Is it bad that I think a reprise of Kent State would be an improvement to the student body of Columbia?

The tanks are being deployed to a fairly open and flat area, where (if I remember correctly) the Canadians and Danes have previously used them to effect.

Anyone who knows body armor ratings would know that nothing short of a clean headshot would've taken out the N. Hollywood guys, short of, say, a .338 Lapua Mag in the COM. Factor in having there be two guys, and having them being spraying you with I find that most opposition to the existence of SWAT teams is is emotion-based. Lots of liberals and libertarians would rather have regular patrolmen dead due to lack of proper training and equipment than piss themselves at the sight of the same cop with a K-pot, AR-15 and a few courses at Thunder Ranch. Sure, there may be a few dozen bad incidents with SWAT, but how many thousand operations do they go on annually? The same kind of BS thinking is used by the Brady's and VPC when they point out that (OMG) x many CCW holders shoot people illegitimately each year. It's a drop in the bucket when you look at it as a percentile. As for cop199's old school experience, I dare him to put back on his uniform and go up against 5 South Central gangbangers with MAC-10s while armed only with a .38 six-shooter (bonus points for no vest). Don't believe this a plausible scenario? Look to what happened to the deputy in Pinal County, AZ, last week. He is supremely lucky that he wasn't killed, and probably would've been if he hadn't had a rifle with him.

You're right. However, heavy artillery and laser-guided bombs can. I think if we treated Taliban prisoners like they treated prisoners they've taken, they'd either quit real fast or get pissed off and start acting stupid and make themselves bigger targets. Either way, I think the soundest policy we could pursue is total annihilation of the enemy wherever he pops up.

Why the hell haven't we offed that Karzai fucker yet?

I recall reading that quite a few more Canadians actually enlisted in the US military during the Vietnam era than Americans fled to Canada.

I think it's worth noting that 300-400m is well within the effective range of the M4.

It goes back even before then, to studies done by the military during WWII. Long story short, they found that most shootouts were at close range, and whoever put out the most rounds in the least amount of times generally won. Hence the STG44, M2 carbine, and the AK-47 shortly after the war. These studies in part lead to the adoption of the AR-15 platform, and what was learned in WWII held true in Vietnam when put to the test. Seems to have worked in Iraq, too. It would probably be cheaper and easier to just pound the enemy with HMGs/mortars/arty/ARA at the these long distances in Afghanistan and save the ammo for close encounters. But who knows.

I believe SSG Bellavia was in the Big Red One, was he not?

Fuck that commie cunt from here to Timbuktu.

Pretty sure that's Quentin Tarantino.

It'll be enough when you no longer question whether or not you should be taxed so much.

Hungarian?

At least once every day I think I have lost all faith in humanity and then inevitably something new comes up to make me wonder why I ever had any faith in humanity in the first place. The fact that this is even a headline is pushing America farther along into our inevitable downfall, at our own hands.

God bless Gary Sinise. Interestingly, (at least for a while) his character on CSI had the same portrait of Reagan than winemkr has as an avatar.

IIRC it was Tommy Franks.

That was freakin' sweet. Need to email it to my recruiter...

ATTENTION EVERYBODY: Fuck Italy. Sincerely, Anonymoose

Little Bird, all day and all of the night. WTF is a copter?

Is it just me, or do Muslims seem to want a reason to bitch at everybody? Something like 20,000 French civilians were killed in the summer of 1944 by allied air and arty and you never hear stories of old French people talking trash on Easy Company...

How many troops do we have tied down in Kosovo? Don't we have, ahem, more pressing issues for them to attend to?

What about us enlisted guys? My IRR commitment doesn't end until... 2016.

Call me thick, but I don't see why an ordinary happening of war is so strange to the, um, brass. If they took the time and money to investigate every unlucky blow of the wind from, say, Vietnam, we'd probably be looking up events from 1966 *today*. Seems like some people just can't accept that shit happens. The feel I'm getting is that someone, somewhere, thinks it preposterous that the Taliban could ever get the jump on us in any case, and reeks of the lack of respect for the ability of the enemy that has lead to downfall and defeat in the past.

If we don't help, then I think it only leaves the Israelis one option. Better to fight it on their terms than the Iranians.

Sorry Sparky, but explain to me how self-defense from religious extremists is itself a form of extremism?