I’ll explain: Once upon a time wars were only won if you had enough men. Artillery, armor, air support etc were all useful but at the end of the day you had to have enough infantry on the ground to beat the enemy. And then incidently if you had enough soldiers to conquer a country, you by definition had enough soldiers to occupy it. Then during the Cold War the US and NATO, knowing they’d always be outnumbered by the USSR and Warsaw Pact, focused on high-tech weapons systems to make up the difference.
After the end of the Cold War our high-tech military was superior enough to allow quick, low casualty, politically cheap victories against inferior Third World opponents. This worked fine during Gulf War 1 because we simply wanted to smash the Iraqi Army and kick it out of Kuwait. But now we’re discovering that destroying an enemy regime isn’t the same thing as conquering a country. In large part because we simply don’t have the numbers on the ground.
Or to put it another way: suppose we had no stealth fighters, no laser-guided bombs, no cruise missiles, nothing higher-tech than the Iraqi Army had. Suppose the only way we could have invaded Iraq was an old-fashioned WW2-style mass invasion where we needed a million infantrymen and took tens of thousands of casualties. We probably would never have invaded Iraq at all because that level of commitment wasn’t there. But if there had been and we did, we would almost certainly have achieved a real victory and a pacified Iraq populace. Or to put it yet another way, did our high-tech superiority lull the Bush administration into thinking it could have a quick victory on the cheap, leading us into a conflict which didn’t really have the needed level of support?
You have a point–except that you have to define “we.” In the Spring of 2002, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reacted to the administration’s interest in invading Iraq with a very clear statement that they thought it was a bad idea and pointed to a lack of troops as one of the reasons. When they were ordered to prepare a plan for invasion, anyway, the top guys at DoD took their troop estimates and slashed them by more than half.
The military was smart enough to recognize that taking and holding a country requires boots on the ground. The civilians above them made two critical errors: they confused fighting battles with fighting wars, (their estimates of what it took to defeat the Iraqi Army were not really out of line; we did win the battles with fewer troops); and they bought into the Wolfowitz term paprer notion that we would be greeted as liberators in the manner of the end of WWII (which demonstrated Wolflowitz’s ignorance regarding how we were greeted in Germany and Japan and compounded it with a blitheringly idiotic view of how we would be perceived in the Middle East).
So, one might say that “we” (meaning some number of U.S. citizens, including too many wth political power) had gotten into the lazy habit of thinking that technology answered all problems, but there were a lot of other people–including the military commanders–who never made that mistake. Unfortunately, the military answers to the civilian authorities (generally a good thing) even when the civilian authorities are self-deluded fools (in this case, a bad thing).
Just to clarify here (which the rest of your post probably already does, but what the hell), the top guys at DoD are civilian. As in, Rumsfeld and his peeps. The OP is right in that an obsession with and overestimate of what technology can do is a contributor to the mess in Iraq, but it’s a civilian error, not a military one. Look at brass like Shinseki; they warned Rumsfeld et al. that it was a terrible mistake to think that modern equipment would make one soldier function as equal to multiple soldiers in all circumstances, and they were dispatched to metaphorical Siberia for their troubles. The remaining generals shut up and toed the line, or they retired (and are now airing their earlier reservations in public).
Actually, our advantage in mobility and technology did more or less make one soldiers function like 10, but as I read it, neither brass nor civvies wanted to put enough people over there even after that. Politics.
There are other effects to consider that are particular to Iraq:
No serious long time occupation plan leading to disastrous ad hoc decisions (e.g. de-Baathification, disbanding the military, stupid economic decisions, horrible infrastructure rebuilding, etc…)
Little or no counter insurgency training. This led to an antagonization of the local population (a wee bit of an understatement).
Chronic lack of Arab speakers (or even worse, recruiting Iraqi translators who later turn out to be agents of the insurgency)
Lack of understanding of the culture.
So if we had all of this under control it would’ve been much better. We’d still have too few troops but it wouldn’t be a complete disaster.
This is going to be an unpopular view: we are unwilling to be as ruthless as is required with the reduced manpower available. This is (paradoxically) a good thing; I do not wish to see allied troops engaged in wholesale slaughter.
That said, looking at history over the past few hundred years, it seems to me that you cannot conquer a group that has developed (or you let develop) a sense of identity. Either you obliterate them or you expel them or you do not occupy their land.
In certain circumstances, yes. Not in all. That’s the point. Only a small force (comparatively speaking) was required to topple Iraq’s regime, but all the computer and satellite technology in the world is basically useless once you transition to on-the-street in-person police action.
Well, that’s a side effect of the soldier/police divide, IMHO. I just don’t think soldiers ought to be doing this sort of tihng at all, although they can be good at it sometimes. I’d prefer a dedicated unofrmed service for this kind of action, trained specifically for that kind of action.
Aside from which, it might be a lot easier and effective to deploy functional “peacekeepers” rather than actual soldiers, politically speaking.
I’m coming to the view that there are two types of warfare.
One can be high tech, but need not be, it is where you kill your enemy.
The other is where you try to occupy your enemy, under those circumstances they kill you - and I doubt that the number of boots on the ground make much difference - more boots means more targets.
The UK had enough problems in Northern Ireland - without a language barrier.
Admittedly Syria managed to … sort of … pin down The Lebanon, but it did not last and if anything it was just building up a powder keg.
Indeed, but in Northern Ireland there was also a functioning police force and an intelligence agency that did help tackle the terrorists by infiltrating and arresting them and a much more concerted effort to tackle economic problems. Iraq has much more poverty and a much larger population than NI, it goes without saying.
They are especially useless if they don’t speak the language
Fallujah was a television spectacular, realistically one would surround the place and then pick people off with night sights when they get tired of missiles.
[Hijack]
I’ve been looking into that peculiar salt tax, it looks as if it was an ancient custom, but got muddled with saltpetre (essential for gunpowder) and adulteration - which is not nice. There is one guy who keeps popping up, an Economic Historian who knows the exact daily wage from 1800 to 1930.
The Gandhi march is interesting, it looks as if the thing was dropped immediately after - but I must suspect that he had old friends from Oxford who had downed a Marguerita with him in happier days.
[/hijack]
No, it’s a side effect of your high-tech focus on the military; the “to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail” effect. The Bush Administration saw a problem in Afghanistan, the tool to hand was overwhelming military force, they applied the tool and it [seemed to] solve it. Next problem, that guy in Iraq that made my daddy look bad. Looked like the same problem so let’s use the same tool - or rather, it was convenient to think it must be the same problem because hey, I’ve still got this really neat tool in my hand.
One thing to note regarding that article is that it was written after five years of Rumsfeld carrying out the goal of making the military “lighter” and a couple of years after the Joint Chiefs tried to stop the Iraq juggernaut. After that long a time, the original military commanders have all retired (or resigned in frustration) and the ones who are left are more in sympathy with the “high tech obviates the need for troops” notions of Rumsfeld and his cronies.
Such attitudes are liable to keep us in Iraq indefinitely, but they were not the rasons we went into Iraq with too few troops to begin with.
If you actually wanted to convince me of anything, you would have posted an actual cite to the “looking into” that you were doing. I have no interest in discussing anything with you anymore. You are simply someone who spews propoganda in order to further your agenda. Feel free to consider yourself on my ignore list. Of course, if you start spouting nonsense about colonialism again, I will post cites to contradict you.
I agree. While technology has enabled us to perform certain tasks with considerably less danger to the troops, there is no substitute for a physical presence in the area you’re trying to control. Unfortunately, the most effective way for Iraq to respond to our presence is their own version of “stealth bomber.”
For the most part, I agree with Quartz. But, I would tend to suspect that even in Iraq that there’s some sort of silent majority who just wants to go to work, make money, take care of their family, and doesn’t much care about who the leader of the nation is so long as they can do their thing. Being straightforward and honest with and convincing this silent majority would have been our only route to a successful occupation of the country. I don’t think we ever even tried to establish order in the country, instead just trying to stamp out unruliness which is, agreed, beyond our means given the number of grunts we have. Given the resources of the silent majority, and working to create police and military organizations in the country that severely penalize graft and absolutely only promote based on worth, it would have been within the realm of possibility to win in Iraq.
By now, though, no one there would ever be willing to listen to us. Had we sent out appeals right at the beginning of the occupation, we would have been able to tell within a month or two whether we had a chance to convert the country. But staying without any internal support is, indeed, a foregone loss unless you are willing to rule through the same sorts of methods that Saddham used.
Assuming a real parity in combat ability beyond simple ‘high-tech’ (i.e. assuming the Iraqi’s could and would actually fight with the skill and determination on the battle field comparable to the US troops in WWII), and assuming the US had the logistics to support such a forced entry assault, had the facilities for the massive ammounts of bombers and fighters necessary, etc.
Assuming all that, then certainly we most likely would have pacified the Iraqi population after a long, multiyear campaign that would have most likely left every Iraqi city a smoking pile of rubble and the Iraqi people weary of the long, bloody, drawn out war. As you say, the US would have had 10’s of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of casualties…and the Iraqi’s would have had millions dead in their bombed out cities.
One of the reasons that there was no real resistance after WWII in Germany or Japan was because their populations were so beaten down that they were essentially in shock…and by and large the thought of further resistance by the population at large was pretty far from their minds. Finding food and water and medical care were higher priorities. Had the US somehow been able to blitz into Japan and take out Tojo and the Government in a few days I have zero doubts that the Japanese population would have made our lives a living hell if any of the fanatical military types had survived to egg them on…same with Germany and the Nazi’s. Simply killing our capturing Hitler and the top guys would have done nothing to prevent the rest of the Nazi part from organizing a real, grass roots resistance.
We have to ask ourselves though…would this have been better? Sure, we wouldn’t have the current insurgency. But so what? Instead of 3000+ American’ soldiers dead there could have been 10’s or 100’s of thousands dead. This is an improvement? Instead of 10’s (or maybe 100’s) of thousands of Iraqi dead there could have been millions dead…after all, if you don’t have guided bombs you are left with carpet bombing. And many of the Iraqi military targets were in and among the civilian population.
All things considered, and as bad as things are, I have to say I’ll take the high-tech solutions over brute force. That said, we COULD have sent in a few hundred thousand more troops initially. I think THAT would have helped a lot. Just because we COULD invade with a minimal force, using high-tech weapons, doesn’t mean its necessarily an optimal solution…
That was another point I’d thought of but didn’t go into in the OP. That paradoxically there almost seems to be such a thing as winning too easily. Traditionally wars were won by (to a first apporximation) killing every enemy willing and able to oppose your army. Conventional wars gave the diehards the chance to die hard. Guerilla war was only used as a last gasp option because it was presumed that a victorious occupying army could and would use tyrannically ruthless methods up to and including mass expulsion or genocide, as Quartz touched on.