Probably because it’s so hard to distinguish between the oppressed peoples we’re liberating and the soldiers we’re trying to take out.
We’re in a great position to negotiate with the Iraqis now.
“One artillery shell for yes, two for no.”
My best hopes for avoiding heavy city fighting having been not only dashed, but specatcularly so, I think now would be a good time to consider Plan B.
“What! There is no Plan B?”
I too am confused by this, Kalhoun. We seem to be using the WWII-Pacific strategy of island hopping, but on land. If I were the 3rdID, I’d be worried about my supply lines.
All this makes it kind of hard for the talking heads to draw any lines on the screen to show the progress made. Our troops are dispersed dots, not a big red, advancing line.
I assume we don’t have all the information. To assume otherwise would mean our generals can’t see the obvious, which doesn’t bode well for us.
I’ve seen some commentary on that from one of the retired generals. He said that there are two main reasons, aside from the civilians manning them, why it might be a good idea to leave those stations alone:
(1) Just as you can see from the embedded reporters, you don’t need a TV station to broadcast TV footage. It was learned in Gulf War I that the Iraqis could broadcast anyway, and there was something of a sympathy factor generated when they were perceived as crying out to the world from a position of helplessness.
(2) The broadcasts can provide important intelligence as the coalition monitors them for content and context. In some cases, they can make judgments similar to those made back during the Cold War when everyone checked out the grandstand at Moscow military parades. Who’s there? Who’s not? Who’s standing beside whom? What does the pecking order seem to be? And so forth.
Sky News reports that the Shiites in Basra have begun an uprising against the Fedayeen operators, and are being aided by British artillery.
That’s better than some of the suggestions in the media that the Shiites would not lift a finger because of the earlier US doublecross. I wish them luck. Let’s all pray or meditate for low casualties, things seem to be approaching critical mass.
I’m listening now to a live report from Richard Gaisford, the embedded reporter for Sky News. According to him, when the locals began their uprising, the Fedayeen fired on them with mortars. British heavy artillery then fired on the mortar locations. Since then, a JDAM has blown up the Republican Guard headquarters there. Gaisford says that people have said they are “fed up” with being starved and used as human shields. They have told coalition forces that it was the Fedayeen who sabotaged the water works.
I too have been underwhelmed by the strategy thus far. “Shock and awe” reminds me of nothing so much as France’s WWI plan to take Alsace-Lorraine using the elan of the French fighting men. I hope that “shock and awe” was just propaganda for the home front, because any battlefield plan that relies for its success on the psychological state of enemy soldiers is pretty lousy.
That said, coalition strategy seems reasonably sound to me. The prolonged bombardment of Iraq prior to a ground advance was undesirable for reasons which can be seen by looking at how civilians tend to respond to their cities being bombed - their resolve is strengthened, and they develop an intense dislike for those doing the bombing, as seen in many cities in WWII. Germans might not have been enthusiastic supporters of Hitler by the last years of the war, but they were most emphatically opposed to those who were dropping explosives on them. I suspect attitudes like this would develop regardless of how “surgical” your bombing is.
One thing that did surprise me a bit was that there was no lightning deployment of the 101st or 82nd to the flank or rear of the primary Iraqi forces. Perhaps the situation hasn’t been opportune for such a deployment, and we’ll see something like that yet.
The thing that’s made me most depressed, though, is that it’s looking more and more like we’ll be faced with a choice between attacking Bahgdad or a very very lengthy siege. It doesn’t look to me like any of the forces Saddam’s been counting on to fight will fail him in that regard, and both large-scale urban combat against determined enemies, and starving out a city of 5 million, strike me as being very undesirable.
I hope Franks has something up his sleeve he hasn’t shown us yet, but I for one can’t think what it might be.
Asked Kalhoun
Your question is a good one and I think you may be surprised with the answer, if you’ll take my word for it. Since the last year of World War I, a new school of thought has arisen which suggests that it is in fact acceptable to leave enemies in one’s rear. Instead, the “point of the spear,” a term I’ve seen used more than once in this war, is supposed to bypass points of resistance, leaving them far in the rear and essentially surrounded.
Other units are supposed to guard the flanks of the advancing force and cordon off the isolated points of resistance. Then the objective is to reduce the isolated points either by attrition or by attacking them from all sides at once. Either way, the enemy is at a severe disadvantage because it is trapped, unsupplied and cannot maneuver. Nobody likes being surrounded in war, but then again it doesn’t look like An Nasiriyah is entirely surrounded…
The Iraqi attack on the 507th Maintenance Company appears to be an example of inadequate flank protection during the advance. Somehow, the Iraqis managed to pull off an assault and then haul their prisoners back to a fairly unmolested area where captives can be held and satellite transmissions can be made. This may mean there is a problem.
The mistake may have been an oversight–this particular point of resistance wasn’t discovered until the Iraqis sallied forth to attack. Or, it could have been that the Iraqis discovered an accidental hole in the flank and exploited it. Or, most ominously, it could be indicative of a problem whereby the Allies do not have enough troops to seal off the bypassed positions and protect their flanks–or maybe they believed their own propaganda and didn’t think they’d need them.
If that last possibility was the case, don’t be surprised if we see more American divisions sent to Iraq to act as flank and garrison security.
Oh, and if you want my opinion, I think it was just a mistake, rather than a symptom of a much larger problem.
My understanding was that it was not an attack on the 507th per se, but rather that the dozen or so who were executed and/or captured had basically taken a wrong turn and got lost. Isolated, they soon found themselves surrounded by Fedayeen operatives. Even with GPS equipment, it is still necessary to coordinate with maps.
Thanks, SofaKing and Lib. I’ll throw this out to my husband (who has been running the war from his barcalounger for a week now!) and see if it will pass muster. If not, I’ll be back to re-strategize.
Sorry, Lib and Kalhoun, I should have mentioned that those guys took a wrong turn. However, it’s still an example of a porous front–those guys shouldn’t have been able to cross their own lines without someone flagging them down. Then again, fog of war and all, it’s bound to happen now and then.
Article regarding whether the 3rd ID is sufficient to invade Iraq alone (e.g., without the 4th ID and/or another heavy division):
Questions raised about invasion force - Some ex-Gulf War commanders say U.S. needs more troops
We are apparently engaged in a “rolling start,” the secondary roll of which has been delayed by Turkish treachery (or bad US planning by taking the actions of other countries for granted). The 4th ID equipment, having waited off the coast of Turkey for several weeks, won’t be in Kuwait for at least another 10-14 days…I guess until then they are a light infantry division…
What kind of a war plan is it that relies on speed but starts without all the troops in the theater when there were months to get them there ahead of time?
On another front (pardon the pun), it appears that the British have a bit of a conundrum on their hands in Basra. News reports suggest that there was a popular uprising against the regime, but that Iraqi forces quelled the public rally with mortars. The British are sitting outside the city, and don’t really want to go into urban warfare. But they also want to help support the public uprising.
All the while, water supplies going into the city are currently insufficient to meet the needs of the residents. Food and sanitation are likely to be serious issues soon.
What tactics could be used to liberate Basra?
The only tactics I’m aware of would put lives of coalition soldiers at risk, and it’s not clear to me that the Coalition is actually willing to risk its own soldiers’ lives yet.
**
Yes, exactly. This is the old “Air-Land 2000” combined forces doctrine. It makes a nice, philosophical point. Do you have enemies in your rear or are you in the enemy’s rear?
The idea of this doctrine was to elminate the idea of fronts and set piece battles. Rather than having two armies facing each other, the battle space would become a checkerboard of allied and enemy forces. Under these conditions, the thinking goes, mobility, information and co-ordination win wars, not maximum firepower.
GWI was a sort of hybrid between the old-style war and the new. IIRC, in addition to the attack in Kuwait, a force was airlifted into the Iraqi rear to cut off their retreat. The force was immediately backed up by a high-speed armoured ground thrust (the famous “left hook”).
From a military perspective, this seems (so far) to be working. The only question is whether bypassed Iraqi elements can cut the coallition supply lines to Baghdad. If they can’t, they’re annoying but irrelevant.
It is unlikely that they can. A rocket-propelled grenade might do wicked damage to the occasional fuel truck, but these forces can be re-supplied by air, if need be. It would slow things down a bit but wouldn’t make much difference in the end.
In keeping with this doctrine, we might expect something dramatic in the battle for Baghdad. I wouldn’t be surprised to see elements of an airborne division magically appear in downtown Baghdad one night under cover of a heavy, extended bombing raid. AFAIK, this has never been attempted before. But superior information, co-ordination and precision weapons might make such a tactic feasible. If you could pull it off, the effect would be devastating. Rather than retreating and taking up urban warfare, the Republican Guard would have to fight its way into Baghdad will simultaneously get blasted by the coallition forces coming up from the south. Game over.
Politcally, the jury is still out on the coallition strategy. Part of the problem is the 24 second news cycle. Once upon a time, it took days, even weeks for information to filter back from the battlefield. Now, every time a soldier stubs a toe, it’s carried live on three networks. This constant exposure creates pressure for a quick victory instead of just a certain one. A three-week long war resulting in total victory might be considered a crushing defeat for the coalition. That’s primarily what’s driving the high-speed rush for Baghdad – and might be making the coallition take chances, too.
On balance, going directly to Baghdad is probably a good strategy. If you can capture Baghdad and take out the regime, you can declare the war “over” and mopping up the lightly-armed irregular forces becomes almost a police matter. If you play it safe and take your time, you may end up, in the end, with a lot more actual fighting and enormous political costs.
The 4th ID (Task Force Iron Horse to be more accurate) is enroute to the Gulf. I will keep looking for something online, but I heard that elements will be offloading in Kuwait as early as a few days from now, with the rest to follow.
Suprisingly little recent news about the 1st Cavalry. Since only one of its 3 bridages have finished converting to the new ‘digital standards’, I wonder it they are destined for action at all. But hey, I have all night to look, so I’ll keep looking for info about the 1st.
An excellent visual representation of the war can be had here.
Said Truth Seeker:
I don’t think it has been attempted. There have of course been attempted airmobile raids on cities, like the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran and the fiasco in Mogadishu, but the two closest examples I can think of are the British 1st Airborne attempt to grab the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem (which also failed) and the planned but never executed drop of the XVIII Airborne Corps on Berlin near the close of the war in Europe. The Arnhem landings were actually far outside of Arnhem itself, and Berlin is an ideal city for a drop because of its extensive park land.
If I had to guess, the planning for that Berlin drop would be hot stuff over there at the Pentagon if such a thing is now contemplated. Does anyone know what the name of that operation was, and if there is anything extensive written about it?
Incidentally, it looks like another 100,000 troops are shipping out. Here comes that flank support the generals say we don’t need.
I don’t know King, privately the Army generals have been saying all along we don’t have enough ground troops. Evidently Rumsfeld fell for the newest “oldest trick-in-the-book” that air power would win the battle all on its’ own. Bush would just shake his fist at Iraq and everyone would surrender.