Nearly one dozen American troops were wounded in Iran’s Jan. 8 missile attack on Iraq’s al-Asad air base. This week, they were medically evacuated to U.S. military hospitals in Kuwait and Landstuhl, Germany, to be treated for traumatic brain injury and to undergo further evaluation, several U.S. defense and military officials have confirmed to Defense One.Either TBI is still not considered to be an injury by the Pentagon, or they are lying.
Senior military and Trump administration officials had said on Jan. 8 that 11 Iranian missiles had caused “no casualties, no friendly casualties, whether they are U.S., coalition, contractor, et cetera.”
Place your bets on which.
But since the Pentagon has a track record of lying, YMMV.
Or, the Pentagon began treating TBI due to concussive shockwaves F differently than the standard treatment for athletes suffering from TBI due to direct physical contact.
ReplyDeleteMy father was a young doc in a WWII Evacuation Hospital , the MASH of its day, in the African and Italian campaigns. If military inteliigence is an oxymoron, he came away with a profound distrust of another, the integrity of military command and their promises. When we took him to see MASH, he came out shaking his head and saying, 'That's just the way it was, only crazier'. There is something profoundly Catch-22 crazy about saving lives....and then sending them back to the meat grinder again.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the military is about winning, no matter what gets ground up. Just how you achieve that gets more difficult when the wars go on forever and victories are written in sand below the tide line.
Bush had a thing going about battlefield casualties: if you were in Medivac you weren't counted as a "battlefield causality". And that kind of concussive shockwave is indicative of an air burst, which just adds to the impressiveness of the strike. Seems to have been missed: Iran can land a ballistic missile anywhere in the region. Anywhere. As an airburst.
ReplyDeleteIt’s also interesting because a few of the hits were the middle building of five or such, with very little damage evident on the other buildings. That impressive accuracy and suggests impact fusing, because the adjacent buildings don’t show obvious overpressure damage from an uncontained air burst. This development suggests the Iranians were delivering a carefully calibrated message to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. When you pair this with the restart of the nuclear program, it’s not a safer world that Donnie’s “messages” are delivering.
ReplyDeleteWhat would that do to the con tower of a carrier?
ReplyDeleteWow. That is a scary thought. Even if a CIWS got lucky think of the damage, but a hit on the island? Wow. Having said that, what's the loss
ReplyDeleteof a carrier compared to really pumping up the base.
Ten Bears- Unless Iran is targeting carriers in port, I don't think this is a worry.
ReplyDeleteHow is "in port" any different than twenty klicks out?
ReplyDelete