iraq
vietnam on internet time

OFFENSE AND DEFENSE
The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
by Seymour M. Hersh

According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. (The military men say that the vehicles that they do have have been pushed too far and are malfunctioning.) Supply lines—inevitably, they say—have become overextended and vulnerable to attack, creating shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition. Pentagon officers spoke contemptuously of the Administration’s optimistic press briefings. “It’s a stalemate now,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers are going to run out of jdams”—the satellite-guided bombs that have been striking targets in Baghdad and elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy. Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. “The Marines are worried as hell,” the former intelligence official went on. “They’re all committed, with no reserves, and they’ve never run the lavs”—light armored vehicles—“as long and as hard” as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. “The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.”

The 4th Infantry Division—the Army’s most modern mechanized division—whose equipment spent weeks waiting in the Mediterranean before being diverted to the overtaxed American port in Kuwait, is not expected to be operational until the end of April. The 1st Cavalry Division, in Texas, is ready to ship out, the planner said, but by sea it will take twenty-three days to reach Kuwait. “All we have now is front-line positions,” the former intelligence official told me. “Everything else is missing.”
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  thanks to Talking Points Memo

“The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.” What the hell is that? It seems that our front lines may not hold, much less invade Baghdad.

"A Lack of Character"

The big issue this week deals with the underlining problem with the military, and perhaps with the strategic political scene — a lack of character. Today, it is more important to pursue a personal agenda—promoting one’s career—at any cost to those around you and to the organization, rather than admit the need for adjustment based on changing conditions. This selfish act violates an understanding of Grand Strategy and Strategy which requires patience and an enlightened understanding of the complexities of war.  But, my purpose is not to address political issues. I only attest to understand the military issues.

OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) and the upper echelons of the Army are now in denial as to the plan, and the surprise that the Iraqis would fight as hard as they have.  Of course, the use of the words “terrorists,” “thugs” and other words to dehumanize these techniques are to sell an ignorant public that these techniques are wrong. But as always, a blunt soldier, in the 3 ID (infantry division) said it best on Thursday when asked what he thought about the Iraqis tactics in response to U.S. methods, “Well we have all the firepower, technology and airpower," he said. "I cannot blame them for fighting this way, they have to find a way to respond.” It is obvious from this statement that the soldiers and marines who are dealing with the fighting understand the nature of 4th generation warfare more than those paid the big bucks to make decisions.

I now surmise that the plan initially used was based on a personal agenda. Rumsfeld surrounds himself with people who believe in technology first, ideas second, and people last. This of course means more investment in weapons systems, which in turn benefit the contractors and those in the inner circle that seek jobs with these companies.

Let’s first start with the denials of the war plan being off track.
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Baghdad assault 'delayed for up to 40 days'

THE United States-led advance on Baghdad appeared to have been placed firmly on hold yesterday after frontline units reported orders to settle into their positions for the next 35 to 40 days.
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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer

An astonishing event is about to happen. For the first time in modern history a city with the population of London is preparing to resist assault from a land army. The outcome of such a struggle is wholly imponderable. Cities hate soldiers. Sometimes they throw them kisses. More often they throw them grenades. Defiant cities are near impossible to conquer.

It is inconceivable that American and British forces will simply turn from Baghdad and go home. Since the death and destruction involved in an assault could be appalling, any humanitarian must fervently hope that the Iraqi authorities sue for peace or President Saddam Hussein suffers a putsch. At present there is little prospect of either.

In the past two weeks I must have seen a hundred maps, diagrams, military handouts and computer graphics. I have watched men in fatigues with whizz-bang videos of soaring missiles and exploding tanks. Each explains how war is won in the open. Not one explained how Baghdad is to be defeated. The assumption is that it will somehow just fold. Yet Baghdad is where Saddam is and apparently means to stay. For victory to be declared, it must be conquered.

I have no doubt why Baghdad is never discussed. War in its streets is too awful to contemplate. No soldiers are more skilled at urban fighting than the British. Yet they are finding it hard to pacify even “friendly” Basra. The city appears to have been terrorised into defiance by units of Saddamist irregulars. Students of this strategy need look no further than the Red Army commissars in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. They murdered an entire division of their own side to make them fight, but they won. British units round Basra have had to resort to long-range bombing and shelling, hoping that this will inspire the oppressed citizens to rise against the irregulars, somehow.
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  thanks to BookNotes

Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.

That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.

The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.

In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage.

The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs  – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war.

The Bush Strategy

Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal. Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.
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US Said Prepared to Pay 'High Price' to Oust Saddam

The United States is prepared to pay a "very high price" in terms of casualties to capture Baghdad and oust President Saddam Hussein, a senior official of the U.S. Central Command said Monday.

"We're prepared to pay a very high price because we are not going to do anything other than ensure that this regime goes away," the official told reporters, adding that U.S. casualties in the 12-day-old war had so far been "fairly" light.

If that means there will be a lot of casualties, then there will be a lot of casualties," said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named.

Referring to nights in World War II "when we'd lose 1,000 people," he added: "There will come a time maybe when things are going to be much more shocking."
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  thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse

"We're prepared to pay a very high price because we are not going to do anything other than ensure that this regime goes away," the official told reporters, adding that U.S. casualties in the 12-day-old war had so far been "fairly" light. Are these people insane? Do they think the American public is going to stand for losing over a 1,000 people in a day? What have they got in store for us? I'm afraid, very afraid. My only hope is that this insanity collapses before too many more people die. We need to get out of there and we need to do it as fast as we can. The only consolation is that this is not going to drag on for years like Vietnam did. It's going to end much sooner than that. I'm afraid that the fallout from this will be more than political. Anyone arrogant enough to commit our troops like this, undermanned and under equipped, will be desperate enough to use the nuclear option. Whatever happens, we're fucked.