You might think by now the editors of the Gray Lady might have figured out that giving a US President a big military is asking for trouble. But no. The editors of the Gray Lady think future Presidents should be able to send larger occupation forces abroad in foreign adventures (really, I'm not making this up).
Military reality finally broke through the Bush administration’s ideological wall last week, with President Bush publicly acknowledging the need to increase the size of the overstretched Army and Marine Corps. Larger ground forces are an absolute necessity for the sort of battles America is likely to fight during the coming decades: extended clashes with ground-based insurgents rather than high-tech shootouts with rival superpowers.
Why should we want to get into extended clashes with ground-based insurgents? By what logic does the United States need to become a neo-colonial power that occupies other countries with hostile populaces for extended periods of time? How is the United States made more secure by this practice?
To put it another way: What list of countries does the New York Times editorial board think make candidates for future American military occupation and to what end? Long term occupations are expensive in dollars and manpower and in deaths and maimings of soldiers. The $170 billion we are wasting this fiscal year in Iraq is not a pattern we should try to emulate in other countries in the future.
Foreign occupations do not uplift and enlighten the occupied peoples. Most countries that do well by occupation tend to be more advanced and organized in the first place (e.g. Germany and Japan). The truly messed up places that get occupied again and again (e.g. Haiti) stay messed up. That's a pattern that will recur until we develop the ability to do genetic engineering on occupied peoples.
The Gray Lady notes that the Pentagon has wanted to invest in more powerful naval and air assets.
When the 21st century began, Pentagon planners expected that American forces could essentially coast unchallenged for a few decades, relying on superior air and sea power, while preparing for possible future military competition with an increasingly powerful China. That meant investing in the Air Force and Navy, not the Army and Marines.
Money wasted in Iraq is money not available for building up the US military to meet real threats that could emerge such as China. We are better off spending on the Air Force and Navy. Oceans and air space separate us from any serious potential future challengers.
If the goal is to protect ourselves from the Muslims the best way to do that is to separate Muslims from Western countries by keeping them out of the West. That would buy us more security than a big Army, and Marines big Navy, or big Air Force. Also, we should work seriously to develop energy technologies to make non-oil energy sources cheaper than oil. Cheaper nuclear, solar, and other non-oil energy technologies would reduce the flow of money to the Middle East, the idleness that oil money makes possible for in Arabs in oil states, and the problems that come from an old saying my grandmother used to say "Idle hands are the devil's workshop".
An article in the Asia Times reports a variety of ways in which Hezbollah fighters, using technical help from Iran and Syria, were able to glean important battlefield information from Israeli forces in Lebanon while blocking Israeli attempts to block Hezbollah communications.
"Israeli EW [electronic warfare] systems were unable to jam the systems at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, they proved unable to jam Hezbollah's command and control links from Lebanon to Iranian facilities in Syria, they blocked the Barak ship anti-missile systems, and they hacked into Israeli operations communications in the field," Richard Sale, the longtime intelligence editor for United Press International, who was alerted to this intelligence failure by current and former CIA officials, told Asia Times Online.
In the next Arab-Israeli conflict will the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) take way the cell phones of Israeli soldiers going into battle?
Part of the reason for Hezbollah's decisive battlefield performance was that it was gleaning valuable information by monitoring telephone conversations in Hebrew between Israeli reservists and their families on their personal mobile phones.
We do not see much (or at least I haven't) about electronic warfare in Iraq where the insurgents use electronic measures to monitor or block communications of US forces. The insurgents use cell phones to set off bombs. Do they do anything more with electronics and communications?
Scott Baldauf of the Christian Science Monitor is writing a 3 part series on his experience embedding with US Army 82 Airborne soldiers as they flew into a remote part of Afghanistan and went on patrol. The soldiers carry 115 lbs of equipment.
For the next five days, I will have a front-row seat in what some call "The Other War," where 18,000 US troops continue fighting four years after ousting the Taliban government and sending Osama bin Laden into hiding. I will accompany a US Army squad carrying a mere 40 lbs. of body armor, notebooks, water, and MREs, while they carry up to 115 lbs. of "battle rattle" - guns, ammo, food, body armor, radios, and night-vision equipment.
The villagers need to be friendly to both the Taliban and the US and Afghan government soldiers.
But as they patrol the villages, the squad also knows that democracy often has little to do with local loyalties. Unarmed Afghan villagers will always cooperate with whatever gunman is in town at a given time. Brannan's men know that a village of "friendlies," as cooperative Afghans are called, can turn into a Taliban haven overnight.
"I don't know who the villagers are closer to, the Taliban or us," says Senior Airman Brian Mellon, alias Gunslinger 37. He's an Air Force forward air controller temporarily assigned to Brannan's unit to call in and coordinate airstrikes if needed. "If we go there, we talk to them, give them food. But if the Taliban go there, they beat the local people. So if your life's in danger, it's more conducive to work with the Taliban."
US soldiers are going deeper into remote areas where US forces haven't previously patrolled. When a village has ammunition but no guns the soldiers assume that the ammo belongs to the Taliban. What I find curious is that some villages are so poor the people can not even afford guns - and this in a country with large numbers of guns.
I'll update this post with links to the 2nd and 3rd parts of the series when those articles show up on the web.
Lt. Col. Ernest “Rock” Marcone was a battalion commander of the 69th Armor of the US Army 3rd ID during the Iraq invasion tasked with seizing the Objective Peach bridge across the Euphrates on the edge of Baghdad, Marcone found that all the modern US military sensor networks provided front line troops little help in finding the enemy.
As night fell, the situation grew threatening. Marcone arrayed his battalion in a defensive position on the far side of the bridge and awaited the arrival of bogged-down reinforcements. One communications intercept did reach him: a single Iraqi brigade was moving south from the airport. But Marcone says no sensors, no network, conveyed the far more dangerous reality, which confronted him at 3:00 a.m. April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. The Iraqi deployment was just the kind of conventional, massed force that’s easiest to detect. Yet “We got nothing until they slammed into us,” Marcone recalls.
Objective Peach was not atypical of dozens of smaller encounters in the war. Portions of a forthcoming, largely classified report on the entire Iraq campaign, under preparation by the Santa Monica, CA, think tank Rand and shared in summary with Technology Review, confirm that in this war, one key node fell off the U.S. intelligence network: the front-line troops. “What we uncovered in general in Iraq is, there appeared to be something I refer to as a ‘digital divide,’” says Walter Perry, a senior researcher at Rand’s Arlington, VA, office and a former army signals officer in Vietnam. “At the division level or above, the view of the battle space was adequate to their needs. They were getting good feeds from the sensors,” Perry says. But among front-line army commanders like Marcone—as well as his counterparts in the U.S. Marines—“Everybody said the same thing. It was a universal comment: ‘We had terrible situational awareness,’” he adds.
The article goes on to state that front line troops found the enemy the way they always have: by running into them. Also, even that quote above paints a rosier picture than the full aricle provides. There were lots of failures of network data flows at the higher levels of the command chain with systems shutting down for 10 and 12 hours at a time.
The US military is even less well equipped to fight an insurgency. Though obviously in the extended battle against the insurgency lots of lessons are being learned and no doubt some high tech equipment is being developed and deployed to better fight an insurgency. Still, whatever the technological advances may have occurred in the last year and a half since the fall of Baghdad those advances have not yet managed to give the US military such a huge advantage over the insurgency that the US military can crush the insurgency the way the US forces can crush a conventional army.
If you think the US military's electronic information systems worked incredibly well in Iraq be sure to read the full and lengthy article and you will be disabused of that notion.
US Major John Nagl, who has studied counterinsurgency at Oxford, is now in Iraq serving as operations officer for a batallion of the First Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle. The always excellent Peter Maass followed Nagl around for two weeks on patrols and wrote a very insightful report on how US military counterinsurgency efforts are faring in Iraq.
Maj. John Nagl approaches war pragmatically and philosophically, as a soldier and a scholar. He graduated close to the top of his West Point class in 1988 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar. He studied international relations at Oxford for two years, then returned to military duty just in time to take command of a tank platoon during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, earning a Bronze Star for his efforts. After the war, he went back to England and earned his Ph.D. from St. Antony's College, the leading school of foreign affairs at Oxford. While many military scholars were focusing on peacekeeping or the impact of high-tech weaponry, Nagl was drawn to a topic much less discussed in the 1990's: counterinsurgency.
The US civilian presence in Iraq is so meager and incapable that the US military is effectively the ruling government and carries almost all the counterinsurgency burden.
Ignoring the civic side of counterinsurgency has been likened to playing chess while your enemy is playing poker. Though this truism is now well known in the military, Nagl acknowledges that it is not being applied in Iraq as well as it could be.
The civic chores are supposed to be shouldered by the American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer III, but the C.P.A. remains isolated and rather inept at implementation. Its presence is minimal outside Baghdad, and even in the capital the C.P.A.'s thousands-strong staff spends much of its time in the so-called Green Zone, in and around Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, behind elaborate rings of security and far removed from Iraqi civilian life. Some of the staff are on 90-day tours: they arrive; they learn a little; they leave. On the few occasions when C.P.A. officials venture outside the compound, they are usually escorted by G.I.'s or private guards.
The single year of service in-country for each soldier sent to Vietnam combined with the ticket-punching mentality of so many officers who treated Vietnam experience as essential for their resumes resulted in a serving force that was not committed to victory and which suffered from a continual lack of experience in a way that lasted many years. The US civilian officials in Baghdad are essentially repeating this mistake with their way of staffing and operating.
One morning, during breakfast at the battalion canteen, I asked Nagl about the Coalition Provisional Authority. He has yet to see a C.P.A. official at the base, he said. He pointed to an empty plastic chair at the table and asked: ''Where's the guy from C.P.A.? He should be sitting right there.''
Given the weakness of the C.P.A., Nagl and other soldiers are effectively in charge not only of the military aspects of the counterinsurgency but also of reconstruction work and political development. Trained to kill tanks, the officers at Camp Manhattan spend much of their time meeting local sheiks and apportioning the thin funds at their disposal for rebuilding; the battalion maintains a list of school-improvement projects known as ''the Romper Room list.'' It is not unusual for Nagl and Colonel Swisher to go out in the morning on a ''cordon and search'' raid and return in the afternoon to their tactical operations center for a meeting with the second in command, Maj. David Indermuehle, about dispersing small grants to local health clinics.
But how can the US forces win over hearts and minds when few of the US soldiers can speak Arabic?
After a half-hour, the crowd filtered away, leaving Nagl with a metaphor for his hearts-and-minds effort: ''Across this divide they're looking at us, we're looking at them from behind barbed wire, and they're trying to understand why we're here, what we want from them. Almost inconceivable to a lot of them, I think, that what we want for them is the right to make their own decisions, to live free lives. It's probably hard to understand that if you have lived your entire life under Saddam Hussein's rule. And it's hard for us to convey that message, particularly given the fact that few of us speak Arabic.''
To the extent that US troops in Iraq can not speak Arabic and can not accurately identify who is an enemy and who is a neutral or a friend to that extent the US will use the wrong kinds of force against the wrong targets and will create resentment and build up support for the enemy. Well, US forces have not been trained well enough for counterinsurgency and do not know Arabic or Arab culture in sufficient numbers to be able to function down at the batallion, company, and platoon levels with the finesse and insight that the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq requires.
''I didn't realize how right Lawrence of Arabia was,'' Nagl said to me once. ''My first experience of war was the gulf war, which was very clean. We shot the tanks that didn't look like ours, we shot the enemy wearing a uniform that didn't look like ours, we destroyed the enemy in 100 hours. That's kind of what I thought war was. Even when I was writing that insurgency was messy and slow, the full enormity of that did not sink in on me. I am seeing appreciable progress, but I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is. There is no prospect it's going to end anytime soon.''
Maass recounts a visit to a training camp where US soldiers are teaching Iraqi recruits for the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC). What does it say about US capabilities to train Arabs that the Arabs are being taught to say in English ''Raise your hands!'' and ''Drop your weapon!''? The Americans are giving the Iraqis English language nicknames because the Americans can't remember the Iraqi names. This is ineptitude.
More of the aid money being sent to Iraq ought to be passed down to the batallion level for dispersal by officers on the front line of the counterinsurgency. They ought to have that money to pass out in order to give them more carrots to use along with their sticks. Also, thousands of officers and regular soldiers ought to be getting intensive courses in Arabic in advance of their deployment to Iraq.
Worries about North Korea are a major factor in the shift in thinking. (Daily Telegraph, free reg. required)
Japan's constitution should be rewritten to remove or amend pacifist safeguards imposed after the Second World War, according to a poll yesterday of candidates representing the country's governing party. The poll by the Asahi newspaper showed that constitutional revision was favoured by almost 90 per cent of candidates from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which is expected to win this week's general election comfortably.
While fears of North Korea are no doubt the biggest factor who wants to bet they haven't been thinking about China's growing economic might and growing military?
Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution has written a long article about private military services entitled Peacekeepers, Inc.
The contrasting experiences in Sierra Leone between the military provider firm Executive Outcomes and the U.N.'s peacekeeping operation are the most often cited example of privatization's promise. In 1995, the Sierra Leone government was near defeat from the ruf, a nefarious rebel group whose habit of chopping off the arms of civilians as a terror tactic made it one of the most truly evil groups of the late twentieth century. Supported by multinational mining interests, the government hired the private military firm, made up of veterans from the South African apartheid regime's elite forces, to help rescue it. Deploying a battalion-sized unit of assault infantry (numbering in the low hundreds), who were supported by firm-manned combat helicopters, light artillery, and a few armored vehicles, Executive Outcomes was able to defeat the RUF in a span of weeks. Its victory brought enough stability to allow Sierra Leone to hold its first election in over a decade. After its contract termination, however, the war restarted. In 1999 the U.N. was sent in. Despite having a budget and personnel size nearly 20 times that of the private firm, the U.N. force took several years of operations, and a rescue by the British military, to come close to the same results.
The UN is incredibly expensive and ineffective. The British military is more cost effective. But what about Executive Outcomes? I bet they were cheaper still. So where are they?
Curiously, while the Executive Outcomes home page still exists in Google Cache if you click thru to the ExecutiveOutcomes.com web site you now are redirected to an organization that sounds like it offers the same kinds of services: Northbridge Services Group Ltd. They have all sorts of services available:
Northbridge Services Group prides itself on the success of its team which is comprised of a highly professional workforce. We have a track record of over 5000 man-years of military knowledge, combat and training experience, with staffing from organizations such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. and British special forces. All personell are hand picked and highly trained, assuring you nothing less than the best. Our success record is as yet unequalled. The corporation is most probably the largest of its type in the world.
Northbridge offers a wide range of services designed to meet the needs of most organisations. Whether it is strategic advice, intelligence support, humanitarian disaster relief, counter-terrorism, support for law and order or close protection teams, we have the services and resources to suit.
Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to pay these folks to change the government in Liberia and to make it a relatively peaceful place? This may sound funny or somehow irreverant perhaps. But think about this seriously. Why not contract out peacekeeping if private organisations can do it more cost effectively? Iraq is probably too big a problem to be tackled by a private company. But Liberia is a whole lot smaller. A company like Northbridge could probably name a price for the removal of Charles Taylor and various other prices for other desired outcomes. Singer reports that Executive Outcomes claimed it could have handled the Rwanda situation more quickly, cheaply, and with much less loss of life:
Similarly, the aforementioned Executive Outcomes performed a business exploration of whether it would have had the capacity to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Internal plans claim that the company could have had armed troops on the ground within 14 days of its hire and been fully deployed with over 1,500 of its own soldiers, along with air and fire support (roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Marine force that first deployed into Afghanistan), within six weeks. The cost for a six-month operation to provide protected safe havens from the genocide was estimated at $150 million (around $600,000 a day). This private option compares quite favorably with the eventual U.N. relief operation, which deployed only after the killings. The U.N. operation ended up costing $3 million a day (and did nothing to save hundreds of thousands of lives).
Singer also mentions an association of private military services companies called The International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) whose own web site description makes it sound like just another industry trade association.
The International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) is an association of Military Service Provider companies - companies who work or are interested in international peace operations around the world. This includes companies that do everything from mine clearance, to armed logistics, to emergency humanitarian services, to actual armed peacekeepers.
The association was founded to institute industry-wide standards and a code of conduct, maintain sound professional and military practices, educate the public and policy-makers on the industry's activities and potential, and ensure the humanitarian use of private peacekeeping services for the benefit of international peace and human security.
Update: One reason to be for the use of private militaries is that the US military is not big enough. As I've previously posted, the US military is too small for its current responsibilities. We already can not sustain current force levels in Iraq indefinitely. Also, see Trent Telenko's lengthy post on the overstretched US military. If the UN or the Europeans or US liberals want something done about Liberia then it is time to hire a private army to get the job done. This will spare the already overstretched US Army and save money.
Update II: Managing Director Denis Fraser writes to tell me about Isec Corporate Security Ltd.
I was interested to read your excellent article on Private Military Companies on your website. I cannot agree more.
Isec Corporate Security are a private military company specialising in all forms of Military combat and training. Our operatives are intelligent and extremely well disciplined. We have over twelve hundred hand picked Ex-British special forces at your disposal. We recruit solely from the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Squadron (SBS) Airborne and Marine Commando. We are a self contained force and available for missions in any theatre of operation any where in the world and for any duration.
We are able to supply teams for skill transfer as well as full military intervention. We also have teams available for hazardous close protection duties or indeed we can supply a larger force with air or marine support should the task require. We have extensive experience in Africa. We are have the best battle tested combat teams available anywhere in the world. British Special forces are revered the world over for their military prowess, this resource is available to you for deployment immediately.
Our motto is "Ethics in action" we have been described as the perfect balance between corporate ethics and military precision. Should you have any questions about security issues or wish to discuss any related subjects for future articles please contact me and I will be happy to answer any of your queries. Alternatively visit our website for further details: www.privatemilitarycompany.com
Frederick Kagan joins Stanley Kurtz and a number of other commentators in claiming that the US military is too small for the tasks that have been assigned to it.
The problem is that we cannot maintain such a large force in Iraq for a year without seriously damaging the Army and harming our ability to pursue other critical objectives. Given the normal requirement to have two units at home for every one deployed, the 11-division-equivalent U.S. Army could support a three-and-two-thirds division commitment to Iraq indefinitely--at the cost of having no forces available for operations anywhere else in the world. But the current deployment is the equivalent of more than five divisions (the 101st Airborne, 4th Infantry, and 1st Armored divisions, two brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and elements of the 1st Infantry and 10th Mountain divisions).
Additional forces are tied down in South Korea, Afghanistan, and an assortment of other places. It is obvious from looking at the numbers that the US military is too small for everything it is doing. One might expect in response to this that there'd either be a push by top leadership to increase the size of the military or to scale back on some US commitments. Instead in response to political pressure Bush is considering sending US troops to war-torn Liberia.
Among those calling for US intervention in Liberia is Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic.
Second, if the Bush administration isn't prepared to save countries like Liberia, perhaps its supporters could at least stop lecturing Europe about our morally superior foreign policy. Explaining his government's intervention in Côte d'Ivoire, France's much-loathed Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said recently, "France accepts its responsibilities." Can the Bush administration look at Liberia, America's brutalized, abandoned West African stepchild, and say the same?
This is the same Peter Beinart whose magazine is complaining about the Bush Administration's handling (or apparently mishandling in TNR's view) of intelligence reports to sell the war on Iraq. Given that the TNR's support for the war in Iraq probably predated the claims the Bush Administration made about Iraq's WMD program the TNR argument about how Bush justified the war seems somehow ungrateful. He did what they wanted. But they were determined (probably because he's a Republican and they are Democrats) not to be happy about it. Now TNR has moved on to calling for US military intervention in some God forsaken place where they can say any imperial administration obviously must be altruistic. Could it be that as liberals they didn't find the US intervention in Iraq to be sufficiently altruistic and that they want to advocate a policy that will let them assuage their guilty feelings over supporting the war even though they really thought the war was necessary?
The calls for US intervention in Liberia strike me as irresponsible. We do not have enough soldiers to deal with problems we already have (you know, little things like the occupation of Iraq and the attempts to intimidate North Korea and Iran out of developing nuclear weapons). The proponents of US intervention in Liberia would be a lot more convincing if they argued for a large increase in funding for the military as a necessary precondition before the military was saddled with any added responsibility. They'd at least then be admitting to the populace that there is a cost to the taxpayers for the US playing global policeman.
Update: Linda Feldmann reports on arguments being made on behalf of US intervention in Liberia.
On the humanitarian front, the war in Liberia has killed more than a quarter-million people and chased out 2 million more as refugees. On the regional front, Liberian President Charles Taylor is seen as a destabilizing presence, having helped launch wars in three neighboring countries. On the energy front, there is an oil dimension to the Liberia story: One-fifth of US oil comes from West Africa.
First of all, Liberia's fighting is not endangering oil production in Nigeria. Also, what sets the United States military apart is the ability to intervene against much more formidable opponents. A military of far lesser ability (e.g. Germany's or France's or Italy's for that matter) could intervene in Liberia and change the regime there. If Western elites are so upset about what is happening in Liberia and at the same time resent US unilateralism then I say to them "have at it". If a foreign military's ships (even leased cruise ships) appeared on the horizon that'd probably be enough to cause a coup. The US faces much bigger problems with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea and can not afford to waste already overstretched resources in Liberia. Others could do the job and if it is to be done then others should do it.
That article repeats the widely made assertion that Liberia was founded by freed slaves. Well, as Mary Kay Ricks reports "Although some freed American slaves did settle there, Liberia was actually founded by the American Colonization Society, a group of white Americans—including some slaveholders".
Update II: The 3rd Infantry Division is stuck in Iraq because the US Army is not big enough to do everything assigned to it.
"The frustration is so great, you just wonder if it's going to cause someone to snap," says Maj. Patrick Ratigan, chaplain for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team in Fallujah. This unit was told that the way home was through Baghdad, and subsequent exit dates have come and gone, as the deployment stretches to 10 months.
Morale is falling in tired Army units in Iraq.
In one Army unit, an officer described the mentality of troops. "They vent to anyone who will listen. They write letters, they cry, they yell. Many of them walk around looking visibly tired and depressed.... We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice [in]."
South Korea is going to make a large increase in defense spending.
South Korea's defense ministry asked for a 28 percent increase in next year's budget to 22.3 trillion won ($18.7 billion). This equals 3.2 percent of gross domestic product, up from 2.7 percent this year.
Defense spending will increase even more in future budgets.
Earlier this week, South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil said the ministry was considering raising the annual defense spending gradually to a level that represents 3.5 percent of the GDP
The latest budget notably revives plans for the purchanse of the Patriot missile defense system.
The project to bolster South Korea's defense capabilities against North Korean missiles was suspended in February when South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun took office, vowing to step up inter-Korean rapprochement.
This comes on the heels of a US announcement to spend an additional $11 billion on US forces in Korea in the next 3 years and to pull US troops back from the DMZ. The US wanted South Korea to increase defense spending and so this announcement is a win for US policy makers. It is possible that the Bush Administration played hardball and told the South Koreans that the US would pull out of South Korea entirely if South Korea didn't step up to the plate and make a bigger effort to build up its defenses. Also, the South Koreans now have to face the fact that they are going to be alone up there on the DMZ and had better be well equipped. Plus, they now understand the US could get sufficiently confrontational with North Korea that a real war is a distinct possibility at some point.
North Korea can not afford to compete with the United States and South Korea in an arms spending race. This latest news is additional pressure on the Pyongyang regime. There are obvious historical parallels that can be drawn with the US arms spending build-up of the 1980s and its contribution to bankrupting the Soviet Union. Whether the North Korean regime will also collapse as a result remains to be seen.
StrategyPage.com has published a couple of emails it received about a battle that happened during the fight for Baghdad against Syrian Jihadists to control critical road junctions.
I can't tell the story of this fight in an email. It will take me at least an Infantry Magazine article, maybe a series of articles. The enemy at CURLEY turned out to be fanatical Syrian Jihadists, determined to die. They attacked incessantly for 12-14 hours, firing small arms and RPGs from buildings, trenches, bunkers, and rubble along side the cloverleaf intersection. They "charged" the US positions (the only word that fits), in taxis, cars, trucks with heavy machine guns mounted, and even in motorcycles with recoilless rifles tied to the side cars (not a war story, I saw one of them that the battalion captured). They drove cars loaded with explosives at high speed towards the US positions, hoping to take American with them in death when they exploded. The mortar platoon occupied the southern part of the objective with two tubes aimed north and two aimed south. They fired simultaneous indirect fire missions south and north, while the gunners on the .50 caliber machine guns fired direct fire to defend their positions. The mortar men continued to fire missions even while under ground assault and indirect fire. They fired over 20 direct lay missions against buildings housing enemy forces and against "Technical Vehicles" firing against the position.
Objectives code named CURLEY, LARRY and MOE were large coverleaf highway intersections which were the scene of a couple of days of fierce fighting. The second letter details how a platoon leader narrowly escaped death at the hands of a couple of T-72 tanks.
With a total number of troops committed to Iraq adding up to half the 10 active US Army divisions the United States does not have a large enough force to deal with any other problem that may arise.
While the stress on the Army can probably be sustained for a few more months, the official said, any delay beyond that could seriously disrupt troop rotation schedules for Afghanistan and South Korea and erode the Army's ability to maintain an adequate reserve for other contingencies.
Asked if he had ever seen the Army so stretched, the official said: "Not in my 31 years" of military service.
The United States isn't going to attack Iran or North Korea for many months to come because the US military is not big enough to manage anything more than its current commitments.
In light of the strains that occupation of Iraq are putting on the US military it is interesting to note that Donald Rumsfeld would like to cut the US Army size by two active divisions. He wants to free up the money to buy equipment that will revolutionize American war-fighting capabilities. This brings up the question of what the US military is for at this point. If the biggest job it is going to have is to invade countries that are developing nuclear weapons then the problem with Rumsfeld's plan is that it already takes a lot more soldiers to occupy a country than it does to invade it. Perhaps he should put more funding toward the development of equipment that will automate more of the work of an occupying army rather than built fancier equipment for doing the invasions.
The resurgence of the Taliban is helped greatly by their Islamic fundamentalist Pashtun compatriots who control the governments of the Pakistan provinces which border on Afghanistan.
Taliban activists in Pakistan and Afghanistan say they are receiving direct support from Pakistan's powerful religious parties, including Jamaat-i Islami and Jamiat Ulema-i Islam, which control the government of two key border provinces. "We are at home as we were before (President) Musharraf hatched a conspiracy against us at the behest of the Americans," says Mir Jan, a Taliban fighter in Quetta. "But our brothers [the mullahs] are in power, so it means we are in power."
The New York Times reports that even elements in Pakistan's federal government continue to help the Taliban,
Those familiar with the situation contend that Pakistan's army and secret service are allowing the Taliban to operate in Pakistan, and even protecting them. Further, the local government, now dominated by an alliance of religious parties sympathetic to the Taliban, provides them with legitimacy by association.
The Taliban are attacking and destroying schools around Kandahar.
But that approach has failed and the evidence mounts with each new Taliban insurgence in the region. A Western aid worker with the International Committee of the Red Cross was killed in the province recently. Gul Agha's soldiers and U.S. forces have battled Taliban fighters to the north and south of Kandahar in recent days. Schools are being burned in the night. Western aid workers are fleeing.
Is the Bush Administration worried? US military figures say US troops may be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2004.
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — The departing commander of U.S.-led military forces in Afghanistan says those troops' success fighting terrorist holdouts, combined with improved recruiting by the new Afghan army, means that Americans stationed here could start going home as early as summer 2004.
Donald Rumsfeld paints a fairly rosy picture of progress in Afghanistan.
In addition to ISAF personnel, more than 10,000 U.S.-led coalition forces remain in Afghanistan to seek out Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week in Kabul that the combat phase of operations in Afghanistan is largely over. He said military forces have begun shifting their focus to civil-assistance and reconstruction projects.
US handling of post-war Afghanistan does not inspire confidence over how post-war Iraq will be handled. However, Iraq is more important to the US and therefore a bigger effort will be made there. Still, what is happening in Afghanistan is also important for a reason which is too often forgotten: Pakistan has nuclear bombs and the support coming from Islamists in the Pakistani government for the Taliban is a frightening indicator of the extent of Islamist influence in a nation that has nuclear weapons and the ability to make more of them.
Writing in The Christian Science Monitor Robert Marquand reports on South Koreans who plan ways to leave South Korea in case war looks imminent.
"It is what we talk about, but not too loudly," an older research specialist in Seoul reports. Like most Koreans contacted, he won't be identified. "It is a North Korean scare, and related issues. It is a subterranean feeling of insecurity. If you are wealthy, you've got a plan, and maybe a plane ticket sitting in a drawer."
Few Koreans will say directly that "North Korea" or "security" is a rationale for leaving. Yet several who are thinking about a visa, admitted that security issues influence their thinking.
The most interesting thing about the article is just how long-standing this fear has been in South Korea. While the fear is higher now than it was a few years ago it was higher still in 1994. The belief that they might some day need to flee has been a recurring belief among many South Koreans for a long time.
While it is not clear that the US will go to war against North Korea this year it seems inevitable that the war will happen sooner or later. The United States military needs to make a larger effort to develop counters to those parts of the North Korean arsenal that pose the biggest threat to the South Korean civilian population. If the US could succeed in developing effective counters this would reduce the divergence of interests between the US and South Korea over how to handle North Korea. The effect would be to create new military options for the US to deal with North Korea.
The threat of massive North Korean artillery barrages into civilian areas south of the DMZ seems like the problem most in need of a solution. The threat comes from what is reported to be over 10,000 artillery pieces dug into hillsides and mountains in North Korea. It is very difficult to find the locations of the small cave entrances for the artillery let alone to direct bombs or artillery shells into them. With that in mind here are some ideas for taking out the North Korean artillery:
The North Korean artillery threat should be approached in the spirit that it is a solvable problem and multiple approaches to solving it should be investigated in parallel.
The Christian Science Monitor has a good article about what the experience in Iraq says about the size and mix of US ground forces. Donald Rumsfeld may desire to shrink the number of combat units but the US Army has already shrunk a great deal since the end of the Cold War and peacekeeping in Iraq is currently tying down a substantial portion of US ground forces.
This buildup in Iraq is only half the size of Desert Storm, when 23 Army brigades were deployed at once. But this operation eats up a far larger proportion of the smaller post-cold-war Army. In fact, not since the Korean War has the US committed as large a share of its combat troops and National Guard units needed to support them to a single operation.
The US is in no position to do anything in Iran let alone in North Korea. The US Army is not big enough to take on a bigger job. Rumsfeld's desire to cut the active force in order to get money for more acquisitions runs up against the demands that an escalating set of peackeeping deployments place on the active forces.
Rumsfeld's idea of shifting more support jobs to civilians seems like a wise move though.
Juan O. Tamayo reports that Ali Hassan al Majid, who was in charge of the chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988, has been seen alive by hospital workers in Baghdad.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Hospital workers say they saw the infamous Saddam Hussein henchman known as "Chemical Ali" alive in Baghdad just before the city fell, contradicting British Army claims that he had been killed in an air raid on a house in the southern city of Basra days earlier.
Tariq Aziz was supposed to have been killed by some accounts and yet he is now in custody. Saddam may still be alive as well. While attempts to kill top regime members didn't succeed they might at least have rattled Saddam enough to cause him to make poorer decisions.
Writing in Slate Fred Kaplan lists a number of unanswered questions about the recent war in Iraq.
On the 29th, an unnamed officer told the Washington Post that the war would last through the summer. On the 30th, Gen. Myers said the assault on Baghdad would have to await the arrival of reinforcements. Then, suddenly, on April 1, U.S. troops were on the outskirts of Baghdad. Two days later, they were occupying the airport. Next day, they were inside the capital. What happened? Did the Fedayeen simply stop attacking the supply lines? Why? When a few U.S. battalions broke away on "seek and destroy" missions in Nasiriyah and Najif, going door to door and block to block, did they kill all the Fedayeen guerrillas who were taking refuge in those cities? And was that all the guerrillas there were? Did that finish off the threat?
What would be most interesting to know is that as the war progressed what was the evaluation of Tommy Franks and his top officers of the progress and problems encountered? Certainly they had legitimate military motives for hiding both unexpected problems and some positive aspects of their progress. For instance, if the enemy believed US forces were making slower progress then that enemy would not expect US forces to show up as soon and the enemy would not be as prepared for them and sudden arrival of US forces dealt psychological blows to the Iraqi forces.
The huge pessimism in the Western press that preceded the arrival of US troops in Baghdad is reminiscent of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan where the press was calling it a big quagmire shortly before the Taliban forces began a rapid collapse. The press coverage focused on when the US forces encountered resistance from some quarters (e.g. the Fedayeen) that was greater than they expected. The unexpected resistance was portrayed as a major failure in intelligence and war planning. But intelligence is always going to be less than perfectly precise and it is likely the case that in other areas the intelligence assessment overestimated the amount of resisistance. Overall the difficulty of the fighting may have been no greater than some expected.
It is possible that the Pentagon war planners expected the Iraqis themselves to turn on Saddam's regime and fight it more. Hence, the battle for Basra was probably more difficult than expected. But what is important for the long term is why didn't the Iraqis rise up? Did the Iraqis not feel that much hostility toward the regime? This seems unlikely given the uprising in Basra after Gulf War I. Or did they not trust the coalition forces to go thru with an overthrow of Saddam's regime? This seems plausible given the events after Gulf War I where the US forces stood by while Saddam's forces suppressed the rebellion in the south of Iraq. Given that US and British forces were busily fighting Saddam's forces it seems likely that the Iraqis in the south just decided to let the coalition do the work. If I'd been in their shoes I'd have done the same.
There's one aspect of war planning that media reports tend to miss: It is unlikely that the war plan had a single time table and a single set of most-likely-to-happen events for the conduct of the war. US military officers who plan wars certainly know that they are dealing with a lot of unknowables and that they therefore can not plan according to strict timetables. A good war plan should be written more along the lines "If X happens then we have Y and Z ready to respond to it and if A happens we can shift B and change C to deal with it".
Still, it would be interesting to know what turns of events were truly surprises to the CENTCOM staff around General Tommy Franks and which problems were really unforeseen by the military officers planning the war. Many civilian advocates of the war, including officials in the Bush Administration, painted rosy scenarios of how the war would go. But we can not assume that just because those folks didn't expect various problems (e.g. the Fedayeen or the foriegn Arab fighters) that the military officers planning the war didn't either.
What I'd most like to see explained is how the war planners envisioned the battle for Baghdad and its immediate aftermath. My guess is that the war planners did not think that Baghdad would fall as easily as it did and therefore were not prepared to take over policing of the city as rapidly as turned out to be needed. But possibly they did not plan to be prepared to take over policing of the city very quickly even if Baghdad had fallen later and more slowly. Was the failure to initially maintain order a result of the unexpected speed of the fall of the regime, an underestimation of the number of people who would join in looting, or a lack of importance attached to preventing that looting?
The Bush Administration has come in for some harsh criticism for not preventing the looting and destruction of the Iraq Museum, the National Library and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Lots of critics claim that the military was in a position to stop the looting at that point if it had really wanted to. Is that really the case? There are military officers who were there who say they were not in a position to stop the looting.
The military perspective is that it did all it could to protect the museum at the time. During the looting, ``the fighting was still going on. The Republican Guard headquarters are across the street, and they were far from secure,'' Army Maj. Michael Donovan said.
Jim Miller has more on whether the military was in a position to stop the looting.
Suppose you hold the view that the military should have been in a position to stop the looting. I've made an argument that the rapid restoration of order would have supported other war aims. Yet a lot of looting happened. Where was the mistake? My own suspicion is that the war goals were not defined expansively enough to justify the use of a ground force large enough to allow a rapid assertion of order in each captured area. I also suspect that the bulk of the complainers who think the US military forces that were in Baghdad could have done a lot more to stop the looting do not understand military affairs well enough to form an opinion. If they are right it is probably an accident.
A related question on the restoration of order issue is this: how big were the intelligence losses that came from the lack of ability to more rapidly and effectively secure all regime installations that had valuable files and other intelligence assets?
Another set of unanswered questions relates to the non-Iraqi Arabs who fought the coalition forces. How many were there? How hard did most of them fight? Was the size of their presence a surprise to Pentagon war planners?
``Everyone who fought us hard was an Arab,'' said the Marine intelligence officer, meaning both that the non-Iraqis fought well and that U.S. ground forces tended to think that anyone who fought well was not Iraqi.
It would also be interesting to know how many of the fanatics were supported by the Syrian or Iranian governments and how many were sent to Iraq by terrorist organizations. The ones that had organizational backing of some sort are more likely to be a problem in the longer run.
Update: While the artifacts from the museum have gotten more attention in the press I think the fires set in the National Library and in the Islamic library represented a greater loss. A lot of the most valuable artifacts in the museum were just stolen and will turn up elsewhere. But the documents that were burned up are gone forever. I wonder whether any Western scholars had at least taken pictures of all the pages of those documents. What motivated Iraqi arsonists to torch these places?
The Iraqi Mukhabarat intelligence agency engaged in some activities that cry out for proper explanations.
The questions raised are tantalizing: Why did the Mukhabarat send covert agents again and again to the United States and at least two dozen other countries on four continents? Why did it have an entire office devoted to the two Koreas? Why did it have an office devoted solely to Zimbabwe and another to the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa?
The Daily Telegraph reports on German intelligence contacts with the Iraqi regime.
Germany's intelligence services attempted to build closer links to Saddam's secret service during the build-up to war last year, documents from the bombed Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad obtained by The Telegraph reveal.
They show that, only months before war began, the Russian Federal Security Bureau briefed Saddam that the White House was pinning its hopes on Iraq obstructing the weapons inspection teams.
The Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) does not come across as a highly professional organization.
The director of the IIS, Tahir Jalil Habbush, comes across in the papers examined by NEWSWEEK as an exasperated bureaucrat. He chastises his supposedly secret agents for showing off their firearms and IDs (the better to shake down frightened citizens). He has to send out memos reminding the secret service of the most elemental tradecraft, such as “not mentioning informants’ names when sending correspondence.”
The Daily Telegraph is reporting documents found in the Iraqi foreign ministry which describe contacts between British Member of Parliament George Galloway and the Iraqi Mukhabarat intelligence service. If the documents are correct the Iraqi regime was paying Galloway a significant amount of money while Galloway was acting as a critic of hardline policies toward Iraq.
George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.
Galloway strongly proclaims his innocence of any wrong-doing.
See this later Christian Science Monitor article about George Galloway and Iraq.
The Japanese military want to purchase the latest generation of the Patriot missile defense system.
After the US "successfully tested" the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile system in the war against Iraq, the Japanese military is now urging the government to order the PAC-3 system if Japan wants to shoot down missiles without US help.
"North Korea's missiles will not be launched against China," the official, Shigeru Ishiba, said in an interview. "They won't be launched against Russia. They won't be launched against South Korea, because it's too close. They can't reach the United States
Other Japanese politicians are talking up missile defense against North Korea.
In a mid-February meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's National Defense Division, Takemasa Moriya, who heads the Defense Agency's Defense Policy Bureau, played up the effectiveness of the upgraded Patriot (PAC-3) surface-to-air missile. Responding to questions about Japan's own missile-defense measures, Moriya said, ``U.S. officials have told us the PAC-3 can shoot down a Nodong (medium-range ballistic missile). We consider it an effective (air defense) system.''
While Ishiba appears to be fairly supportive of missile defense he cautions that the success of the previous generation of Patriot missiles in the first Gulf War was exaggerated.
"What is judged as success?" he questioned. "A variety of judgment exists (concerning the effectiveness of PAC-2) after the last Gulf War. Some said a lot of damage had been caused by fragments (of enemy missile) that had fallen out after they were intercepted at the terminal phase, while others said even limited success was meaningful.
The biggest factor holding back the wider deployment of missile defenses is the widespread doubts as to whether any missile defense systems work. It will be very important to find out whether the PAC-3 Patriot missiles used in Gulf War II really worked as well as initial reports have claimed.
Robyn Lim argues for Patriot missile deployments to protect American bases in Japan.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, fearing that he is next on U.S. President George W. Bush's list for "regime change," is openly threatening Japan with his Nodong missiles. Yet Japan chooses to remain naked to this threat. Why doesn't it ask for PAC-3 (Patriot) missiles to be deployed by U.S. forces in Japan?
At a foriegn policy forum held in Japan right after the Iraq war started the worries of Japanese national security and foriegn policy thinkers revolve around fear of North Korea and concern about American ability to deter a North Korean attack and stop North Korean nuclear weapons development.
Okamoto: Prime Minister (Junichiro) Koizumi's administration's policy toward North Korea has been resolute thus far.
In the event that North Korea acquires a nuclear capability, the only path Japan can take is to rely on U.S. deterrence, since Japan cannot provide for its own defense. Depending on the outcome of the war in Iraq and the anti-American nationalism brewing in South Korea, the United States may have no recourse but to withdraw its troops from Asia.
To avoid the prospect of facing North Korea alone, Japanese diplomacy must strive to ensure South Korea and the United States keep reading from the same page.
It is necessary that Japan work with the United States to establish a missile defense system (to counter North Korean nuclear weapons).
Obviously, the debate was colored by the early stages of the Iraq War when lots of press accounts were exaggerating the trouble that coalition forces were having in Iraq. The US did not fail in Iraq. It did not inflict massive civilian casualties. It is not paralyzed by mutual recriminations over who botched the war effort. Therefore the US is not going to withdraw from Asia.
I find the arguments I've read from Japanese debating their national security to be fairly rational for the most part. They do not want to be defenseless against North Korean missiles and they know they will be less safe if North Korea develops nuclear weapons. They know what the threats are, they are not overly influenced by a resentment toward American forces that help guarantee their security (by contrast with South Korea), and they are arguing about appropriate responses.
I think Japan needs to move a lot more quickly to build missile defenses. One short-term option might be as Robyn Lim suggests: shift Patriots PAC-3 defense systems that the US has in other locations to American bases in Japan.
Russian intelligence even passed along lists of hit men available in Europe to hire for assassinations.
Top secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders.
It is great that Western reporters are combing thru Iraqi government buildings. The CIA will probably keep secret much of the great stuff they find. But the reporters will rush to tell us all about it. The intelligence value of capturing Iraqi intelligence files and agents will be immense. Activities of other intelligence services will be revealed as well. I'm especially looking forward to reading about documents relating to contact with the French, Russian, and North Korean governments.
Update: The Times of London also has an article about discoveries about the nature of the Iraqi Mukhabarat secret police as shown from examining their files.
The dusty sheaves of documents, compiled with the kind of attention to detail of the former East Germany’s Stasi, attest to the ruthless determination with which the Mukhabarat monitored the population.
The handwritten notes show that people merited surveillance on the slightest of pretexts. These could range from being “talkative” or “a troublemaker” to having a “disreputable wife” or “bad sisters”.
The UK Observer also has a report on the contents of files at a Mukhabarat facility in Baghdad.
Iraqi intelligence agents were ordered to take files and computers with information about weapons of mass destruction home from their offices before United Nations weapons inspectors arrived late last year, say documents found at a security headquarters in Baghdad.
Matthew Fisher of the Canadian National Post finds the Iraqi Mukhabarat did more extensive surveillance and record keeping than the East German Stasi.
The difference between the Stasi and the Mukhabarat is the sheer volume of information collected by Saddam's henchmen. Like the Nazis, they both appear to have been meticulous record keepers. The files, which sometimes appeared to include information on both a husband and wife, often had 30 or 40 items in them. The files filled building after building in a compound that dwarfed that of the Stasi.
Files on each person were very detailed.
In just one room were files for a million souls — their pictures, personal details, and entire history recorded in minute, chilling detail, reports CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan.
Jim Bronskill reports on what US and allied intelligence services hope to find in Iraqi intelligence files.
Intelligence experts said yesterday the files of Mr. Saddam's intelligence and military security agencies might contain clues about attempts to acquire nuclear devices, alliances Iraqi personnel forged with spies in neighbouring countries and espionage operations mounted around the globe, including in Canada.
The San Francisc Chronicle has an extensive write-up about the Baghdad Mukhabarat site including information about connections between Iraqi intelligence and Russia.
Baghdad -- A Moscow-based organization was training Iraqi intelligence agents as recently as last September -- at the same time Russia was resisting the Bush administration's push for a tough stand against Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi documents discovered by The Chronicle show.
Iraqi intelligence archives captured in the previous Gulf War also provide a glimpse into the nature of Iraq's secret police.
The government personnel card for Aziz Saleh Ahmed, which identifies him as a "fighter in the popular army" whose duty was "violation of women’s honor." The report calls Ahmed a professional rapist.
The Times of London reports that the foreign fighters imported into Iraq by Saddam Hussein before the fighting began were highly trained before they arrived in Iraq and behaved as a disciplined foreign legion. The question is what group trained them?
British investigators are more cautious, but one officer involved in questioning the survivors told The Times: “These are not just zealots who grabbed a gun and went to the front line. They know how to employ guerrilla tactics so someone had to have trained them. They are certainly organised, and if it’s not bin Laden’s people, its al-Qaeda by another name. But they certainly came here to fight the West.”
Captured survivors of this fighting force might turn out to be useful sources of intelligence once some of them can be made to talk.
The Russians are trying to grab information from Saddam's fallen regime before the CIA gets to it.
Russian newspapers have cited anonymous intelligence sources saying that a unit of the Sluzhba Vneshni Razvyedki (SVR) - the Russian foreign intelligence service and equivalent of MI6 - has been sent to Baghdad to secure the Russian embassy compound, and hoard there the invaluable archives of Saddam's regime.
UC Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller examines lessons from the Iraqi war. He argues that truthful propaganda is far more effective than deceitful propaganda.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the pamphlets. If they were important, and we will know someday, it will illustrate a key and underappreciated aspect of U.S. Special Operations psychological warfare. Their doctrine demands truth. It is the key to effective propaganda. Don’t lie; build trust. This strange new approach (not totally accepted by the government, or other parts of the military) is based on the observation that in most conflicts, truth will benefit the United States. This was such a case. Don’t destroy the wealth of the Iraqi people. It rang true.
Muller also argues that there are no software programs for doing facial recognition that work as well as the human mind. Therefore he argues that humans examining old and new pictures of Saddam Hussein are as qualified to determine if the new pictures are legitimate as the intelligence sources who claim they are using special software to make facial comparisons.
While Muller, like many other commentators, properly draws attention to the importance of GPS-guided munitions for bringing air power to a higher level he misses the importance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have allowed battle damage assessment to be done in real time and have greatly degraded the ability of defending forces to create fake targets and fake damage. UAVs have allowed air controllers to identify many more legitimate targets and to spot the construction of fake targets. Therefore, many more real targets have been identified for attack by precision guided munitions.
Greater accuracy in bomb delivery is just one element that has contributed to another phenomenon: a reduction in the number of friendly fire incidence. Friendly fire incidents have been reported on very rapidly and therefore the press gives an impression of a significant problem with friendly fire incidents. But as compared to previous wars the rate has been quite low. A greater ability to manage the information flowing from the battlefield and better electronic and other means to identify friendlies have worked together to reduce the incidence of friendly fire attacks.
John Keegan, whose assorted books on military history (e.g. The Face Of Battle and The Mask Of Command) demonstrate his familiarity with battles and wars, argues that what we have been watching unfold in Iraq has been such a total debacle for the Iraqis that it can not properly be called a war. (free registration required at the Daily Telegraph)
Because the war has taken such a strange form, the media, particularly those at home, may be forgiven for their misinterpretation of how it has progressed. Checks have been described as defeats, minor firefights as major battles. In truth, there has been almost no check to the unimpeded onrush of the coalition, particularly the dramatic American advance to Baghdad; nor have there been any major battles. This has been a collapse, not a war.
Keegan ticks off a list of things that Saddam should have done had he been intent in slowing the allied advance: destroy the Umm Qasr port facilities, blow up bridges as his forces retreated northward, use paramilitaries for harassment instead of for direct attacks, and use forces more talented than the Baath Party members to hold cities.
Some attribute the punishment that the totalitarian regime has meted out to anyone who doesn't follow orders exactly as an explanation for why the Iraqi soldiers in the field didn't take obvious actions to slow the US advance.
This chronic lack of initiative may also explain why vital bridges across the Euphrates and Tigris were never blown up as the US forces advanced closer to Baghdad.
Commander of British forces in Iraq Air Marshal Brian Burridge thinks the degree of improvisation involved in fighting in Iraq makes war more like jazz music.
"In the cold war, you knew who the enemy was; you knew his kit; you knew his doctrine; you knew his training. All you had to do was to play the music, set down in notation and conducted from the front.
"Now, there's a constantly moving kaleidoscope, and you have to improvise. War used to be like symphony music - now it's like jazz."
Update: Keegan examines the question of why did so many pundits call the war so wrong?
When the history of the campaign comes to be written, that to which it may be compared is the German blitzkrieg in France in 1940. The distances covered are similar; so is the speed of advance; so is the extent of the collapse.
Richard Sale of the UPI has the hot story on how US intelligence and special forces managed to locate Saddam Hussein for the attempted assassination by air strike.
Three Iraqis who aided the CIA in the March 20 attempt by the United States to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein were executed this week by Iraqi counterintelligence, former and serving U.S. officials told United Press International. A super-secret U.S. intelligence operation, working in Baghdad for weeks before the war, provided the crucial targeting data for the attack on Saddam and his sons, launched in an effort to pre-empt a full-scale war, these sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
What I've wondered about this since the very first announcement that the bombing only managed to wound Saddam is why didn't they use more bombs? Why didn't they send, say, 4 times as many F-117A bombers and 4 times as many cruise missiles? They probably could have killed him if they had just made a much bigger hit on the building he was in. If someone out there thinks the size of the strike force used makes sense and can explain why I'm all ears.
US forces may stop outside of Baghdad, grab just a few key pieces of it, conduct only special forces operations in Baghdad and wait for the regime to collapse.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated the coming days might bring neither an all-out fight for the city, as many have predicted, nor a conventional siege of the capital.
``When you get to the point where Baghdad is basically isolated, then what is the situation you have in the country?'' he said at a Pentagon news conference. ``You have a country that Baghdad no longer controls, that whatever's happening inside Baghdad is almost irrelevant compared to what's going on in the rest of the country.''
It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out. Do they think they can get the regime to break up into factions? Can they get into the underground tunnel passageways without capturing all of the city? Can they build large spy networks to track the movements and activities of members of the regime in Baghdad? There are a lot of possibilities.
The US military obviously wants to avoid large numbers of casualties.
Although he did not rule out any scenario for Baghdad, Myers' comments strongly suggested that the intention is to bleed Saddam's government of its political and military authority without launching an all-out ground assault that would risk high casualties.
ABC TV correspondent Mike Cerre reports so many people streaming away from Baghdad that the military unit he is travelling with has had to stop to set up a POW compound.
"What is stopping us now is the flood of deserters and civilians, on buses, trucks, taxicabs and whatever they can catch a ride on, trying to make their way south to their families or American forces to surrender," he said.
They will need to find a way to handle the large numbers of civilians who are bound to try to flee Baghdad.
Update: The reason why this strategy may not work is illustrated in a report filed by Newsweek journalist Rob Nordland. Here he talks to Umm Qasr port workers about how everyone in southern Iraq is still living in fear of Saddam's intelligence agents.
They begin naming people they know in Safwan, overrun well before Umm Qasr, who spoke out. "One even said, 'What took you so long?' when the Americans and British arrived. And now he's dead," said a dockworker named Khalid. "We hear from Basra that they're hanging them in the streets." In their own town, the coalition authorities are acting on tips and hunting down regime activists, but that still hasn't made them feel terribly safe. "You can never tell who is from Saddam's intelligence, and if I can't tell, how can the Americans and British? They can come in our homes any night and kill us any time," says an engineer named Ali.
An AP story by Doug Mellgren with US Marines in Nasiriyah illustrates the level of fear in the minds of the Iraqi people.
The civilians seemed terrified in the first house he searched. Beitia assumed they expected the Americans to murder the men, rape the women and plunder the home.
''Then I got down on my knee and gave their little girl a piece of chewing gum,'' he related. ''The father was ecstatic. It was like I was saying I was not better than them. When I got I got down on my knee, they almost started to cry.
The job of routing out Saddam's intelligence agents will take months if not years.
The US Marines have captured the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah which has a population of about 560,000 (and as recently as 1987 had a population of only 265,937 - Iraq has a rapidly growing population). That population number is interesting because Baghdad has a population of approximately 10 times that size. Let's take a look at the casualty figures for the U.S. Marines who took Nasiriyah. While the exact number dead is not yet known exactly let's guess its approximately 20.
The American marines of Task Force Tarawa — whose task it has been to secure Nasiriya and its bridges across the Euphrates that sustain the main supply route to the armies to the north — said today that they had suffered 12 confirmed dead and more than 50 wounded in the battles for the town. Six or seven other marines are believed to be missing there.
If casualty figures for urban fighting in Baghdad scale up proportionately we can guess that the US military will suffer about 200 dead and possibly as many as 500 wounded to take Baghdad. That is a lower figure than some estimates that Dartmouth academic Daryl Press has made. The Iraqis will probably have a higher ratio of fighters to population in Baghdad than they had in Nasiriyah. Also, it seems likely they will concentrate their most devout loyalists there. Therefore Press's estimates that run from 400 to 2000 American dead seem more plausible. Still, the Nasiriyah experience at least is heartening from the perspective that if it had been worse we would expect even higher casualty rates for Baghdad than estimates that Press has made.
I haven't been able to find any numbers of how many soldiers and what kinds of forces defended Nasiriyah. Therefore it is hard to compare the battle for Nasiriyah to the coming battle for Baghdad. However, here are some numbers of the defenders of Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein's personal security is the responsibility of another group, the Special Republican Guard, often described as a "Praetorian Guard." Many of its estimated 12,000 troops are natives of Tikrit, Hussein's home town, and nearby communities.
Those 12,000 are in addition to the 50,000 regular Republican Guard. How many of those regular Republican Guard are either dying or being captured outside of Baghdad? How many will manage to retreat back into Baghdad to continue fighting in an urban environment that will afford them much better protection? There are also paramilitary forces including the Saddam Fedayeen defending Baghdad.
The four remaining Republican Guard units, as well as the Special Republican Guard, have also suffered losses, officials said, but not as extensive. Baghdad is also defended by a paramilitary force estimated at 6,000 and 8,000.
It is beginning to look unlikely that the US Army and Marines will have to fight regular Republican Guard forces within Baghdad because Saddam may not trust the loyalty of the Republican Guard soldiers enough to allow them in that close.
"The mystery is why the Iraqis left the RG in defensive positions so far south of Baghdad," a British staff officer in Kuwait told UPI. "They must have known from Desert Storm what our air power could do. I can only assume that Saddam Hussein was worried about the loyalty of the RG if he pulled them back into the city. His priority has always been the survival of his own regime rather than the survival of his troops."
If anyone can find information on the size and nature of the defending force in Nasiriyah I'd really like to see it.
There are other wild cards in the attack on Baghdad. Saddam could use chemical or biological weapons. The defenders could fight either more desperately or some, seeing that the end is near, could opt to surrender in greater numbers.
So far the British forces have stayed out of Basrah which is less than half the population of Baghdad (I can't tell you what the population of Basrah is since news media reports run from 1 million to 2.3 milion). Currently the British believe there are only 1000 militia fighters left in Basrah.
Further south, British forces battling for control of Basra were still facing resistance from about 1000 militia.
Israeli military historian Yagil Henkin comments on lessons learned about the best urban fighting techniques.
Israeli experience, as well as Marine Corps studies since 1996 of war games based on urban combat, also shows that most casualties in urban fighting occur when soldiers move along the city streets, exposed to enemy fire. Therefore when Israel took the casbah in Nablus, soldiers moved through holes they cut or blasted in the walls between attached houses. Israeli snipers positioned themselves in the tallest buildings and worked closely with troops at the street level to identify targets and confound their enemies' expectations.
Update: I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of news services use old atlases and other reference works to get Iraqi city population estimates for their news articles. The numbers quoted are all over the map. Above I quoted a Reuters article that said Nasiriyah has a population of 560,000. The Christian Science Monitor says Nasiriyah has 250,000 people. whereas Voice of America says 500,000 whereas USA Today puts it at 300,000. These numbers all come from news articles that are at most a few days old and they are all over the map. Keep that in mind the next time you read a news article that states a number for the population of some city or country. If they are reporting on a place where the population is growing rapidly the odds are great that the number they are providing is lower than correct number by a substantial amount.
Writing in the Moscow Times Russian defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer says the US and British forces floated fake stories of logistics problems and exaggerated the problems caused by Iraqi paramilitary forces.
The U.S. and British allies also had a good reason to cheat. By faking weakness and portraying an inability to make a decisive push for overall victory without weeks of preparation and reinforcement, the U.S. military command apparently hoped to trick the Iraqis into keeping their best units in the field rather than withdrawing immediately to Baghdad, where defeating the Republican Guard would come at a higher cost.
This is a plausible argument. A large number of air bases and forward supply depots have been opened around Iraq. The paramilitary forces are degrading rapidly in their ability to slow supply convoy shipments. While there are people arguing that the US is going to have to wait for weeks for reinforcements before closing on Baghdad it seems more likely that the coalition forces will keep pressing on and engaging and destroying more Iraqi forces in the field. The US forces are experiencing such a low rate of losses that it is hard to argue that they need more equipment in order to make the odds more favorable for them. Also, the competition between the US Army and US Marines over who will get to Baghdad first is an additional impetus for continued offensive operations that has not gotten the attention it deserves. The threat of the Marines getting ahead of them will keep the Army from stopping to wait for reinforcements.
Jeffrey Goldberg has a great article in The New Yorker about the peshmerga fighters and the mood of the populace in Kurdistan. What's the difference between Kurdistan and Ivy League universities? In Kurdistan the intellectuals are pro-American hawks.
It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Kurdistan who is opposed to the war against Saddam’s regime. People on street corners ask for American flags or photographs of George Bush; the appreciation of the United States extends to the intellectual class. Sherko Bekas, who was described to me as Kurdistan’s unofficial poet laureate, was particularly upset by the well-publicized efforts of American poets to stop the war. “Saddam is the god of war,” Bekas said, when I saw him in his office at a publishing firm in Sulaimaniya. “He is the killer of poetry.” He went on, “I say to these poets that if they lived for two weeks under Saddam’s rule they would write verse in reverse. They would write poems asking Bush to attack Saddam sooner.”
Goldberg captures the intensity of the Kurdish desire to regain control of Kirkuk. My guess is that the Arabs in Kirkuk will be forced to give back their dwellings to the Kurds who Saddam forced out of Kirkuk.
The Kurds are understandably thrilled that Turkey did not agree to help the United States to attack Saddam's regime. They understand that the United States will be far more solicitous toward the Kurds as a result. I think that is great. History has repeatedly dealt the Kurds a poor hand for such a long time that they deserve a good break for once.
There is a fierce debate going on about whether the US sent too few troops to the Gulf and also why too few troops were sent. The blame game is getting fierce.
"It warned that paramilitaries could threaten and exploit the civilian population as shields. It predicted that irregular and unorthodox tactics could be used by Saddam's fedayeen. It said they might fight wearing civilian clothes. It was ignored."
Intelligence officials have also complained that warnings of possible resistance were frequently "sanitised" by hawks, including the agency's own director, George Tenet, before reaching the White House and President Bush. "The caveats would be dropped and the edges filed off," said one.
This brings to mind the War of Numbers book by former CIA analyst Sam Adams about how the numbers for the Order of Battle estimates for the Viet Cong were cooked to make the size of the enemy look smaller than it really was. One of the founders of the Steerforth Press publishing house that published Adams' book is Thomas Powers. Powers gave an interview to The Atlantic in 1997 about Sam Adams and the politicization of intelligence.
The answer to all of those questions is essentially the same: There is no real way to take politics out of intelligence. It's a problem. The more interested the White House is in a question, the narrower the range of freedom that any analytical or intelligence agency has in trying to explain what's going on. When the White House really has its mind made up, you can't talk them out of it. If you try too hard they stop listening to you and start listening to somebody else. So the politics of intelligence is just a fact of life.
If the CIA didn't let its more pessimistic analysts submit more accurate assessments of the dangers facing US and allied forces in Iraq is that because Bush didn't want to hear more accurate assessments? Or did the top people in the CIA simply lack confidence in their own analysts? Or are what we hearing out of the CIA now a matter of blame shifting? Heck, if what is being claimed is true the blame is being shifted as much onto the top CIA leadership as it is on the White House or the civilian leadership at the Pentagon.
The biggest question in my mind is what was the chief error. Here are some possibilities:
The US Air Force is of course a great believer in the efficacy of air power. At the same time, Rumsfeld and other top civilian officials in the Defense Department are great believers in the ability of technology to be a great force multiplier. Therefore there were certainly factions that wanted to believe that more could be done with less for reasons that had nothing to do with the debate over whether the Iraq war should be fought in the first place. However, the intensity of the larger debate about what should be the US strategy for dealing with the Islamic countries elicits a great deal of intensely partisan polemics where the factions accuse each other of all sorts of things - including claims that some members of an opposing faction have been hiding intentions that they have never really concealed.
If, as seems to be the case, the top Pentagon war planners underestimated the difficulty of defeating Saddam's regime why is that? Is Donald Rumsfeld to blame? Or are neoconservative hawk advisors to Rumsfeld the reason for the underestimate? Or did General Tommy Franks really believe that he could get away with such a small force? If he did, is that because he wasn't given accurate intelligence about enemy capabilties? (of course if Saddam's regime collapses in a week there will be a competition for who should get credit for the US war plan)
Rumsfeld says he didn't turn down a request for a larger force.
Rumsfeld denied published reports that he had rejected requests from U.S. war planners for additional troops.
Tommy Franks said he was satisfied with the number of troops he had available.
The commander of the U.S. war in Iraq denied Sunday that he had asked the Pentagon for more troops before invading the country but sidestepped a question about whether the war might last into the summer.
Where is the truth in all this? We probably aren't going to understand in detail how the decisions were made until the memoirs get written and documents get declassified many years from now. Tommy Franks may be telling the truth. Or perhaps he knew he'd be turned down if he asked for more troops. Or perhaps he's taking the public position he's currently taking because he needs to maintain his working relationship with Rumsfeld. Or perhaps he thinks the war really is going well.
Update: What would worry me the most is if it turns out to be true that there are CIA analysts who predicted the problems that the Saddam regime loyalists would cause and if those analyses were not even made available to the war planners.
In advance of the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq some proponents of the war against Saddam's regime exaggerated the ease with which Saddam could be ousted. At the same time, to be fair, many of the war's opponents painted excessively pessimistic pictures of an enormous quagmire with huge casualties both among the Iraqi civilians and coalition soldiers. Initial reports of rapid advances enforced the Panglossian view. However, the mood switched from optimism to pessimism within a week. The sandstorm, over stretched supply lines caused by rapid advances, a lack of rapid collapse of the Baath Party control of bypassed towns, the failure of the "Shock And Awe" attack to cause regime collapse in Baghdad, and unexpected resistance from fighters sallying forth from bypassed towns to attack convoys all led to a big shift from optimism to pessimism about the course of the war. While the initial optimism was excessive it is likely that the current most pessimistic views are excessive as well. We should ask what the real mistakes were, whether the mistakes can be rectified, and if so at what cost and in what time frame.
First of all, what have been the surprises?
In light of these surprises was the initial US strategy a mistake? First of all, it is important to understand that the decision to bypass the southern Iraqi cities is not obviously a mistake. The goal of the US war plan is to take Baghdad. There is a good reason for making directly for Baghdad If and when Baghdad falls then the enforcers of the Baathist system of repression in the rest of Iraq will be faced with the knowledge that their days are numbered for their smaller and weaker outposts. Also, the populaces of those other cities will be far more likely to oppose the local representatives of the regime if Saddam is gone from power in Baghdad.
The chief question about the war that is debated is not whether we should be taking the southern Iraqi cities. The most contentious question is how big should the US and coalition forces be. One reason we are seeing a lot of criticism in the media from retired military officers and off-the-record from serving officers is that much of the Army officer corps wanted a larger force with more divisions to do the invasion. Anything that goes wrong is taken by these officers as a reason to argue that they have been right all along and that the civilian leaders who overruled them are wrong. There are highly visible retired US Army officers such as Barry McCaffrey working as news analysts for the big news channels who are representing this point of view on news shows. These folks have motive to cast a negative light on various developments just as the Pentagon officials speaking publically have motive to portray developments in a more positive light.
Here are some questions that can be asked about the wisdom of the US war plan that concentrates on a rush to and attack on Baghdad using a force that is only a third the size of the ground force used in the first Gulf War to liberate Kuwait:
Lets take the last question first. To put it another way: if the coalition forces focused first on some other major Iraqi city and totally purged it of its Baathists and of its Fedayeen and other Saddam supporters what would be the potential benefits? Here's a list of potential advantages of taking other Iraqi cities before Baghdad:
The problem with taking another city first is that the taking of that city would cause destruction and death as well. That is important for the post-war period because the more death and destruction the rebuilding will be harder and the resentment of Iraqis toward the US forces will be greater. Would the amount of destruction and death that would be caused by the capture of another city be paid back by less destruction and death in the taking of Baghdad? Its hard to say. It even depends on which city is taken instead of Baghdad. If the first city taken was Basra then the potential benefit would not be as great as would be the case if the first city taken was one further north and along the route of the US Army supply convoys. That's because taking a city that is near a supply convoy route would presumably greatly reduce the forces that could sally forth from that city to strike the US supply convoys.
It may be possible to protect the supply convoys without taking the southern Iraqi cities. Troops can be stationed near the areas where the convoys are most likely to come under attack, more tanks and APCs can be included with the supply convoys, and intelligence collection will lead to targets to hit in the bypassed cities to selectively knock out some of the Baathist, Fedayeen, and Al Quds forces leadership.
The bypass of the southern cities has at least one historical precedent: the US island hopping campaign in the Pacific during World War II. Though in that case the Japanese forces on the bypassed islands had less of an ability to attack the US forces that bypassed them. Japanese air bases on the islands could be attacked and their aircraft gradually destroyed without invading the islands. So the military value of those bypassed islands was probably less than the military value of the southern cities to the Iraqi regime.
Here's the key reason for the bypass strategy: the regime falls