Let me answer that right now: No, they wouldn’t be
I get testosterone poisoning just thinking about it, but yeah, you’re right.
Ahem.
Now, back to the OP…
For a unit fighting like the Germans or Japanese in WWII, or the Iraq army, where you are outgunned, it probably is, as a poster above said, like being on the losing side of a video game.
If you are blowing stuff up and sneaking around, you probably feel pretty good as long as you don’t get caught.
Apparantly they had been talking to him for a couple of months. He was being moved to someplace nicer, safer.
I dunno, I am not a pilot.
The Germans fought roughly 10 times as many Russians as Americans, and that would be overwhelming. And the Russians would do assaults that the Americans would consider suicidal. So yeah, even if you are going to lose, you know which front you want to lose on. That doesn’t make the American assaults less effective, just more survivable for a number of reasons. Also, the Americans had the proximity fuze on their artillery. So instead of hitting their target and then blowing up, or blowing up at a set altitude for anti-aircraft, the artillery would blow up at the optimum distance from the target to spread shrapnel. So a ground burst wouldn’t hit the ground and be immediately absorbed, but go off above the infantry soldiers’ heads and kill many more. AA would go off near enemy planes. This was one of the best kept secrets of the war and very effective.
As to the OP, even beating the Americans, as in Vietnam, means that you are going to suffer enormously in casualty ratios. You don’t do such things for sport, but only when your country’s existence is at stake. In either Iraq conflict the regular forces of the Iraqis surrendered rather than be slaughtered. Insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq still suffered highly disproportionate losses.
Fight the Americans, win or lose, you are going to be suffering a lot more than the Americans.
Yeah, but if you win…
Probably because fighting Americans was just business, with Russians, it was personal and too the knife.
Declan
Man o’ man. Here I go.
Nothing I’m about to say is driven by politics or opinion. I’m re-stating things I saw in various independent documentaries, so I sure do not want to get into some kind of debate. That said…
About a year ago, I watched the Hurt Locker. I thought it was fascinating and great. I read reviews, tho, and saw that actual troops criticized the movie as not portraying an accurate genre-piece of the day-to-day happenings of the Iraq war.
This sent me on a freakin’ BENDER of war documentaries, readying, and just a full scale knowledge binging.
I wondered exactly what you are seem to be asking: if we have this amazing technology, why aren’t we squashing the bujeezus out of everyone?
Speaking off the cuff here, in the first Gulf War, we utterly dismantled Iraq in short order. The Highway of Death incident is a great example of how, as Schwartzkopt put it, we “smashed a fly with a sledgehammer.” We basically blew up the first and last vehicles in the escaping convoy, ruling out retreat, then carpet bombed everything that moved. I saw interviews with ground troops sent in to “mop up” who were ordered to shoot anyone near “being armed.” The people being interviewed said it was a haunting, troubling experience.
So I, like most people, expected the new wars to go this way. However, they have not.
I will try to steer clear of any rhetoric, but there’s simple facts that factor into why things have gone so much more poorly this time.
I’ll pause here and say there are a lot of really great documentaries that follow battalions around. And I want to emphasize these are all even-handed documentaries without political agenda for the most part.
Restrepo. It follows a troop in an FOP in Afghanistan. (this film is unflinchingly honest, real, and heartbreaking).
**Secret Iraq: **(this film gets into the Iraqi point of view and has more truth than I believe I’d ever otherwise have heard. They interview a lot of Iraqi citizens and warriors).
**Dispatches: Iraq’s secret War Files **(again, not getting to politics of right or wrong—this film discusses the specifics of certain battles/conflicts and how they were resolved in a very candid, behind the scenes way. VERY Informative.
Something I learned: Al Qaeda’s entrance to the conflict severely complicated the ground war, increasing troop death by huge proportions. The saving grace came when things got too hairy and allied troops stopped going deeper into Al Qaeda led cells of the city, so AQ had nothing to do. So Al Qaeda turned on the populace, enforcing Sharia law as dictators, declaring sectors of Iraq “Muslim Nations” under Al Qaeda rule. They would beat women to death in some cases for not having full burqas.
Eventually, the insurgent leader came to the nearest US FOP and basically said “look. We killed your guys, but Al Qaeda has become the bigger enemy. Look at who I am. And look what I have done—I have walk in here, to you. We need your help.” It was because of this that the insurgency went into a ceasefire—and we armed and trained the very people who weeks before had killed our troops.
This was the tidal shift the Iraq war and was the first turning point where we could start to hand power back over to the locals to enforce their own laws. It was effectively the end of the insurgency and more or less the first rays of sunlight in this godawful war.
I say all that to say this: part of why this war was so ugly and grueling was because it’s urban warfare. Technology can only go so far. Shooting in the streets is shooting in the streets. It was the old west.
Not to mention we were on their turf.
The first major problem was as soon as we invaded, we dismantled Iraq’s National Army. This was a crucial mis-step insomuch as Saddam fled. His armies had nothing to do, no loyalties to what was no longer a dictatorship. Interview after interview confirms these men came forward and said “we are organized. We have guns. We will fight with America. TELL US WHAT TO DO.” This is vital for several reasons, first and foremost—these men were professionals. It was their job to fight, and suddenly we rendered them unemployed. They were literally told to “go home.” So now we’ve created a group of disenfranchised warriors who now armed and unemployed—and pissed off we didn’t want them to help.
Furthermore, when the insurgency realized the effectiveness of IEDs, things got nasty. 64% of US troop deaths were IED related. 75% of all Afghanistan US troops were IEDs. Technology and progressive warfare does little against being simply unable to drive anyplace at any time because you’ll probably get blown up.
It’s a bone-simple and totally unconventional weapon. Again, there’s only so much technology can do in this case.
Another exacerbating factor was we weren’t fighting an army of organized and well defined troops. We were in essence fighting EVERYONE. Ex Iraqi nationals joined paramilitary cells simply because it was work (a lot of people were paid to fight by Al Qaeda).
Al Qaeda was paying local Iraqi boys $250 per RPG fired into US troops. In one interview, they said “it’s no big deal. We just go shoot some Americans, get money, feed the family.” They do not consider themselves combatants, they just were desperate and it was hell. They might do it once a month, or once ever, or join the cells.
So. Like I said, I thought if we have crazy robots and drones, missiles that shoot other missiles and every other manner of mind-bendingly futuristic technology, we should win more efficiently. But all of that does little when it’s good old fashioned toe-to-toe with what essentially was everyone. When a woman in full burka could blow herself up, how do you proceed?
Everyone was weapon.
Every**THING **was a weapon.
They strapped IEDs to a donkey and had it run into a US encampment and detonate. From then on, the order was to shoot all stray donkeys.
In Afghanistan, things were tremendously more dire. Whereas in Iraq we could train local personnel and have them take over, limiting our role and gradually phasing out—it didn’t work that way in Afghanistan.
The majority of that nation—one of the poorest on the planet—cannot read. Not just that they cannot read, most are on drugs. Opium is huge there. So for every 10 guys they’d hire and train, 9 would drop out. Because it simply wasn’t worth the risk to the locals. We wasted so much energy training people who later simply dropped out—or worse, switched sides.
I forgot the statistic, but the ratio for how many guys we killed vs how many came over from Pakistan to take their place was something like 1:2. We simply couldn’t kill them fast enough.
Think about that. The mechanism of war is “WE WILL KILL YOU IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY,” yet we have an enemy who glorified dying.
And Restrepo shows how this actually went on the battlefield with real troops.
I’ll wrap this up, but long story short, most of what we did emboldened the fanatics we were fighting. Not to mention the economics involved—watch Iraqi For Sale and seethe in indignation. Short answer there was a lot of the peril for us troops was created due to the commerce of war, once again limiting what good our technology could do.
I strongly suggest you watch Restrepo, The War Tapes, or—if you want to see what it’s like from Iraqi’s point of view, watch Iraq in Fragments or **Dispatches **or Secret Iraq.
Iraq in Fragments was the most amazing documentary of the bunch simply because they actually speak with Insurgents who fought against us. It is wholly from the Iraqi’s standpoint. As far as I know, it’s the only western media that spoke with any insurgents. They imbedded with Moqtada Al Sadr/’s Madhi Army before having to get the heck out of there when things got super real. I also believe Dispatches talks with a LEADER in the insurgent army.
Powerful stuff.
Another good documentary that is slightly more partisan (but I still think factually honest) is No End in Sight.
At the risk of flaming a debate (again—I really don’t want that!!!), I think it requires mentioning that another major reason we struggled in spite of our technology and training was the massive mismanagement of the war from the get-go.
Without commenting anyone’s political motive or agenda, it seems factually relevant that we grossly underestimated the initial phases of the war and how we predicted it would go.
That whole buzzphrase of “we will win their hearts and minds” and “greeted as liberators” was an honest prediction. Because of this, we didn’t enforce popper martial law or even take firm control. The Coalition Provisional Authority was poorly instituted and then neutered to do much good—again, all because of mismanagement based on prediction.
The potential of an insurgency was addressed and laughably dismissed as preposterous during the run up to invasion. It wasn’t so much as we “didn’t see it coming,” it’s more we scoffed at the possibility. Rumsfeld is on the record doing that charming giggling dismissal thing he does when asked about “potential insurgency.” He actually denied it for some time after it started, calling it “isolated paramilitary groups akin to gangs.”
The point is we didn’t accurately or efficiently utilize our technology, which left the coalition forces impotent in a great many ways.
And, from the Iraqi standpoint (which if I understand you are looking to understand how they perceived our military might?), we looked like total jerks because we didn’t do things like secure the National Museum in Baghdad. This lack of procuring national treasures and the vacuum we created by disposing the Iraqi government and NOT taking it over with a strong-handed interim government caused many locals to feel like we didn’t much care about them, their nation, their heritage, or anything else. It fueled the indignation of the locals and caused a rift that led to the insurgency.
Finally thought, slightly off the central topic:
The documentary Shadow Company discusses the private military contractors and their roll in Iraq.
This is one of the coolest, most fascinating documentaries I’ve ever seen. We largely tried to privatize this war for a host of varying reasons—which again I will not comment on the morality or politics of it all. It is however, worth mentioning the effect mercenaries had on the mentality and perspective of the Iraqis.
PMCs are not regulated by any law. They do not represent an ideology (they are simply in it for the money, which was really good during this conflict—some made $1000 a day). Because they didn’t have an ideological investment in the war, because they didn’t fall under jurisdiction of any nation’s laws (immune to Iraqi law, immune to US law, do not fall under the Geneva Convention, etc)—a lot of loose-cannon mishandling of force came about.
The battle of Fallujah was because of a misguided PMC daytrip into a not very good part of town. They were lead into an ambush, murdered, their bodies quartered, burned and hung on a bridge. It was so high-profile the coalition forces had to react, which lead to the quagmire battle in Fallujah.
The documentary follows various PMCs and gives very interesting insight into the day-to-day happenings in Iraq.
The most recent account I’ve read is Sorrow of War which was written by a Vietcong soldier.
Its an interesting question, actually. Has anyone written anything post “war on terror” from the opposition point of view ? (other than anonymous Al Qiada diatribes posted online).
several of the documentaries i mentioned have interviews with madhi army members, al qaeda and insurgents.
Another aspect of at least the war in Iraqi was the Sunni/Shi’a relationship.
Once Sadam was was deposed, the reign of terror the Sunni had over the Shi’a majority ceased. The initial vaccuum of power we created upon invasion (due to our lack of imposing interim government) left the populace virtually anarchic.
Shi’a used the oppurtunity to enact revenge killings on the Sunni, which is when the sectarian violence and civil war began. This further affected the Iraqi perspective of Americans as not caring about the people of the nation.
Shi’a police were put into power by coalition authorities, which further incensed Sunni insurgents.
I saw that, I actually added Iraq in Fragments to my netflix queue. But a western documentary featuring interviews with insurgents is not the same as a narrative actually written by an ex-insurgent.
Maybe not–but personal interviews with them gives pretty clear insight as to their mentality. These are their words, their voices, and their point of view.
Secret Iraq has the clearest, most one-on-one candid conversations with insurgents. (it might be worth noting this was a British documentary, there seems to be a lot more transparency. The British Commander ((Gen Shaw)) in Bazra goes on camer and full out admits they straight lost to the insurgency there).
There’s really nothing surprising: they were emboldened and even arrogant against the coalition forces. We came into their city with tanks, but they’d film the same tanks being blown up by IDEs, make the footage into DVDs or put it on the net, to prove they could destroy our technological might with sheer will.
Hearing them speak, they lack fear in any capacity. There’s an interview with one of the insurgents who ambushed the PMCs in Fallugha explaining the disconnect between who they thought they were fighting and who they actually were fighting. (how they got interviews with these people is such a massively interesting aspect)
Iraqis believed the PMCs were CIA. So they were merciless.
I just revisted an interview with a US Captain who caught a pair of insurgents driving with a massive truckload of armor piercing shells and RPGs–and they were caught basically at the gate of the largest local US base. He was astounded at the audacity of the insurgents. They didn’t even attempt to hide the weapons. They weren’t idiots, either–it was just hubris. They felt they had an ideological and theological advantage and became ostensibly fearless.
Plus they knew they’d goaded us to come fight on their turf, on their terms. Nothing about the scale or scope of our military frightened them.
Iraq in Fragments, to repeat, is 100% about Iraqis. It follows a young Iraqi boy as the war begins, imbeds with the Madhi Army, then talks to the (newly liberated) Kurds in the north. As far as i know, it’s the only documentary strictly from their standpoint.
I do not suggest it–but you can also find the DVDs i referred to with english translations. It’s basically war porn filmed by Iraqis used to boost moral of the local militias.
It’s…a lot of stuff i desperately wish i could unsee.
How do soldiers/fighters feel when up against the American military? Hard to say and I doubt there is any useful answer.
There are two sorts of war: conventional and guerrilla. Conventional war fought by trained soldiers in uniforms under a command structure is now rare. Occasionally in Africa, a few hot moments between Pakistan and India, North and South Korea, but generally that type of war is currently quiescent.
I imagine the Iraqi army was hammered so hard and fast that they didn’t get much of a chance to test themselves although they did inflict casualties.
The other type of war waged by guerrillas, insurgents, freedom fighters, mercenaries whatever, is much more difficult for any military to win against. Its hit and run. When there are no uniforms and a civilian population how do you know who the enemy are?
America’s loss in Vietnam despite huge firepower amply illustrates this. Small men in pyjamas with no tanks and vehicles humbled a great power.
US technology such as night-vision gives its soldiers an edge but ultimately war is one group of humans trying to suppress and control another. Technology can not overcome the human spirit which means in the long long term, insurgents should win if the population agrees with them.
In one of his books David Hackworth recalls meeting NVA; veterans of the regular forces and it was generally that after they got over the fear of the awesome US firepower they realised that they had many advantages, such as knowledge of the terrain and the US had many vulnerabilities and that those could be exploited. The aim was to neutralise the US advantage in firepower. When they fought with the US troops, they made sure to fight close in, so the air and artillery could not support. Hackworth also says that the general Vietnamse view was that outside the airbourne and the Marines, regular US forces were not very good.
Exactly my point-we were NOT ruthless enough, to win in Vietnam. Becase we tried to “fight fair”-whatever that means, we lost our advantages (high tech weapons, overwhelming firepower). Generals like Westmoreland fought Vietnam like we fought the Spanish American war-hand to hand combat. This resulted in high US casualties, and frustration-guerilla fighters are trained to avoid battle when the advantage moves to their opponents. That is why, despite the sacrifice of thousands of lives, we left Khe Sanh-it was simply not worth the cost in lives.
Had we used our weapons to our advantage in Vietnam, we would have won-of course, such a victory would involve taking about 5-6 million vietnamese lives-and the world opinion would not have been positive.
To sum up: if a war is truly worth it, be prepared to commit horrible massacres, and inflict massive casualties on the enemy. If this is not worth it, get the hell out.
Ok, the US manifestly did not try to fight fair in Vietnam. I don’t know where you get your theories from. The US aim in Vietnam was NOT to detroy or conquer, it was to pacify and remake/keep S Vietnam as an ally. That required an altogether different application of force then say WWII or WWI or indeed Desert Storm.
And its not a liberal (what the hell do Americans think that word even means) idea or a new one, but dating back from the ancient history.
There’s one little itty-bitty fact that always seems to get left out when the Clinton critics discuss this incident. That is, it wasn’t Clinton that sent the troops in, it was Bush. And, in the tragic incident the troop didn’t have their hands tied. They killed hundreds of Somalis. The screw up of the incident lies with the military command and the way they executed. It wasn’t a failure of policy. Now compared to Reagan/Lebanon, which incident demonstrated more incompetence?