THE DIGNIFIED RANT
NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS APRIL 2004 ARCHIVES
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“The Mother of All Sieges” (Posted
We have agreed to let hopefully former Baathist officers and soldiers clean up Fallujah for us:
Convoys of U.S. troops and equipment could be
seen heading out of parts of Fallujah, replaced by
Iraqi troopers in red berets under the flag that flew over Saddam's Iraq
Uh huh.
This is such a tremendous error that I cannot believe it. As I concluded in a post on April 1st, delenda est Fallujah. What did we do instead of destroying them? We let them walk away alive. And just as Saddam proclaimed victory for having survived his ass whipping in 1991, so too will the insurgents who are even now watching Marines retreat from their positions. We had them by the throat and we let them go. It doesn’t matter that we killed at a tremendously lopsided ratio. We failed to teach the lesson of what resisting us means. Or rather, we did teach them what it means. And that’s the problem. The enemy should be dead, crippled, headed for Gitmo, or so scared that they almost made it into categories 1-3 that they head for home and swear to their families and themselves that they will fight no more.
As Owens observed, this was a big mistake:
The reason is simple: The fighters in Fallujah
do not seek peace. They want to drive the Americans out of
Certainly, no war is perfect and mistakes will be made. We can afford to recover from mistakes. And who knows, maybe this will work.
But my gut feeling is that we made a terrible mistake.
The only way to compound our failure to crush Fallujah would be to storm Najaf—a city we should let dangle until Sadr is tricked out.
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“Prosecute Them” (Posted
It isn’t enough to say that the press seems to be more outraged at photographs of Americans humiliating a few Iraqi prisoners than they got over 300,000 dead Iraqis found in Saddam’s mass graves.
It isn’t enough to say that cruelty isn’t on the same order of evil as plastic shredders for people, rape rooms, and children devoured by dogs.
We are better than that and expect to be judged by standards higher than Saddam-levels.
And not only is it shameful, it will get American soldiers killed.
Those soldiers that posed with humiliated Iraqis might as
well have thrown a grenade into one of our command posts. Or
rammed an American checkpoint with a car bomb. Or set off a bomb in a
mall back home in
Those soldiers were sent abroad to defend us and they brought danger and shame to us and to their fellow soldiers and Marines on the front lines.
They must be publicly arrested and quickly tried and punished. The chain of command must be investigated for their role in allowing this outrage to happen. And through it all, we must judge them by our standards. We can’t help how al Jazeera or Ted Koppel will tell this story to the world, but we can make sure that we know what standards we keep.
American soldiers are better than this.
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“Fighting Spirit” (Posted
Much is being made of the fact that 10% of Iraqi security forces defected; 40% sat in their barracks and refused to fight; and only 50% fought with us. With 200,000 Iraqis providing the bulk of the manpower to defeat the insurgents, this is a problem in providing sufficient density. Not critical at this point and given we’ve been working on this for only less than a year, not too bad really.
Let’s look at the other side. Back in March and April 2003, the perhaps 500,000 Iraqis had maybe 10% of their strength fight and the other 90% melted away. Since I read that 75% of the Iraqis in the current pro-American security forces were in Saddam’s military, perhaps 30% of the pre-war Iraqi military eventually defected to our side. This Baathist record was after 25 years of Saddam’s rule.
All in all, our record is a lot better.
And our guys will get better as they are better equipped and as they gain experience. Eventually we’ll be able to pull our forces to the background.
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“They Expect Rewards” (Posted
Some action is going on to get the talks with
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when
"The DPRK side will attend this meeting to discuss the
proposal 'reward for freeze'," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement
carried by the official KCNA news agency. DPRK is short for
the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of
The proposal involves the North freezing nuclear plans in
return for compensation.
Really, though, how can we blame them? We trained them to think that they can get goodies for threatening us with nuclear destruction.
It will take a while to disabuse them of this long-held and
fed belief. Luckily,
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“Typical Defeatist Attitude” (Posted
I’m used to some analysts saying that if we fight back, we only make things worse by encouraging our enemies. We’re just supposed to sit and take it I guess—and apologize ever more loudly over the din of explosions. Another example:
Falluja is tribal territory, one that functions by tribal rules. There are
expectations of hospitality, practices for settling disputes and obligations of
revenge against anyone committing an offense against a member of the tribe. The
last — revenge — poses a big problem for the
So riddle me this, Batman, if the tribes are unable to break out of the cycle of violence or whatever, how did Saddam maintain control? Is it possible Saddam never killed any one of the tribes members or another unnamed offense?
The wild men are not unbeatable. Even if some like to insist they are.
Silly drivel is what it is.
Sometimes I wonder if there are comparable fools in the ranks of the Islamists who argue that it is foolish to attack us since it will just make us mad and recruit more Tommy Franks to kill them all. It should only be fair. Why should we have all the idiots on our side?
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“The Sniper” (Posted
A sniper in Najaf has picked off five of Sadr’s goons:
American
commanders were also closely monitoring reports from inside Najaf
said that growing anger of residents there against Mr. Sadr
and his militiamen, who have sown a pattern of lawlessness since launching an
uprising in the city earlier this month, had taken a startling new turn with a
shadowy group of assassins killing at least five Sadr
militiamen in attacks on Sunday and Monday.
I had been thinking that we should have snipers going after Sadr’s pretend army to scare the crud out of them. Seriously.
We had special forces in
So, who is picking off Mahdi Army goons with accuracy that no Iraqi has demonstrated thus far?
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“OK, Now it Sounds Fishy” (Posted
I wondered whether Kurds or Islamists attacked in
"I think al-Qaeda wanted a
media explosion to send a message to the Americans that it can reach any
target, even highly secure countries like
Uh, yeah. Their campaign against terror? Nice try, Sparky.
Still, with an Alawite minority government, I still find it hard to believe that the Syrian government would stage an attack even if it sounds fishy as to the target; and considering the blatant phoniness of the explanation for it. They could actually spark an uprising if people think a group is out there fighting the government.
More likely is the Strategypage thought:
Syria became more chummy with their Iraqi brothers after Iraq’s defeat
in 1991, and it is believed that much of money stolen
from the Iraqi people by Saddam and his henchmen ended up in
Remember the main Islamist rule: killing Americans is best. But any of the rest will do.
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“A Really Tough Press Conference” (Posted
V. D. Hanson has an excellent press conference experience that President Lincoln could have faced had our press corps been around then. Actually it was around then to be fair—just no 24-hour news cycle.
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“Good Point About 1991” (Posted
Orson Scott Card has an excellent article about the war. Just read it.
One good point he makes in this article is about the
supposed failure to destroy Saddam in 1991 when our troops were within striking
range of
And
So we couldn't get rid of Saddam until we had
the national will to stick with the job until a strong government with popular
support could fill the power vacuum.
It is often said we made a terrible error in holding back. I’ve never agreed although our need to destroy Saddam in 2003 led me to waver in this assessment. Boy, it sure would have been nice to have gotten rid of Saddam in 1991 and avoided all our problems now.
But in 1991, we would not have had the motivation provided
by 9-11 to see us through some tough times in suppressing the fanatics who
would have resisted us after a 1991 fall of
Maybe we could have won in 1991-1992, but it is hardly a
given as some assume now. It is quite possible that we would not have had the
fortitude to stick with a counter-insurgency then and
would have just gotten out of
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“Destroy Enemies, Reassure Friends, Impress Neutrals” (Posted
Like I’ve been saying, crush the Fallujah
resistance to demonstrate we will not be screwed with; and kid glove the dimwit
Sadr to keep him from becoming a martyr and losing
our support amongst the Shias. Remember, I know even
I’d be angry if the Islamists killed hundreds in
From an American military guy in Iraq:
We are struggling to tip toe through the tulips in Fallujah
when it is no longer possible to do so. Fallujah
should already have been an object lesson that if handled decisively and
quickly would make further operations in the south unnecessary. We have lost
the equivalent of two marine infantry companies precisely because of our
over-reliance on light infantry again. Sad for the parents' whose sons have
died valiantly, but needlessly. Now, we are poised to
sacrifice whatever good will remains in the Shiite population by making war on
a cleric who until recently was a minor player. If we go into Najaf, we will enrage Shiite Arabs, Persians, Pathans and Punjabis unnecessarily. I sincerely hope we
just quietly withdraw from Najaf and finish the
problem in Fallujah instead. Fallujah
is a better place to make clear what will happen to anyone who threatens or
challenges
When
all options have risks, however, we have to take risks. And the risks will
differ in different situations. At this point the risks in Fallujah
of either a compromise deal or a long siege are worse than those of a full and
rapid conquest. The
In
Najaf the calculation now points in the opposite
direction. Rather than attack a city beloved by Shiites still largely
sympathetic to us, we should accept the offer from the firebrand Motoqba al-Sadr to surrender to
an Islamic third party for interrogation by the Iraqi judge who issued the
murder warrant against him. That would avoid one major threat to good U.S.-Shia relations, namely a bloody conflict with Shia militias, and remove another, namely al-Sadr himself, from the center of
events.
In
both cases, however, we are adopting the worst possible response — namely,
issuing bold threats but taking weak actions or even doing nothing. And this
paralysis stems largely from indecision in
The longer we let Fallujah drag on in stalemate, the more the neutrals doubt we are determined to win. Najaf we can let go longer like a hostage situation confident that the locals grow increasingly upset that the outsiders loyal to Sadr are disrupting their lives.
Are we doing more than we know in Fallujah? Are we dividing the resistance as they split on responding to negotiations? Are we showing the locals the joys of rule by the thugs in hope that the friendlies in the city will ask us to crush the resistance? Are we locating the resistance to better go after them when we strike?
I don’t know. But I’ll feel better when we just crush that snake’s nest. The ceasefire is not tenable. How can we patrol in anything less than platoon strength when so many enemy can mass to attack? We’ve been lucky that we’ve smashed up the attackers when they violate the ceasefire. But one day they’ll do what they did in Ramadi and kill a dozen Marines.
Take Fallujah! Isolate Najaf and push our friends in
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“Well This Is Getting Major Press Attention” (Posted
The Jordan plot is highlighted by CNN:
Jordanian
authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda
plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of
Jordan's capital, Amman.
There is uncertainty about whether the chemicals were really intended to be a chemical attack or whether it was to make a better explosion.
But it certainly shows that the Islamists are willing to kill just about anybody they can reach. Those darn Crusading Jordanians.
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“Blowback?” (Posted
Following the Kurdish riots of late we have this in Syria:
Gunmen attacked a former
United Nations office in a diplomatic quarter of
So. Was this a Kurdish attack in revenge or was it an Islamist attack to unseat the Alawite (who many Moslems don’t even think are real Moslems) minority government?
If the latter, the Syrians are finding that fanning the
flames of Islam in neighboring
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“WMD Evidence” (Posted
I remain convinced we will find the smoking gun of chemical
weapons in
This
story, (via Instapundit), reminds me of the
discoveries of mass quantities of “pesticides” during the invasion of
When
coalition forces entered
Caches
of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the
expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that
is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells
Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare
program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a
similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new
facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch
production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.
At
That
wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles,
Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of
At
Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the
Again,
this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a
mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But
subsequent tests by the
The
discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding
real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the
president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought
to look like.
A
senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting
from
What
does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage,"
the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of
VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that
still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of
The mortar rounds are something I really didn’t think of in this context either. I figured that they were Iran-Iraq War era so only relevant to the WMD hunt by the fact that Coalition troops sat on them for months before discovering them. I should have considered this angle. Just what the heck was that liquid if not chemical agents? Really, it makes no sense that this would have been declared nothing. What is going on?
I think what we have found is significant as it is. Taking out Saddam’s regime was both morally right from the mass graves we’ve found and in our national interest from destroying a regime intent on aggression, terrorism, and acquiring nuclear weapons. We’ll find stockpiles that will not be ignored.
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“I Don’t Trust the Man” (Posted
The UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is just a Baathist apologist and why we should trust the man to do anything to benefit us or the Iraqi people is beyond me. This is what he says about the Fallujah fighting:
"When you surround a city, you bomb the
city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?" Brahimi said. "And you, if you have enemies there,
this is exactly what they want you to do, to alienate more people so that more
people support them rather than you."
Surround it? Why yes we did. The better to keep new thugs and weapons out and to trap the insurgents inside to kill them.
Bomb it? Are we Russians? We used air power and firepower sparingly. The low level of civilian casualties is unusual for city fighting and comes from the unique care that we take to avoid killing innocents.
People can’t go to the hospital? Well if the enemy would stop violating the laws of land warfare and refrain from using ambulances to transport fighters and weapons, we’d let the people go to hospitals.
What name do we have for this? Why I’ll tell you, you duplicitous SOB, it’s called taking an enemy-held city.
And how are we doing exactly what they want us to do? Why is fighting our enemies and killing them in large numbers always what they want us to do? Why is it always best to just let them kill us and terrorize the locals into submission without lifting a hand to stop them? Why would standing aside while they get out the plastic shredders get the thugs to say, “Damn those clever Americans! They let us capture a city without killing us in large numbers and retaking the city! Curse their clever infidel strategy!”
Refusing to crush our enemies in Fallujah is alienating people. They think we don’t want to win. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re right.
All in all, Brahimi is an untrustworthy man representing an untrustworthy body.
Keep the UN from getting any real authority in
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“Allied Help” (Posted
Our friends in
So what do they say when we ask the colossus that is the EU
to contribute more than the paltry few thousand that now guard
NATO allies agreed months ago to expand the mission and set
a target of sending peacekeeping teams to five more cities in the north and
west of
However, nations have been hesitant in coming forward with
troops for the costly and potentially dangerous operation.
Mind you, these are sovereign states able to decide where
they will commit their militaries. I just wish they’d spare me the bull that
they’re only holding back in
When they have to be cajoled into provided troops in
relatively quiet
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“Small World?” (Posted
I just finished a post recently that mentioned an old
teaching assistant of mine at
So of course I read an article today with a Navy commander of the same name quoted!
The
ESG concept sports a highly mobile, self-sustaining force able to conduct
expeditionary missions from humanitarian and disaster relief to combat
operations, according to Cmdr. Bradley Martin, the amphibious squadron’s chief
of staff, who presented the briefing in
Same Bradley Martin? Could be. If so, glad to see an old TA doing well. He was good then. I imagine he still knows his stuff.
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“They Were Looking for What?” (Posted
We will find chemical weapons in
A workshop believed to be producing chemical
munitions exploded in flames Monday moments after
Yes, the chemical weapons could have been smoke grenades, but this hardly seems likely. I’ve worried for a year that the Baathists buried chemicals and that they’d hit us one day.
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“Born in the North, To Die in the South” (Posted
The panic in some of the media over the recent Fallujah and Sadr revolts was just amazing to me. It frightens me to think of what might happen with a real setback. Though the attacks were far, far less potent than the Tet offensive in 1968 and quickly contained with the troops on hand, the cries of despair over this event amaze me.
So I picked up Ronald Spector’s After Tet to read. I have a few dozen unread books standing in line and figured this was as good a time as any to read it.
I’m not finished yet, but other than showing that April 2004
should not even be compared with February and March 1968, what struck me
relates to the transformation of our Army. We are evolving it into a post-Cold War
mobile strike force able to travel the globe and then rip apart conventional
enemies with speed and precision. The capture of
The question that creeps up in my mind after reading Spector is what if shock and awe—so effective against an organized army similar to our own—doesn’t shock the true believers? How do we beat those that aren’t easily discouraged?
The description in After
Tet of the North Vietnamese is frightening. Spector describes a
The soldiers sent south felt like foreigners in a strange
land and never expected to go home. Their initial training wasn’t even that
rigorous. Indoctrination combined with strict and continuous supervision to
look out for defeatism kept the soldiers fighting. Fighting made the survivors
more effective. The scary thing is that despite the prospect of near certain
death, the North Vietnamese soldiers remained confident of victory. Even though
the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were turned back with heavy losses in Tet, the average surviving soldier and their successors did
not think of it as a defeat. And though we were not war criminals as some have
asserted even recently, the North Vietnamese believed we were brutal and a
hundred times worse than the French who came before us. The Vietnamese never
broke under our bombardment despite their heavy casualties, unlike the Chinese
in
So will our nimble and precise Future Force win against enemies that cannot be discouraged? Against some enemies, we must be able to kill them in large numbers without mercy and without respite. Those that cannot be discouraged must be killed. Will just-in-time logistics for precision munitions wielded by light troops fighting heavily outnumbered as a networked force be able to kill in the numbers needed once we transform? Transformation does not automatically mean we are seeking bloodless victory. But I fear that many will confuse information dominance with actual victory in battle and war. Already, we seem like we hate to kill our enemies almost as much as we hate to inflict civilian deaths. How will we kill enemies who cannot be beaten but only killed when networked precision reigns? When we recoil from killing even our enemies?
The one comforting thing to note is that killing in large
enough numbers will discourage even true believers eventually. The Chinese in
The damnedest part of today’s problem, however, is that the example of Fallujah shows we may have effectively given our enemies sanctuaries inside Iraq when it is within our power to deny them safe havens to recover and come back to fight again.
If our enemies are born in Fallujah to die in the Sunni Triangle, then we need to destroy Fallujah. And do it now.
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“Friends, Neutrals, and Enemies” (Posted
Friends are becoming neutrals. We can’t afford to have neutrals become enemies. According to American military people:
But
most worrisome, commanders say, is that the insurgents' terrorist tactics —
from street fighting in Falluja to the car bombings
in Basra this week — have successfully intimidated Iraqis to the point that
many are withdrawing their support for the allies and shifting to the
uncommitted camp. They are not necessarily joining the fighters, but many no
longer cooperate as freely with the allies. Some informants have dried up,
officers said.
I don’t think the attacks have caused our friends to become
neutral. I think our failure to crush the Fallujah
revolt has frightened our friends. We’ve made them doubt that we are in
I argued for the “bandaid off fast” rule for Fallujah. We should have guarded against popular sentiment being forged against us by quickly destroying our enemy so that the irritant would not last long. If we are to be accused of atrocities, why not fight hard and win fast? Instead we’ve let this fester with our enemies still alive to violate the ceasefire that we pretend exists. They continue to accuse us of “besieging” Fallujah and harming civilians. Unusable weapons are turned in and in only small numbers. In the end, we’ll have to attack. This could have been wrapped up already.
The statement following the above quote in the article is unclear. Is this an opinion of the author or the above-mentioned commanders?
If
there is an American offensive at Falluja, or
especially one at Najaf in the south,
anti-Americanism could escalate, jeopardizing the American hopes of winning
back the undecided.
I agree that an American offensive in Najaf would be unwise. This is a Shia holy site and we need the Shias on our side. We need to send in Iraqis to get that Sadr bully boy. Americans should only be sent in support of the Iraqis. Sadr has little support so why give the newly neutral a reason to join him in misguided Shia solidarity? It is too late to bitch too much that we should have arrested or killed Sadr long ago. Let him wither and push our Shia friends to get Sadr.
But what of this Fallujah assertion? Why would anti-Americanism be fanned long-term by crushing Sunnis? Yes, there is a certain shame effect on the Shias of Americans destroying even the hated Sunni Baathists. Look at the relief and shame over the destruction of the Saddam regime and Saddam’s capture.
Yet if we win quickly, we can move on to helping Iraqis and the shame will dissipate in time. Notice that we’ve kept Iraqis friendly to us even as we’ve fought Baathists and Islamists over the last year and even as the thugs slaughtered Iraqi civilians in horrendous attacks. Our support is weakening recently only as we’ve refused to crush the latest uprising against us. Had we crushed it, friends would have stayed friendly. Neutrals would have edged to the winners. And enemies would either be dead or wandering off to neutrality rather than join the dead.
Winning is the key to winning back the undecided. Dithering has been key to losing them.
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“De-Baathification” (Posted
The CPA press conference somewhat eases my mind that de-Baathifaction is the official process and that the exceptions are reasonable.
This article highlights why I am nervous that de-Baathification will not be resolutely implemented:
The reverberations of the Coalition's decision to rehabilitate Saddam's
support network will be long lasting and will lead to the deaths of Coalition
soldiers. "Death to the Baath Party"
banners hang throughout southern
We can’t betray our friends and neutrals by letting our
enemies into government. The Shias won’t
understand—even if the State Department and our Sunni allies in the rest of the
De-Baathification is not a mistake. It is a necessity to win. Keep in mind that if we ever lose the Shias we really will need a lot more troops—another 150,000 at least plus one-for-one replacements for whatever Shia security forces defect or quit in that case.
Now that’s a nuanced solution to our Sunni/Islamist problems, eh?
And for Pete’s sake, crush the Fallujah resistance—fast—before we look like a bunch of wusses for letting our enemies get away with murder. Coupled with the possible perception that we are letting our enemies back into government service, the Shias might conclude that we are trying to put the Sunnis back into power. And don’t think the Sunnis won’t fan those embers of a rumor.
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The Next Target” (Posted
Although I expect our next short-term target to be the Horn
of Africa region (and it had better hurry up before yet another time prediction
collapses), I think
Why do I think this? No real reason other than the fact that Iran is on the Axis of Evil, I believe the President remains committed to preventing hostile states from getting nuclear weapons, I think the eventual failure of diplomacy taking place now will convince even semi-serious Europeans that Iran will not cooperate, and then there is the guess that Iran will have nukes by the end of 2005 to go with their missiles.
So, this from the President (via Caerdroia) is interesting:
President
Bush told newspaper editors in
As the article notes:
The language was reminiscent of comments Bush made about
If the President isn’t going to take care of this threat, what reason does he have for re-election? Anybody could do nothing.
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“Troop Strength and Other
Strategypage goes over some
myths about
Highest on my list is the discussion of troop strength. I’ve written consistently that the chorus of voices calling for more troops are just plain wrong. I rarely see anything that agrees with me. I wouldn’t say that I was starting to doubt my assessment but I have been uncomfortably alone on my limb wondering if I was missing something. Strategypage writes:
The
Exactly. The guys on the ground will always want more troops. Who would turn down help? And we managed with the in-country troops to contain the violence quickly. The 20,000 troops being held over are insurance and they probably weren’t absolutely needed but since they are still there, keep them just case. The 10,000 troops to be identified to go in are extra insurance. I doubt they will go in at all. My amateur number crunching seemed fine and I want Iraqis in the forefront.
The article discusses others that I agree are myths. But
one, that it is a myth we need to expand the Army, is one with which I
disagree. Sure, the article is right that the military thinks it will win
But read it for a good take on the so-called problems and errors.
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"Pat Tillman KIA" (Posted
Pat Tillman, a soldier in the
75th Ranger Regiment, was
killed in action in
This news has struck me very
hard.
But not
because he was wealthy and famous. It hurts deeply because of his motives. In an
age when those "on the other side" denigrate those who serve and die
as either the losers of society who had no choice but to enlist or mere
mercenaries in it for the money, Tillman's decision to defend us destroys those
arguments. He needed neither money nor opportunity that society supposedly had
denied him. He served—and died—for love of country. His service and death
highlight the truth about all the other men and women in the Armed Forces who
have served, died, or been injured at war these last 2-1/2 years.
It will really hit home when
I receive the Department of Defense email that notifies me of his death. It
will sound like all the others.
Because it
really is like all the others. A young soldier who died protecting me because he believed that it
was his duty.
God bless them all.
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“What Will the Pillsbury Nuke Boy Think?” (Posted
Three thousand North Koreans may have died in a train explosion that took place 9 hours after Kim Jong-il passed through on his train.
The key is whether the Pillsbury Nuke Boy thinks we just tried a decapitation strike on him. Never mind that we would not kill 3,000 just to get him. He could believe it.
More important is what conclusion he draws—surrender his nukes now before we succeed, or renew his efforts to build nukes and prepare to use them against us?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA22APR04B
“I Don’t Know if This is Good” (Posted
We are now willing to hire former Baathists.
I’m not sure what this means.
I’ve always felt that de-Baathification
of
I just don’t trust any general in the Iraqi military or any senior civilian. They should be assumed guilty until proven innocent. After proper sifting and making sure they turn in resisting Baathists or hidden documents or arms or whatever just to make sure they now stay on our side by visibly betraying their former lives, sure, I’d allow former Baathists a way to rehabilitate and re-enter society.
I don’t know the details, but I’m really worried we are just letting the Trojan horse into the walls.
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“Winning in
My wild ass guess of 50% effectiveness for the Iraqi security forces was right on the money according to the US military:
About one in every 10 members of Iraq's
security forces "actually worked against" U.S. troops during the
recent militia violence in Iraq, and an additional 40 percent walked off the
job because of intimidation, the commander of the 1st Armored Division said
Wednesday.
Half fought.
Why didn’t the other half fight?
"It's very difficult at times to
convince them that Iraqis are killing fellow Iraqis and fellow Muslims, because
it's something they shouldn't have to accept," he said. "Over time I
think they will probably have to accept it."
Doesn’t this convince them that their enemies are willing to kill “fellow” Iraqis?
Suicide attackers unleashed car bombings
against police buildings in
Didn’t the mass graves of Saddam tell them something about the willingness of the enemy to murder “fellow” Iraqis? Shouldn’t Iraqis remember the price of his rule? The trial of Saddam can’t begin too quickly. People need reminding.
On the bright side, back to the first article, the US military realizes that kill ratios are only relevant to showing our military prowess—not as a metric of success:
Dempsey maintained in the interview that popular support
for the U.S.-led coalition in
But he acknowledged "a form of descending
consent" for the
"There is a point where it doesn't matter how well
we're doing, it won't be accepted that we have a large military presence
here," he said. "We're all working very diligently trying to figure
out where that point is."
Exactly. This is why we must push
Iraqis to take over security functions instead of pumping more
Questions were also raised about the wisdom of de-Baathification of the security forces. To me, taking the recent fighting as proof of de-Baathification being a mistake is ludicrous. Would a security force full of Baathist-led and dominated units have fought for us 50% of the time? Shoot, the 10% defection rate would have been a lot higher. De-Baathification is not a mistake. The Baathists were and are our enemy, remember? Will their past victims really appreciate the nuance of bringing Baathist “skills” into the security forces? No. The Shias and Kurds (and even many Sunnis) will rightly see it as a betrayal and a danger to their future. Punish enemies and reward friends—not the reverse.
To win, we do need to discuss problems (as this memo a bit selectively quoted by the Village Voice (via Instapundit) but which is still within the bounds of constructive criticism, mostly). However, Max Boot notes the disconnect between reporting on the recent counter-attack by our enemies and military reality:
I don't mean to underestimate the sheer physical challenge confronting
160,000 allied troops in controlling a country of more than 22 million people.
But from a purely military perspective, nothing that has happened in the last
two weeks poses an insurmountable obstacle. Rebel cleric Muqtada
Sadr seems to have ample money and firearms, probably
supplied by
Too often, criticism descends into madness and we end up debating the accusation that the Jews/oil companies/Halliburton/insertyoursillyreason led to the war or engage in a debate over an unseemly eagerness to insist that what we face is now Vietnam and we should just surrender now and avoid the next 58,000 KIA. Oh, and imprison Bush and his cabinet to boot for the crime of deposing Saddam. Krugman comes to mind easily for this line of insane attacks.
I’ve raised issues I believe are wrong in our approach even
as I remain confident of winning and sure that we were right to overthrow
Saddam. Still, I’ve spent lots of time arguing against the ridiculous charges
and accusations. But let me say that ‘happy talk’ is not what I insist on. Real
discussions between Americans about how to win is the way to get
Get on with the June 30 turnover date. It is the start of a path to a real government of Iraqis. Iraqis need to have ownership of their country so they will fight their “fellow” Iraqis who blow up children on the way to school and shell their own people in prison.
Instapundit brings up the idea of partitioning Iraq
into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish states (though he is
not decided on it). On the surface this seems appealing. Screw the Sunnis and
let them rot in their oil-less desert if they don’t want to contribute to the
new
And try to debate in good faith how to win and bring
Even for those who still oppose the war and don’t think President Bush deserves that outcome, don’t the Iraqis deserve a chance at peace and freedom? I would have thought left and right could agree on that.
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“Winning in
I have been very dismissive of the claims by some that we
should increase our troop strength in
As I’ve noted, our kill ratios are irrelevant. Even a ten or
twenty to one kill ratio doesn’t win us the war. It is not a metric of success.
If we try to make it the metric of success, our people will only count our
casualties so even if we kill more of the enemy with more of our troops there,
more of ours will die too. As Sensing notes, if even 1% of
If only one percent of the Iraqi population
is willing either to take up arms against us or actively support those who do,
then we are facing a force, however poorly organized and equipped, of just
under a quarter-million. As best as I can tell (figures are not exact), we are
killing between 6-8 Iraqis for every soldier or Marine
we lose. By the time we take out 240,000, we will lose between 30-40 thousand
dead.
Sensing guesses a 6 or 8 to 1 kill ratio in our favor. I think 10:1 is more likely. But even at my ratio, we’d lose 25,000 dead to kill all the Baathists and nutjobs. This doesn’t even count dealing with foreign Islamists going to Jihadworld for the all-day ticket to paradise.
Sensing rightly notes that this is not the way to win.
Not that we shouldn’t kill the enemy at 10:1 ratios or more when they mass to fight, but our fighting prowess won’t win the war.
We have to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis. We have to
push the Iraqis to fight for their country against the Baathists,
Sadr nuts, and foreign Jihadis.
This is our metric of success. Some of our Iraqis broke and ran, it is true.
But others fought. We have to bolster the Iraqis who
fought with us, get rid of the ones who defected, and provide better leadership
to the ones who wouldn’t fight with us. If they continue to not fight, replace
them, too. It doesn’t matter that the Iraqis we arm won’t kill at anywhere near
our ratio. Don’t worry about that. Kill ratios aren’t the metric, remember?
Push the Iraqis to the front. It’s their country. They must fight. They can’t
be spectators to a war between
So hold onto 20,000 US troops through the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to deal with the effects of the April Sunni/Sadr surge (and I still bet we won’t need to send in 10,000 more as has been discussed). But continue the glide path downward in our troop strength as soon as possible. And turn over primary fighting duties to Iraqis as quickly as we can in more secure areas—leaving US forces to ride to the rescue of our guys who get in trouble.
Don’t Americanize this war. If we do, we’ll lose.
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“Hope for
I’ve worried about the hostility of the EU toward
Look at what they do now:
European Commission president Romano Prodi Monday praised Spain's decision to pull its troops
from Iraq, saying the move could help mend the rift in
If it was just the rift that was the issue, the Germans,
French, and Belgians could have supported the Iraq War. But no, slapping
But now Blair will put EU membership to the people for a vote.
Thank goodness. Worse come to worst, I’d hate to lose
But it would be better to end our obsolete support for European unity. That is a Cold War relic. And it is decidedly not in our interest any more.
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“Whoa” (Posted
Al Qaeda people were probably the
ones who nailed the Jordanian embassy in
The bomb plot was disclosed earlier this week and was said
to have been foiled following the arrests of several suspects in two raids in
late March and early April. Had the chemical bomb exploded, it could have
killed at least 20,000 people and wrecked buildings within a half-mile radius,
government officials say.
Was there a concerted effort to attack across
The 20,000 victims claim is
amazing. This would require a lot of nerve gas, expertly applied to succeed. But
even if they didn’t have that expertise, did they have the amount necessary and
think they could succeed? Was actual gas seized? I mean, the amount necessary
to kill that many isn’t something you can make in a basement lab. This is a
serious quantity.
And though the Syrians may not
have provided the chemical weapons from their own stocks (since intel could probably trace it to them), where did the gas
come from? Could we trace this back to
One would think this would get more coverage—either to
support or debunk it. I’d be dismissive if some of this information wasn’t
coming directly from
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“
I look forward to the 60th
anniversary of the D-Day landings.
The French will have to thank
us in public ceremonies for all the little white grave markers that dot the
French countryside. Can you imagine the press following the 1944 campaign as
2004 unfolds? The summer and fall will be a travelogue of American-dominated
Western troops, with the British at our side, advancing across
The Germans will tug
uncomfortably on their collars as they are reminded that once they were the
fascist threat that killed our soldiers and now they refuse to help us fight
the modern successors of their fascist ideology.
And I really look forward to
seeing Saving Private Ryan hit the
small screens for the anniversary. Americans will be reminded again of the
meaning of sacrifice and how hard a tough enemy can make a war. We will all be
reminded that American soldiers fight for good causes and fight bravely.
Some might be reminded that
our soldiers and Marines still carry on that tradition as they fight in
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"The Value of Armor" (Posted
Iraqi experience has led to a
lessons-learned report that questions our plans to abandon heavy armor. From Strategypage:
U.S. Army
researchers, after scrutinizing operations in the 2003 Iraq campaign, have
concluded that those events contradicted the army’s plans for a new generation
of lighter armored vehicles, and dependence on improved communication and
reconnaissance to avoid or destroy enemy anti-vehicle weapons. The army
report, done at the
I'm on record as supporting
the retention of some type of armored behemoth in the future. Yes, a lighter
armored vehicle is nice to bridge the yawning gap between leg infantry and
Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but the envisioned 20-ton Future
Combat System (the reference to 39 tons below was from some talk of upping the
weight limit) cannot be both types of armored vehicle. Something has to give.
As I
wrote in 2002 in “Equipping the Objective Force” (I penned the first
version in summer 2001):
The collapse of the
A light, cannon-armed
FCS with an antitank guided missile attached and plugged into a tactical
network will handle many moderate conventional threats and will be useful in
stability operations. Experience with IBCTs may well
give the Army a better sense of what light armor can do and lead it to accept
that it cannot succeed in all threat environments. The IBCT has a limited role
as an early entry force and clearly recognizes that it is not the main fighting
force. It will eventually be supplanted by heavier divisions if the enemy is
heavy and will fight as a maneuver unit of a division.50 The
Objective Force is to blur that distinction so that the light forces are the
main fighting force. The FCS is critical to making this happen.
Building the FCS,
however, is a high-risk venture. The Army should not spend whatever it takes
attempting to meld multiple revolutionary technologies into one vehicle for all
missions. The FCS should be different from the Abrams and Bradley but must be
designed with near-term technology that incorporates modular improvements if
the Army is to turn "gee whiz" ideas into actual hardware. Separated
missiles and a sensor grid; active defenses; EGTs;
and exotic engines, fuels, and weapons can be retrofitted to defeat more
capable enemies. Barring successfully fielding exotic technologies to make the
FCS work, the Army must consider how it will defeat future heavy systems if
fighting actual enemies and not merely suppressing disorder becomes its mission
once again. The tentative assumptions of 2001 will change by 2025. When they
do, the Army will rue its failure today to accept that the wonder tank will not
be built.
Indeed, our assumptions did not
last even two more years. The value of our heavy armor in the race to
With top-attack weapons
available to end-run the massive frontal armor of an Abrams, we cannot just
stick with our current design and expect our heavy armor to continue to survive
in battle. But I'm not ready to just abandon the monsters we've taken to war so
successfully. I’m old enough to remember that some have predicted the death of
main battle tanks since 1973. Forgive me if I don’t rush to declare the tank
extinct.
Evolved dinosaurs may still
crush those wily mammals nipping at their heels.
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“Troop Strength” (Posted
Kagan and Kristol want more US troops in the war and want Rumsfeld’s scalp if he won’t provide them:
On Thursday, the secretary
of defense announced a three-month extension in tours of duty for about 20,000
troops in
Let me first say that I was disturbed that Rumsfeld was planning to get rid of two Army divisions
before 9-11. He has never seemed to value what soldiers can do and what we need
soldiers (and Marines) to do. I strongly disagree with Rumsfeld
in the big picture. Nonetheless, I think Kagan and Kristol are off base on
What crisis is so bad now? Sadr’s
threat is evaporating rapidly. His revolt was a joke as long as we don’t blow
it. And if we do, we’ll need a lot more troops than even Kagan
and Kristol anticipate, I imagine. Ramadi is tamped down. Fallujah
and the roads to
How many troops do we need in
But the entire country does not need pacifying to the same degree. The 5 million Sunnis, 5 million Kurds, and 15 million Shias need differing levels of control. With 0.2% representing a standard civilian peacetime police level and 2% representing the minimum for a successful pacification campaign against opposition, we could assume 2% in the hostile Sunni areas, 0.5% in the friendly Kurdish areas, and 1% in the restless and vulnerable but largely friendly Shia areas.
In this approach, we need 25,000 security personnel for the
Kurds, 150,000 for the Shia areas, and 100,000 for
the Sunni areas. This totals 275,000 which is a bit
less than the 280,000 troop-equivalents we have. It is actually even a little
better than this since we have the use of our troops in Kuwait that provide
logistics and maintenance services without the same security needs as they
would impose if based inside Iraq. This is 40,000+ troops, I believe. So our
troops in
Since I strongly believe that it is a mistake to Americanize
the war any more than it is, why would we lessen the pressure on the Iraqis to
perform? We cannot fight for years on end and expect the public to support the
war effort when we lose 30-40 soldiers a month on average and more in spikes.
If the Iraqis assume we will do the job, are we prepared to replace the 100,000
soldier-equivalents that the Iraqis provide right now just to fight the Baathists? And how long will the public support
No, we do not need more troops in
Do we need more troops generally in the Army? Yes. Ten more
separate brigades (40,000 troops) would be nice to help with the rotation of
forces and reduce the stress on the total Army and Marine Corps effort in
That said, I should post this article that highlights the great risk we took in going to war with an Army smaller than the planners thought sufficient to win. Instead of going ahead with what the planners thought, we decided to take a risk and in the end fielded only 42% of the divisions believed necessary to win. Indeed, on the very eve of invasion our leadership ratified the assumption that we could go with far less than war plans originally assumed.
And our leadership took this decision even though we needed troops to fight in other unanticipated locations in the GWOT.* Indeed, an unwillingness to disrupt our civilian workforce was a major part of the decision to not fully mobilize for combat. In addition, we believed our air power would reduce the need for ground troops and decided that plans for air strength would remain as first anticipated. We also assumed that we could skimp on troops overall by using troops from the main effort to bolster subsidiary efforts after we won the main war. What is more, we reduced the number of heavy units and emphasized lighter infantry units on the assumption that all the armor we thought we’d need was too heavy to transport and ultimately unneeded to win. Backing up our truncated combat force was a service troop strength inadequate to wage war. The military even considered retraining combat troops as support troops to meet the demands of war.
The military and civilian leadership knew we were taking a risk yet we did it anyway. We ended up having virtually no strategic reserve. When the enemy counter-attacked we found our assumptions faulty and we had only two divisions out of our entire Army uncommitted to the war by the end. As the author notes:
It will long be a question whether the photo-finish in World War II
reflected an uncommonly lucky gamble or a surprisingly accurate forecast. But
few would deny that, in their performance on the field of battle in the
critical campaigns of 1944-45, the hitherto still largely untested divisions of
the
Of course, we won World War II so I shouldn’t be too harsh on FDR and Marshall.
We’ll win in
*Global War on Tyranny;
otherwise known as World War II.
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“How We Fight and Win” (Posted
It took a Russian paper to note this in the media, but check this out
regarding our fighting in Fallujah (via Instapundit). First, he notes the strange eagerness to
compare the fighting to
The
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has plenty of enemies both at
home and abroad. A lot of people would love to see Bush get a bloody nose in
He rightly says that we are smashing our enemies in Fallujah without killing civilians on a mass scale:
Just like the Russians in
Nice to see somebody in the press with some clue, at least.
The writer, however, ascribes our success to technology:
The
Marines are far better trained, of course, but the Iraqis were fighting in
their hometown. The decisive difference between the two sides was the extensive
use of a computerized command, control and targeting system by the
Modern
It is a compliment to say we are better trained “of course,” but our superior training is not a given. We work hard at it. Nor is it an aside to state and then move on to the real reasons for our success.
Sure, technology helps, but the real advantage we have is
the training of our troops. While our enemies may be willing to die, they are
not part of—as we chanted in our running cadences in basic training—the
American
forces killed more than 100 insurgents on Tuesday in close combat in a small
village in central
The
battle, classic urban combat that raged for 14 hours, was one of the heaviest
engagements since the invasion of
"A
lot of these guys were souped up on jihad," said
Lt. Col. B. P. McCoy, commander of the Fourth Battalion, Third Marines.
"They might as well been suicide fighters."
Marines
fought house to house, roof to roof, doorway to doorway. They repelled attacks
of machine-gun fire, volleys of rockets and repeated charges by masked
fighters, Colonel McCoy said. Two marines were shot but their injuries were not
life-threatening.
The
fighting erupted in Karma, six miles northeast of Falluja,
during a search-and-destroy mission.
More than 100 insurgents killed and we suffered 2 wounded. And how did we do it? With the high-tech gear that the Russian writer clearly wants for his military? No:
One
of the most important tools for this battle comes from the garden shed:
sledgehammers. On Wednesday, marines punched "mouseholes,"
just big enough for gun barrels, in the brick walls of the homes they occupied.
They also smashed windows to scatter shards of glass across the front steps.
"It's
an early warning system," Capt. Shannon Johnson explained, as he crunched
noisily across the glass, "something the old guys taught us."
Nearby,
a squad of young men with crewcuts swung heavy
hammers under a punishing sun. They were knocking down the low walls along the
rooftops so they could move on catwalks from roof to roof.
"This
is classic urban warfare," said Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis,
commander of the First Marine Division. "It's all the stuff World War II
taught us, along with
The
weaponry — mostly low-tech, like machine guns and mortars — is also reminiscent
of earlier wars. There have been a few guided-missile attacks from the air. But
Falluja is so densely populated — 300,000 people in
only a few square miles — that commanders have been reluctant to call in airstrikes.
"And
we don't want to rubblize the city," said
Colonel McCoy, whose battalion of 800 clashes daily with insurgents. "That
will give the enemy more places to hide."
Hammers. Broken
glass. Personal and crew-served weapons like wars past. These are the
tools used to shred our enemy. It also confirms the care we are taking not to
destroy the city with its residents still present. It also shows our ability to
use our brains and avoid just leveling the city like the Russians did in
We can be proud of how our soldiers and Marines have fought this war. Proud that we have proven our enemies wrong who said if only they could come to grips with us without all our high tech gear that they would beat us. Our enemies may think the green banner is superior, but the Green Machine is the real killing machine in battle. Willingness to die crumbles in the face of ability to kill.
Now, I’m not really comfortable with counting enemy bodies. It is not a measure of success or failure. And I don’t want it to become a measure of success. But it is coming out more now because it seems like the military wants to erase the impression that we are taking it on the chin. Our public may think that reports of only US casualties means only we are taking them. This is unfortunate. As much as I celebrate the skill of our Marines and soldiers (and welcome whatever high tech gear they bring to the fight to enhance our killing advantage over even souped-up enemies), I hope the military high command is not putting pressure on lower level officers to provide body counts. Just win.
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“The New Plastic
The new faux issue for the anti-war side to use in their
continued debate over whether to invade
As prologue, I’m continually amazed at their refusal to move
on and at least try debating the best course to win the post-war fight. I know
I ended any complaints about going into
But I digress.
The current buring issue is … wait for it!
President Bush directed our military to plan for an invasion of Iraq as early as November 2001!
President Bush secretly ordered a war plan
drawn up against
Horrors!
One must of course ignore a number of basic facts to be outraged.
First, the military has an invasion plan for
Second, unless I’ve missed the dotmil site that has the pdf files for all our invasion plans, they kind of need to stay secret in case our enemies might find them of use.
Third, I’m not aware that the President has to clear or even inform all of his advisors on a given subject. I thought they, you know, advised at the pleasure of the President.
Fourth, you must completely blank out the outrage that was expressed for our supposed failure to plan enough for the war and aftermath.
Fifth, you have to really toss down the memory hole the fact that any indications at all of planning prior to the war were seized on by opponents of the war as evidence the administration had pre-judged the issue and really wasn’t giving “peace” a chance. Shoot, it came out in one case I recall that our work with a humanitarian group had to be kept secret lest the group be ostracized for assuming war as it prepared to cope with any humanitarian emergencies that might emerge.
Lastly, I know that I figured as early as December 2001 when
It is always so exciting to see the newest plastic turkey issue arrive! Who will say the most idiotic thing about the non-issue? Which news outlet will most embarrass themselves covering it? How long will it last?
I’m giddy.
But mostly saddened, actually. Saddened that some will seize on anything to attack our war effort. Saddened that the press either agrees with the attack or is unable to see it as a faux issue.
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"Army Rotation" (Posted
Troops of 1st AD
and 2 ACR (Light) who haven't already rotated back to their home base will be kept
in Iraq for another three months. This must be tremendously disappointing.
Still, like reservists getting called up in greater numbers now that we are at
war, I expect that soldiers will fight when necessary. It would certainly help
the soldiers' morale if criticism of the war effort didn't drift into defeatism
so much. In the end, the soldiers will step up. The critics will not.
While a short retention to
get past June 30 seems appropriate given the Fallujah
region and the lesser Sadr problem, the path to
reducing strength should get back on track as soon as possible. The Iraqis need
to take more of a burden, notwithstanding some well-publicized failures
(question: so how would recalling Saddam-era units intact after the war have
made them more loyal to the new
This does highlight our
numbers problem. We have over 150,000 mobilized for the Army. We are
reorganizing our divisions to provide 20% more line troops (armor, infantry,
recon) by reducing air defense and other support troops more suited to fighting
peer armies. We are also moving excess troops such as artillery units into new
military police units.
Yet this is not enough. We
should have had enough troops to reinforce
In addition to
reorganization, we need new Army units. I used to think that a couple motorized
infantry divisions with one organic battalion each of armor and mechanized
infantry for heavy forces was at the very least a good
start to handling the need for numbers. It might be better, however, to organize
separate brigades or even battalions to plug into existing divisions when they
rotate into
We certainly need a larger
Army.
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"Exciting Tales of the Reality
Challenged!" (Posted
We start out with the Palestinians:
Bush's concessions to
Yet consider their recent
history regarding
And after all that, they
express some shock that we are backing Sharon's plan to get out of the occupied
territories with a wall to protect Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers
while keeping some of the border-straddling settlements on the West Bank.
Never mind that this was
anticipated even in the last
Never mind that the
Palestinians should be thanking God every day that our government has backed
Palestinian independence despite their deplorable conduct and support of
terror.
No, the Palestinians are
shocked that we support a border adjustment in
Ladies and gentlemen, I give
you this week's prime example of the reality challenged: the Palestinians.
Actually, as long as some are
divorcing reality from arguments, why don't the Israelis vehemently insist that
the barrier wall is designed to protect Palestinians from Israeli suicide-bombers. That would be ok, wouldn't it?
Of course, it would be rude
to insist that only foreigners are capable of this.
The 9-11 hearings display
this characteristic as well.
How else can we explain the
heated accusations of the administration's most vocal opponents that Bush
should have done more prior to 9-11 to stop the attacks.
How can we take this line of argument seriously when they simultaneously insist
that the USA Patriot Act infringes on civil rights and that the administration
has suppressed dissent? How can they argue that we should have implemented
measures far more extreme than we've implemented after 9-11? And further, how can the critics insist with a straight
face that inquiry into mistakes must go back no farther than the inauguration
of Bush 43? How is reality even being recognized in this line of attack? Oh
yeah, the reality that if you looked before 2001 you might have to examine one
of the panel's
commissioners (thanks Instapundit) for her role
in the failure of intelligence. Yes, more tales of the reality challenged.
And let us not forget worldly
I must say, you're really picturing a
Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way.
Stone doesn't think it feels like a Stalinist state. Ignore the
reality. Ignore the gulags and oppression. Ignore the patterns of aggression
around the world in support of thug-regimes and causes. Ignore it all. Castro
was nice to him and he didn't feel anything was wrong.
Yet another tale of the
reality challenged.
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Just a personal opinion on the WMD issue.
While I am satisfied that Saddam was pursuing nukes and would have gotten them eventually if we hadn’t invaded, I am also convinced that we will find some buried chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
I still find it hard to believe that all his scientists were scamming Saddam for money. And our long detour through the UN gave Saddam’s people plenty of time to dig deep.
I just hope we find them before they are dug up and used on our troops or the CPA.
I’ve said this before, but as long as the President mentioned it last night, I figured I might as well toss in my two cents again.
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“The Fruits of Extensive Planning” (Posted
We’ve been told many times that if only we’d planned for the post-war in Iraq as we spent planning the post-war in World War II (you know, thousands of experts working for 3-1/2 years churning out tons of reports) we’d have done better in Iraq.
Via Winds of Change, a little reminder (again) of
what post-WW II
No, there wasn’t armed resistance like today, but the economy and despair were rock bottom for four years before progress was evident.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA14APR04C
“Korean Balance of Power” (Posted
For decades, dealing with a massed armored assault by
But the precision air power demonstrated in Kosovo in 1999,
Much of the new military equipment and weapons seen in
But now, with smart bombs, improved helicopter gunships,
UAVs and better battlefield intelligence, plans are
moving towards more aggressively disrupting North Korean operations.
Even better, with 2nd ID moving off the DMZ and pulling south, our lone division on the peninsula will be better poised to direct all the lethal and precise weapons our ground forces now have.
Even better again, the North is so low on fuel and food that even the Northern army is weaker and more poorly trained. So if the North attacks, their armor will be slower, likely bunch up, and otherwise make themselves easier targets for our weapons raining from the sky and sea. They’ll probably be pretty brittle too.
So instead of just absorbing the first blow, we will reach out to disrupt the first, less expertly landed blow. This means the North will be stopped faster and farther north with more Northern losses and fewer Southern/US losses. As this improvement in our firepower increases further, we will eventually get to the point where our counter-attack will kick off rather rapidly and we will welcome a Northern assault just to get the Northern units out in the open and moving where we can easily detect and kill them.
And in time, should the political will be there, we’ll be able to just strip the “counter” prefix off the war plans and just nail the Pillsbury Nuke Boy for good.
And the best part? We could have
anti-missile ships off of
That correlation of forces that Marxists love to prattle on about is moving our way.
This means we have more freedom to squeeze the North since their military option is getting weaker and weaker every day.
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"Najaf"
(Posted
I've said I'm most worried
about the Baathist resistance in Fallujah
and elsewhere and not worried about the Sadr affair. Strategypage says they are worried
about the Sadr affair and not the Baathists. They have a point but I think that who you
worry about more depends on what you are worrying about.
I worry about the Baathists because they have the means and motive to resist
hard in the short run and are the ones killing our troops. The Shias are friendly for the most part and although Sadr is defying us, he isn't terribly effective and the Shias consider him more of an idiot brother-in-law than a
legitimate voice of the Shia.
In the long run, Strategypage is correct. Since the Sunni Baathists are a minority in a geographically distinct
region, they can't on their own retake
I guess I figure we can keep
the Shias content by transferring power to a Shia-dominated interim government on June 30 and
transitioning to a democracy where numbers will count (with minority rights and
rule of law established so losers don't reach for their AKs
and RPGs).
Given this distinction, I'm
actually glad that we have been softer on the Sadr
uprising. I'm still upset we are in a ceasefire with the Baathists
in Fallujah, mind you. But we can't storm Najaf the same way to get the idiot Sadr.
Najaf is a holy site and Sadr
would gain sympathy for being attacked in there. Indeed, were I the Iranians,
I'd have the Iranian contingent of the Mahdi Army in Najaf primed for a fight to the death to provoke the
destruction of holy sites and the death of Shia
civilians. Shoot, I'd blow up the holy sites myself since I'd be pretty sure
the Americans wouldn't do it even accidentally.
It would have been better for
our allied contingents to have held fast in the first attacks. Had they held,
the Sadr militia would have recoiled and gone home.
Even in Kut the Sadr people
showed little stomach for facing Americans and we swept the Sadr
thugs out quickly and with little resistance, and so had little need for
firepower (and no press coverage, too).
All in all, we'd be better
off arresting Sadr and his top lieutenants. Or better
yet, getting Sistani to bless the arrest and get local
cops backed by ICDC troops to do it. (And note that Sadr is backing off on his conditions to talk already—a
sign of his weakness) Then, as the price for letting the low level rabble go
home without their arms (the Sadr guys in Najaf are not locals as I understand it and 2,500 US troops
should be able to screen them leaving) and get Sadr's
people to turn over the Iranians in their midst to us (again, 2,500 US troops
will take custody). Summer in Gitmo should be lovely
for the Iranians. Trials and prisons for the top Sadr
Iraqis by other Iraqis would serve us well. Consequences must exist for
resisting us with arms.
Order needs to be maintained
at the lowest possible level of force. And the Sunni and Sadr
problems need to be addressed uniquely. We can afford to offend the Sunnis
since they hate us for removing them from power. We've been more than patient
giving them a chance to join the new
The Shias
we rely on as a base of support. The Kurds are an important addition to our
supporters but they can't be a base of support alone unless we abandon
democracy and just use the old tried and true colonial method of giving a
minority of friendlies formerly abused the guns (the
Kurds—not the Sunnis). I don't advocate that at all. So, since the Sadr uprising is more farcical than a real threat, don't
fight it like a real threat. Or it could
become one.
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“The Most Important Front” (Posted
The President ably defended our Iraq policy:
American forces will "finish the work of
the fallen" and usher in a new era of freedom and democracy.
He needs to do this more. And often. Never let up. Make sure that the left has to wait
for yet another war to get their precious new
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“There Must Be Consequences” (Posted
"The target is not Najaf.
The target is Muqtada al-Sadr
and his militia," said Brig. Mark Kimmitt,
deputy head of
Sadr must be jailed or executed for his crimes, his lieutenants must face trial, and his militia must be disbanded with the Iranians turned over for a trip to Gitmo. If negotiations can provide these things—fine. But all these things must happen. Or Sadr’s people must be killed in battle if they refuse to surrender and resist.
Our enemies must know there are consequences for opposing us. We can’t just let them go home and try again when we may be more vulnerable. We cannot let our friends see us flinch in the face of threats. Neutrals must see that our friends are protected and that our enemies die or languish in prison.
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“Chavez” (Posted
The battle over accepting the call of the Venezuelan people for a referendum on the thug Chavez continues. The AP report has a gem:
Chavez opponents accuse the president of becoming
increasingly autocratic and pitting rich against poor with
"revolutionary" rhetoric. Supporters say he is the first president in
decades to show concern for
Concern for the poor.
Yeah, Chavez loves the poor of Venezuala so much that he wants more of them.
As long as you say you love the poor, you can do anything and lead your poor to support any crime, and some will still laud you for your “concern.”
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“So What About that
We’ve been hearing about new
So what about the
M.T. Owens noted that the South Vietnamese showed they could defend their country with our help:
The proof lay in the 1972 Easter Offensive. This was the biggest
offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. The
Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units,
First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country
from
I thought I was right in the 1980s. I still do. Indeed, I have a bumper
sticker on my car that reads: "I don't know what happened. When I left, we
were winning!" There is growing evidence that this sentiment is not as
farfetched as some might think.
Yes. I too believed this in the 1980s. In 1982 (or ‘83 or
‘84, I forget), I had an undergraduate poli sci class and one class we were discussing
So when some say that
In time, I think that
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“Finish the Job” (Posted
We’re still in the process of ending the Sadr and Fallujah uprisings. Our enemies have not stopped us. We have stopped ourselves. We allow our enemies a respite to talk in Fallujah and to retreat in the areas held by Sadr’s thugs.
Steyn thinks (and I agree) that we are too worried about “rattling the teacups” of our enemies. Yes, counter-insurgency must be waged at the lowest level of force possible, but where our enemies gather in large numbers with military weapons, sending in the Bobbies should not be the option. As Steyn notes:
Look at those pictures of the atrocity in Fallujah:
the remains of four corpses, and a bunch of savages dancing around them. In all
those photographs, can you add up more than a hundred men? And half of them are
punk kids under 11. There are 300,000 people in that city. A few score are
depraved enough to cheer on the killers of four brave men; 299,900 of the
town's population were either disapproving or indifferent.
And in the Arab world, the indifferent are the biggest demographic.
They sit things out, they see which strong horse has jostled his way to the
head of the pack, and they go along with him. The Turks.
The British. The British-installed
king. The thug who murders the king. The thug who murders the thug who murders the king.
The passivity of the Arabs, the sensitivity of the coalition and the
defeatism of the media is a potentially disastrous combination. Rattling
teacups gets you a bad press from CNN and the BBC. But they give you a bad
press anyway. And in
The Iraqis will go with the winning side. And, though the Americans had
a bad week last week, the insurgents had a worse one, losing as many men in
seven days as
Look what our sensitivity and restraint has given us. Rumors of our violence outweigh our restraint. It is simply not possible for us to be restrained enough since our enemies will spread the vilest rumors about our bloodthirsty nature no matter how concerned we are to not rattle teacups. No matter how hard we try to avoid harming civilians. Better to fight hard (while taking care to minimize civilian casualties because we are better than our enemies) and win quickly since we will take the same amount of heat regardless of the actual facts. The key is ending the fighting with a win as soon as possible.
Let the people of
Moqtada Sadr's organization must be destroyed. Sadr must be captured or killed. If he hides in a mosque,
go in after him. We're not impressing our enemies with
our restraint - they play the religion card as the ace that never fails.
And
the parallel operations in the Sunni Triangle must be pursued to the complete
subjugation of Fallujah and the defeat of any
terrorist who raises a gun.
Our
president must make no mistake: Any "settlement," any halt short of
the annihilation of the killers who want to destroy the future of
Reality
is immaterial. In the
Oh, and Iran’s hand in supporting Sadr that Peters notes will aid in justifying our spring 2005 campaign to end the mullah’s regime in Tehran.
Crush our enemies. It’s bad enough we fought
If we don’t destroy them now, they’ll retreat, lick their wounds, and then they’ll be back for more. We are at war. Remember?
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“When You Start to Take Fallujah, …” (Posted
… then take Fallujah.
Fallujah
— 35 miles west of
More than 600 Iraqis have
been killed in the fighting in Fallujah since
fighting began early Monday, the head of the city's hospital said Sunday. Rafie al-Issawi said actual
number may be higher because there were reports of people being buried at home.
At least five Marines have
died in the fighting.
Members of the Iraqi
Governing Council were holding a second day of negotiations with city
representatives Sunday in an attempt to win the handover of Iraqis who killed
and mutilated four American civilians on March 31 and of other militants.
Hundreds of
So what are we doing with a ceasefire there? What is to talk about other than their surrender and why would they do that now? Why on Earth would we halt offensive operations to talk? If they want to talk, we can talk. But our Marines should be driving them back and killing them as we talk. That’s a negotiating position hard to beat. Surrender or die. Decide quickly while you can.
So what have we done now? Talking saves them since we halt offensive operations. What kind of incentive do they have to surrender? Just talking keeps them alive!
Yes, the heavy combat is unsettling to some. But when something is unsettling, you get it over with fast—not drag it out.
We’ve set a very bad precedent by treating the Baathist thugs as negotiating partners with stature. We’re killing them and losing but a fraction of the troops in the process. We should not let up until we win. Yes, when the ceasefire breaks down, we will use our skilled Marines and kill at the same unbalanced ratio. Yet kill-ratios are meaningless in isolation. Our national resolve depends on visibly winning, and our dead are the only dead that count when our public opinion is polled. Win quickly. Break the Baathists. Clamp down on the city and sift it for any Baathists and any Islamists who broke and melted into the population.
Take Fallujah. (Strategypage doesn’t seem to be as worried about the negotiations in Fallujah, I should note. I disagree but I note it. They are also heartened by the apparent increase in Iraqi willingness to fight the thugs in response to this mini-crisis. As I’ll mention in a bit, this is key)
Oh, and we need a lot more of the President
defending our cause in
But the call for more troops, as some in this article argue for, is misguided. Sure, hold over some of the troops scheduled to depart until we tamp this surge down. But I disagree strongly that we need more troops. We have enough, and if we send more we do two things.
One, we reduce the pressure on the Iraqis to fight for themselves. It would be a tremendous mistake to reverse the trend toward more Iraqis under arms taking more responsibility for fighting the Baathists, Sadr’s goons, and Islamists. We would be needlessly Americanizing the fight when we must put a local face on it as much as possible, with our troops pulling back into the background as soon as we can, where we can.
This relates to the second problem of increasing our troop
strength—we’d be escalating expectations of committing more
Pretty soon we’ll have the Samarra
Umpires Association as our troops need recreation and as the numbers of
baseball teams grow to require an actual association of military umpires to
referee the games! (This did happen in
Reduce troop levels as soon as we can, relying on Iraqis to
endure most casualties, and our public will accept lengthy commitments. Like
Finally, when we do go after Sadr’s forces, having waited for the Islamic holiday to end so civilians will clear the area, do it as fast as possible (with our customary care for reducing civilian damage, of course). We appear confident of rapid success when we do strike:
About 1,000
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), deputy chief of
"It is our assessment
that the al-Sadr militia doesn't have the capability
to conduct prolonged offensive operations," he told reporters in
Yes, we should easily crush his forces. But I would have one caution: if Iranian Pasdaran goons have bolstered Sadr’s band of idiots, they could die hard. Perhaps not skillfully, but they may not break and run when confronted. There could be pockets of tough resistance. Prepare mentally for a hard fight. Be grateful if it turns out easy. And for Pete’s sake, crush them—don’t halt the offensive to negotiate once we start.
The same principle applies: when you begin to destroy Sadr, destroy Sadr.
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“The Sadr Threat” (Posted
Amazingly, one degreed fellow thinks our side needs to negotiate with Sadr!
Negotiate? With a man who couldn’t get as many votes as
Ralph Nader in a free election? A man who relies on
Iranian mullahs for money and advice? A man who uses murder and terror to build
a little fiefdom? A man who is in open—albeit militarily weak—revolt against
us? A man who is willing to ally with the Baathists?
Negotiate with that scum? At what point in a person’s long pursuit of a PhD
does all sense just leach out? And this is one of the people teaching about the
Oh. And here’s the really good part:
Any
compromise will also require implicit recognition by all parties that Mr. Sadr's supporters will be allowed to participate in Iraqi
politics just as the Shiite organization Hezbollah does in
Creating an Iraqi Hezbollah may be in somebody’s interest but it sure as Hell isn’t in our interest or in the interest of the Iraqi people.
Sistani doesn’t need any legitimacy and Sadr wouldn’t provide it if he did—God forbid we should reach that point. Sadr does and negotiating with him would give him the credibility he failed to build in the last year. Negotiating with him would teach everybody that the rule of the gun and the mob has not been replaced by rule of law.
My God, our problem is that our enemies don’t fear us enough and our friends can’t count on us to destroy our enemies, and the neutrals are getting the wrong ideas when they see how we treat our enemies too gently and how our friends worry about our commitment.
Brooks is cooler and feels we must get Sadr. Carefully to avoid offending Shia sensibilities, but get him. And Brooks is pleased that the government is not panicking even as some see disaster looming and wish to retreat as fast as possible:
This
week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert
Byrd were ranting that
Maybe
we should calm down a bit. I've spent the last few days talking with people
who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We're
at a perilous moment in Iraqi history, but the situation is not collapsing.
We're in the middle of a battle. It's a battle against people who vehemently
oppose a democratic
Most
important, leadership in the
Support our Iraqi friends so they will arrest Sadr, try him, and let him rot in an Iraqi prison.
And aim for the June 30 transition without flinching.
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“Chinese Air Power” (Posted
The Chinese are improving their ability to control the skies
over the
So, as early as 2006 the Chinese will have better air power. Intensive training of pilots and ground personnel looks like gearing up for action. Coupled with rapid Chinese improvements in amphibious capabilities (described as a “crash” building program), the possibility that China’s first aircraft carrier will be ready by 2006—with two more to follow quickly, and the fact that at best Taiwan’s defenses will only start to improve by the end of the decade, and we have a serious window of opportunity for the Chinese to take Taiwan in the latter half of this decade. The Peking Olympics are scheduled to be held in 2008.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat myself here, but 2008
right before the Olympics would be a great time for the Chinese to launch a
surprise offensive to capture
And by all means, move more forces to the Pacific and
instill a sense of urgency in the Taiwanese who seem oblivious to the threat
even as they hint at independence which are fighting words to
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“European Allies” (Posted
Sometimes I am frustrated the Europeans don’t seem to feel the urgency of the war on terror. Sure, they help us in the quiet war on cells and funding, but when it comes to operations designed to break the Islamists and keep them from getting weapons that can be provided by hostile states (like Iraq or North Korea or Iran), or even just publicly expressing support, they are lagging in their efforts.
Yet their holding back is not protecting them. The war on terror may be focused on Europe as the terrorists look to attack targets there (via Donald Sensing):
"Europe is
now clearly in the spotlight of terrorism," said Daniel Keohane, a security and defense expert at the Center for
European Reform in London who says it is highly probable that Al Qaeda was behind the Madrid bombing. "It is the
greatest terrorist threat the Continent has ever faced."
I thought that refusing to get involved in
In a related calculation, the Turks refused to participate
in the Iraq War or even to let us attack
Foreign Minister Michel Barnier
told parliament Wednesday that
“Current circumstances” of course meaning
“
Hey, it happens. The Turks trusted the French. They F’d up. Join the club. Or not, actually.
But back to the original point. The
Europeans are not joining up like I’d expect allies to do.
Yet it is hard for me to maintain anger. They are sovereign. And they help us when they can and when they think they share the danger. Is this maddening? Yes. But I imagine the French and British would have liked our help from 1914 to 1917 and from 1939 to 1941. In each war, domestic considerations of what was in our interest and what we could contribute kept us from opposing what the Europeans felt was an obvious danger. We came around in time. I trust that in time our allies will come around, too.
Heck, I’d be happy if more of my fellow citizens felt we are at war.
And until our friends and allies do come around, I will not
gloat when they suffer losses to the new Islamist focus on
Thank you very much for your kind message and support during this
difficult time.
The American People have shown their compassion and feelings of
solidarity toward those who have suffered he horror of
the March 11 terrorist attacks. The citizens of
Even when we think the Europeans are idiots for refusing to fight as hard as we’d like them too, their suffering should not ever be a reason to gloat. Our compassion and solidarity will be more effective than our scorn.
This will be a long war, remember. The Coalition of the Willing will change over time as nations enter and leave based on their needs. In the end, we will win. Of that I am certain.
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“Sunni-Shia
NPR today seemed to be in a tizzy of describing a widening Sunni-Shia uprising. I actually had to switch it off this morning driving to work.
A Sunni-Shia alliance idea is
far-fetched. Sadr and the Baathists
are allying for their own purposes and not for a grand resistance between the
branches of Islam. The Sunnis know they need the Shias
to revolt if the Sunnis are to have a chance at getting the
Sadr is allying with Sunnis because Shias won’t help him in sufficient numbers. If Shias would help him, he’d rely on Shia help.
And I sincerely doubt that Shias generally would risk an alliance with the Sunnis even if they wanted us out. The Shias have lost out to the Sunnis for four centuries despite outnumbering the Sunnis by a good margin. Why ally with them to fight us when all they have to do is wait until June 30 and they’ll begin to get power through the ballot box?
But more important for our purposes, we should advertise the Sunni-Sadr link! Sunnis killed the elder Sadr and now the good-for-nothing thug son would ally with them. The nutjob son would betray the memory of his father and his own Shia people and risk Sunni domination for another four centuries.
Yeah, that’s what I’d be spreading were I god of the CPA.
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“Horn of
Another gem from Strategypage:
The CJTF-HOA musters between 1,300 and 1,600 task force personnel based
at the 88-acre
B Company was recently trained by the Marines in Tactical Recovery of
Aircraft and Personnel (TRAP) tactics, which prepares the unit's three platoons for fast-paced insertion and exertion of
troops to retrieve assets in hostile situations.
Although the article describes the Horn mission as a “hearts and minds” oriented mission, training B company in TRAP seems significant to me. Are we expecting lots of helicopters and aircraft to be criss-crossing the region soon? In hostile situations?
I still expect some offensive action in the Horn region before summer begins.
Otherwise, why train a unit in TRAP when it is mainly there to protect the base?
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“Counter-Attack or Desperation?” (Posted
First of all, relax, this isn’t the Sepoy
Mutiny. I hate to see our troops taking casualties like this but our
enemies have simply counter-attacked. They do that. I wish the Marines the best
in this battle. They are getting it rough right out of the gates in their return
to
Second, it is important to see the Sadr revolt as a separate event from the Sunni counter-attack in Fallujah and Ramadi.
Sadr’s revolt is a desperate attempt to change the rules of a game he was losing. He wasn’t getting anywhere with threats and the Shias weren’t listening to him. He took money from foreigners and tried to lead the poor in revolt. Oh, and although I thought he was probably not a terrorist yet, I am wrong on that count:
Sadr was long suspected of using violence, and murder, against opponents. A
months long investigation last year, using Iraqi
police and detective, uncovered the details of Sadrs
use of death squads and terrorism against civilians, clerics and government
officials who opposed him. In the last week, members of these death squads were
arrested, and this apparently pushed Sadr to open
rebellion.
So I expect Sadr will lose big despite all the attention he is getting in the press. I am troubled we didn’t nail him earlier, but as long as he is painting a target on his chest now, we better not miss this chance to get him off the streets for good. And follow up in the areas we put down the Sadr revolt with civil affairs guys. Spread money around. Nobody likes having their neighborhoods torn up. Otherwise, resentment will build up.
Unfortunately, Sadr’s gamble coincides with a far more serious event: the crackdown on the Baathists in Fallujah and the attacks by Baathists against our forces in Ramadi, probably in support of the Fallujah fight:
Reports from Ramadi, near Fallujah, said dozens of Iraqis attacked a Marine position
near the governor's palace, a senior defense official said from
Heavy casualties were inflicted on the insurgents as well,
officials said. It was not immediately known who the attackers were, nor whether the attack was related to fighting under way in
nearby Fallujah.
Depending on the number of Ramadi
deaths, Tuesday's casualties could have brought the the
three-day total as high as about 30 Americans and more than 130 Iraqis killed
in the fighting.
On the Fallujah front, Marines
drove into the center of the Sunni city in heavy fighting before pulling back
before nightfall. The assault had been promised after the brutal killings and
mutilations of four American civilians there last week. Hospital officials said
eight Iraqis died Tuesday and 20 were wounded, including women and children.
Marines waged a fierce battle for hours Tuesday with gunmen
holed up in a residential neighborhood of Fallujah.
The military used a deadly AC-130 gunship to lay down a barrage of fire against
guerrillas, and commanders said Marines were holding an area several blocks
deep inside the city. At least two Marines were wounded.
I’ve always worried most about the former regime elements.
The foreign Islamists are easier to spot and can unite Iraqis against a foreign
threat to their future. The Baathist guys have
nowhere to go, however, so I always believed they were the center of gravity
for our pacification campaign. During the big unit drive on
Though we are winning the post-war fight overall, enemies do refuse to go along with the other side’s timetables for victory. I’ll not try to gloss this over since I am disappointed that we failed to lock down these two towns enough to prevent Baathists from massing enough to do the damage they are doing. It hurts to see our people dying like this now. Nonetheless, it is also true that the Baathists will be more vulnerable as they decide to fight. Perhaps they were fooled into thinking Sadr’s revolt represents a Shia uprising that the Sunnis must now join. In any case, despite the casualties, we can’t shrink from piling on them and killing as many as we can while they stand up and fight. Doing that will result in lower casualties in the long run.
Wars ebb and flow before the final victory is achieved. Enemies adapt or counter-attack. And forget about Sadr’s ploy. It will fail. The Sunni gambit is the one to watch. It will be awhile before we know whether this is a desperate attempt to drive us out before June 30 (or prevent us from turning over power to the Shias and Kurds on that date) or a real counter-attack that represents hidden strength.
I’m hoping for the former. I think we have the edge in this
war by a long shot. But a dedicated, well-armed and financed insurgency—even in
relatively small numbers—could go on for longer than I expected them to last
after
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“Meanwhile in the War on Terror” (Posted
We have not been so distracted by crushing Saddam and his nuclear ambitions that we couldn’t decimate al Qaeda, according to our State Department:
A
new cadre of untested Islamic militants is emerging to take the place of
leaders in Osama bin Laden's
al Qaeda network, which is now under
"catastrophic stress" as a result of international operations over
the past 30 months, the senior State Department counterterrorism official told
a House International Relations subcommittee yesterday.
At least 70 percent of al Qaeda's senior
leadership has been detained or killed since the
Fancy that, our allies have not been too offended by our
actions in
And in other news, the Spanish now find that the Islamists
are also mad about
"If these demands are not met, we will declare war on
you and ... convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like
rivers," the letter said.
Having run once, the Islamists have amazingly come to the conclusion that the Spanish will run again. Having compelled one retreat, they want another. Who’d have imagined that?
It all comes down to the rivers of our blood. That’s really all they want.
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“Support Friends. Defeat Enemies.”
(Posted
It really comes down to this in Iraq and although I’ve thought many of the anti-war side’s complaints about the war and occupation have been off the mark, one thing that I have been frustrated with is our refusal to support our friends and marginalize or defeat our enemies:
We should not be more willing to help our adversaries than our friends.
Democracy is about not only elections, but also about tolerance, compromise and
liberty. Twenty-five years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution in
We treat every group like peaceful rival factions of the League of Women Voters instead of recognizing that we’ve got some criminal gangs mixed in too. We fail to recognize that some factions want rule of law and some want mob rule. We bone headedly fail to support our friends.
Finally, at least, we are going after Sadr and his militia:
About bloody time. The arrest warrant was issued months ago by an Iraqi judge. Why we’ve waited this long I don’t know. It does help that he is wanted for murdering a Shia cleric in April 2003. That’s got to undermine is Shia solidarity schtick.
His militia of course blame us for the fighting on Sunday. We started it, they say, when they were just protesting peacefully:
A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led
occupation rippled across
Darned lucky for them they remembered to pack their RPGs and AKs along with the
slogan banners, eh? Otherwise they’d have been defenseless. I don’t think Sadr can win this battle—too many Shias
don’t like him—but we let him get strong enough to challenge us. I’m mad that
we treated him with kid gloves since
Support our friends—with money, access to the government, and seats at the table. Defeat our enemies—by marginalizing them politically and if they fight us, ruthlessly crush them.
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“Deterring What Islamists Want” (Posted
Sadr may not be a
terrorist—yet—but he is not the right type to wield power in
"For the past 11 months,
I’m not talking about a massacre here, just contain his supporters and if they initiate violence, target those with guns or those doing the attacking. The protesters should be contained at the lowest level of violence possible. Defend with lethal violence only targets worthy of defending. That is, if they want to torch a 7-11, it isn’t worth killing one of them. If they try to torch a police station, then defend it. That’s how the National Guard taught me crowd control. Let them blow off steam—it should be legal to protest. Just arrest those who are violent and if they make a street battle of it over a worthwhile target, hit the gun wielders with focused lethal violence.
Violence should not lead to victories in a new
And since I wrote the above, we lost 7 dead fighting Sadr’s people who used military weapons to attack Iraqi police stations. Sadr is not just an opposition leader—he’s a combatant with his own militia and must be defeated. We’ve treated him with kid gloves for too long.
Incidents like this are tough. Seven of our soldiers dead all at once. And the urge to strike back is high. But we have to fight smart. Don’t drive friendly people neutral and neutral people hostile by flailing about and killing innocents. Yet doing nothing only emboldens Sadr. And its effects can go wider, too. Neutral people can go hostile by seeing our weakness. And the friendly can go neutral if they see us unwilling to confront our enemies. We have to go after Sadr and his organization. Quietly. But hard. A summer in Gitmo might be just what Sadr needs. And some jail time for his underlings. And US snipers for his arms-toting militiamen.
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“What the Islamists Want” (Posted
The Spanish have not been able to
surrender fast enough as the terrorists up their goals in the face of a
retreating
The terrorists seem to know something that I’ve harped on—when you have an enemy beaten, pursue them until they are utterly destroyed and defeated. Never ever let them up off the mat once they are down.
Let’s see, the Islamists have a choice between hitting
The Spanish are in for a hard summer if it’s a race between their appeasing and their enemies’ murderous anger.
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“Deterrence” (Posted
The amazing debate that will not die continues. I’m not
talking about any particular article or anything, just the mind boggling debate
that I see in many places and contexts over whether to invade
What gets me is the periodic, “by invading
First of all, what do those who say we should have dealt
with
So what could “dealing with” these greater threats meant? I know, in an ideal world of the hard left that would mean showering these states with money, apologies, and “peaceful” nuclear technology (we are the only nation not to be trusted with nuclear power or weapons, apparently), but let’s assume that this surrender policy is off the table for now.
Inevitably, dealing with
The anti-war left has said that they are in favor of it (now that the Cold War is over, of course) rather than using our military to prevent nuclear strikes on our homeland. Groups like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have argued we could deter and that if deterrence failed, we would have retaliation to ball back on. My God, the very idea of missile defense is horrifying to the neo deterrence crowd. But that’s another rant.
First of all, as people who hated deterrence during the Cold War, preferring to—in its extreme variations—totally disarm unilaterally to show a good example (or just partially disarm for the mainstream left), their conversion to the value of deterrence is not comforting. I’m a little suspicious you might say.
Second, assuming that their conversion is real, their position accepts that we should allow our looniest enemies to gain the means to strike us with nuclear weapons. Our strategy of going after known enemies to prevent them from getting nukes is to be tossed out in favor of a strategy that assumes they love life as much as we do, and that they are in fact deterrable. We must assume that nuclear-armed Islamist enemies don’t believe that we are too weak to respond in kind and don’t believe we would collapse if struck with a nuclear weapon. This deterrence strategy assumes that Islamists don’t believe that losing 10% or even 90% of the Moslem community (which is so filled with the unpure anyway that maybe they think Islam can use a good “cleansing”) is a good price to pay for destroying the power of the infidels. Sadly, by counting on deterrence rather than prevention, we increase the odds that we will face a nuclear attack by an enemy that is not deterred by our nuclear arsenal because they think us weak, or think Allah will bless them with our destruction, or whatever. A bunch of mad people without nukes are obviously less likely to nuke us than a less-mad crowd with nukes.
But let’s go on with the logic of enforcing deterrence. If we are struck with a nuclear weapon, the left’s love of deterrence has led many of them to say we would retaliate in kind if deterrence failed. That has always kind of floored me. I mean, they think it is morally superior to destroy an enemy with a nuclear device after we’ve been hit with one rather than wage non-nuclear war to stop a nut case from getting that bomb? But aside from that, would the neo deterrence left really advocate using a nuclear weapon in response to a nuclear attack on us?
The general “retaliate” mantra isn’t enough. Against whom would they retaliate? Let’s assume we know who did it—or who supplied the nuke. Would we reply by destroying a city in the enemy state? Would we destroy a major military unit or base of the offending state? I have to say that even I would shudder at the idea of slaughtering a hundred thousand or a million civilians in an enemy state to reply to the loss of tens of thousands of our people. Many of those people would be enemies of that state anyway and so we’d be killing opponents of the regime. I would not want to just slaughter civilians even to maintain deterrence.
But we would have to reply. And with nukes. A robust conventional JDAM campaign would not be enough. Even overthrowing the guilty regime after we were nuked would not maintain deterrence. We’d have to use nukes and kill tens of thousands, too. A symbolic detonation in a remote area would just symbolize our weakness. So we’d need to target the capital palace with very small penetrating nukes to destroy the seat of government and those directly responsible without killing too many civilians and then send several nukes against major pillars of the regime’s loyal military. This to kill numbers and to make sure the deaths accomplished something like weakening the regime and not just retaliation.
Then, we’d also have to make sure the government was overthrown so it wouldn’t try to come back at us again when it gets more nukes.
But the basic point is that to defend the idea that we can deter future nuclear strikes on us, we’d have to use nukes if we faced an enemy that was not deterred the first time. And that is the problem with the anti-war side’s professed love of deterrence. I just don’t believe them.
I don’t think the neo deterrence left would accept that we must retaliate with nuclear weapons under any circumstances up to and including the loss of multiple American cities to nuclear attack. In the end, they think we face mirror images of ourselves who will of course never use nuclear weapons. They don’t really believe they’d ever have to support retaliation.
Never mind that some mullahs in
No, the neo deterrence left would argue that enough had died already. Why lower ourselves to revenge? Why kill innocents separate from the regime. Won’t the dreaded cycle of violence continue? What did we do to provoke this anyway? Shouldn’t we give even larger tribute to the enemy as sincere shows of our sorrow? And how sure are we really that we know for sure who did it? Would we kill thousands because we think we know who did it? Let’s investigate for a few years…
Really, the left’s advocacy of deterrence is just a
defensible alternative to preemption for the left as long as the left never has
to contemplate defending deterrence. Once we fall back to deterrence, the left
would again retreat to doing nothing. The only objective is to prevent a more
forceful alternative. They just want to deter the
Ok, I think I started rambling about four paragraphs ago. You get my drift. Time to just stop.
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“What Causes Islamist Terrorism” (Posted
Via Andrew Sullivan,
this lovely piece
of work about Islamists ranting about their grievances and their
determination to kill us. One lovely “spiritual leader” in
"They warned them in
To all those who say our invasion of
Yet the historically challenged nutball thinks the latter two caused the former.
So what do we do to appease them? Remind me again, please.
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“I’m
Sure This Isn’t a Cover Up” (Posted
Now that some are questioning the UN’s responsibility for standing
by during the 1994
A fire swept through an evidence room at the
U.N. tribunal for
Tragic accident, I’m sure. And good luck that the fire didn’t touch any key documents—just the worthless ones.
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“Creating Islamists” (Posted
So by invading
Here’s a good article refuting that:
The afterword
of Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The
Age of Sacred Terror, which is easily the best book about the rise of
bin Ladenism and the Clinton administration's
response to it, tells us the following: "U.S. officials have spoken of
'tens of thousands' of individuals who were trained in the camps of
Afghanistan, and Germany's intelligence chief put the number at seventy thousand,
though many were trained as soldiers to fight alongside the Taliban, not as
terrorists. Still the number of operatives at large is probably multiples
greater than that on any other terrorist group in memory."
Benjamin and Simon were
once the director and senior director for counterterrorism in the Clinton
administration's National Security Council, and they, too, are
highly critical of the Bush administration. I strongly suspect the numbers
above are grossly exaggerated. When I visited Ahmed Shah Massoud,
the legendary Tajik leader of the
But, for the sake of
argument, let's accept the numbers suggested by Benjamin and Simon. In other
words, during the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, when the
So, during the best of
years--or at least, according to Clarke and Kerry, vastly better years than
what followed--al Qaeda grew from scratch to an
umbrella organization, drawing into its apocalyptic designs holy warriors from
the Middle East, America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Orient. These
were the years when bin Laden promised the faithful that they, not the
Americans, were the "stronger horse."
And now, according to
the "realists" and antiwar Democrats, the Bush administration has
made things worse. It's theoretically possible, of course. It's possible the
I quote at length because I really do get tired of the
repeated claim that by fighting against Islamists and destroying those who the
Islamists hold out as heroes defying
Also note that the Persian Gulf War pissed them off. This 1991 war of the exemplary coalition and UN approval. The war with French participation (on our side). The war that liberated conquered Moslems from an invader that stripped the country of valuables like bank robbers on a heist. Even this war made the Islamists mad.
One has to ask, what doesn’t make the Islamists mad at us? And another question must be asked, why should we care?
Kill them. Arrest them. Doesn’t much matter to me. Just take the fight to them. And don’t let up.
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“Most Interesting” (Posted
So, if you have a UN-sanctioned coalition to defeat a ruthless dictator all will be well. Legitimacy will be assured. That’s what we are told these days.
Consider this woman in South Korea who recently passed away:
The couple were among thousands of leftist farmers who
believed in North Korea's promised "liberation" from landlords and
took up arms in Chiri's thick forests and jagged
ravines. They kept fighting, long after North Korean troops retreated and even
after the Korean War ended in 1953 with an uneasy truce.
Her husband died in battle in 1952. By 1955, most of the
Chung's life on the run ended in a shootout with police on
Nov. 12, 1963. "Disoriented communist bandit caught!" read headlines
at the time. Chung was wounded in the gunbattle and
lost her right leg.
With her arrest,
Imagine that, the war ended in 1953 but it wasn’t until two
years later that most of the insurgents had been killed or captured. And it
took ten years before the government could finally say the insurgents were
gone. And this in a country that was saved by a
UN-authorized coalition and that had UN troops in the country all that time.
Sure, they were US troops after the war, but they had the authority of the UN.
And a point to remember is that the South Koreans did the fighting. While
The passage of time makes all our past accomplishments seem
easy and preordained—in contrast to the present messy uncertainty. Post-World
War II Europe and
I did not know this detail.
Sometimes I think that the post-war in
One day
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“Fallujah—the Next Day” (Posted
Peters is
good. I may disagree with his continued emphasis on complaining about our
troops levels. While true in the short run after the fall of
In time, we rebuilt Iraqi security forces and the numbers looked just fine to me according to my back of the envelope calculations.
But Peters emphasizes what I noted about our failure to crack down on Fallujah:
Fifth
(and related), when the cities of the Sunni Triangle, such as Fallujah, Ramadi or Tikrit, engaged in acts of terror, we needed to make an
example of one of them to demonstrate our power and resolve to the others.
He also notes that the men and boys who committed atrocities against our dead had finally found American targets they could take on with some confidence of victory:
Confident
enemies do not drag bodies through the streets and mutilate corpses. The grim
display in Fallujah was a symbol of weakness, not a
sign of strength.
Kid gloves where we can. Most Iraqis deserve our help, despite the widely televised images of localized rage.
Iron fist where we must. Delenda est Fallujah.
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“I Aspire to Rants Like This” (Posted
Bravo. I stand in awe.
Just go read Lileks. The latter part.
Amazing what does and does not anger the world, eh?
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“Axis of El Vil Cooperation” (Posted
A good Strategypage description of the Cuban-Venezuelan alliance:
Three years ago, Chavez made a deal with
Oh, we know that dictators have friends. Just look to Hollywood or college faculty rooms. You just have to be the right kind of dictator.
Of special note is the description of the so-called medical brigades. Yes, they do provide medicine, but with political minders well represented in the brigades, the purpose is to promote revolutionary communist zeal in the host country.
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