What Have Our Army Learning From Iraq? (Tactics -- Not Policy)

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
The problem with that is when the majority of the population supports killing you, “clearing” would be hard to distinguish from genocide. This isn’t really a “war of insurgency”, which would be a war against the legitimate government; without such a government, there can’t be an insurgency or insurgents, despite how much we like to use the word.
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That’s what I was trying to get at.

[QUOTE=toadspittle]

Unfortunately, when you (a) can’t tell the insurgents from the non-militarized civilians and (b) don’t disarm the population, the only way you can “clear and hold” is to completely depopulate the country neighborhood by neighborhood and city by city. Otherwise, someone is going to move back in, and we aren’t going to be able to tell if they’re insurgents (or, for that matter, local militias that just want us the f— out) or not, until we start getting shot again.
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[QUOTE=Danimal]
Well A is correct, but in my understanding B does not apply, insofar as our forces do disarm the population when clearing and holding, or at least do their darnedest to do so, without depopulating the areas they move through.
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Except for the fact that every Iraqi household is allowed to have its own AK-47…

22

I do hope that America learns what it did not learn from Vietnam: that you cannot successfully occupy a land unless you can isolate it from neighbours that are not your allies.

23

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
All our base are belong to you! And you destruct they!
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Not exactly what I was going for, but it might make a good drinking game or the like to translate some of GWB’s speeches through AYB. “Is our children learning that the terrists set us up the WMD?”

24

[QUOTE=toadspittle]
Sorry–re-reading the OP title, maybe my post was a little too strategy-oriented and not tactic-oriented enough. But I think the tactical lessons of occupying a country like Iraq show that we have serious imbalances in the strategic makeup of our forces.
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At least the first of your points fit well into my OP intent (which could have been framed as “military tactics OR military strategy, just not anything about excecutive geopolitics”). And most of the answers here have hewed to this divide: “What strategies/tactics CAN the military execute, when asked to excecute them in pursuit of a given political policy?” or even “what military operations can the subordinate military commanders report to the CIC as being feasible/not feasible when he contemplates the formulation of political policy X?” vs. “Which policy should be chosen by the executive for the military to execute?”

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[QUOTE=Toadspittle]
That’s what I was trying to get at.
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Whoops; somehow I missed your post.

[QUOTE=Quartz]
I do hope that America learns what it did not learn from Vietnam: that you cannot successfully occupy a land unless you can isolate it from neighbours that are not your allies.
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That idea suffers from the problem that almost all of the people fighting are Iraqis. You could build a mile high wall around the country, and there’s no reason to believe that would stop the fighting.

Which reminds me of another lesson that should have been learned ( and shouldn’t have required learning, for that matter ) : Secure the armories. Don’t drive past them to get to the Oil Ministry as fast as possible.

26

[QUOTE=toadspittle]
Except for the fact that every Iraqi household is allowed to have its own AK-47…
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Well, maybe I’m confused. I Googled and found references from summer 2003 to U.S. forces allowing Iraqis to keep their AK-47s to protect themselves. But a report from 2007 shows U.S. and Iraqi police searching out and seizing weapons caches, apparently including AK-47s, so even if that was the policy, it doesn’t seem to be the policy anymore. Either that, or the Defense Department’s right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Anyway, not to stray too far from the topic, I will agree that clear and hold tactics won’t work very well when you leave the population armed, and U.S. forces are probably learning that lesson also.

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[QUOTE=Danimal]
Well, maybe I’m confused. I Googled and found references from summer 2003 to U.S. forces allowing Iraqis to keep their AK-47s to protect themselves.
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I have a feeling we’re looking at the difference between one AK-47 and a crate (the “cache” mentioned in your link) of them. Someone with a crate of AKs is clearly up to no good.

One lesson I hope US Forces have learned is that just because you believe in the right to keep and bear arms doesn’t mean you have to share that right with your freshly liberated “friends.”

28

And I hope that is a lesson we HAVEN’T learned actually. I think the Iraqi’s are going to need those guns one way or the other…in fact I think they already do.

-XT

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I think one strategy lesson of Iraq is that it may actually be possible to win a war too quickly. To illustrate what I mean, look at a boxing match where one fighter clearly outclasses the other. The fight can go one of two ways:

In the first example, after letting the weaker fighter get in a few jabs while setting up his punch, the stronger fighter delivers a devasting 1st-round KO that leaves the other fighter down for the count.

In the second example, the stronger fighter toys with the weaker one: dodges, weaves and blocks the other fighter’s punches and delivers a slow but steady barrage of punishment. After several rounds, the stronger fighter is still fresh as a daisy while the weaker one is dazed with pain, staggering, gasping for breath, barely able to lift his arms. The stronger fighter measures his punches enough to send his opponent to the mat two or three times, and if the fight hasn’t been called by then finally puts his opponent out of his misery.

The thing is, conventional wars of the past wore out the enemy resistance- admittedly by necessity mainly- but the effect was that you let the die-hards literally die hard, stripped the enemy of hot headed young men eager to fight, and left the survivors so sick of fighting that they’d accept any defeat short of genocide. What no one realized back at the start of the war was that there’s a huge difference between destroying a country and conquering it.

Instead of blitzing Iraq from the air and then rolling over the almost non-existant conventional resistance, we possibly should have gone in far more slowly: used our immeasurably superior air power simply to minimize our ground troops’ casualites, and pushed the Iraqi army back bit by bit, consolidating our control of the ground before advancing again. This strategy would never have been considered by the Bush and Cheney crowd, who wanted a war won in two months, but taking 1 1/2 to 2 years to do the job right would have been faster and cheaper than the mess we’ve gotten into.

30

[QUOTE=Windwalker]
I’m not sure if they are, but they really should be learning that in these types of occupational wars, “Winning Hearts & Minds” has got to be ingrained in every soldier on the ground from the very beginning. That means mandatory language and culture shock programs at the very least, and soldiers who don’t take learning the local language seriously get penalized.
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Nation building has to be incorporated into the overal military and political strategy. The mentality that our military exists to “kill bad guys and break shit” is incorrect, immature and self defeating.

Vietnam lasted 12 years, killed a million Vietnamese and they still had people ready to fight. I get what you’re saying but I think you are probably comparing to WWI and WWII when you say “conventional wars of the past”. Conventional, professional armies driven by nationalism and ideology with a conventional command structure fighting a total war. Everything was fair game in the World Wars. Entire cities would be bombed to rubble if necessary (or even if it wasn’t). By the time it was done, the Germans were more worried about starving to death than mounting a guarilla war in defense of the Nazi regime.

31

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Instead of blitzing Iraq from the air and then rolling over the almost non-existant conventional resistance, we possibly should have gone in far more slowly: used our immeasurably superior air power simply to minimize our ground troops’ casualites, and pushed the Iraqi army back bit by bit, consolidating our control of the ground before advancing again. This strategy would never have been considered by the Bush and Cheney crowd, who wanted a war won in two months, but taking 1 1/2 to 2 years to do the job right would have been faster and cheaper than the mess we’ve gotten into.
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They would have simply gone to ground guerrilla style, as would the citizens. Your idea is based on the Bush lie that we were there to liberate them. We went there to conquer them, and they know it. Destroying the opposition by air (or otherwise ) would require the genocide of the Iraqi people. Destroying the army won’t do it, fast or slow. The army wasn’t our enemy; the majority of the population, soldier and civilian was, and is, because we made them so by attacking.

And we’ve already ground their faces in the fact that we don’t consider them human, that we consider their lives worth nothing. And that we seem to positively delight in laying waste to Iraq. Doing so on a grander scale for far longer wouldn’t make them hate us less.

32

I’m not sure that we’ve learned it but we should have done.

If there is a problem in another country then go in, remove the problem,do the best you can to make it V.difficult for the problem to rearise and then leave.Do not take over the whole country.

We went to war ostensibly to take out the threat of W.M.D. we should have located them or where they were likely to be and took out those sites.
Always supposing that they had existed in the first place of course.
As you are actually conquering territory(and not afterwards or in this case never)secure all captured arm dumps,weapons from surrendering soldiers and destroy soonest.

This may or may not slow down the advance but it will lessen the odds of the post victory conflict dragging on for years.
The allies are currently being killed by weapons and explosives that they took in the war but just left lying around for anyone to help themselves.

Secure art treasures as WELL as money/gold reserves etc. during the advance.

Immediate Post victory control external borders to limit smuggling and infiltration.

Do NOT dismantle all the organs of the previous government but use them,educate them,control them.

Wherever possible use local proxy troops,use the absaloute minimum of your own troops (more troops make more targets but are not necessarily that much more effective)and keep them V.V low profile and preferably as far away from the media as possible.
Its exciting,brave and noble fighting the Great Satan but less so your own people.

Dont keep troops in areas where they aren’t actually achieving anything just to establish a presence.
There are some very highly trained,very brave soldiers in parts of Afghan who are achieving nothing and due to the local circumstances CANNOT achieve anything,but they are there with some woolly brief about winning hearts and minds.
What they ARE doing is supplying the local Jack the Lads with targets and a meaning to life.

Their successes are basically killing some Mujas when they get ambushed which is offset by their own losses and doesn’t win over or impress the locals.
And finding some small,arms caches.

I’m most definitely not an airy fairy pacifist but those men are dying for very little good reason.

And finally,though it may offend some western liberals who think that people throughout the world can only be happy if they have the same political system as us dont take out dictatorships just because they’re dictatorships.

Just because someone lives in a dictatorship it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily long suffering angels themselves.

The average Iraqi is living in hell(Those who are still living of course)compared to the life they led under Saddam,and yes I do believe that he was a sick evil bastard.

And is the world a safer place because of that war?

Safer?

The same?

More dangerous?

Or a hell of a lot more dangerous?

33

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
They would have simply gone to ground guerrilla style, as would the citizens. Your idea is based on the Bush lie that we were there to liberate them. We went there to conquer them, and they know it. Destroying the opposition by air (or otherwise ) would require the genocide of the Iraqi people. Destroying the army won’t do it, fast or slow. The army wasn’t our enemy; the majority of the population, soldier and civilian was, and is, because we made them so by attacking.

And we’ve already ground their faces in the fact that we don’t consider them human, that we consider their lives worth nothing. And that we seem to positively delight in laying waste to Iraq. Doing so on a grander scale for far longer wouldn’t make them hate us less.
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Points taken, but I guess I’m left scratching my head; how did we ever win a war in the past? Where did these unsupressable insurgencies come from?

34

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Points taken, but I guess I’m left scratching my head; how did we ever win a war in the past? Where did these unsupressable insurgencies come from?
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Modern technology and tactics. The fact that we aren’t interested in simply killing every last Iraqi and settling there ourselves, like we would have in the old days. The fact that we aren’t willing to occupy Iraq forever. And the fact that we are so obviously in the wrong.

Certainly we can suppress the resistance - but we have to keep doing so, and keep doing so, and keep doing so. Short of genocide, it’s not a fight you generally ever actually win.

35

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
That idea suffers from the problem that almost all of the people fighting are Iraqis. You could build a mile high wall around the country, and there’s no reason to believe that would stop the fighting.
[/QUOTE]

On the contrary: one only has to look at the Malay insurgency which the British successfully crushed.

36

[QUOTE=Quartz]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
That idea suffers from the problem that almost all of the people fighting are Iraqis. You could build a mile high wall around the country, and there’s no reason to believe that would stop the fighting.
[/QUOTE]
On the contrary: one only has to look at the Malay insurgency which the British successfully crushed.
[/QUOTE]
Whatever the British did, I doubt they did it by building a wall around the country. The point, which you are ignoring, is that the vast majority of the fighting is NOT due to or by non-Iraqis, but home grown. And we let the Iraqis loot the armories, and have been handing weapons to various groups for that matter, so there’s no shortage of weapons. So securing the borders would do nothing.

37

[QUOTE=Quartz]
On the contrary: one only has to look at the Malay insurgency which the British successfully crushed.
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Interesting: Gary Brecher (the War Nerd from www.exile.ru) says the Malay insurgency is essentially the only time a Big Power has successfully suppressed an unconventional/insurgent movement by military power alone. Not sure if that’s true, but I’m having a hard time thinking of another example . . . .