If the “experts” did, then perhaps our soldiers and Marines might have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan ready to fight an unfair fight at the squad level. Giunta’s life was saved by state-of-the-art body armor. More soldiers and Marines might have been saved had this body armor been provided before they started the march to Baghdad in 2003. We must also ask why the Taliban was able to see Giunta’s squad first by observing the soldiers from the surrounding high ground. After nine years of war, no small unit in such peril should ever cede the high ground to the enemy, particularly when unmanned vehicles are capable of monitoring constantly overhead and transmitting clear pictures of the surrounding terrain. Army and Marine Corps infantry squads were outgunned at the tactical level in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army’s superior AK-47 assault rifles. We would like a Beltway guru to explain why Sgt. Giunta had to fight with the same rifle we used so long ago.
For more than two-thirds of a century, this country preferred to crush its enemies by exploiting our superiority in the air and on the seas. Unfortunately, these efforts to win with firepower over manpower failed to consider the fact that the enemy had a vote. From Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Laden, all our enemies have recognized that our vulnerable strategic center of gravity is dead Americans. It is no surprise that the common tactic among our enemies has been to kill Americans not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Every enemy has spotted us those domains where we are dominant and challenged us where we are weak: against small units, on unfamiliar ground.
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