My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
Bang, pause, bang.
I have family in the police, military and security services and those lines are necessarily blurred these days. One of them, a niece of mine, has done a number of tours into the war zones. She pushed hard to get those assignments, because from then on the salute isn’t to a girlie who happens to outrank you. Once a squaddie catches sight of those campaign ribbons, it’s to a vet who’s been out there where the metal meets the meat.
She told me a story about being part of an intelligence team coordinating three sections of snipers who were watching the fordable points of a river between Pakistan and Afghanistan. What’s called SIGINT and a few other assets had given strong indications that a major shipment of arms and munitions was on its way in.
The intelligence was good and the mule trains loaded with ordinance and their handlers duly started to arrive. Sniping with an automatic weapon isn’t an optimum choice for a number of reasons, hence all the specialist tools are bolt-action. That technical limitation means that the time between shots comes down to how long it takes to eject the brass from your first shot, ram another live one into the chamber and acquire a new target.
In the circumstances of that particular ambush, it meant letting the lead person nearly get to the other side of the river before dropping him with your first shot, giving time to reload and possibly take out at least another one who was mid way across the river and too far from safety – hence the bang, bang title of this article. Three bangs would be extremely good shooting, but the odds on that weren’t particularly good. By then, they’d all have scuttled to safety.
What amazed her was the savage’s reaction to getting hit. Instead of rethinking what was obviously a compromised operation, they’d wait fifteen minutes and attempt exactly the same river crossing at a not too distant point on the same river and the whole bang bang scenario would be rerun. It was as if they naturally assumed they were up against forgetful children who shared their same limited attention span, rather than well-motivated professionals who were not in the habit of losing focus. The snipers had a good day, Bisley would have been proud of them.
Like all fanatics, they were essentially stupid.
It’s a tactical story but the lessons to be learned from it are especially relevant after the last week’s catalogue of terrorist atrocities. The big one, because everything else flows from it, is that accurate intelligence is the only way of fighting terrorists. There is absolutely no other way, and that has certain implications we in the democratic countries around the world have to think about.
The snipers were that day the tip of the spear and did a great professional job, but it took a huge amount of effort by a lot of other people to place them that exact day, in precisely those locations and with accurate information about what was coming at them. If you can’t operate in a team, you’re no good to anyone on a big complex operation like that.
The mass media, who are overwhelmingly liberal, will stay quiet as the bodies of the Mums and Dads who were just ordinary folks on a package holiday and are Tunisia’s victims are flown home by the RAF, and will no doubt do their best not to snigger as the grim-faced troopers of the RAF regiment carry their coffins off the transports with full military reverence.
The BBC insists they have to give an impartial hearing to the fuckers who murdered them. They weren’t killed by terrorists, but by a nation and its name was Islam nation. My arse, they were killed by fucking terrorists. The Guardian will no doubt sneak out from under its slimy rock to help out after an indecently short period, right after they can get over a bit of I-told-you-so wanking over the corpses.
I really can’t find a way of conveying how much I truly despise, never mind hate such decadent enablers of the massacre of our ordinary folks. They live in a different world and I would so like them to have just five seconds of the sheer fucking terror on a beach in Tunisia our people suffered. So many of the victims were couples, and the unarmed men didn’t run. They couldn’t. Not one. They stayed with their woman all the way, took the bullets and the bastard still killed her anyway. Not uncommon valour, but men just loving their woman. Not Rambos, just ordinary decent blokes.
There are nicer ways of putting it, but we’re in a war. We didn’t go looking for it but that’s the reality, so get your head straight. If you think that’s too blunt a statement, then tell me what caused the body counts in New York, London, Madrid, Paris, Mumbai and this week Tunisia.
This article was supposed to be a lot more analytical, incisive and prescriptive but my anger got the better of me, so I’m going to skip straight to the executive summary.
We are going to win and it’ll be done by ordinary people. The vaguely Christian meek, with the help of some totally ruthless bastards who know what they’re fighting to protect, will inherit the Earth. Cowards that you are, you’ll kill a few more of our innocents but we’ll beat you in the end.
You can bet your new manky caliphate on that.
©Pointman
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Brilliant article
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Amen.
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Pointman,
Richard is right …. brilliant article!
This is an undeclared war as politicians and media whores continue to bleat that these are “lone wolf” attacks by a few deranged or drug-addled misfits. We know better, and so do they.
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I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
A Dead Statesman
Epitaphs of the War (1914-1918) (1918)
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I think we will win in the end. But the first people we have to beat are our political ‘leaders’ who, more concerned about the next elections are even now practicng rolling on their backs and begging. We have less armed forces than we did before the last war and the senior officers have been politicised. It will be the people that will win this despite the politicians.
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Hopefully there will be a transition like Len Dighton in “Fighter” pointed out as was on the way from “The bomber will always get through” to the Hurricane and Spitfire – along the lines of
“Bombing could kill voters. Accurate bombing could even kill politicians”
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Ian W – In World Wars 1 & 2 the Imperial Forces of the Empire volunteered in their hundreds of thousands in defense of King and the Mother Country.
Today the strategy of the United Nations becomes clear; dissolve borders, scorn nationalism, facilitate mass migration and promote ‘multiculturalism’ on humanitarian grounds and Voila! …. you have an idealised ‘melting pot’ that is, in reality, a seething cauldron of racism, bitter resentment, divided loyalties and civil unrest. Who is going to volunteer to defend a country from which they feel either alienated or betrayed ? And for which they feel no loyalty or gratitude for their opportunities.
Last week, as they were still clearing up the aftermath of the Tunisian massacre, half a dozen Boko Haram female suicide bombers mingled with fleeing villagers in Nigeria, blowing themselves and 200 victims to pieces. Where is the Media outrage for those Innocents? Has anyone had a minute’s silence for them?
And all the while Nigeria, Chad and Angola sit on the UN Security Council.
Where are the UN Forces in Africa routing out those crazed bastards and protecting the people from the incessant onslaught of these mad Islamic marauders that steal and rape their children by the hundreds?
And all the while we have a born and raised Islamic POTUS (now apparently an apostate), who bends his knee to a Saudi king and declares the Islamic call to prayer is “the sweetest sound on earth”.
It’s really time for us all to quit paying lip service to the ‘politically correct’ diktats of the Socialist/Anarchist United Nations and our toady politicians, start telling the truth, and calling our politicians to account. There’s no time like the present – our future depends on it.
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You’ve probably already read it, but if not, can I suggest you read Mark Steyn’s “America Alone”?
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No, I haven’t read it and thank you for the suggestion – I’ll make a point of it.
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Amen. Peace.
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Happy Birthday America. Have a good day!
Pointy
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Much respect from me to your niece.
Tell her that there a few folk in the Southern Hemisphere that will support her and her friends.
All the best.
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Straight from the heart. Thank you.
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Pointman, I think this video captures the spirit of your executive summary. The particular incident referred shook me as some of the participants were practicing Doctors of Medicine, but then, of course, so was Harold Shipman. He though was not a terrorist, that is, one who seeks to induce terror in others. I suppose what he does have in common with Jihadists is in following the worship of Kali and the practice of Thuggee. It is recorded that Muslims and Sikhs were amongst the followers. The organisational methodology of Jihad, recruitment, training and deployment uncannily parallels that of the cult of thuggee. Although associated with Hinduism, in fact the earliest 14th century references trace the origins back to some Islamic tribes.
Thuggee was ultimately defeated by dedicated intelligence work and the exploitation of the corruption and self centeredness endemic in the creed.
Thus it will be with Jihad, its inherent negativity being the feedback which limits its scope.
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Remember how when the ISIL spokes-bastards first declared the caliphate that “O’Barmy” immediately dismissed it as irrelevant and a none event!!
That man, sorry let me re-phrase that, he’s not a man, he’s a spineless, self-serving, devious and divisive waste of space bastard and has caused incalculable damage to western society. The blame for the upsurge in terrorist activities lies squarely on his shoulders and his lack of action. I can only wish that he never sleeps peacefully again, that he is woken by vivid nightmares of the lives so needlessly and brutally lost on his watch, but I’m afraid his capacity for self delusion seems endless.
He obviously never read the story of King Canute, this will be blood and not sea water that washes over his feet before sense is restored.
Thank you for this post, it helps to have affirmation of ones views.
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Here, here Pointman.
I have many friends and family in the armed forces and more so the police and it’s shameful how their ‘leadership’ are no longer professional, experienced members who are ready to back up the conduct of their members, but are instead fully compliant (or more accurately complicit), politically correct appointments who quite aside from spending all day long managing their political aspirations, are very eager to make scapegoats of their rank and file any time ‘the clientelle’ moan that being arrested wasn’t a pleasant experience and claim to be the victims of police brutality or harrassment; all the more vocally if the villian happens to represent the ethnic diversity of our multi-cultural societies.
The greatest hypocricy are the illigal immigrants who arrive in open western societies, claim assylum on the grounds of persecution at home, preach hate and intolerance to the unthinking faithful in the host country but then when the threat of deportation looms (because even the most naive, open, tolerant societies have their limits), cry to the courts that since an uncertain future awaits, it would breach their basic human rights to send them home to face possible execution. As if basic human rights mean anything to such vulgar urchins.
But the habitually indignant do-gooders are able to give some definition to their pointless lives, a bunch of parasitic lawyers rake in the money for another seaside mansion, the lame stream media has some more bile to regurgitate in their pathetic printed toilet papers and the bureacrats have some more manure to fertilise their career growth with.
So as a start I don’t buy the paper and when ever I overhear ‘progressive’ toerags patting each other on the back for being so ‘enlightened’, then I give them the good news – you can’t win with these people, but at least you might spoil their eutopian daydream by reminding them that poeple with a healthy sense of propriety understand that their progressive politics are cack. And of course I would never vote for any party whose policies are borrowed from the enlightened frog that carried the scorpion across the river or Robin Hood.
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RE sniping tools.
I haven’t shot for some time but while bolt actions are common, gas operated weapons have made enormous strides in attainable accuracy. The Barrett .50 comes in both versions and the M110 is the M24 in US Army inventory.
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Good article, refreshingly non-PC.
RIP those who lost their lives.
Per Ardua.
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