If this is true, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. This would be the height of cowardly, moral-pedestal jumping Canadian bullsh*t. If ISAF troops (like the PRTs up in ISAF NORTH,or the folks out in SUROBI ) get into the sh*t and ISAF can't help out with its one sqn of NL F-16s, or its one sqn of NL Apaches , guess who's coming in with Apaches, A-10s, AC-130, B-1 or whatever else is required? The US.
If ISAF get hits by a MassCas and its hospitals can't handle the load, guess who has said they will fly medevac and open their hospitals? The US.
Guess who's down on the AFPAK frontier, capturing and killing the baddies before they can get to Kabul and blow up ISAF, meanwhile getting their own soldiers killed or injured? The US.
Guess who runs three times as many PRTs and does loads more reconstruction and civil health assistance than ISAF does? The US.
Guess who carries the load of training, supporting and supplying the ANA and ANP? The US.
Sorry if I'm bit testy, but "hiding" so that the US takes the hit is just sick. I much prefer to think that the real reason that we didn't wear AR was because there just wasn't enough in the system. Now we all wear it. Cheers.
Sir, I kindly ask permision to quote your eloquent, no-bullshit retort when this subject comes up at the next cocktail party, in order to make myself appear more intelligent than that "I'm a Slave 4 u" video. Kudos.
Also, while it is sad that the current administration cannot even ensure that the most visible aspect of the force's equipent, their uniforms, can be adequately provided for (the cost of uniforms and individual load bearing equipment being peanuts compared to most other defence expenditures), I do think many people, especially well meaning civillian observers, overanalyze their importance.
If the majority of prescence patrols on roto 0 and 1 were within the limts of Kabul it self, and LAV mounted, does is *really* matter whether the uniform is green or brown? I reall some similar comments made about US troops in the initial stages of OIF wearing green uniforms and vests that "didn't match". The fact that these troops were going into battle on 60 ton, 100km/hour tracked vehicles powered by helicopter engines is seemingly lost on them.
Here's someone who knows better:
"People seem to be spending a lot of time on uniform patterns for combat troops, such as are usually referred to as camouflage. Anyone who has spent any time in the field must realize that cloth patterns, apart from snow clothes, are almost pointless. If you are close enough to a man to discern the pattern of his shirt, it is his outline rather than his pattern that matters. In the Bush War up in Rhodesia, we experimented with this and our conclusion was that the things most readily discerned about a trooper in the field were the backs of his hands and the black line of his firearm. We conducted a number of tests along this line and decided that if an adversary is close enough for his cloth pattern to be important, he is most readily "camouflaged" by blackening the backs of his hands with shoe polish or mud or something of the sort and breaking up the outline of his weapon with irregular bands of masking tape. Oddly enough the face did not stand out anywhere as prominently as the hands, and facial make up seemed more theatrical than effective."
- Jeff Cooper
Source: http://users2.ev1.net/~mkreynolds/jeff/jeff12_10.html
