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Letters to Falcon

Obama’s USMC Aircraft Destruction

Falcon,

Hillary Clinton once jabbed at President Obama: “You campaign in poetry but govern in prose”. Today the appropriate reformulation would be: you campaign publicly but govern privately. Despite grandiose promises to be the most transparent administration in American history, essential information regarding our foreign policy engagements only makes its way to the light of day in a slow drip, and even then tortured by mendacious spin. Despite the ubiquity of modern media, our armed forces wage secret wars in shadows and suffer untold losses, unreported by either the Obama administration or its media minions

Exhibit A: on September 14th, American forces in Afghanistan suffered what has been called by one military expert “arguably the worst day in [Marine Corps] aviation history since the Tet Offensive in 1968” and the most debilitating hit a squadron of this kind has absorbed since World War II. More than two dozen Taliban fighters, many of them disguised in American military uniforms, attacked Camp Bastion, the home of a Marine Corps VMA-211 squadron. The damage done to the fleet of specialized combat aircrafts was devastating, destroying 8 of 10 Harrier AV-8B’s, an astounding 7% of the total carrier fleet reduced to smoldering rubble by charging suicide bombers with explosives strapped to their chests. Squadron Commander Christopher Raible was killed in the surprise offensive. It has been confirmed that US and NATO forces killed 14 of the attackers but it is still undetermined if any survived or escaped or how many precisely were involved in the attack.

All available evidence indicates that this was a meticulously strategized and professionally executed attack, as tactically sound as it was bold. This has lead to expert speculation that the invaders were somehow trained or supported by either the Pakistani-sponsored Haqqani network, which has a significant presence in Afghanistan, and that it acted on intelligence provided either by careful and long term reconnaissance or inside information. It has also been hypothesized that the assault was motivated to specifically target Prince Harry, who was stationed at British-run Camp Bastion as part of a helicopter regiment and was planning on celebrating his birthday the next morning.

According to John Gresham, an expert at the Defense Media Network, some of the damage done is literally irreparable:

“Eight irreplaceable aircraft (the AV-8B has been out of production since 1999) have been destroyed or put out of action – approximately 7 percent of the total flying USMC Harrier fleet. Worse yet, the aircraft involved were the AV-B+ variant equipped with the APG-65 radar and AAQ-28 Litening II targeting pods – the most capable in the force. Given the current funding situation, it’s likely that the two damaged AV-8Bs will become spare parts “hangar queens” and never fly again. A Harrier squadron commander is dead, along with another Marine. Another nine personnel have been wounded, and the nearby Marines at Camp Freedom are now without effective fixed-wing air support. The USMC’s response to this disaster will be a telling report card on its leadership and organizational agility.”

This full article can be viewed at:  Secret Wars: What Obama and the Media Don’t Want You to Know : The Daily Witness Here’s another article about the attack published in the American Thinker:  Articles: Untold Loss: Media Blackout on Military Disaster on Obama’s Watch

-DS