I’m no longer embarrassed by shit like this:
British forces took part in a five-day mock battle at the US Marine Corps’ Twentynine Palms base in southern California, one of the largest military training areas in the world, and achieved a decisive victory against their American counterparts.
The Royal Marines, along with allied forces from Canada, the Netherlands and the UAE, destroyed or rendered inoperable nearly every US asset and finished the exercise holding more than 65 per cent of the training area, after beginning with less than 20 per cent.
Combatants used paintball-style training ammunition, which fires with reduced pressure and velocity, along with hi-tech simulators for heavier firepower like artillery, and live ammo on expansive ranges.
Seeing no opportunity for victory, American combatants asked for the exercise to be ‘reset’ halfway through the five-day exercise, having taken significant casualties from British commandos.
You can either teach combat tactics or Critical Race Theory and gender neutral pronouns.
You can’t do both.
Our Marines lost on their home turf.
That’s not embarrassing.
That is demonstrative of just out much our military leadership has failed us.
This is Millennium Challenge 2.0.
Our entire military 0-5 and above needs an overhaul.
Honestly, every command level officer involved in this, going all the way up to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be prosecuted criminally.
On the bright side though, if everything goes to shit and they turn the military against us, we will have a solid chance at victory.
No shame is loosing. Someone has to.
But this!!!’
“Seeing no opportunity for victory, American combatants asked for the exercise to be ‘reset’ halfway through the five-day exercise, “
Jesus! Seriously?
What a Embbarrassment.
The same thing happened when General Van Riper (Ret) handed the DoD their asses in 48 hours during the aforementioned Millennium Challenge 2002.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
So IOW, they LARP’ed Down Periscope.
If a training exercise is going that badly, why carry it on through? Why not reset and try something different so you can learn?
Because the USMC I remember reading about had commanders that when told they were surrounded, outnumbered and out gunned, replied: “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.”
“They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29:1. They can’t get away now.”
This is shameful.
That’s a fight, not training.
What’s the difference, and why?
Agreed. Someone does have to lose, but this article implied it wasn’t even close. This wasn’t some Army reserve unit, it was a Marine unit. Ultimately, it might be difficult to truly know if all the woke BS is having an effect on our warfighting capability, but if we aren’t focused on killing people and winning wars, this could be the result.
Sad. Very sad.
It’s pitiful and it’s disgusting, but I told myself years ago that I should only be embarrassed by things that I do.
It’s another marker of the End of American Greatness. No one will be afraid of doing anything wrong to us. What are we gonna do? Send in the Marines?
UAE marines in the CA desert, sure. Dutch marines in the desert, that’s interesting. Not much desert in Holland, unless you count the sand dunes on the coast, or around Kootwijk.
The Netherlands have a national interest in being prepared to wage war outside of the Netherlands and their immediate vicinity.
Odds of them getting into a shooting war with Belgium or Denmark are pretty slim. But there’s a strong likelihood of Dutch civilians, diplomats, or NGOs getting caught up in “kinetic contingency actions” with “austere religious scholars” in various desert nations…
Yes and no. Yes, “interest” in the sense of Kissinger’s quote about “nations have interests”. No, in the sense of “we’re interested in this” as in “we care about this”. The Dutch military deployment in recent years I remember best is to the disintegrating Yugoslavia, where long-haired Dutch soldiers spent their time playing soccer on base while just outside the fence ethnic cleansing was in full swing. It got so bad it even became a major scandal domestically (I don’t remember if it cost the Dutch SecDef his job; it may have).
I suppose Marines, in any country, are different from army especially in Holland where they are (or were at the time I was speaking of) draftees.
This kind of wake-up call is necessary.
I remember when the US Navy got upset at my squadron when three of our BUFFs did an intercept on the USS Ranger and got within 50 NM of her before we popped *up* to the allowed 300 foot minimum.
Flying a flock of BUFFs at less than 300 feet high? NICE.
Reminds me of a pilot in the novel Fire Arrow describing LAPES (low altitude parachute extraction) runs: “lower than low. Go around trees, climb to clear a camel.”
LESS THAN 300′ — that was the minimum we were “allowed” to fly. My crew was at ~100′, which is dangerous if you have to maneuver, but that was on straight segments. 😉
If you dont get bruised in training, you’ll bleed out in war. You don’t get resets in real life. Improvise and overcome, or manage your failure to extract the best outcome to a bad situation. The men in Bastogne were in an unwinnable situation, but they held out until the situation changed to allow victory.
Sure, “train hard, fight easy” — but the reset lets them try something different and learn more than just spend the rest of the time getting mopped up.
Everything the left touches turns to sh*t. It’s a feature, not a bug.
I can tell having played airaoft with and against many current and former military included highly decorated people from wars of yesteryear, they get shot in a doorway the same as anyone else.
Update. The BRITISH media blew it all out of proportion. Long story short, the foreign contingent was formed into an OPForce attached to another USMC regiment. So in essence the USMC, lost to the USMC. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43007/marine-corps-rejects-reports-that-it-surrendered-to-british-forces-during-recent-exercise