie Dunlap, will be on the panel.

I've also followed Gulliver's lead and am now on Twitter (http://twitter.com/GunslingerInkSp). Yes, I'm a little behind the times, but better late than never.