Neocon- Military Split: Cakewalk vs casualties 100's of K GI's to Fight & Occupy?

Additional quote from further down in the same article:

 

I'm assuming this is a joke. I have absolutely no stickers...lol. I see merit in each sides arguement. Ok....sitting here looking at your quote while I'm typing this, I KNOW youre joking. Feel free to mix in a wink My Post is about as demonstrative as I've been and will be. Since this is Chance, I gotta believe he's being tongue in cheek.

 

Right you are. I am judicious with my winks.

 

Ottomaton:

I would not say that Rumsfeld is blameless for the faulty planning; he did, after all, OK the plan. I also noted that he was predisposed towards an "air heavy/ground lite" type of campaign as well, although to think that he actually came up with the plan is to misunderstand exactly how such planning works. He did not create the plan; that was far more Myers' doing than his. Franks, BTW, wanted a larger ground component to begin with. Myers wanted the Air Force to shine. Research Myers a little bit; he's been wanting the Air Force to win a war by itself for a while. Like most good Air Force generals do...

The Time article fails to mention Myers' role in the planning. That leads me to believe that they are either unaware of the role the CJCS takes in war planning, or that they are trying to pass the buck onto Rumsfeld. It's not like Time never had any biases...

An article on the success of the war:

Operation 'Setbacks'?
By Dale Franks

In their coverage of the current military campaign against Iraq, the media seems to have given in to the impulse to endow every event with some sort of transcendent significance. The minor Iraqi attacks of the last few days have been played up as if they are "setbacks" to the operation. In fact, they are tiny hiccups in what has been a dramatically successful campaign thus far.

To a reporter embedded in a company of marines, and who is facing enemy fire for the first time in his life, a firefight probably seems like a quite significant event indeed. It probably seems that way to the 18 year-old marines he accompanies, too. It is, however, a tiny slice of a vastly larger campaign.

A Reuters story about a U.S. Apache gunship making a forced landing in Iraqi-held territory began with the sentence, "U.S. military prowess suffered another setback in Iraq on Monday and another omen that bullets rather than liberators' garlands may await the invasion force when it finally reaches Baghdad." Now, that's a lot of omen finding for one helicopter crash. Helicopters are, after all, slow, low flying, and not extremely maneuverable. The Apache is certainly a nice chopper, and a pretty fast and maneuverable one as far as helicopters go, but it's still just a helicopter. It's not like it smokes along 150 feet in the air at Mach 1.5, or pulls 5-gee Immelmann turns when threatened.

As the first week of fighting in Iraq nears a close, the BBC is pointedly observing that the fighting in the 1991 Gulf War only lasted four days. By the end of the day Sunday, reporters were already broaching the "quagmire" question to U.S. military officials. That beats the previous record for media doomsaying, which was set during the fighting against Afghanistan's Taliban government, when three weeks passed before the "quagmire" question came up.

Comparisons to the Gulf War, however, are mostly invalid, because the tactical and strategic conditions of this campaign are vastly different.

In 1991, the Iraq Army and Republican guard were placed in fixed positions in Kuwait and Southern Iraq. Their defense was aligned to the south, as if expecting a direct frontal assault from coalition forces stationed in eastern Saudi Arabia. Instead, coalition forces were arrayed far out into the western desert. When the war began, these forces swept north and east, moving behind the Iraqi forces into their rear, threatening to cut off their lines of supply and communication, encircle their forces, and prevent their retreat. In such a situation, the only practical options were to remain where they were and face annihilation through either coalition attacks or starvation, or to retreat to a defensive line north of our sweeping movement in order to keep their supply line intact. They chose the latter, which necessarily meant moving out of Kuwait.

By fighting the ground campaign in that way, the allies achieved complete tactical and strategic surprise and forced the Iraqis to fight a war of maneuver rather than one of attrition. Moreover, our ground offensive was preceded by several weeks of aerial bombardment that destroyed their ability to mount offensive mobile operations of any size. At the same time, allies displayed an entire marine division off the coast of Kuwait, threatening the Iraqis with a direct amphibious assault, which induced them into sitting tight in their forward positions while the real assault, which was directed behind them, was prepared.

No such plan was available this time. The Iraqis designed a defense based upon what is called a "strategy of interior lines". Rather than being deployed far forward, the Iraqis set up a defense centered on Baghdad. This type of strategy allows a fighting force to secure their line of supply by ensuring that even if they are defeated, their retreat shortens their line of supply at the same time it extends the enemy's. This prevents the enemy from fighting a war of maneuver, because it denies them the ability to make an indirect approach to the target. Such a strategy also prevents an enemy from cutting off the line of supply, since it is never exposed.

Because Baghdad is the central political target of the war, it becomes the central military one as well. The Iraqis can allow coalition forces to maneuver in the desert as much as they desire, because such movement doesn't bring the allies any closer to victory. The allies must take Baghdad. They know it. We know it. This greatly reduces the chances for either strategic or tactical surprise.

Given the Iraqi strategy, the opportunity for a quick, 96-hour campaign of maneuver like there was in 1991 simply doesn't exist. So, this will require longer, more methodical operations to batter our way through the Republican Guard forces surrounding Baghdad. Much fighting remains, but the superiority of our weapons, training, and moral will likely produce large casualties for the Republican Guard, and relatively small ones for the coalition forces.

What is important to remember, however, is what's been accomplished so far is extraordinary.

While George Patton's 400-mile mad dash across Europe took two months to accomplish, our troops have moved 200 miles in four days. While hundreds of allied soldiers died on D-Day in 1944, fewer than 50 have been killed this week, and several of them were lost in non-combat accidents. Indeed, in the vast majority of firefights, allied forces have destroyed the enemy without taking a single casualty.

The Iraqi Army has essentially disappeared as a fighting force. Some 3,000 or so have been captured. The remainder has simply slipped away and gone home, leaving Iraq's defense almost entirely to the Republican Guard, and small bands of Fedayeen militia.

At the same time, coalition forces have fought this campaign with an almost painful attention to reducing civilian casualties. This has reduced the speed of the campaign by forcing them to deal with enemy resistance in a much more methodical and patient way, rather than responding to attacks by unleashing massive amounts of firepower on anything that remotely resembles a target.

And we've still advanced to the gates of Baghdad in four days.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-032603D

 

The pile on Rumsfeld campaign looks like it's just getting started.


Report: Rumsfeld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq
Sat Mar 29, 6:39 PM ET Add Politics to My Yahoo!

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=615&e=3&u=/nm/20030329/pl_nm/iraq_usa_report_dc_3

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly rejected advice from Pentagon (news - web sites) planners that substantially more troops and armor would be needed to fight a war in Iraq (news - web sites), New Yorker Magazine reported.

In an article for its April 7 edition, which goes on sale on Monday, the weekly said 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.

"He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the article quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon planner as saying. "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."

It also said Rumsfeld had overruled advice from war commander Gen. Tommy Franks to delay the invasion until troops denied access through Turkey could be brought in by another route and miscalculated the level of Iraqi resistance.

"They've got no resources. He was so focused on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart," the article, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, cited an unnamed former high-level intelligence official as saying.

A spokesman at the Pentagon declined to comment on the article.

Rumsfeld is known to have a difficult relationship with the Army's upper echelons while he commands strong loyalty from U.S. special operations forces, a key component in the war.

He has insisted the invasion has made good progress since it was launched 10 days ago, with some ground troops 50 miles from the capital, despite unexpected guerrilla-style attacks on long supply lines from Kuwait.

Hersh, however, quoted the former intelligence official as saying the war was now a stalemate.

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.

"The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the former official said.

The article quoted the senior planner as saying Rumsfeld had wanted to "do the war on the cheap" and believed that precision bombing would bring victory.

Some 125,000 U.S. and British troops are now in Iraq. U.S. officials on Thursday said they planned to bring in another 100,000 U.S. soldiers by the end of April.

 

http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.war29mar29,0,1695366.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

one quote:
Some administration officials had spoken privately of a war that would be over within two weeks. Vice President Dick Cheney, asked last fall whether a war against Iraq would be a "a cakewalk," replied: "I don't think it would be that tough a fight."

 

Timing:

While I would largely agree with the article's assessment of Rumsfeld's mistakes, I would disagree with the idea that the war is in a stalemate. I think it's hard to justify that position.

The Iraqi army has basically disappeared. We are now faced with a few Republican Guard divisions that are getting weaker by the minute, and whom the 3 ID and 101 AA should have no problem dispatching when they feel that the RG have been attritted by air enough to roll. And there are the Fedayeen Saddam, who are running at a kill ratio of about one of ours for a hundred of theirs. The Iraqis are recieving no resupply (except a trickle from Syria), while we are pumping in ammo, food, water, spare parts, and fuel like there's no tomorrow. Those Tomahawks are actually being replenished at sea (never been done before, but it is now), and the flow of JDAMs continues.

The 4 ID will be there soon, and when it arrives the scales will not be merely tipped, but toppled. The northern front is gaining weight as we type, with a brigade from the 1 AD preparing to fly into the area. The 2nd and 3rd ACRs are following the 4 ID.

Hardly a stalemate situation. There is currently a pause in the ground advance, but that is very much a temporary one, and of relatively short duration. If you want to call that a stalemate, you won't be able to for very long.

The military term for this is refit. Not stalemate. Stalemate implies an inability of either side to influence the battlefield in their favor for the forseeable future. Refit is simply getting ready for the next battle.

 

Anybody who would like a depressing preview of the "Battle of Baghdad" should read the DoD's Joint Urban Warfare Doctrinal Manual.

 

Here he says no cakewalk:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/12/17/sproject.irq.us.iraq.war/

 

Or they could just keep in mind that we will almost certainly avoid a large urban battle, and opt for seige tactics with enabling raids instead. Since we don't want to lose 5,000 people, you know.

 

BTW, treeman, can you give me a good reason why the Marines are marching towards Baghdad? If I'm not mistaken, each MEU consists of only 4 tanks, and 15 of those goofy AAV's (which, if I'm not mistaken are very lightly armored compared to the army's Bradleys). While the Army, for the same amount of people counters with 20-30 M1's and 20-30 Bradley's? Is there any good reason for them to be driving inland, or is this just another outcome of interservice rivalry, as you seem to imply is the cause of our poor troop strength.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1996-2002Feb12?language=printer
Former assistant to the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in an unofficial capacity "cakewalk", many times in different places.

 

Of course we're not going to lose thousands of our troops. We plan on killing civilians! This won't disturb the Arab street, cause we'll kick Al Jazeera out after we win, and the Army media outlets won't show any of this.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49102-2003Mar29.html

some excerpts

Rumsfeld, in comments Friday, seemed to reject the notion of broadening the air campaign in a way that would cause more civilian deaths. "We do not need to kill thousands of innocent civilians to remove Saddam Hussein from power," he said at a Pentagon news conference. "At least, that's our belief."

Other officials in Washington were discussing reinterpreting the rules of engagement to place less emphasis on minimizing civilian casualties and more on destroying the enemy, even if Iraqi tanks and other heavy weapons are interspersed with civilians

 

Ottomaton:

The Marines are lighter and much faster to move (strategically, but not tactically) than Army units. I am not sure how many tanks a MEU (or MEB, as that is what's driving towards Baghdad) has, but I know the answer is on the order of "not many at all". The Marines would do 2 things well in this conflict: 1) protect supply lines and LOCs, and 2) lay seige to Baghdad. The 15 and 24 MEUs are, I hear, to be assigned to protecting supply lines in the rear. The MEB advancing appears to be protecting key nodes of LOCs, although they also appear to be moving slowly towards Baghdad. What their role will be if/when they reach Baghdad is unclear. Marines are not my thing...

The 101 AA and 3 ID (and now the 4 ID, along with the elements striking from the north) have been assigned Baghdad - that is clear. Originally the plan called for the Brits and Marines to focus on the south, with the US Army to take the prize. I am not sure that that strategy has changed; only an addition to the Army's force has been made as far as I can tell.

Is there interservice rivalry? There always is. At times it is healthy, usually it is not.Could it have something to do with the Marines' activities? Possibly, I just don't know.

 

Dude, What in the Fu*k are you talking about?

 

http://www.militarycity.com/iraq/1680440.html
There are only eight active Army divisions. We can't just commit all of them to Iraq without shortchanging our commitment to South Korea and Afghanistan and any other contingencies.

Leaders of Army, Marines Doubt Early Hussein Fall
Projection on Fall Of Hussein Disputed
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, 18 December, 2002; Page A01

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.20B.generals.doubt.htm

 

There is no other way to interpret:

Other officials in Washington were discussing reinterpreting the rules of engagement to place less emphasis on minimizing civilian casualties and more on destroying the enemy, even if Iraqi tanks and other heavy weapons are interspersed with civilians

We mean to save our foot soldiers' lives by killing more civilians, because the Iraqis intend on putting military hardware among civilians. What other way is there to interpret this?

 

Unless we have eliminated two Army divisions when I wasn't looking, there are ten active Army divisions, with many independent units and a large reserve/NG force to back it up. Three active Marine divisions, and one reserve, plus several MEUs afloat.

Afghanistan takes up less than a single division, and the rest of that division is already inside Iraq, so don't use that one. South Korea takes up exactly one Army division, plus Marines in Okinawa. You do the math.

 

Woofer, you are a dork if you think that when an Iraqi sniper hides behind a civilian then we should just leave him alone. Or that if a SAM is next to a house, that we should leave it alone.

We do try - very actively - to limit civilian casualties as much as possible. Often, we don't take the shot. But it is not always possible to avoid it, unless you prefer our troops to commit suicide to spare Iraqi civilians (who may be cooperating with those who are hiding behind them, and are therefore not really civilians).

But I get your drift. You'd much rather see US soldiers die than Iraqi civilians. Whatever floats your boat, just glad you're not in charge...

 

I am repeating the news. I'm sorry if different opinions threaten your masculinity so much you have to resort to continuous namecalling.