Votes to Support Air Strikes, transcript w General Wesley Clark
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK (RETIRED), FORMER NATO SUPREME COMMANDER: I think when you look at that, you look at the difficulty of this campaign.
As Fareed said, there are no ground troops. What you've got, in appearance of the cameras, it looks like a handful of troops. It may be many more than that. This could be the advance the element. Maybe behind the ridge line where you can't see it, there's artillery, mortars. Maybe there's another couple hundred troops somewhere, waiting for a breakthrough here. We don't know.
The point is that, if you try to put yourself in the position of a pilot flying five miles up at 500 miles an hour, looking for something to bomb, he's not going to bomb those five troops there unless there's someone on the ground that can put a laser spot on those troops and show them exactly where the bomb must fall and make positive identification.
So we have to understand the limitations of an air campaign. Now, what Fareed said is also important. It's never been assumed that we were going to put U.S. ground troops in there to clear this out. This would be a major military operation. >>>
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1409/26/lvab.01.html
