Fallujah

The Belmont Club is doing invaluable work in reporting and commenting on the assault on Fallujah. The following passage posted there sends chills down my spine when I think of the brave young men doing this difficult task:

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through
the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of
Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range
950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud
booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates
the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing.
Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."
...
The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along
rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a
mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley,
a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You
guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken
small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and
fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the
enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last..... From UAVs wheeling overhead to Marines going through alleys linked by their intra-squad radios (a kind of headset and boom-mike operated comm device), the US force is generating lethal, real-time information which is almost immediately transformed into strike action. Against this, the jihadis have no chance.... terrorism has unleashed a terrible engine upon itself. Capabilities which didn't exist on September 11 have now been deployed in combat. It isn't that American forces have become inconceivably lethal that is scary; it is that the process has just started.