Via Instapundit, Michael Yon documents the exposure of a gi-normous weapons cache in Mosul. Lots of pictures and accompanying explanation; Yon was there for the unpacking and destruction of the cache. Nothing I excerpt can do his site any justice at all; go read.
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great post. I mean, Yon’s, and yours too. I esp. liked this line:
“[For the record: If I am ever captured and seen on television telling the world that America is evil, I am lying.]”
I admire that sentiment a lot, and share it, though clearly it’s much easier to share it here in Illinois where I’m in slim danger of being captured and tortured into lying.
Yes, these people are doing very good work, and very important work.
And what a tragedy that the work they are doing recovering munitions could all have been avoided if Bush had sent over enough people to secure the munitions dumps to begin with.
This assumes we knew where even a sizable fraction of them were to begin with. Did we?
I’m struck by the 25 shoulder-fired SAMs. Can anyone point to examples where helicopters or planes are thought to have been hit by SAMs? Hard to believe these are (were) the only ones around….
This assumes we knew where even a sizable fraction of them were to begin with. Did we?
why wouldn’t we know where they were? we knew where all the other weapons were, after all…
oops.
No, actually, we didn’t. Regardless, I submit that a great deal of conventional weapons were in places we didn’t know about. After all, outfits like UNMOVIC weren’t tasked with observing conventional weapons caches in general.
Al Qaqaa, at least, was known to us beforehand.
Re the SAMs: just noticed this from a July 20 AP story on the Iraq Casualties page:
Wondering what the results would be of a NEXIS search for stories of helicopters downed due to “mechanical problems”… Not that there aren’t plenty of those for real.
At least, being the operative phrase. BTW, there’s an interesting compilation of the barrage of conflicting reports on Al Qaqaa here. What few people are saying is that although HMX can be used as an explosive initiator for nuclear weapons, so can RDX. The first implosion bomb we ever set off used a mix based on RDX (80%, IIRC). Oh, and the reality is, RDX has a slightly higher explosive yield than HMX, and PETN is higher than both of them. The major discriminator between HMX and RDX is relative effectiveness in use as a shaped charge.
Why didn’t we just bulldoze the stuff together in a pile and explode it? Why didn’t the UN do that a long time ago? By now, this is probably something not easily determined. Also, exactly how much high explosive left at Al Qaqaa when our initial sweep went through is, as far as I’ve seen, not known.
As far as SAMs go, there were literally thousands extant in Iraq. The US Army initiated a buyback program and obtained a few hundred; if I were a smart insurgent, I’d take the broken ones and sell them back for beer money. There have been several incidents just since the beginning of this year where helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft have been shot at, some hit. The press hasn’t been all that reluctant to publish successful SAM attacks, so I’d assume that reported mechanical problems are just that. Helicopters are accidents waiting to happen; a stressful environment, hard usage and frequent usage combined are going to result in many more accidents over a given time period.