Mood:  irritated

I was in the lunch room at work today, right before coming home, and Wolf Blitzer was on, talking to some retired general about the incident in which 14 marines were killed by 1 IED.

The general was trying to make the point that the IED was a "monster IED," and a shaped charge IED at that, and that it is not even clear that a Bradley or even an M1 Abrams tank crew could have survived that particular blast at that range.

The marines, apparently, were riding in a LAV or similar armored fighting vehicle (emphasis added):

The explosion flipped the 31-ton troop carrier over and caused it to burst into flames. It was not immediately clear how many of the marines had died from the explosion or from the flames.

That's right. The explosion flipped a 31-ton APC.

And what is Wolf Blitzer's argument? That the military didn't provide good vehicles in the Al Anbar Province. And that -- and I quote verbatim, -- "an up-armored Humvee would have stood a better chance."

Do the math. If the explosion flipped vehicle weight 31 tons (plus another ton and a half or so of marines and gear), then what are the survivability chances of a 4-ton uparmored Humvee?

I'll tell you:

Anything left of the Humvee would have been parked in Syria, dumbass.

The retired general was being too diplomatic to tell Blitzer he was being a moron, but Blitzer kept pressing the point. "I'm very disappointed that we don't have the good vehicles in the Al Anbar province," he says. "It's a very sensitive issue for me, because I was there in March.["]

Yeah, Wolf. How was the ride to the hotel?