Friday, July 20, 2007

The Bradley/Klingon Fighting Vehicle    [Stephen Spruiell]

The effort to get to the bottom of a fishy New Republic article allegedly written by a soldier stationed in Baghdad — first noted by Tom Smith at the Tank and then given a huge boost by Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard — is really gaining traction. Criticism from knowledgeable veterans has mainly focused so far on the pseudonymous soldier's account of a sadistic private he knows who can apparently run down dogs with laser-like precision in a 30-ton Bradley fighting vehicle:

One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book.

But as defense analyst Stuart Koehl writes in an e-mail to Goldfarb, that's nearly impossible:

I am looking now at a 1/32nd scale model of a Bradley, and I can say with some assurance that the driver's hatch is on the left side of the vehicle. Immediately to the driver's right is the engine compartment, the cooling grill of which rises above the level of the driver's hatch, making it impossible to see anything on the right side of the vehicle. Even if the driver was head-out, he still couldn't see anything to his right below the level of the top deck (all armored vehicles have significant blind spots close in, which is why they need dismounts to protect them from RPG guys in foxholes). So, if, as the blog says, the driver "twitched" the Bradley to the right, he must have used extrasensory perception in order to catch the dog. Because there's no way he knew the dog was even there.

A Desert Storm vet offered a lighter take:

The article makes it sound like the BFV (Bradley Fighting Vehicle) is some sort of Klingon warship with a cloaking device and a sound silencer, capable of sneaking up on sleeping dogs and running them over before they can get up and move the 2 feet they'd have to get out of the way.

And earlier, Michael Yon e-mailed Goldfarb and said the story "sounds like complete garbage." About the only detail TNR would provide to Goldfarb by way of vouching for the story is that, according to the soldier, a particularly vile episode he describes took place at Forward Operating Base Falcon. Yon writes, "I spent time with [the soldiers at that base] this year... 1-4 CAV is an excellent unit. I emailed the commander, LTC James Crider, about the story."

If it turns out that TNR has fallen for another fabulist, it will be worse than last time. Stephen Glass was at least by all accounts a talented fraud. These articles, on the other hand, read like some of the more deranged scribblings we find in the NR mailbox and tack to the weirdo wall.

07/20 12:45 AMShare