Tanks for Afghanistan

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Heibges

The two Egyptians basically did not feel they should have to go out and sleep in the field. It's hard to win any type of war, when your combat arms officers don't like going to the field.

Gen .Franks wrote about his experience as corps commander, when he arrived in Saudi Arabia, inspected the already established sites and then was told of the training for the Kuwaiti of Saudi units in 1990/91 in one place. When he inspected the site, trainers complained that when they told their group to dig some foxholes for themselves, the troops said it would be offensive to their male honour to dig in the dirt or something like this. They got out their handies, called their families, and some time later servants of theirs tried to come in by car, to dig the foxholes for them. The US trainers of course went ballistic about this. And commander of VII. corps wrote he definitely was not pleased to learn about this.

another story he reported is this: that the first Kuwaiti or Saudi units (I forgot which one it was, I think it were Saudis), that recovered the Abrams in preparation for Desert Storm - jumped into the tanks, drove around like crazy or like being drunk, yelled like kids into the microphone and brought the whole radio network down. They also fired around blindly until the tanks ran out of ammo, like they use to shoot their rifles into the air during assemblies or festivities. It was a stockcar race. The tanks were scattered around over the whole training area, and finally stranded, out of ammo. Again, their US trainers went up into orbit...