Yep. The Warrior is an infantry fighting vehicle - armoured troop transport with moderate firepower - and the US has had an equivalent in the M2 Bradley for many years (as do most countries).
Boring, I know, but I can’t resist a military question. Sorry.
More in line with what the Canadians have. (Grizzly? Or something like that; A GM/MOWAG LAV I believe, regardless.) I think the Brits use fairly ‘light’ stuff in NI, more to keep bricks and molotovs at bay than to properly transport combat troops in a combat enviroment.
Of course, the French have a full series of excellent wheeled armored vehicles. The USMC was interested in checking a few out (The Caesar arty system, and the AMX-10RC, but buying stuff from the French is about as popular as eating infants to the congresscritters. Too bad.)
Over at the various gun boards I frequent, troops are putting up some interesting ‘after action reports’.
To summarize: (Anecdotal, but interesting.)
More optics for the infantry. (From aimpoint to ACOG; The M240 gunners seemed to love their ELCANs)
More infantry. Too few actual ‘line infantry’ to go around, at times forcing units to use less-trained troops in the role of infantry.
Better filters for the Abrams and Bradley. Seem to get gunked up awful quick, but I wonder if any country has a good solution to the dust problem?
Unified battery. Too many different batteries for different peices of gear.
More language training. Troops wanted more of an ability to interact with people, but not enough language training/aids were provided.
Sorry I took so long to check in back to my thread… there goes:
From what my history books I thought that Norway was over garrisoned not due to "guerrila" activities which happened in most occupied countries, but due to false intelligence fed to the germans about Norway being a major target for British invasion. This was done to tie down troops and it worked. Hitler easily put twice as many troops as necessary.
This 1 soldier to 15 citizens... where did you get it ? Never seen anything like that. Seems overblown... Iraq is desert mostly which air power should easily "patrol".
As for the embedded Journalism that someone mentioned... it certainly was a "sucess". Thou lately I have read articles from formerly embedded journalists that are still in Iraq that do point to some negative things. Still overall stockholm syndrome was strong among the "embedded"... :)
Regarding the embargo... no one thinks it was a total sucess. Certainly the suffering it caused was terrible. Still there was a wide view that embargoes were more symbolic than real punishment... a way of making countries fear loss of revenue rather than economic colapse. Iraq certainly was much weaker for it and the lack of WMD does indicate that those programs didnt get much further due to the embargo. The military were also in bad shape... 10+ years of embargo arent the best course of action... but they can certainly "hurt".
Guerrila fighting certainly demands something more subtle than a M1... lets see what the americans come up with. I hope South African consultants are helping them... they had much experience with this kind of vehicles.Infantry wasnt what was necessary vs Soviet Tank armies… so some cold war legacy there. Filters for tanks ? What do the Israelis do about it ? They are usually the masters at adapting equipment.
Language training or lack of it… smells of political euphoria and shortsightedness. Certainly peacekeeping was something these troops had to learn on the job… not good. The British are still handling the peacekeeping better ?
Actually, the number of mechanized infantry companies per division were scaled back after Desert Storm, in the early 90’s.
Rand corp released a study recently calling for 1:22 in Iraq.
OOPS. I guess that I “mis-remembered.”
Heres’ a link to the Rand study:
http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2003/burden.html
It actually suggests 20:1000. Quite a bit different.
Interesting link… thou the ratios are none to positive. Its like having 10 times more policemen than the USA average.
…or three times as many troops in Iraq as we do now and a troop base of 2.5 million to suistain it.
Paints a pretty bleak picture of Afghanistan. I guess that the Rand Corp are liberals trying to undermine the war effort bring back Saddam, and help al Qaeda kill Americans. :rolleyes:
I am interested in some more military lessons … are lessons from Iraq valid for future possible engagements of the US ? Should europeans set up “expeditionary” type troops of a different sort due to these lessons ?
Or every new peacekeeping or invasion different from the last and no general lesson is to be learnt ?
The greatest lesson by far is that before you go in to ‘liberate’ a country, you had better make sure your troops can communicate with the locals in the locals tongue.
Better still, send in troops who have some slight understanding of the culture, it’s problems, the way the society works.
Make sure that you offer a better deal than the one they just had, electricity, clean water and food are the basics, and although there are huge problems, the lack of these things are causing resentment to those who might otherwise greet us favourably.
I have to smile a little, you all are talking military hardware, numbers etc, perhaps we ought to train the troops to operate with more empathy.
No police force can operate effectively without the consent of the population, it can exert control but this can easily be seen as repression.
A handful of sweets, or small portable generators,or fuel to run the cars of the inhabitants, these are worth much more than any amount of armoured vehicles.
Here endeth the lesson.
“here endeth the lesson”… the political one. Most of us know that Shrub and Rummy screwed this one. Its a no brainer. Still some of the military aspects arent as well defined… and in my view not given as much attention.
Afterall if in the future if a real american leader decides to invade another country with UN support… people will be scared of friendly fire and american firepower too close to them. Coordination problems killed way too many brits and US soldiers. So these offbeat aspects are what I asked for in the first post…
I don’t think I was Bush bashing, and lessons learned seem to get confined to military matters, but in the end even though the war was won, there was too little thought about how to bring the Iraqi people over.
Grand infrastructure schemes but not enough emphasis on the smaller day to day issues that affect them.
If there is another time, maybe we should look to the eye contact, personal relationships, loosen the trigger fingers on patrolling troops, it needs to be much more of a hearts and minds policy.
If we go into Syria or Iran in 2005 after Bush is sworn in again, these things will be handy to know. At least then we can all say, “I tol’ you so.”
Everything American has to be able to fight in a range of conditions from the antarctic to Desert conditions.
The Vehicle that you want to use , probably resembles the old British Saracen or the Caddilac-gage. It would probably be better to outfit the new Iraqi army with these combat SUV’s , than to equip American forces.
Would be a sorta lend lease affair , American units would use these vehicles and then transfer ownership and duties to the Iraqis after a certain period of time.
Declan
Using it for what? There’s lots of things that I think the military would want to use M$ Winblows for. Non-secure e-mail and general office paperwork to name but two. Since nearly everyone these days is familiar with Winblows, it’d make sense to have PCs running that, so you could train the folks on how to use the specialized military software.
The US Navy tried using M$ Windows NT as the OS for one of their ships, only to have the software crash, and totally disable the ship, forcing the Navy to tow it back to port and do a complete re-install of the software they had been using. Afterwards, the Navy said that it’d be a cold day in Hell before they ever used a M$ OS to run one of their ships again.
Of course, rumor has it that it was M$ who wrote the “Carnovore” software, so perhaps M$ is getting chummy with the military and writing specialized versions of its OS for the military.
This Windows Crashing and disabling a warship story is true ? I have my doubts… thou if they did use Windows they had it coming… 
CASDAVE I wasnt bashing you over Bush bashing... its just that I really wanna see the smaller things that got left aside. I agree totally with you about the sweets and the generators. Rummy thought he would be a Iraqi hero of sorts ? The US army went there to invade... not to occupy... to control or to pacify. They were an invading army and not much else.
Thou US officers seemt to be doing there best to get around the lack of political foresight, training, resources or a grand strategy… there is only so much they can do. Ultimately the key moment to win hearts and minds is past… damage control is what is left to them now.
There’s a book about it. Can’t remember the title at the moment, but I’ve popped a message to the fellow who last mentioned it in discussion to see if he remembers the title. I’ll post it as soon as I find out what it was.
Oh please do ! I can barely wait ! Smiling already… imagine being operated by a doctor robot ? The future of automatic machines will have to wait for better software…
Most definitely true. Us die-hards in the Mac community got a big laugh out of that one – a state-of-the-art Navy warship brought to its knees because someone entered a zero into the wrong field and took down the entire network. 
Almost as funny as the Department of Homeland Security announcing a $90-million software contract with Microsoft the day before Microsoft admitted to the discovery of major security flaws in Windows.
You’re right, though, they had it coming.