Wednesday, April 09, 2003

[Colin Glassey] Failure of Special Forces to Win on Northern Front Not a Surprise Well, its not a surprise to Dr. Biddle. I just finished reading his essay on Afghanistan. Look at this: The results thus suggest that where the troops on the ground are comparable—either both skilled or both unskilled—American precision fires can make the difference. But where an unsophisticated ally is pitted against an enemy with the skills and motivation to survive precision engagement and fight back when attacked, then poorly trained allies will be unable to take advantage of the enormous potential that precision fires bring. Even with precision air support, indigenous allies thus need a combination of skill, motivation, and equipment at least broadly comparable to their enemies’ to prevail. In other words, special forces plus air power can turn the tide when special forces are working with allied forces that are at least the equal of the enemy. But, if the enemy is better than the allied troops, the special forces and air power won't be able to make up the difference. In the Northern Front it is clear that the Peshmerga of the Kurds have much less equipment than the Iraqi army. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no combat engineers. By contrast the Iraqi army does have tanks, troop carriers and artillery. The result should be (and is so far) a stalemate. Hats off to Dr. Biddle. 10:52:41 PM     [Colin Glassey] U.S. & British Performance was Impressive in 1991 Also Thanks to Intel Dump for this pointer to this wonderful paper on military history by Stephen Biddle called Victory Misunderstood. Here is a quote from the early part of the paper: ...About 4 p.m. on the afternoon of February 26, the regiment's lead troop, under the command of Captain H.R. McMaster, made contact with the main Iraqi position. Launching an immediate assault, McMaster's troop of 9 M1 tanks and 12 M3 Bradleys subsequently destroyed the entire defensive belt in front of them, hitting 37 Iraqi T-72s and 32 other armored vehicles in about 40 minutes. The adjoining troops immediately followed suit. Before stopping to regroup at around 5 p.m., this nominal scouting mission by three U.S. cavalry troops had overrun and wiped out an entire Republican Guard brigade. Subsequent Iraqi counterattacks were beaten off with heavy losses, leaving a total of 113 Iraqi armored vehicles destroyed at the cost of one U.S. Bradley lost and one crew member killed by Iraqi fire (with a second vehicle loss attributed to fratricide). Some 600 Iraqi casualties were removed from the battlefield. The other actions followed a similar pattern. The largest of these, the Battle of Medina Ridge, pitted the 2nd brigade of the U.S. 1st Armored against the 2nd brigade of the Medina Luminous division. In 40 minutes of fighting, the U.S. brigade annihilated the Iraqi armor in place, took 55 Iraqis prisoner, and killed another 340. No U.S. casualties were suffered. At Objective Norfolk, two battalions of the U.S. 1st Infantry division destroyed more than 100 armored vehicles of the Iraqi Tawakalna and 12th Armored divisions with the loss of two U.S. Bradleys. In the Battle for the Wadi Al Batin, a battalion of the U.S. 3rd Armored division wiped out an Iraqi brigade, killing more than 160 armored vehicles while losing less than a half dozen of its own. By the morning of February 27, the Iraqi blocking force had been effectively wiped out. In all, VII Corps destroyed as many as 1,350 Iraqi tanks, 1,224 armored troop carriers, 285 artillery pieces, 105 air defense systems and 1,229 trucks. VII Corps itself, by contrast, lost no more than 36 armored vehicles to enemy fire, and suffered a total of only 47 dead and 192 wounded. I didn't realize that we fought so many engagements against strong forces in 1991 with such incredible results. As the author points out, the loses suffered by our forces were low in an historically unprecedented way. The Coalition's Gulf War loss rate was lower by at least a factor of ten than the Israelis' in the Six-Day War, or the British against the Italians in North Africa in 1941, or the Royal Marines against Argentine Army conscripts in 1982. Of course, it is hard to measure skill differentials precisely. But it is far from obvious that the difference between Coalition and Iraqi skills in 1991 dwarfs the imbalance between any of these armies. In each case the attacker enjoyed a major advantage in personnel quality and motivation, yet in no case were the attacker's losses anywhere near as low as during the Gulf War. Dr. Biddle argues that superior training by the U.S. Forces, coupled with superior equipment combined with poor training by the Iraqi army led to these incredible margins of victory (remember, this is the 1991 war). Based on losses so far in 2003, it is clear that the differential in training between our soldiers and Iraqi soldiers has widened. Here is another essay by Dr. Biddle on the Afghanistan War. This is an essay on the 2003 Iraqi war by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post. 10:22:15 PM     [Colin Glassey] How to At Least Try to Beat the United States I think its safe to write this now. The obvious method for dealing with a narrow-front attack is to get behind the attacking forces and cut their supply lines. Since the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) avoided most of the enemy formations it came near on its Blitzkrieg to Bagdad, in theory, these bypassed Iraqi formations could have moved to block the supplies which were coming all the way from Kuwait. Such a move, if successfull, would have shut down the forward progress of the 3ID. The Marines, heading up along the river, were more methodical and captured or destroyed most of the Iraqi forces in their way. As a result, their supply lines were tougher to cut, but they moved slower as a result. Also, if Iraqi divisions along the border with Iran had moved away from the border towards the rivers, behind the Marines, their supply lines would have been in trouble also. What stopped any movement (and I do mean ANY movement) of Iraqi forces? We don't know yet. Some obvious possibilities: Saddam's command centers were destroyed in the early days of the war. And without orders, the idiot leaders of the Iraqi divisions simply stayed put. Remember: dictatorships have terrible military leaders (except, rarely for the man at the top). Example: Erich Von Manstein (Germany's greatest general) sat out the last two years of World War II at his estate in East Prussia while useless fools like Sepp Dietrich were in command of an SS Panzer Army. Even if the mobile divisions had tried to move, they would have been destroyed by U.S. air power. While this might well be true, that is not much of an excuse for not even trying to cut off the 3ID. Don't get me wrong, I'm damn glad we won and I salute the members of our army, the finest army in the entire world, but, we beat an army that didn't even try to engage us operationally. Not every army we fight is going to as stupid as this one. For example, would we try this attack agains the Russian army? I sure hope not, the Russians proved they can play that game back in 1942 (though today the Russian army is a pale shadow of what it once was). The Iraqi Army did not want to fight. I have believed for a long time now that dictatorships are very fragile. From the inside, they are all terror and death squads and iron control. But when confronted with an outside force, what man wants to die for Saddam? Obviously some fanatics have died for Saddam. The Iraqis who have died for Saddam are in large part militarilly untrained (as their idea of attacking Abrams seems to be charging forward inside Toyota Land Cruisers, which is really dumb). The people who actually know something about fighting have all mysteriously disappeared from the war. By that I mean the people who know about combined arms attacks with artillery, tanks and infantry. So, again, what man is willing to die for Saddam? A person who thinks he does better when Saddam does better. A person who is close enough to the power to taste it. This excludes 95% (or more?) of the Iraqi population. There are plenty of historical examples of people fighting (and dieing) in huge numbers to support dictatorships, so I'm on thin ice in saying dictatorships are fragile to outside force. But looking at recent history and we see seemingly powerful dictators destroyed by fairly small shocks. Milosevic of Serbia in 1999, Ceausescu of Rumania in 1989, and now Saddam in 2003. Its not a huge list but even so, predictions that Police States are hard to remove seem wrong now. 7:03:43 PM     [Colin Glassey] The Liberation of Bagdad All sorts of stories are filling the web today about the liberation of Bagdad. This is a great story about the capture of Iraq's main nuclear labs and the discovery of a vast underground complex which no one outside of Iraq was aware of!. So, to all those people who were confidently saying the U.N. Inspectors didn't find any new nuclear weapons production, so it wasn't happening. I say welcome to the real world. Local woman lands her A-10 Attack Plane after taking heavy damage. The daughter of San Jose Councilman Chuck Reed was nearly shot down over Bagdad but flew her plane back to base. Our women did great in battle. Arabs that insist on putting women behind veils are robbing their own countries of fully half of their possible brain power and a good share of courage as well. Here is a photo that made me laugh out loud. Its part of a great collection of photos here. People in U.S. and British military circles are now saying that Saddam was the worst military leader in history. His army was deployed badly, his forces disintegrated on contact with our forces, and they never mounted an actual counter-attack on U.S. or British troops. The largest action by the Iraqi army that we have seen in the entire war is company-sized (in other words around 100 men with 6 or 7 tanks). An example of the Iraqi army simply vanishing has just occured. See this article about the Iraqi 10th Armored Division's vanishing act. Our special forces men have not been able to beat the Iraqi north. Take a look at this report. To the surprise of some Special Operations soldiers, American air power alone has not been enough to force the Iraqis to retreat. An infantry truism — that tanks and soldiers are needed to seize and hold ground — is apparently being reinforced here. In a three-day period on the front line due east of Mosul, Special Operations soldiers had American planes drop more than 200 bombs on Iraqi positions in Khazir. The Iraqis did not budge from the route, the shortest into Mosul from the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. In fact they reinforced their positions and retook some lost ground. "Two companies of light infantry attacked us," a Special Operations soldier said, referring to roughly 200 troops. "We fought them off with light machine guns and rifles." This means that our Special Forces are not able to pull of their Afghanistan conquest against the decent troops which seem to be in the north of Iraq. If this is true it suggests several things: We aren't treating the Northern front with the same seriousness as the Southern front in terms of air strikes. The Kurdish Peshmerga don't have tanks, artillery, or even much combat experience. Contrast this to the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan, who had fought with the Taliban continuously for five years and did have tanks and artillery. The next time someone says we can do any job with 12 special forces men and an air wing to back them up, tell them about the Northern Front of Iraq in April of 2003. Combined arms works. Get the Abrams and Bradley's on the ground, with some 155mm self propelled artillery to back them up, some helos for scouting, and A-10s for air support and you would see the North front collapse. 6:09:11 PM

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