Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 9:02:39 PM
Because of my offline projects, which I promise to write about, I have been limited in both my reading and writing. Much of my small amount of news intake came from NBC Nightly News which was hyping a "devastating attack on US Troops."
Those words made me look up from my dinner. I fully expected hundreds of casualties. Two dead, and 17 wounded. That's a devastating attack.
I was reminded of my days in Command and General Staff College when the curriculum included the Battle of Schmidt. What, you've never heard of the Battle of Schmidt? Neither had I, and I considered myself more than a little mildly interested in military history.
It turns out that there were three separate battles for Schmidt Germany. The first two were bloody repulses that were the result of poor planning (non existent planning) by Division Commanders. What happened to those Divisions was "devastating."
Yesterday's attack on a platoon was serious, but to the degree that there was devastation, it was limited to one platoon and a few families. The division that platoon belonged to has many more than 250 platoons of all kinds.
The reason I bring up the Battle of Schmidt is to point out the difference in news coverage between the WWII media which wanted to win the war and the present day media which wants us to lose it.