Sgt. Giunta's fair fight

We watched with enormous pride and humility Tuesday as Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta became the first living soldier awarded the Medal of Honor since Vietnam. For many of us who served in that long-ago war, the circumstances under which Giunta won his medal felt frighteningly familiar: an inhospitable and forbidding mountainous battlefield that looks very much like Vietnam's Central Highlands. A diabolical, fanatic enemy skilled in the tactical art of war. A lone squad patrol, armed with the same class of weapons we used more than four decades ago, engaged in a desperate firefight against an enemy who remained undetected until the patrol entered the kill zone. The results were both heroic and tragic: Two of Giunta's buddies died in what appeared to be, sadly, too fair a fight.

All this raises a question, particularly for those who have served before: After nearly half a century, and after nine years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, why are our soldiers still involved in fair fights?

Giunta's story is simultaneously heartening and maddening because we have seen this go on for too long. His unit was an infantry squad, one of just 2,400 serving in the Army today. During World War II, serving in an infantry small unit was the third most deadly job, behind submarine and bomber crews. In wars fought after World War II, submarine and bomber combat deaths dropped to virtually nil. Yet as a proportion of total combat deaths, infantry deaths have increased from 71 percent in World War II to 81 percent in wars fought since. Put another way, four out of five combat deaths have been suffered by a force that makes up less than 4 percent of uniformed manpower in the Defense Department.

Yet we cannot seem to offer an advantage to those who are charged with doing most of the suffering and dying. Too often defense gurus inside the Beltway still view war as a science project. They talk about cyber and space wars; control of the "global commons," a new concept for striking some distant enemy from the air; and the need to engage our enemies using non-military means. One wonders if they have serious empathy for heroes such as Giunta.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111805015_pf.html

...tell them to fund. They are of questional value compared to other intelligence methods that cost a lot less.

Scales' and van Riper's comments on body armor and "the high ground" are certianly insightful.

This article is just another blowhard military analyst wanting a larger budget and using the Sargent as a sells pitch. Fuck this guy.

you're not going to get a lot of deaths in those forces. The vast majority of the combat is at ground level, ground level troops are going to make up the vast majority of the casulties.