The news today is that Ramadi has fallen to ISIS. It seems the Iraqi army failed again in open combat against a group of terrorists. I just don’t understand how a national army could loose this kind of fight. How weak is the Iraqi army? According to Wikipedia a battalion is about 300-800 troops. Let’s say we had a time machine and could transport some troops from a historical army to try to accomplish the same goal ISIS just did in taking Ramadi, or maybe the battle when ISIS took Mosul. How far back would we have to go to find a battalion the Iraqi army could defeat? Could they defeat a battalion of WWII era German troops? What about WWI era troops? As poorly as they have performed, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Iraqi army would loose to troops led by Grant from the U.S. Civil War, French troops led by Napoleon from his time period or even the Continental Army troops led by George Washington. Just how pathetic is the Iraqi army, and is it really worth it to continue to support such a pathetic bunch?
This article looks at some of the factors.
To summarize:
- Officers get their position because of loyalty to the regime, not skill
- There are large rates of desertion, especially among Sunni soldiers, exacerbated by a government purge of Sunni officers, and among Shiites stationed in Sunni and Kurdish areas, who don’t see any particular reason to die to protect groups they don’t feel any loyalty to
- Soldiers are routinely not getting paid or getting underpaid.
The fact that ISIS is a sunni movement and Iraq is majority Shi’ite and Kurd, doens’t that motivate people to fight? It isn’t like ISIS has a good track record in human rights with non-sunnis. Their record with sunnis isn’t that good either FWIW. In elections, islamist groups generally don’t do well as people don’t want to live under religious dictatorships.
When these people desert, do they go somewhere safe and free of ISIS or are they living in conquered areas?
Did the military act like this under Saddam?
Depends on what you mean. The military was less likely to say “eh, fuck this shit” and run under Saddam, because Saddam would be sure to find their families and have them tortured/raped/murdered (not necessarily in that order).
But at the same time, the country was less divided by religious strife under Saddam, because his shtick was that Iraq was a secular country, people were Iraqis first and foremost and any deviation from that standard… well, see above.
It’s important to note what got built after the fall of the old Baathist regime. Most of the experienced senior leaders got purged by de-Baathification so in many ways it was starting from close to scratch with relatively inexperienced troops. The fight they were facing at that point was an insurgency that didn’t stand and fight. They got trained and equipped with an emphasis on dealing with that internal insurgent threat. Aspects of those skills apply to any fight but there are other skills that got lip service if they were trained at all. The forces got arrayed internally in a way that was set up to conduct internal patrolling to deal with an insurgency. In many ways their duties and training were more closely related to law enforcement SWAT teams than a traditional army focused on fighting larger battles.
Then ISIS crossed the border. Suddenly there was an invader operating as organized light infantry formations with supporting heavy weapons. ISIS had a chance to hone their craft fighting against the Syrian Army. The IA has been playing catch up ever since.
I believe it was Donald Rumsfelt who decided that it would be a good idea to purge the Iraqi army of Saddam supporters. That was a big strategic mistake.
All those senior military officers did not just retire and wait for their political enemies to come looking for them. They joined the insurgency and later found a home in ISIS.
The Iraqi army was weakened by their leaving and those Sunni soldiers that remained found they are now led by Shítes supported by Iran.
The Iraqi army does not want to fight its former officers nor does not care for its new leadership or the Shi-ite dominated government.
Donald should return and fix the awful mess left behind in Iraq.
I should imagine that a company of German troops led by a v. Mackensen or a Rommel could fight them to a standstill.
On the other hand, why blame them ? It’s not like they’ve got much of a state to fight for.
Rumsefeld and company didn’t just purge the Iraqi Army of Saddam supporters; they completely disbanded the entire armed forces of Iraq.
And yeah, that was a pretty colossal fuck-up.
For people like us who have lived all their lives in a first world country, it is difficult to imagine how people live and think in a third world country. The level of corruption, the loyalty to tribe rather than nation, the lack of organization and purpose are hard to understand.
If you’re in the Iraqi Army, your commanding officer is some idiot who’s only an officer because he’s the friend of the relative of someone rich. He has no talent, nor any attachment to the cause, and everyone knows it. So what’s the point of obeying his orders.
(The USA’s Army was the first where people rose through the ranks solely by displaying talent for strategy and leadership, rather than by paying money and having connections. That’s why the American military kicked so much butt, at least in its first two centuries.)
Huh. I’m open to hearing about ways in which this might be construed as true, but I can think of countless exceptions. I mean, up through at least 1865, in times of war the officer corps was positively rife with political appointees at all levels. While there were certainly many professional soldiers who rose through the ranks on merit, it was also quite common for a new regiment to be mustered and put under the command of, say, a freshly-volunteered plantation owner, serving under a brigadier who’d just resigned from Congress to go play war – ideally at least one of them had served in a militia at some point, but that was hardly a requirement. I’d also be surprised if no European power had had a similar level of martial meritocracy by the middle of the 19th century.
I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but what knowledge I do have suggests that this is a dubious or incomplete statement. But, again, I’m open to seeing it fleshed out.
This wasn’t true of the US at least through the Spanish-American War, where you could be up to at least a Lt. Colonel because you were the one who recruited/hired/lead a sufficiently large group of men to enlist with you. See Teddy Roosevelt.
After Prussia was beaten up by Napoleon, they created the idea of a General Staff that was based on merit. It later turned into the German General Staff and had some pretty impressive names at its head: German General Staff - Wikipedia
Let me ask you this - when has the Iraqi army *not *collapsed? Man-to-man, they’ve always been the worse regular military force in the Middle East.
The same would be said by others of the French Revolution, which did create one of the world’s most successful armies ever [ at least at invading, and at that invading the unprepared ], although it was simply following on* Ancien Regime* practice in aims and strategy, and it’s magnificent military tradition unravelled over many wars to the later 20th century.
Very few military scholars rate the American Army at all highly until the 1980s ( since when it has been supreme — certainly against Iraq ) if by reason of awesome size. For the first century it fought only the British/Canadians, the Mexicans, the Native Indians and itself; only the last of which was a Napoleonic sized conflict, and which a greater Napoleon than Beauregard would have finished in a year regardless of which side he chose ( probably the Unionists ). Right down past Vietnam, until now, the rest of the world was sceptical of American fighting ability.
But never, I should say of the American Navy: that has always been one of the world’s finest.
They can run because they have a clear path out. No longer the enforcers behind the front line ready to execute anyone who gets up to leave.
What? Everyone who plays Civilization IV knows that from the entry for the Military Tradition technology:
Sid Meier is the Cecil of gaming. I’ll take his word for it and the US was not the first to promote based on merit.
Back to Iraq: it goes back to Rumsfeld. When you strip an army of all its leadership, what’s left doesn’t fight for shit.
This is a rather astoundingly gross oversimplification of thousands of years of military history.
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and which a greater Napoleon than Beauregard would have finished in a year regardless of which side he chose ( probably the Unionists ).
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But then so is this. Given the sheer size and scope of the battlespace of the American Civil War, the nature of its combatants, and the technology available to the generals of the time, it is very doubtful any general who has ever lived in the history of the world could have won that war in a year. It is perhaps very instructive to note that it took Grant, a general of tremendous ability, well over a year to push back the Confederacy in the Western theatre.
That’d explain why we don’t need iron mines any more, now that we know how to make cannons and rifles.
Actually I believe that cannons require iron but riflemen and infantry do not.
They don’t exactly match up well, because Sunni and Shi’a are religious traditions and Kurds are an ethnic group. Some Kurds are Sunni, some Shi’a, some none of the above. It’s sort of like saying that the US is primarily composed of Catholics, Protestants, and Blacks, why aren’t they fighting?