This won’t happen. You can’t have a guerrilla campaign over the long term without a secure line of supply. They can’t get one at all. If they don’t have the cooperatio of the populace (and it appears in most places they don’t.), then they are screwed. Period.
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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.
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Since they had another 100,000 troops ready to go after one week of campaigning, I would assume that Rumsfeld prepared for that eventuality. Regardless, since we’ve taken half of Iraq and many of the critical sites in North and Western Iraq, we’ve been doing damned well. Also, I point out that the strategy was to roll fast and far into Iraq without a huge bombing prelude. Therefore, Rumsfeld probably didn’t count on that bombing prelude leading to surrendur.
In any event, the militry never predicated its plan on the Iraqi Republican Guard surrenduring.
smiling bandit, I’m not following your logic when you say, “You can’t have a guerrilla campaign over the long term without a secure line of supply.” Since the guerillas can blend into the civilian population, your statement only seems to be correct if the civilians don’t have supplies either (unless your only talking about ammunition).
I think the Iraqis are counting on summer. If they can hold out long enough, it’s gonna get damned hot. I heard this discussed on NPR, and a Admin guy pooh-poohed that idea, pointing out that the British had worked and fought under such conditions. Now I’m not saying that our guys aren’t as tough as the Limeys but there’s a catch. Those bio/chem suits. They are closed environments, are they not? In very hot weather, the very optimum conditions for heat stroke.
Well, they don’t have to wear them all the time, do they? No, they don’t. But every time the Iraqis lob a Scud, or scud like missile, or do anything that bluffs like a chemical attack, we will be scurrying to put them on and keep them on as long as a presumed threat exists.
The Iraqis wont be constrained in that way, they will know there isnt any chemical/bio threat. Bio threat will be worse, it will be hours before an all clear can be safely sounded.
So…bluff the Americans into wearing thier suits, wait until they start to keel over. And then attack.
This just in, via Drudge, from my most recent favorite reporter of all time, Seymour Hersh, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan magazine, The New Yorker
"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly rejected advice from Pentagon planners that substantially more troops and armor would be needed to fight a war in Iraq, New Yorker Magazine reported.
“… Rumsfeld insisted at least six times in the run-up to the conflict that the proposed number of ground troops be sharply reduced and got his way.”
…“They’ve got no resources. He was so focused on proving his point – that the Iraqis were going to fall apart,” sez source.
“Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said.”
Well, that could be. This fellow Hersh has a history of making wild accusations. Why, just the other day Richard Perle threatened to sue him for suggesting that Perle had some conflict of interest. I have even read him suggesting that our Fearless Misleader oftimes does not convey the whole truth.
And thanks to CNN, I was just reminded of this thread from last fall. As you may recall, the military wisely decided to run some war games to see how this whole Iraq invasion thing would play out. The guy they hired to command the pretend Iraq, a retired Marine general, ran a guerilla campaign, suicide bombers, etc. The U.S. brass ruled that was out of bounds, resurrected the forces the “Iraqis” had destroyed, and merrily went about their plans. The ex-Marine quit in disgust.
Some of the comments of certain posters in that thread strike me as, oh, I don’t know . . . interesting:
Amen, Wabbit.
(And I note that the linked thread has now been revived in the Pit. Might be some interesting further conversations, in light of current events and lessons apparently not taken to heart.)
Yes the Hersh article sounds interesting. I find it surprising that the backbiting has started so early. Despite the higher-than-expected resistance I thought the war had gone reasonably OK from a purely military perspective. Howerve the article identifies some potentially serious problems at least in the short run:
“Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said”.
I still think the US will win relatively easily in the end at the purely military level, but every week that the war goes on will create problems in the region and if it lasts for months, as some people are suggesting, it could be disastrous.
One big worry is a surge of Islamic extremists who slip into the country to carry on guerilla warfare against the US with suicide tactics even after the war is technically over.