To the people of Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, and southern Sudan, this will come as very welcome news. After years of Congressional speeches calling upon somebody somewhere to capture or kill Joseph Kony and shut down his monstrous Lord's Resistance Army, President Obama has acted. This is the army of The Invisible Children. Child abuse is the least of this man's crimes. His "army" is based upon what he claims to be Christian principles, which he sought to impose upon Uganda (one of Africa's first Dominionists). It consists of some veteran soldiers, many kidnapped children, and abused women.

Yes, I know that I am in favor of this police action although I am generally opposed to the U.S. going it alone on such matters. The African Union has sputtered and fumed and put some troops into the field, but Kony has escaped into the jungle with little damage. The European former colonial powers have not lifted a military finger to stop this horrid legacy of their depredations of the people of this region.

Clearly a bad guy, evil guy, bad gang. Needs to be taken down, bad. But why us?

I don't think I like this.

We are not the world's police force.

I don't know that I like it, but the obvious answer to "why us?" is "If not us, who?"

Do we say "bad shit happens, but that's the way the world is, and it's not our problem"? What are the ethics of that position when there are things we can do?

But we are the guys who have the folks who know how to run a police force. They may get some results. In Vietnam, there were only a couple of advisers per unit, but they turned out to be quite effective at times.

With a $1.4 trillion budget deficit and other economic problems here, where's the money going to come from to pay for it?

I would have less of a problem with this if we had already completely pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't waving a moron's sword at Iran.

In the over all scheme of life, this is just pennies in the bucket my friend.

It's also my son at the front line, like I was. It's time the dumbasses deploying Americans all over the place get their accounting.

I WAS on the front like like it was.

Sending people to help other people fight for themselves is a pretty noble tradition. Its basically the plot of the magnificent seven after all there is the danger of escalation of course.

There is some background with European intervention by the way. A couple of years ago the EU sent a force to Chad to enforce a ceasefire and to put down militia groups. I don;t know much about what happened, but I have a strong feeling from the silence about it that it was a total disaster. So the EU is not probably feeling ready to deploy troops to places like this even in this minor capacity.

It also rapidly spiraled out of control, with so-called "advisors" ultimately participating directly in the conflict. As much as this particular mission needs doing, what does having 100 Americans' feet on the ground there do over advising from a distance? It seems to me that's not enough to be anything resembling military assistance, but instead, enough to have 100 targets there to get shot at and have another "Black Hawk Down" situation. What do we do then? Escalate or leave with our tail between our legs again? We can afford neither an escalation in the event of casualties, nor can we afford another humiliation to damage our reputation.

The Wikipedia article about EUFOR Tchad/RCA says little about the success of the operation. It notes a very slow start because of logistical difficulties and a lack of consensus within the EU. There was also a charge that the EU force was not enforcing a ceasefire but was instead taking the side of one of the combatants. The UN is said to have authorized this by Security Council resolution and is said to have replaced the EU forces. The UN has now withdrawn, but the refugees from Sudan continue to be a big problem for Chad. The conflict area overlaps the area plagued by the Lord's Resistance Army, but Kony was not a target of the EU or UN forces.

When you're a country with 850 overseas military installations, if you don't use 'em you don't keep 'em sharp.

(I, for one, would like to see the number reduced to maybe 10 overseas bases. Then we could re-build our infrastructure.)

Careful. I'm pretty sure this makes you a commie these days.

Those 850 military installations probably mean that the 100 U.S. advisers will not experience the logistical problems that the E.U. force encountered. Wouldn't it be a good thing, however, if many of those 850 installations were closed and a few others were made available to a multilateral force with the capacity to act as a "police force" on monsters such as Kony or Idi Amin? I can't imagine a better case for employing a police force to stop the atrocities of Africa's longest-running war. The Invisible Children, welcoming Obama's action, tells the story of unbelievable cruelty, especially to children and those who dare to oppose gawd's prophet, Joseph Kony. News of the crisis is continuously updated at http://www.lracrisistracker.com/.

It was three California surfer kids with a passion for making videos who accidentally stumbled into the crisis and have since devoted their lives to stopping it. A new recruit to their cause was killed in the Islamist bombing of a championship soccer match in Uganda.
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I have met one of those founders of Invisible Children and one of the child soldiers (a woman) who they rescued from the LRA; the story they have to tell is ... words cannot describe the horror. Kids at our local high school are organizing to raise money for some to go to Africa and participate in the work to take down the LRA.

According to Wikipedia:


I hope they are successful this time.

Limbaugh is quick to come to the defense of that man of gawd, Joseph Kony:
Limbaugh's Latest Smear: Obama Is "Target[ing] Christians" In Uganda.


Ignorance is no excuse. Evil is a sufficient explanation.

Yes, I do, too.

Based on the description of the mission and rules of engagement, I'm guessing that most of the Americans on the ground are Green Berets. If that's the case, they can do quite a bit. Advising and training local units in conditions like this is one of their primary missions, and something that they have specific training for.

There's a big difference between the described rules of engagement and the mission in Somalia. There, the Americans were conducting combat missions with larger numbers of US troops, without substantial local support and without the involvement of local forces.

Perhaps it's not as badly planned as Somalia. I still don't want to see American soldiers killed, leaving us with the choice of either escalating, at greater human cost, or being forced to beat a retreat, sending the message that if you kill Americans, they leave. If there is anything worse than our soldiers getting killed, it is getting killed for something that ultimately benefits nobody. I think we did quite well for many years with the Powell Doctrine, that you don't ever deploy without a guarantee that you have enough troops to do the job and get out.

I hope this is on some kind of solid basis that it is possible to finish off this guy now. Previous missions to do the same thing are not impressive.

I suppose I have better cause to believe that now than I did with the previous idiot President.

We stand ready to assist any democratic (and others) in the fight against terrorism. The US (UK, Nato) and Russia have the competent folks to try to ends this crap quickely one way or another.

It sound like we sent 100 trainers and command advisors to help give the locals a backbone and increase the IQ of the area.. A couple of crates of M4s don't hurt either.

I have a book called "Expendable Elite" where this man talks about his experiences training local troops in Vietnam. Its prety interesting. he also claims to have received the first orders to cross the border into Cambodia and talks a lot about why that was justified in his view. It was pretty interesting.

This might be worth a separate thread, since it's an issue that's come up in a few threads recently. If so, or if it's too offtopic, the greenies should feel free to split this off.


The whole 850 overseas military installations thing has always sounded way too high to me. I don't doubt that we've got a lot of bases, but the number seemed really strange, particularly since I've never seen it given with a primary source. This morning, I finally got a few minutes to do a bit of poking around.

The best source I could find for the number of bases is the DOD's FY 2010 Base Structure Report. This report, and its predecessors, seem to be the most commonly cited source for specific number of base claims.

According to the 2010 report, there are 662 overseas sites, spread across 38 countries. That's not 850, but it's in the same order of magnitude, and adding US Embassies with Marine detachments to that would probably give us about 850, and many more countries.

The thing is, when we dig into the weeds of the report, we start to see that referring to those "sites" as "bases" is misleading. Many, if not most, of the facilities that are listed are not bases in and of themselves - they're facilities that might be slightly separated geographically from an installation, but which are for all real purposes part of that installation.

For example, let's look at the Air Force's Aviano Italy location. Most people would think of that as a single base. In the report, it's 9 sites. The base itself is a site, there's an Administration Annex, an Ammunition Storage Annex, 2 Bachelor Housing sites, 2 Family Housing sites, a Maintenance Annex, and a Storage Annex. In Germany, the Landstuhl Hospital (which is often considered to be itself part of the Frankfurt base complex) consists of the hospital proper, the Army heliport, family housing, and 2 maintenance sites - each of which is listed separately.

As best as I can tell, less than 100 of the listed sites have more than 99 military personnel assigned. About 40 have more than 1,000. Those numbers are a bit misleading as well, since a number of those sites are a bit duplicative. For example, we have one Army division stationed in Korea. That one division accounts for almost 10% of the bases with more than 99 troops.

So, in short, while the claim that we have hundreds of overseas bases might be true for some technical definition of "base", it's majorly overstated in terms of the definition most of us would normally use.

Limbaugh is an evil SOB.

Indeed he is and hearing him say this crap makes me really want to support this action, prove the bastid wrong, shove it up his cyst-hole. But still, 100 advisers, our 'Nam experience, the problem of how you have a certain portion of Americans not care so much for what happens to a bunch of Africans way over there, the terrible shock, all the possible complications of national politics among the nations in that part of Africa, the heartbreak of the death of any of our folks way over there, the ongoing state of our economy meaning we will have a tough time justifying resources for this effort, the crap coming out of RWNJ's like Limbaugh--it all sounds like it could quickly unwind, devolve into another disastrous quagmire.

I think Obama should use his bully pulpit with the rest of the world to get a multinational group of advisers/trainers over there. If it's just us, the chances of a bad ending that's hung around Obama's neck just seems like it's way too possible.

And I hope they succeed too.