Mark Wales
speaker
3,479 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Mark Wales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This is the other thing that made me really think we're in a bit of strife here.
I remember seeing the directive for that.
So this is another change in the strategy.
We went from all these targeting missions to counterinsurgency targets.
There was this hope that we could win applying this strategy where we would protect the population, thereby kind of separating the insurgents from the population.
It's just a very flawed – like it sounds good in theory, but it only works if you can control the borders of that place and you've got a functioning kind of replacement for the –
We didn't have any of those things.
We had Pakistan bordering Afghanistan with thousands of fighting-age males just able to come across whenever they wanted.
So this notion that we could just have counterinsurgency, protect the population and win was just a terrible idea.
And they were talking about – I remember at one point they're going, you know, we're going to award medals.
to soldiers that show restraint in combat.
And I was just like, what are you talking about?
You're asking us to do something we have no ability to implement.
They used to call – I think it was SEALs or CAG were calling themselves the Baghdad SWAT because they were just going in and doing all these kind of SWAT-style missions.
Really flawed.
Someone should have just looked at it and gone –
This, this is not going to work.
And it was clear it wasn't going to work at a certain point.
It was like, I remember seeing an assessment on counterinsurgency, like for this to work, we're going to need 400,000 troops in at least a decade of time.
Yeah.
Showing 901–920 of 3,479 · page 46 of 174
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