Dopers who know about military stuff, what do you think about the "surge"?

Great Debates
21

Sam, you’re going to have to persuade me on this one. First of all, I don’t see a ton of evidence that Iran and Syria are providing lots of support to the insurgency. Secondly, I don’t necessarily buy the contention that Syria and Iran don’t have an interest in a stable Iraq. There are 700,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria, a huge strain for that country. Iran would presumably love to see a stable Shi’ite-governed Iraq, no?

To return to the subject of the OP, let’s assume that 20,000 additional troops can actually control the level of violence in Baghdad. But then what? I know there’s this theory floated by Bush that then suddenly public-works projects can go forward, reconstruction can go forward, politicial reconciliation can happen, and all will be hunky-dory. I think that’s implausible. Just tamping the violence down doesn’t suddenly make Sunni and Shia love each other, doesn’t give Baghdad more than 6 hours of electricity a day, doesn’t make the hospitals work, etc., etc. You need some stability for years to achieve that level of reconstruction.

And unfortunately, as soon as violence is tamped down, there’s a motive for U.S. troops to be pulled back. And when that happens, violence rears its ugly head once again.

In short, a short-term troop surge ain’t going to work in a big-picture sense, even if it works in a temporary military sense – and even that is doubtful.

22

To quote the Red Bull guy: Brilliant!

Is this similar to what happened with the Alaskan oil pipeline? Don’t Alaskans get regular oil payments (or dividends or tax breaks), just for being Alaskans? It must work, because I can’t remember the last time I heard about a suicide bomb in Juneau or Anchorage.

One of the parts of the new plan that I really don’t understand is the proposal to take troops and put them out there 24/7, to “secure the neighborhoods”. Instead of patrolling and returning to base, it sounds like they’ll be living among the populace. How is that not going from moving targets to stationary targets?

How will that work? Will they commandeer Iraqi buildings? Live with Iraqi families? Oh dear.

If I were an insurgent, nothing about this new “policy” would make me change anything I’m doing.

23

Someone else might already have posted this but here goes.

The whole idea behind this new approach is that the Iraq army will be the first line assault force in combatting those who are doing the killing. This idea isn’t really new and was the plan in an attempted clean up of Baghdad last summer. The prolem was that only a few of the promised Iraqi army units showed up and the Iraq government took no disciplinary action against them or their command as far as can be determined.

If in fact the Iraqi army will take the lead then I don’t believe that additional US army/marine corps troops are needed.

We shall see if Shia troops will make determined efforts to control Sadr’s Shia militias. Likewise, we shall see if Sunni troops crack down on Sunni insurgents. And, of course, there is the question of whether or not Kurdish troops give a damn if the Shia and the Sunnis kill each other. I can’t imagine why they should considering how Kurds are regarded by both of them.

Does anyone know if the Iraq army is integrated down to small unit level? Do Kurds, Shia, and Sunni make up a squad, for example? Or are the companies, battalions and regiments composed of all one group?

If a squad is composed of a mixture and an attack is against a Shia militia will the Shia and Kurdish troops dog it? That will be the key thing to watch for, i.e. if the Iraqi troops act like a cohesive unit or a miscellaneous collection of people with more loyalty to their sect than to Iraq.

24

Not quoting to contradict, Dave, only that you touch on a point I want to expand a bit.

Will we know? What independent sources of information do we have? If al Maliki’s government kill one hundred Sunni militant and claims to have killed one hundred Shia militiamen, how are we to know the difference? If they hand us a target and say “Full of Al Queda foreign fighters, drop a big 'un on 'em!”, how are we to know that it is not the political headquarters for legitimate opponents of the al Mailki admin?

For that matter, why wouldn’t we suspect a tacit agreement between the Shia dominated government and the Shia militia to keep a low profile while the al Maliki admin sheds American blood to rid itself of its Sunni opposition. Especially if you believe, as I do, that the al Maliki admin has adopted a posture of deliberate provocation towards the Sunni.

They are definitely going to tell us that they are vigorously oppressing the Shia militia, the press releases are probably already written. But why should we believe them? What steps can we take to ensure we are correctly informed?

25

What elucidator said - please remember, this is the guy who figured out that Saddam was just bluffing on the WMD’s to keep up his cred, and turned out to be right - plus what someone else (I’m lazy, sorry) said about the Prez wanting the reconstruction done by Americans because he was beholden to American contractors.
He kept out not only Iraqis, but the Brits from having a share in anything more than the crumbs. The Brits! It is simply not possible to be too cynical about just how deep-down corrupt this Admin is. It simply isn’t.
And no, that does not preclude incompetence. Frequently, the two go together. This lying jackass’s Administration might even be conclusive proof of that proposition.
Which, btw, brings us to the rationale for the surge: he wants this to end on someone else’s watch. That means he will do everything possible to insure that comes about, including attacking Iran and Syria and turning them into this Vietnam’s version of Cambodia.
He will stop at nothing. You can take that to the bank.

26

We probably won’t know for sure who is being attacked by the Iraqi army except by noting the area in which they are operating. As I understand things, the Sunnis and Shi’ites are separating themselves into isolated neighborhoods and I suspect our lower level unit commanders, squad, platoon and company know what neighborhood is what. As I understand things, our troops are supposed to be backups for the Iraqi’s so we will know where the operation is taking place and can observe the rigor with which the Iraqis act.

I think the more likely scenario is that they won’t show up or will be indifferent about action in “friendly” areas, or will balk at going into them.

One worry to me is that iff the Iraqi army isn’t integrated to low level units, our troops will be backing up Shia regiments in Sunni areas and Sunni regiments in Shia neighborhoods. Wouldn’t that be a fine mess?

(Stupid board. I got the old “This Page Cannot be Displayed” on three tries to preview. :mad: )

(Four)

27

The logic behind the surge is exactly the reason I laugh out loud whenever some guy decides to run for office because he is “an American businessman” and he “knows how to get things done.”

This is a classic display of the American business model: we can’t cut our losses because it will demonstrate that we had no idea what we were getting into and we can’t fund this disaster in a way that will produce results, so we are going to nickel and dime it until (we hope) everyone forgets that we were the ones who created the mess or until a miracle (or the amnesia produced by an even bigger disaster) rescues us.

In an interview today, (Thursday), an administration official (whose name I missed) objected strongly to a reporter’s use of the word “escalate,” in reference to the war, noting that the “surge” would not even bring us up to the troop levels we had last January.
Right. Throwing a few thousand more bodies into this meatgrinder is supposed to provide a magic solution despite the fact that more bodies at a time when there was (relatively) less violence could not get the job done.
The guy who initially proposed what became the “surge,” Frederick Kagan, is despondent because he claimed when writing his proposal that we needed far more troops than were selected for far longer than Bush intends to keep them there. If we are going to achieve anything more than “peace with honor,” :rolleyes: we need to provide sufficient troops throughout all the restive portions of the country to actually suppress violence long enough for the economy to get on its feet, the electricity to run for more than four hours a day, and the water to be available in every house, not pumped out of local hydrants for a few minutes each morning.

In typical managerial fashion, the administration looked at the call for 35,000+ additional troops for a sustained period of months, reckoned that they would never get the support of the public, (for some reason, they appear to have lost the public’s trust), and decided to do it on the quick and cheap. Of course, this means that more troops and Iraqis will die, needlessly, and that the horror of this boondoggle will prevent any future effort to do it right by taking the hard look and making the bold decision to follow Kagan’s plan. (In addition, the continued losses we will see in this nonsense will further weaken the military so that we will not even have the resources to pull it off even if someone did get sufficiently bold to try it.)

Now, I do not know whether Kagan’s plan was realistic. I have no idea whether 35,000+ additional troops, given the specific tasks of stabilizing the country (while one hopes, encouraging sufficient Iraqi soldiers and police to act in the interests of their own country rather than promoting sectarian or tribal feuds), would actually be successful.
It might have made more sense to try to co-opt Sadr with an option to join and support the government with carrots of financial aid and hands-off treatment by the U.S.–as long as he reined in his boys attacking the Sunnis–and the stick of simply taking him out or arming the Sunnis, might have had a better chance to work.
Or, there may have been some other set of policies that would have made sense.
Choosing one policy, but then doing it on the cheap is the classic stupid business model.

28

Condoleezza got into that bit of semantic wrangling with senator Hagel today:

29

I’m not a military expert by any means, but I can’t help thinking that the “surge” is less about securing Baghdad, and more about some sort of limited military action, consisting of air strikes and perhaps minor border incursions, against Iran and/or Syria. Certainly the number of troops to be added doesn’t seem likely to have all that much of an effect, and unless there is some some sort of miraculous information that I haven’t seen, the planned November takeover of security by the Iraqis appears a complete pipe dream.

The evidence that the above suggestion might be part of the plan is admittedly highly circumstantial, but the combination of a troop increase, stationing of an additional carrier battle group in the region, the recent action against an Iranian consulate, and the paragraph in Bush’s speech concerning cutting undefined “supply lines” from those two countries, suggest to me that the administration is considering going for broke and will shortly attempt to set one of these countries up for a punitive attack that will be promoted as mere retaliation for some outrageous (as defined by the administration) provocation or another.

Whether or not widespread supply of Iraqi insurgents by Iran and/or Syria is true, I take at face value that the administration believes this to be so and that it believes assets of these countries are legitimate targets. I hope I’m wrong on this, but I hoped I was wrong on the administration being serious about invading Iraq, and we can see how that turned out.

30

Heh.

OTOH, I am not so much concerned with nailing members of the Administration over whether the “surge” would or would not be an escalation. My point was that even the administration admits that whatever it is they are doing does not even bring the troop levels even back to those of early 2006, much less the levels sought by the Joint Chiefs (and refused by Rumsfeld) prior to the invasion and occupation.

This is a horrible, doomed, life-wasting farce.

31

IOW, they’d need most of the U.S. combat troops.

According to NPR, the Army has 39 combat brigades of about 3,500 troops each. The Marines have seven expeditionary units, according to Wikipedia, and the NPR story says that a Marine expeditionary unit is roughly the equivalent of an Army combat brigade.

That means we have roughly 160,000 combat troops in uniform. Total.

But we can’t use them all at once: being in combat is stressful on man and machine. You rotate units in, keep them there for a year or so, then pull them out so soldiers can heal or be replaced, equipment can be repaired or replaced, so the unit can re-train with its new soldiers training together with the veterans, and then the unit goes back into combat. Army policy used to be to do this on a three-year cycle - one year in the combat theatre, and two years out. Currently it’s running more like one year in, one year out.

Which means that there’s only about 80,000 U.S. combat troops available at any one time.

Some of them are in other places, such as Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Baghdad has 5-7 million people in it. So counterinsurgency doctrine says you’d need 100K-140K combat troops to pacify the city.

Oops.

32

And of course, some of our combat troops are needed elsewhere in Iraq. Bush said some of the ‘surge’ troops are headed for Anbar, for instance.

33

I am coming to the firm view that the best (and only viable) option is to pull right out.

Sure, there will be a bloodbath, but that is inevitable.

To save face the USA and allies can say, well we have learnt that we can de-stabilize a regime, but we have also learnt that we cannot stabilize it afterwards, without the consent of the vast majority of the population.

For others, the threat of ‘regime destruction’ is actually greater than ‘regime change’

  • one can live with a change of regime, but life is short and brutal in a non-regime.

Without the US, UK et al, the Iraqis will have some incentive to sort things out for themselves.

I still think that we would have been better off hijacking the Ba’athist party, and retiring Saddam to a holiday village.

34

From what’s emerging, it appears that El Kabong got it in one.
It looks like some kind of preparation is in fact being made to do a little cross-border pursuit, or something, into Iran and/or Syria.
It appears that the President has decided that the will of the people wasn’t to pull out of Iraq, but to escalate the war and widen its reach.

35

Remember that the American people were against the Vietnam War two-to-one from 1968 onward. (Discussed here.) But we didn’t pull our last troops out until 1974.

36

And got into Cambodia, bombing it until the rubble bounced, only in 1969, when Nixon apparently decided that the people had voted for escalation and widening of that war.
Plus ca change…