Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ras_ | Hacker News Reader

"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province.

This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small, isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo...

Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...

View on HN

It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared -- line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent operations center.

They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that?

I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it?

Do they use mIRC?

Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.).

http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh...

http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mir...

They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product (I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of text, often, rather than a simple text email.

It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine.

The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it ever was internally to the military!

http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-comman...

http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069

Email is sent out as attached powerpoints

That's a thing I've noticed in the commercial world too. With most non-technical managers, if you send them a long email, they'll ignore it. Well not quite; they'll see it in Outlook, then their eyes will sort of slide off it and go onto the next one (I have observed this). Sometimes they will even phone the sender and say, you sent me an email, what's it say?

Put exactly the same content in a Word doc or a PDF and in the email just say "please see attached" and they'll perfectly happily read it, or even 10x as much text. Very, very weird.

As an IRC junkie, this is an incredible tidbit of info to find out. So all those wasted years of scripting irc bots could have real-world application at the highest levels of global warfare!

> LET'S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR? Y/N

I think it's kind of sad that they don't have bots, usually (they rely on humans to transcribe from voice radio to IRC and back again), and use mIRC vs. something like irssi or even BitchX.

Also I doubt people do channel takeovers, banning, amusing hostmasks, etc. Warrior using IRC != IRC Warrior.

Founding IRC: http://www.mirc.com/help/jarkko.html

Very similar to the birthing of Linux.

Some thoughts on reading that log: - have a look at the stats on that: 8x US Killed IA (in action) 23x US Wounded IA 3x Afghan National Army KIA 10 x ANA WIA 2 x ASG

2 Enemies KIA

11 x GBU 31 (2000 lb bombs) 26 x GBU 38 (500 lb bombs) 1 x Hellfire 3 x 20mm strafing runs. 19x 105 (AC-130) attack airplane

- illiteracy (in the moment, it's excusable) aside, the level of organisation and effort that went into that brief moment in history is truly admirable. But one can only imagine how it could be better spent... these aren't just dollars being spent, it's serious, high quality, highly organised man hours; intense effort, training and organisation. I realise these are personal politics, but really: it makes it hard to enter arguments about welfare state resource wastage when you think about warfare stage waste.

Money, and lives ("blood and treasure").

Also note the 23 US WIA and the ANA/etc. WIA, of which 5-10 are going to be permanently disabled, and all of which together probably cost more in medical treatment than the munitions expended. Plus of course all of the time spent training those people to do an inherently negative-sum task.

This is why the decision to go to war should not be taken lightly, and why it is important that if you do go to war, you fight it to win as quickly as possible.

Especially if you consider that the base was abandoned a week later [1]. Looking forward to seeing "Restrepo"[2] when it becomes available. I can't say I like the "action theme" in the trailer, but at least it seems honest.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/International/exclusive-apache-pilots-... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DjqR6OucBc

Uncensored @ http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/afg/event/2009/10/AFG20091003n...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com