Security blunders proving deadly for our young troops 

The wreckage barely looked like a vehicle. A powerful bomb that ripped through a military truck in the far South on Monday, taking six lives along with it, shredded the pickup to pieces and left it beyond recognition.
Four troops miraculously survived the roadside blast in Pattani’s Thung Yang Daeng district – a bombing carried out Malay Muslim separatist militants bent on 
carving out a separate homeland for local people in this historically contested region. 
About 7,000 people have died since January 2004 from 
insurgency-related violence and 
the end is nowhere in sight. 
It’s hard to imagine why the course of the insurgency might change given that the government – administration after administration – has done little to influence changes. 
On the policy level, there has never been a decision to step back and examine the conflict from a historical perspective and ask where the state went wrong with its southern policy; and what happened to that comfort level that the Patani Malays and the state enjoyed in the first fifty years after the border was drawn with the British, which placed this Malay homeland under direct rule by Bangkok.
Because if we did such a review, it is not hard to come to the understanding that our policy of assimilation failed when we tried to force the Malays to take up a Thai identity that they felt would come at the expense of their own religious and cultural traits. 
Instead of ‘think new, act new’, we responded to the rebellion with carrot and stick. The word human dignity never registered in our mind. 
Sadly, we fooled ourselves into thinking that good intention is policy. We tried sending morally upright people to administer the region. But a benevolent colonial master is still a colonial master.
On the security front, our troops get sent in and out like factory workers clocking for work. For more than a decade, they were little more than sitting ducks, waiting to be shot at by unknown gunmen sneaking from behind the treelines or take a direct hit from roadside bomb attacks, always followed by a brief gunfight before the militants retreat back to the woods and blend in with the rest of the local community.
Our military spent a great deal of money on things that don’t enhance our military capability – like a gigantic blimp that doesn’t float. A procurement project for three Chinese submarines is in the pipeline but that does absolutely nothing in addressing the insurgency in the far South. 
Highlighting the absurdity of the military's procurement policy was the June 19 roadside bomb attack in Pattani’s Thung Yang Daeng district that killed four and injured six. The men were travelling in the pickup through a very “red” zone with no support or backup vehicle in the patrol. One has to wonder what kind of security grid these men are operating under. 
It was clear from the very first roadside bomb that pickup trucks are not able to withstand bombs. In that respect, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that an armoured vehicle should be used for patrolling and that each patrol should have more than one vehicle.
How come the government can spend money on blimps and submarines that will probably never go into hot military operations, but we can’t buy armoured personnel vehicles for our troops in the far South? 
Can any one of our esteemed military leaders explain that to the parents of these dead soldiers, many of whom come from poor families sent to the far South to fight a conflict that they and many of the country’s people don’t really understand?