Lessons of the Iraqi Invasion that are less spoken of...

I want this thread to focus on some of the lessons the Iraqi invasion presented and that got little focus. Not only the invasion of course but the facts revealed by the demise of Saddam too. Feel free to agree or disagree with the points presented.
(Lets keep Bush bashing to a minimal necessary too… other threads are doing a good job of it already.)

  • First was that Embargoes can work reasonably. Iraq was certainly weakened considerably compared to 1991. Military and WMD wise too. Of course Saddams opulence and hidden stashes of dollars also prove that embargoes arent perfect. Still this limitation forced him to chose in part between military and luxury.

  • Another is how quickly oppressive regimes fall before credible military opposition… how strong the caos than ensues too. Funny enough I could say less troops are needed to invade than to occupy Iraq.

  • How incredibly dependent society is on law enforcement and police. With no tangible authority when Saddam fell and ever since the lawlessness took over pretty fast. The relative ease with which guerrilas are acting now say loads for how society can break up once authority is taken away. Other countries would suffer too if people are left to their own devices ? How much is state “control” necessary to keep anarchy away ?

  • Military wise I think armoured forces proved their worth still. Thou certain elements might feel that the military "light" forces are cheaper.... I think the Armoured Division went pretty well. Against irregular forces too. Special forces showed their value too.
    
  •  Guerilla Warfare in the information/technology age seems to continue to be effective. Naturally the fact that the political victory is still necessary was a no brainer of course. Still it put a nail to the coffin of any plans of serial invasions and democratizations. I wonder if some countries will emphasize irregular warfare in their troops training.
    
  • One that isnt mentioned much... but the costs of modern war and the time to build up pretty big. That even a relatively small country like Iraq (25 million) requires expenditures of very big order. Pacification and occupation even more.
    
  • Coordination of troops of different countries proved harder than imagined too. The fact that both spoke english comes to show that forces with multiple nationalities arent as effective or safe together. Any future notions of a pan european army or UN armies might require greater coordination efforts. Modern warfare has lost none of its "fog of war". (Exception of cooperation seems to be of course Special Forces coordinating with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan... that worked well due to limited scale.)

So the embargo worked?
Absolutely not!
It starved the man on the street but didn’t do any of the things it was supposed to do.

I have to disagree, Mehr. While I agree with you that many of Iraq’s problems right now are at least partly due to the embargo (infrastructure and schools in bad shape, for instance), Saddam apparently had real problems getting military equipment and spare parts during the embargo years. I’m personally convinced that the long embargo made it easier for us to win a quick military victory.

I am taking this one point from the OP, whatever the context, and disagreeing.

The object lesson, or example you cite does not even prove your thesis. Saddam is alive. A mortar attack just killed several in Baghdad.

Hitler and Stalin did not crumble either. Hitler once said about Stalin’s Soviet Union, “if you kick in the front door, the whole rotten edifice will come crumbling down.”

That sounds eerily similar.

The embargo certainly did not work.

It didn’t accomplish what it was supposed to.

Saying that it weakened the Iraqi military is just silly. It’s certainly more effective for the US to weaken the Iraqi military by dropping bombs onto it than it is to strangle the entire country with a 10+ year embargo that is barely effective.

Are you suggesting that the next time we want to make war with a country similar in strength to Iraq it would make sense to have a 10 year embargo first? Simply to weaken the military prior to invasion?

I wonder if one of the big lessons is that until Bush said otherwise last week, 70% of the US public believed Saddam was linked to 9/11. In this electronic age, that’s simply a remarkable indictment of modern media.

Yes that is probably true, but that was not the intention of the embargo!
It was started as Resolution 661 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and demanded that it retracts.
Later it was also demanded that Iraq admits UN-inspectors into the country to monitor destruction of WMDs.
Here is the whole List of resolutions.
Since then the embargo was never lifted.
That Hussein initially allowed inspectors in, was a result of the lost war, not the sanctions. That he retracted from Kuwait was a result of military force and not the sanctions. And that he disposed his WMDs was also the result of the lost war.
So the point of the embargo after 1991 was to ensure inspections and that didn’t work well. Actually another resolution condemns the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq, including in Kurdish populated areas, and insists that Iraq allow immediate access by international humanitarian organizations. This also didn’t work.

On the armored, or armoured, front the US needs more, not less. The Humvee and other light armored vehicles are obviously sitting ducks for RPGs. Someone should have considered that when they were designing them.

One thing I should note is that mortars take a few moments to set up and are usually not tiny. Some are pretty small, and it doesn’t take that long, granted.

The point I am trying to make, that Shinseki made, and seems obvious to everyone but the administration is – Hello, McFly There need to be more troops in Iraq. Those troops need better tools, intelligence, and vehicles to fight the kind of war they are in now.

We need a heavily armored, but light and quick street car for these types of engagements. An Abrams on asphalt, if you will. We need more eyes watching what is going on. We need more Iraqis involved in what is going on. Most of all, when Iraqis do get involved, it would be nice to keep them from getting killed.

Would someone call the adults back into the room? Chirac, Schroeder, and Bush are not filling me with confidence right now.

Lesson # 39875

“Having a thing is not always as pleasing as wanting a thing. It is not logical that this be so, but it is true.” ~ Spok ~

Hitler had to commit 300,000 troops to Norway in WW2 to secure just one iron ore port. That was 300,000 men who were sorely needed elsewhere. And yet, that’s how many it took to subdue little teeny Norway. And even then, those troops faced sustained guerilla attacks the entire length of WW2.

The general consensus is that it takes 1 soldier to every 15 civilians to occupy a country against it’s will.

You do the math. 22 million Iraqis. 170,000 US troops, and 20,000 British troops.

And Iraq has shitloads more open borders than Norway ever had.

One lesson from the Iraqi war that the OP doesn’t mention is the success of the imbedded journalism program. We will probably see this done again.

I don’t know which part of that makes me laugh the most, the “success” or the “again”.

Heavily armored, light, quick and inexpensive are mutually exclusive terms. You may, at best, pick 3, but no more.

ie
Abrams M1 tank - Armored, quick (not light or inexpensive)
HMMWV (Hum-vee) - light, quick, inexpensive (not armored)

the Bradley M2 and the new Stryker vehicle are somewhere in the middle.

I would think it would be obvious that the US needs more infantry on the ground, not more armor. I read one article somewhere where tank crews were having to get out on foot and search homes with scavanged AK-47s. To me, that seems like a good way to making the crew vulnerable to attack while rendering their tank useless.

Armor and helicopters are fine broadswords but they make terrible scalpels. The tactic of building impregnible firebases and then patrolling the countryside and villages and then calling in massive firepower did not work well in Vietnam and I don’t suspect that it would work well in Iraq. It gives the enemy freedom of movement to go where they please. It allows them to wait for big, loud convoys to travel along their regular routes and choose when and where they want to set up an ambush.

I never said inexpensive. I’m a realist in that sense anyway. But, Abrams are not cost efficient as police cars, and Humvees (our best option) are taking RPG hits all the time. I’d settle for minimal firepower on my city-tank-car also. Maybe a .50, .30, grenade launcher: something to lay down fire without wrecking the whole block – well, instantly anyway. This is city combat we’re talking about.

We at least should make the Humvee more resistant to RPGs. Rather than saying, we can’t do it. It makes more sense to look at what’s happening and try, at least, to make it better. From Somalia to now, I keep hearing about these RPG thingies smacking into our Humvee thingies with unpleasant results.

Hell, fire, damnation: let’s do somthing.

I agree with this, “US needs more infantry on the ground.” Since that was my basic point, it seems silly that I quibbled about an armored vehicle hijack. But, there it is.

Since this thread is moving slowly anyway, I guess I’ll just hijack it a little longer. I don’t know if there is a way to “RPG” proof Humvees (not my area of expertise). I think RPGs used a “shaped charge” so one solution might be to weld or bolt steel or kevlar plates to the side to detonate the charge away from the vehicle. But that’s really an engineering issue that I’m sure is being worked on by people who know more about RPGs Humvees and balistics than I do.

Getting back to the OP, I think the lesson learned is the same lesson we learned in the Baltics. That we need a medium vehicle that is cheap, menuverable, rapidly deployable, can survive RPG or smallarms hits and is low maintenance (we’re spending a fortune in tank parts). Our military doctrine seems to be focused on hitting hard and fast yet we don’t know what to do once we get there. War these days usually does not lend itself to big glorious decisive battles and we should stop fighting as if it did.

The first Stryker brigade is enroute (or soon will be) to Iraq. These viehicles can handles mines pretty well, and apart from add-on armor plating, will also have a ‘cage’ around them, to prematurely detonate incoming RPGs.

M1s and M2s are great, but are very expensive to operate. The Marines are pretty happy with their LAVs; Now we’ll see if the Army much talked about uber-LAVs are up to snuff.

The British Army are happy with these:

"Warrior Section Vehicles carry driver, commander, gunner and 7 fully equipped soldiers together with supplies and weapons for a 48 hour battlefield day in NBC conditions. The Warrior adapts to a range of roles with weapon fits ranging from machine pistols to 90mm guns, mortars and missile systems. "
Do the US forces in Iraq have similar ?

I’m not familiar with the Stryker- is it similar to those big armored vehicles the British used in Northern Ireland? I definitely agree that we need something between the Humvee (which is really a light truck, not armor) and a full Amored Personell Carrier.

Anyway, based on both the current war and Vietnam, I would add the lesson that:
it is almost impossible to wage war in a country without waging war on that country’s inhabitants.

In both cases we went in trying to make war on “just the bad ones”, and in the case of Vietnam did badly. In WW2, we occupied Germany and Japan knowing that most of the inhabitants had supported (or not opposed) the war, and we were ready to kill as many civilians as would not surrender.

Maybe we need to take a look back at how the Union handled the occupation of the South to learn the best way to pacify areas of mixed or dubious allegience.

In this case I don’t think the Iraqi army put of much of an effort at all. They didn’t blow up bridges, they didn’t flood the desert, they only set fire to a few oil fields (blocking laser fire + chopper movement), and most importantly, their main forces stayed outside or in the outskirts of Bagdad instead of retreating to the city itself. There they were sitting ducks.

According to Washington Post, the US military made “deals” wqith many Iraqi officers beforehand, and that’s why so few bridges, etc, were blown up.

In addition it’s much more easier to fight a war in desert landscape than in the jungle or up in the mountains.

American forces are superior in joint air-ground rapid movement operations. European and other forces will only have slowed them down.

But I think the greatest lesson fromn this war i the importance of instant intelligence information from UAVs, technology advantage, etc.

A question: I watched a short tv report from the US headquarter (the intelligence room) just before the war stated. I could have sworn they were using MS Windows (ugh), anyone know anything about that?

You got it right, OP, but one very important lesson we learned is that sanctions are usually even more inhumane than war.

This war didn’t kill a million Iraqis, not even close. If we’d done this in 1991, the Iraqi people would have been saved a lot of suffering.