Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Last rescue post
Uncle Jimbo over at BLACKFIVE reports on his findings regarding the Easter rescue of Captain Phillips, while noting more ships have been raided:
"The tests for our President continue and I now have multiple confirmations saying that the initial set of rules that Obama put on the Navy forbid any active attempts to rescue the hostage and only after they requested he reinstate their authority to act if the hostage was in imminent danger did he do so."(emphasis added)
Beauty is in the eye if the beholder here: if President Obama can be possibly criticized for first putting on "no shoot" ROEs, as the National Command Authority was trying to gain an understanding of the facts on the scene, then he can be seen as correcting the ROEs to status quo ante and permitting use of force in the "imminent danger" situation (giving the discretion to interpret that and act accordingly to the local commander).
One of Thomas Paine's famous quotes is: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." Even if you don't think that President Obama exercised sufficient leadership during this standoff (and it would have been nice for him to comment blandly "we are considering a variety of options"), at the very least, he got out of the way. So, that's something.
Also via BLACKFIVE, this t-shirt will be available soon from a vendor:
Next time you are out on the water in 2-3 foot seas, try taking a shot at a 3" x 3" object 25 meters away -- it is moving and you are moving -- and then synchronize your shot with two buddies on two other targets. Oh, and it's really hot, so you'll be sweating and having to stay on station for a long time. Being able to do that in a life-and-death situation is the result of a fair amount of time spent practicing, I would think. I am told it has something to do with being able to control your breathing. The distance of 25 meters may not sound like anything special, but that is some high quality marksmanship right there.
UPDATE: Via Hot Air -- I am not sure if I understand this correctly (he is kind of stumbling over his own words), but Chris Matthews thinks the SEAL snipers "got lucky" (?) --
CWCID: BLACKFIVE
6 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Tue Apr 14, 02:03:00 PM:
"reinstate their authority to act"
Micromanagement.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Tue Apr 14, 03:10:00 PM:
You're separating the wheat from the chaff and writing about the chaff, Escort 81.
Maybe when we are finished discussing Obama's authorizations another time, we can talk about the best color for toilets on aircraft carriers.
We (conservative and libertarian Republicans) aren't going to win elections by focusing on the fine points of silly political propaganda.
Somali piracy has started to emerge as a major problem. Nearly 10 percent of the world's shipping goes through the Suez Canal.
At the moment we seem to have few options:
1. Pay the pirates.
2. Allow militant Islamists to gain contol of the country and stop the pirates (like the Islamic Courts Union did before the Ethiopian invasion in 2006). Personally, I like pirates more than I like militant Islamists. (Right now most of the pirates belong to crime syndicates using sophisticated intelligence for carrying out attacks financed by wealthy businessmen.)
3. Clean out the pirate nests on land.
By Escort81, at
Tue Apr 14, 03:32:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By Escort81, at
Tue Apr 14, 03:34:00 PM:
DEC - I agree that the ongoing piracy problem needs more analysis and then action, as illustrated by the multiple takings today. Of course you are correct.
It will be the topic of future posts; this was just meant as a punctuation mark on the other threads.
My guess is that in the short run, it will be more of your option #1 than the others.
But your toilet point reminds me of a funny family story -- my father was with my sister attending the wedding of her brother-in-law in Louisiana, and they went aboard a WWII era Destroyer Escort (now a museum of sorts) quite similar to the one my father served aboard. When my sister saw the head, she was grossed out and incredulous that he could live in such primitive conditions. When she told me about it, I said that the conditions there might even be tougher when you're at sea and someone is shooting at you. We still laugh about that.
By 
, at
Tue Apr 14, 06:40:00 PM:
To paraphrase Auric Goldfinger:
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is genuine skill.
By , at
Wed Apr 15, 01:14:00 AM:
Personally, I like pirates more than I like militant Islamists. The pirates are militant Islamists.
