Dayton: Sandbagging
Powerline points out that "Senator" Mark Dayton has stepped in it again.
Our favorite powerlawyers have no idea how comically ill-informed our "senior" "Senator" is.
The Strib starts the narrative:
Nearly three weeks ago, Cpl. Travis Bruce of Rochester was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while standing watch on the roof of a Baghdad police station.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., sent a letter to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning the circumstances that led to Bruce's death.
In the letter, Dayton said that the day before his death Bruce told his girlfriend in a telephone call that he had been unable to obtain enough sandbags to fortify his position adequately.
"He gave his life heroically and importantly, but it's immoral for our command not to provide our soldiers with absolutely everything they need to give them maximum protection: body armor, armored vehicles, sandbags. It's immoral if our soldiers are left in any way unequipped and unprotected"
Rocket Man follows with a further quote from the Strib story, and an inference:
Bruce was killed when the rocket-propelled grenade hit a sandbag, ricocheted and exploded into a water tower, showering him with shrapnel.
On Tuesday, the day before he died, he called his girlfriend and said that he was stationed on the rooftop and increasing the height of the sandbag barricade. "He said they didn't have enough sandbags up there," she said softly.
So, the day before he was killed on the roof, Bruce said that he was "increasing the height of the sandbag barricade" because he didn't think it was high enough. No suggestion that he was unable to get his hands on enough sandbags to accomplish this task. No suggestion that there was a shortage of sandbags, only that they didn't have enough on the roof.
Dayton's crushing, demigogic ignorance goes way beyond that.
Sandbags are (all you infantry guys you there stop me if I'm wrong) protection from bullets and shell fragments. A "Rocket Propelled Grenade" (RPG) is built to direct an explosion, essentially a super-hot instant cutting torch of explosives, through up to a foot of steel armor; a solid hit on a sandbag wall will lance through several feet of sand. Sandbags, in and of themselves, are no protection (and either, for that matter, are the armored Humvees, the lack of which were nearly the downfall of the Republic before the election; they, too, are built to turn the bullets and shell fragements that cause the vast majority of casualties in every modern war). An M1 tank, or an M2/M3 personnel carrier, are both relatively safe from the RPG. For the rest of the military, the best bet is to kill the RPG gunner before they can get their bulky tube inside the 200-meter effective range.
For whatever reason, Corporal Bruce's sandbagged guard post atop the Iraqi police station had no top cover, leaving him vulnerable to the shrapnel that killed him after the RPG "...hit a sandbag, ricocheted and exploded into a water tower, showering him with shrapnel", according to the Strib account.
Note to non-Minnesotans; you just try to tell me Boxer is more stupid than Dayton.
Note to Minnesotans: I liked "Senator" Dayton better when he was evacuating his office, frankly.
Posted by Mitch at
April 13, 2005 06:08 PM
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I don't want to make light of Cpl. Bruce's death. He was a hero doing hero's work. But is it just me, or does it seem strange that there would be a shortage of SAND bags in Iraq????
Posted by: chriss at April 13, 2005 09:04 PMChriss, that's the point, there are PLENTY of sandbags in Iraq, there just weren't enough on the roof, yet. And Sen. Dayton doesn't seem to know the difference. Geesh
Posted by: Silver at April 14, 2005 07:32 AMI'd actually expect sand to do a pretty good job of stopping a HEAT round. The heat capacity of SiO2 is pretty high (much higher than metal armor, per mass) and I'd expect that the diffuse structure of the sand would tend to break up the jet.
None of that changes the fact that the round ricocheted up and the explosion ended (functionally) as an airburst. Since the soldier obviously didn't have overhead cover, I don't see any particular connection between the height of the wall and his death.
And all that is without reference to the assertion that sandbags are hard to find in Iraq. Somehow, I suspect that there might be just a few leftover sandbags from the Iran-Iraq war, Desert Storm, and OIF, and that's just from the Iraqi side.
Finally, let's assume that that there's a sandbag shortage. I'd imagine an experienced troop with an IQ above room temperature could figure out some sort of field expedient barrier. It's not rocket surgery.
Posted by: Doug Sundseth at April 14, 2005 12:25 PMThis is kind of off the mark. Dayton had very little to say about sandbags in both Strib articles and in his letter to the President. His main contention (and one that Kenneth Bruce agrees with) is that we aren't training Iraqi police quickly enough and our soldiers shouldn't be standing on the roofs of their police stations.
Even when he did use sandbags, it was a side note about the nature of Corporal Bruce's duty. He never even came close to saying that sandbags could have protected Bruce from an RPG...never. He simply said that we should give our troops what they need...be that body armor, armored vehicles, or sandbags.
Dayton's beef was that Bruce was up on that wall in the first place...guarding something that Iraqi police should have been guarding.
I know you don't like the guy, but I don't think this one holds up.
Posted by: cleversponge at April 15, 2005 01:30 PM