01 November 2007

Oh, Mother Jones...

So, Mother Jones, an interesting news magazine has, as it's cover story this month, an article entitled, "U.S. Out How?" using a play on the anti-war movement's phrase "US Out Now!" Interesting article, though it seems a little light on substance, relying mostly on sound bites from people to whom they sent a survey, and on half-baked statistics. Still and interesting article, but, as I plan to illustrate, they really didn't try to dig any deeper than what they had lying around.


To me, this seems to be attempting to point out some of the incongruity, the strange "comforts" that differentiate this war from previous ones. I can't impugn their intent because I don't know exactly what it is. However, I can impugn their use of their data, which is massively flawed. The numbers used in reference to facilities seem accurate enough. The number of night vision devices seems very low - it would give one set of NVD for every five or so US soldiers, one in six if you include marines. Plus "night-vision equipment," to me, should also include night sights for weapons and perhaps even vehicle-mounted sights. My company alone probably had 20-50 pieces of "night-vision equipment" in addition to the set of individual NVD that each person was issued. So that number seems rather low to me. The body armor number makes much more sense, and I wouldn't be surprised if the NVD number was much closer to it in reality.

The truely ridiculous number, however, is the Playstation/Nintendo/XBox figure. 48? Seriously? If this is meant to represent the number that US government owns in MWR-type facilities, I might buy it. It still seems low, though. However if it is meant to represent the number of game consoles in use in Iraq (which seems implied), it is off by orders of magnitude. Again, using my personal experience, no. Freakin'. Way. There were more than 48 consoles at FOB Warhorse. Hell, the Warhorse MWR had at least four, and it was a terrible, small MWR. My platoon (a very small platoon) had at least another eight. I really doubt that I've seen all the consoles in all of Iraq, but I saw at least 48 in person over there.

These are obviously trifling little complaints about an interesting article, but they speak to a lacksidasical way the whole article was put together... it seems to be more quotes and infographics than the type of deep, smart journalism we usually get from Mother Jones.

The

posted by Interested Soldier @ 00:18