| Monday
March 31, 2003
The war continues, and I am behind in my work. There was a lot of mail
over the weekend, and other comments. See the weekend's Mail
and View.
Monday
Morning Quarterbacking
Thoughts at breakfast this morning. This is ALL PURE SPECULATION. I
have absolutely no sources the rest of you do not have.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and as a result one
develops flexible plans and troops who can carry them out. This war
illustrates that.
It wasn't supposed to start until the 4th Infantry was in place. That
was supposed to come in from the north, bypass the Kurds, and secure the
northern oil fields without having to use the Kurdish forces. This would
make life easier for Turkey, as well as for us, and the Turkish government
understood this. Unfortunately, the Turkish Parliament wasn't in on the
game, and for various reasons including, among some Members, simple greed,
and among others anti-Americanism, the vote to allow the 4th to go through
Turkey got a plurality but not the majority their constitution requires.
The best US division was stuck on ships and couldn't be in action for at
least a week.
This was grim news, because the 4th was integral to the original
"Shock and Awe" campaign plan. With the 4th closing from the
north, Saddam would be forced to redeploy his elite forces: and any time
they move they can be seen and are vulnerable to air attack. If they
didn't move the 4th sweeps to Baghdad.
Baghdad is the center of gravity, as Paris was in the Franco-Prussian
war (see mail). That has been
clear from the beginning.
We had not fully digested the fact that the 4th wasn't going to be in
action for at least a week when the intelligence report came in: Saddam
and his sons were in a known location and we could probably take them out.
The war plan changed. This was a thrilling opportunity: decapitate the
snake, Saddam is gone, the war objective is achieved, we negotiate with
his successors, and all is well, and all is well.
The missiles were sent in. Some 30 of them. Alas, they didn't get him
although they probably did wound him and kill one of the sons, as well as
some of his key people. But why we did not send in a new missile every 5
minutes for the next four hours I do not know. Yes, it would have killed
emergency service people, and that would be bad public relations; but it
would also have made sure that Saddam was dead, dead, dead, which was the
only justification for starting the war while we were not yet ready to do
it.
Lesson: if you think a platoon will do the job, send a regiment. A
lesson every military man has learned (although they usually find
themselves unable to profit from the knowledge: the more usual situation
is that you are sure you need a battalion but you only have a company);
but a lesson the politicians have never learned. Witness the bootless
"graduated escalation" of McNamara's days. The Marine rule for a
gunfight is "Bring a gun. Bring two guns. If you have friends with
guns bring them. If you have friends without guns go get them some guns
and bring them." The politician rule is "no unnecessary
damage," and I would bet some money that in the discussion
authorizing the strike on Saddam the military people suggested strikes
timed to take out the emergency service responses, and the civilians were
horrified. That's speculation, but I would bet on it.
So: the strike started prematurely, and because hopes ran high, it
wasn't part of the devastating attack that would leave Iraq blind and
confused and reeling: "Shock and awe." There was shock but not
much, and no awe at all, other than the reaction back here when it was
learned that Saddam survived: "Aw, sh--:" Why we didn't have
stealth craft loitering in the area to take out survivors I have dealt
with above.
Now the war has started. Our best division is a week away, and we have
nothing going in the North, Nothing at all, because we had planned on
keeping the Kurds out of the fight, and thus we weren't in there arming
and encouraging them, and we didn't have them seize airfields. There was
absolutely no threat to Baghdad from the north.
Meanwhile, we had started the war, and the forces in the south were
sent forward to probe the enemy's defenses. Those turned out to be
brittle; in many cases non-existent. The probes went forward, and forward,
and forward, and at a walk! At at trot! At a gallop! Onward! Armies
do that. Generals do that. Push where things give.
Now we are moving forward faster than Grant's infantry, and much like
Vicksburg we have cut ourselves off from our supplies, keep them running,
don't let them look back. And it's working.
We didn't need the shock and awe! We're going in. We're taking ground
faster than Subutai and Genghis Kahn! On to Baghdad!
And that worked pretty darned well. Eventually we ran into some
resistance, and we lost a few people along the supply line. TV shots of US
POW's and US dead, including displays of a grinning Arab manipulating
American corpses shot in the head after their pants had been pulled down,
took a lot of the triumph out of it. The losses were not militarily
significant but they were very much politically significant.
Meanwhile the air war had been surgical and clean, and the Iraqis began
to think "Why that's not so bad." Which is what usually happens
in a siege. Once the initial shock is over, a kind of fatalism sets in.
Shock and Awe didn't work because we didn't apply it. We didn't apply it
because we seemed to be winning without it, and the politicians have an
understandable -- indeed admirable -- reluctance to engage in needless
destruction. If we can take Iraq without destroying it, then do so.
Military cautions were drowned out by the amazing early successes.
And here we are. We have the airfields in the north courtesy of the
parachute troops. Airborne! Sir! We have positions around the Gap. We
encircle Baghdad, and if the Republican Guard shows itself, it dies. Our
fight is now against patriotic irregulars and Ba'ath thugs, patriotic
militia and Saddam death squads, honorable enemies whom we will need to
rebuild a decent government over there mixed in with despicable vermin to
be eliminated on sight. All mixed together.
Had the original Shock and Awe campaign taken place, we might well have
got mass defections and capitulations as troops cut off from command,
unable to see Iraqi TV, unable to send reports or receive orders, made the
best deals they could to avoid being pounded into jelly. The regular units
were ready to surrender, and even the outer circle of elites were a bit
shaky and would have been a lot more so under continuous air attack.
We didn't do that. We were lured into trying it on the cheap, 30 cruise
missiles and a couple of earth penetrators and hurrah! The War is Over!
That didn't work. And we didn't try the original war plan.
Fortunately we have enough force in place, and good enough troops, to
be able to make a victory out of a bunch of mistakes. God usually is on
the side of the best battalions. War of maneuver works.
But it is often followed by prolonged sieges. Stalingrad, Moscow,
Leningrad come mind. Or Paris.
What Would I Have Done?
I would have authorized the attack on Saddam that opened the war, but I
would have said, "Make sure. Strike that place every five minutes for
hours. Hit it, hit it again. And again. Let it be a monument to our Ground
Zero."
And then I would have waited, played with them a bit, tried to get the
4th in place; and when I restarted the war I would have done it with the
full Shock and Awe campaign. But that's me, and I wasn't there, and even
with Monday Morning hindsight I can't say my plan would be better than
what was done.
The army has done well, more ground taken with fewer casualties than
any campaign in history as far as I can remember. And the Republican Guard
has yet to be engaged with the full might of the Anglo-American military.
They'll learn. When the Americans and the Brits go to war in partnership
we win. It may take a while. But we win. One good rule in warfare: don't
fight an Anglo-American alliance.
What's Critical?
The situation in the North is critical, not because anything threatens
us yet, but because we had to arm and encourage the Kurds, and do it with
no army there to control them.
The way you make war using client states is to have an army capable of
wiping out the client standing behind the front, preferably occupying
their capital city and holding their king hostage. We don't have that. We
have Special Forces up there. They can help the Kurds win. They can't
fight the Kurds. They have opened the bottle and the djinn has emerged.
I would not myself want to be in the shoes of the Turkish Prime
Minister.
And this just in:
Subject: By the waters of Babylon.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A58618-2003Mar31.html
Roland Dobbins
Debka was unavailable for a while but seems OK now. No idea of what
happened.
If we are looking for necks to wring:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common
/story_page/0,5478,6206548%5E663,00.html
Subject: Important new security RFC posted
>> ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3514.txt
Roland Dobbins
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