Why would a superpower use less than extreme force when taking over a country?

[Bibliovore]

@Zagadka

WE INVADED THEIR COUNTRY. WHAT THE F DO YOU EXPECT?*

Seriously, some people… look, because you CAN throw billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of soldiers at a problem doesn’t mean you will solve the problem. Most of the time, you’ll just create more problems. Much more important than sending an overwhelming force is your policy once that force is in place.

Exactly. We have no bloody right to be there in the first place, so all this talk of daisy-cutters and bombing civilians is just a steaming pile of murderous gung-ho horseshit

[scule]

You know, I can understand where PaulFitzroy is coming from, even if I don’t agree with his methods. Quite simply, if you’re going to do something as serious as go to war, it has to be done properly, and this war was not done properly. I wouldn’t say let’s bomb the cities, but fear and intimidation are the hallmarks of successful conquest, and like it or not that’s what this war really is about. The Iraqi people may have wanted to be rid of Saddam, but they didn’t want this.

I remember reading an editorial a while back where the author said that the British method in the past was to annihilate the incumbent regime and install a new leader from among the local population, then brutally put down any opposition to his rule. Doesn’t sound very democratic, but then democracy tends to come long after war, rather than as a direct result of it (with exceptions of course). If the US et al were going to invade, they should have sent a gargantuan force (more than is there by double, at least), disarmed every single person and immediately and thoroughly established control of every town, village and city. Lock up the borders, control people’s movements, and otherwise exchange one dictator for another. Then, while continuing to maintain control (not through brute force but through threat of same), they could gradually allow the Iraqi governing authority to build trust and move towards taking control of government. This was the idea, but it wasn’t thorough enough in its existing implementation to be effective, and so it hasn’t been possible to put down the insurgency and keep the populace in line.

Personally, I’m with most people here in that I don’t think this war ever should have happened in the first place, and any alternative to combat would have been preferable, but if you’re going to do something, do it right and do it all the way.

[Merijeek]

@ralph124c

Unfortunately, PAULFITZROY is right. We should either withdraw, and keep a token force to show support for the Iraqi government, or else brutally crush the opposition.
Thereis no “middle path”. Bush and Blair should have thought better before the invasion, but this is what we are faced with now.

I think that PAULFITZROY has a point, but I don’t think he’s articulating it well.

That, or maybe I’m just projecting my own thoughts onto what he’s saying. Anyways, I’ll try a shot at an explanation.

What’s being done isn’t working. As ralph124c said, there is no middle road, but the Coalition is trying to walk it.

It seems as if they’re trying to do the whole tit-for-tat thing the Israelis been doing for nearly thirty years. How is the Coalition doing the same thing going to be any different? Not learning from history is one thing, not learning from what is going on and has been going on as far back as I can remember is something else alltogether.

The choices are to use overwhelming force and hope for success (although I think the 10 mile radius DaisyCutters are a bit of an overreaction) or to get the fuck out and say, “Shit, we’d best not do that again.”

Remember that bunch of standoffs we had in April? Those ended up in defeat for the Coalition. It was pretty much demonstrated that the Coalition can’t win when the Bad Guys try hard enough. They demonstrated that the US has as much control in those cities as Saddam had in Northern Iraq with the sanctions going on. They had a chance to put fear into their enemies (and potential enemies) with a show of strength against an obvious and well defined target*. Instead they caved.

Besides, it may have been possible back in the day for the Coalition to win the whole “heats and minds” battle. That’s totally gone now, and I think pretty much any fool can see that now.

It’s back to being a guerilla war, and the guerillas aren’t afraid of the US troops anymore. If the Coalition continues to follow the path they’re on now, the Iraqis will eventually get sick of 50 of their countrymen being blown to confetti every single day. Then you’ll have the average Iraqi protesting in the streets for the USA to get out.

-Joe

*Not that the target was perfectly defined or anything, but in a guerilla war it’s the closest they’re going to get

[Tamerlane]

@Shagnasty

The question that I have here is why a superpower would only deploy a few thousand troops to take over to another country. It seems like suicide for the soldiers and no political gain and a sure loss for the leaders. It seems to be repeated over and over. The most recent example I have is that of Afghanistan. The Soviets fought the Afghans for years without winning even though they obviously could have done it if they deployed even a relatively small portion of their resources.

That is highly speculative. In fact the USSR was close to “winning” in 1985-1986 in the sense that they had developed a much better force mix and were having great success in suppressing the Mujahadeen. This reversed itself ( not in the sense of losing battles, but in the sense of failing to sucessfully contain ) in 1986-1987 when deployment of U.S. supplied Blowpipe and Stinger missiles started costing the Soviets 150-200 aircraft a year and greatly inhibited the close air support and infantry heli-assaults they had earlier been so effective.

Doubling or tripling the number of troops wouldn’t necessarily have helped any. For one thing the regular army was armor heavy ( in training and doctrine, as well as equpiment ) and armor, outside of convoying support on main roads, was not very useful in Afghanistan ( and the second-rate armor available even less so, see below ).

More importantly due to economics the very large Soviet army was grouped into tiers. So the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany ( GSFG ) were top of the line, well-trained and equipped with the best equipment ( Category 1 ). But the home defense divisions in Russia were a bit lower grade, with less new equipment ( Category 2 ). Owing to its low priority and the compromised quality of the local adversaries facing them, the Central Asian divisions that initially were deployed in Afghanistan and were readily available to reinforce, were Category 3 divisions - understaffed, undertrained and underequipped with antiquated equipment at that. They performed very poorly in Afghanistan and were later withdrawn and replaced with a different force mix with better units drawn from Russia, in particular airborne divisions and specialized commando and recon units like Spetznaz that were better suited and trained to operating in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. However the USSR had bigger security concerns than a little country on its flank, desperately poor at the best of times. They could not, in their mind at least, afford to strip ALL or even MANY of their top-line units to fight in Afghanistan when they were needed to defend against the west.

So flooding Afghanistan with top-grade troops was not possible and low-grade troops were worse than useless under the circumstances - they were just casualty magnets as they were armor-bound sitting ducks in old armor that was easily dispatched.

Another obvious example is Vietnam. Deploying troops in small numbers over several years is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is devote the full forces of the country in a small period of time to win decisively.

Deploying a half million men on sudden notice to a teensy country is not always that easy politically, even after a Gulf of Tonkin. At any rate the U.S. simply miscalculated ( badly ) the force that would be necessary. As it is the U.S. army was straining to meet manpower demands by the latter part of the war as it was and still not gaining ground.

On the other hand, you have the current administration that decides that Afghanistan is a threat and takes it over in less than a week.

No, they toppled the government in a week, by creating an environment where local warlords found it more expedient to abandon the Taliban than support it. Afghanistan is still not “taken over” in the sense it is neither occupied nor pacified. It just is no longer dominated by an actively hostile government, but rather fractured into more locally concerned warlords. If anything Afghanistan argues against your thesis in that it was achieved with a bare minimum of U.S. force, carefully applied.

The other example is Iraq. We took it over in less than a month because we devoted all resources to it.

Quite the contrary, I, and many analysts, have argued strenuously that we deployed far too few resources. Even if the Iraqi army had stood and fought, removing Saddam was always going to be the easy part - we had sufficient force to accomplish that. However we should have two or three times as many troops on the ground to immediately secure the peace. Gulf War II was mostly well-fought ( though really they should have t least waited for the other heavy division, delayed by the Turkey snafu - marines should never have been operating as they did ), but woefully handled in the aftermath. Poor planning. And this backs your thesis, because it was indeed unnecessary. A dominant clique in the government was convinced that going small was cost-effective and just as operationally effective. Unfortunately, they were wrong IMO.

My basic argument is that if you decide to do it, you better do it decisively or you are prolonging a war and killing civilian and military personell on their side and ours. My stance is, if you want to do it, you better do it and use the full force of the US military. Otherwise, innocent civilians and soldiers on both sides are going to be killed without any gain.

You have a valid point in a sense, but I’d say the real world doesn’t always allow such options.

• Tamerlane

[RTFirefly]

@PaulFitzroy

After the mutilated, burned bodies of contractors were paraded through the streets of Fallujah and ultimately hung from a bridge while nearly the whole town watched in attendance, the appropriate response would have been to drop daisycutters on every hovel within 10 miles of the scene. This is how to win with the people we are fighting: only fear can destroy an enemy as determined as the ones we are fighting in the Middle East right now.

OK, let’s backtrack and review the bidding.

Why are we still in Iraq to begin with? We’ve known for a year that there were no WMDs. (At least, we’d better hope so, because if there were, we sure don’t have 'em, so whoever does is not our friend.) So we don’t have to worry about the WMD threat or the alleged Saddam-terrorist nexus. (That threat was dependent on the WMDs anyway.) And once we captured Saddam last December, we knew he wasn’t returning to power.

Oh yeah, that’s right: we invaded to liberate the Iraqis.

Well, then: if you wind up having to indiscriminately kill large numbers of the people you supposedly came to liberate, that kinda ends your last reasonable excuse for hanging around. (AFAIAC, the degree of force we already used pretty much managed that.) Yeah, you can win, sure, but if the Iraqi people in general weren’t your declared enemy upfront, you’ve pretty much lost sight of your objectives, and have made a mission out of your revenge fantasies.

Can’t you see there’s a difference between some tools in Bloomington, Indiana (of which there are more than a few) wishing ill on others, and literally hundreds of people pouring out into the streets cheering, chanting, screaming and celebrating while the bodies of noncombatant American civilians are defiled as an act of spite?

Surely you can see the difference.

In any case war is war, and that was most certainly an act of war deserving of retaliation.

The Blackwater security contractors weren’t exactly noncombatants.

AFAICT, nobody’s ever explained what they were doing in Fallujah in the first place. The initial explanation was that they were guarding a food convoy, but that explanation was ditched pretty quickly, with no replacement provided that I remember.

At any rate, in war, you have to define who your enemy is, and act against them. Did we go to war against Iraq? No, we didn’t. We went to war against Saddam’s regime, which is long gone. We can retaliate against the killers or their organization, if we can find them. If not, killing the people we’re supposedly liberating because they’ve expressed hostile opinions isn’t retaliation; it’s revenge.

Maybe you’ve seen photographs of lynchings in the South in the early 20th century. They were often like big picnics, outdoor socials centered around the torture and killing of a black American. By your standard, we should have destroyed numerous Southern towns.

Actually, there’s a better case to be made for destroying the Southern towns. Fallujah’s celebrations pretty much took place after the Blackwaters were already dead, and nothing could be done for them. With lynchings, the celebration was generally well underway while the victim was still alive, signifying that all the other participants (which, in a small-town lynching, could easily amount to most of the town) were party to the murder.

[Asteroide]

Not really a new point, but the force in Iraq is clearly too small for an occupation - probably not even big enough for effective policing of a peaceful society. I believe there is something like 1 soldier per 300 population in Iraq, this is similar to the average number of police officers in EU countries - and the EU police forces have the cooperation of the populace, a clearly defined mission, and specialized training.

So I guess the number one error would be trying to wage war on a tight (hah!) budget.

Following a close second, I believe fear of casualties is another important factor. A couple of posters have mentioned the lynching in Fallujah - it’s interesting to note that there was no US presence to interrupt the festivities. The same appears to be true with the various stand-offs that followed - the media often referred to “coalition incursions” into cities which were clearly not occupied by coalition troops in any real sense.

It would seem that the coalition forces have been avoiding engagement to some degree, and don’t have big enough numbers to be able to set up “community policing”.

I haven’t heard a whole lot about intelligence / infiltration / commando action either - anybody know what’s happening on that front ?-

[Zagadka]

@Asteroide

It would seem that the coalition forces have been avoiding engagement to some degree, and don’t have big enough numbers to be able to set up “community policing”.

Well, it probably coulda worked if some asshat coughBremmercough hadn’t disbanded the Iraqi military and police.

Apparently the concept of “dismissing over half a million trained and armed enemies overnight” sounded rather enticing to someone in the Bush Administration.

But I’m just an armchair general, what do I know.

[Bryan_Ekers]

The Soviets lost Afghanistan when John “Your Worst Nightmare” Rambo showed up.

I mean, duh.

[Optihut]

@Shagnasty

The most recent example I have is that of Afghanistan. The Soviets fought the Afghans for years without winning even though they obviously could have done it if they deployed even a relatively small portion of their resources. Another obvious example is Vietnam.

On the other hand, you have the current administration that decides that Afghanistan is a threat and takes it over in less than a week. The other example is Iraq. We took it over in less than a month because we devoted all resources to it.

Vietnam and Russian activity in Afghanistan happened during the cold war years. In those times, neither Russia nor the USA could go “all in”, because that might have been enough to change the cold war into a hot war, which was something everyone wanted to avoid.

For better or worse nowadays, without the threat of real repercussions, it is possible to use extreme force to take over other countries, as it was so stated in your OP.