Hi twfowler; Re: "Do you honestly believe that the casualties trends will basically follow the chart you posted (or be even worse)?"
Of course not. We have nowhere near the capacity to take casualties now. There's no way in hell that we could put enough troops into Iraq to take the level of casualties we took in the 60s. Here's the records from the SSS themselves:
sss.gov
In addition, it's politically impossible to start up the draft now. The only politicians supporting it, so far, are a few Democrats who are only doing that so as to make the Iraq war less palatable to the middle classes. As soon as Republicans begin clamoring for a draft (if they do), those Democrats will flip-flop and getting a draft will become very difficult.
From a practical military point of view, take a look at the time delay between the political decision to institute a draft, and the time when those inducted will be available to fight. If the country is united, and very much behind the desire to fight, you can turn out soldiers about 6 months after the decision to draft, but not much earlier. Our problems in Iraq have an exponential growth curve to them that is somewhat smaller than those six months. What I'm saying here is that I doubt that we could draft generation X fast enough to save the situation on the ground in Iraq.
If Bush really had wanted to be able to stay in Iraq, he should have started up the selective service six months ago.
Re: "In Vietnam this wasn't the case but they where willing to take an extraordinary number casualties to take over the South. Not an unmatched number there have been other extraordinary cases ... "
Vietnam was not at all an "extraordinary case". Humans are vicious. The various parties managed to kill something like 4% of the population, (about 2 million out of a total of about 50 million, counting North and South together) and that's fairly mainstream as far as the adequacy of violence. An extraordinary case would be one that required much more than 10% of the population. A good example of that would be Paraguay:
...
The Paraguayan people had been fanatically committed to López and the war effort, and as a result they fought to the point of dissolution. The war left Paraguay utterly prostrate; its prewar population of approximately 525,000 was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men.
...
onwar.com
Re: "A minor point. While our logistical situation is not perfect in Iraq (its never perfect in any conflict) we have no major logistical problems in Iraq."
If we manage to open up the highways again, you're right. But right now, they're closed up, and we are definitely having some worries. Like I posted recently, Iraq is no "Stalingrad", but there is no doubt that we have to spend more effort on maintaining control over supply lines in Iraq than we had to do in Vietnam. They're just longer, and longer is harder.
But the fact that our soldiers are now eating food a little less palatable than they had before civilian contractors began refusing to drive in Iraq is missing the real long term problem, which is that the violence is hurting our ability to improve the infrastructure there (which has been our excuse for staying).
If we give up on even pretending to try and repair Iraq's infrastructure, we end up alienating more Iraqis against us and the guerilla war heats up that much more.
Re: "Also there is geographical advantages. The lack of jungle in Iraq has been mentioned often."
Fighting in cities is every bit as bad as jungle, as is well known in military circles.
Re: "As for "so far", I don't think its likely to happen in the future. I would just say "We don't have that in Iraq.""
What you do have is a rebellion in the southern part of the country that is generally believed to be funded by Iran. The Bush administration has also been vociferous in their accusations against Syria. Where there's smoke, there's a fire, unless you argue that the Bushies' simply can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
Re: "If we don't bug out would you expect an addition 30k or so casualties before the end of 2007 or at least something close to that?"
No, there is a way to "stay" in Iraq and keep casualties down. Simply pull our forces into some corner of the country and let the rest of it run loose.
It's a simple matter of numbers. We don't have sufficient troops to garrison the whole of Iraq. But we could garrison a corner of it. I would suggest the Kurd run areas. If we want to avoid being seen to once again sell the Kurds down the (Euphrates) river, this might be a reasonable choice. But it is still a retreat, a bug out.
Re: "Which is not the way we got involved in Iraq. The fact that we did get involved in Vietnam that way would tend to lower the initial number of combat deaths in Vietnam. This fact makes it more likely that the chart you posted is misleading."
Good point. The Iraq conflict should really be divided into two parts, before and after the fall of the Saddam government. The first part follows the typical chart of classic military wars of maneuver, lots of front loading of casualties. The second follows the typical guerilla war profile, which is a slow increase in casualties.
Our losses in Vietnam doesn't follow the guerilla war profile for the following reasons: (a) The guerilla war was already going on long before we got there. What we did was to assist one side only. (b) We had a lot of assistance from local fighters, the ARVN.
If you backout the initial war casualties from the Iraq conflict (i.e. up to the point where Bush declared victory), the remaining casualties follow the guerilla model much better.
But as far as comparing our casualties in Vietnam to those in Iraq, the "boiling of the frog" analogy has nothing to do with the fall of Saddam's government. The "boiling of the frog" has to do with the acceptance by the public of a relatively small amount of ongoing casualties, while those casualties steadily increase.
Re: "One statement was along the line of the NVA caused most of the combat casualties, the other was a statement about how the Vietcong would normally melt away at the first sign of a serious attack or decently supported defense but that the NVA would at times slug it out and fight very hard."
Yes, if you're in your own neighborhood, it's a lot easier to run away and live to fight another day. If you're "just visiting", you don't want to get separated from your buddies. Let me take your commentary and reverse it. From the Communist side, the ARVN would normally melt away at the first sign of a serious attack, but the US military would not. Look at it from the point of view of a US soldier. Where would you go if you deserted? You stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone who saw you would know that you were a deserter.
This tendency, (that foreign fighters are less likely to melt away), is common in history, and there are examples of it that are truly amazing, such as Alexander the Great's "band of brothers".
Re: "Add up all the "volunteers" in Iraq or on their way, and all the members of any Iraqi group we are fighting plus the individual solo violent hotheads and you get a smaller number then the number of people we fought against in Vietnam and IMO it also seems like they are typically less organized."
As it is, those hot heads and volunteers have managed to put Vietnam level casualties on our troops (per capita) in Iraq for the past month. We had about 800,000 troops in Vietnam during 1968 and lost 14,592 or 40 per day. The last few weeks we've had about 130,000 in Iraq, and are losing about 5 per day. The rates are comparable, and this is without a full insurrection in most of the country.
Re: " I'm not saying that you have no point at all here but the issue is not really the raw numbers of the entire Arab population."
The reason you want to look at the whole population of the Arab states is that this is where the replacements for those "hotheads" comes from. You win a war by either killing all the other guy's "hotheads", or alternatively, convincing them to cool off. As an example of the second option, look at how Britain calmed down Northern Ireland. I doubt that it's possible for us to calm down Iraq now.
In a regular war, you kill a lot of people very quickly, and all of a sudden one side or the other runs out of people who still want to fight. Unless you set up gas chambers, a guerilla army never ever runs out of hotheads because (a) guerilla war is so low level, and (b) the actions the army takes against the guerillas stirs up more anger among the population generating hotheads.
Look at the Palestinians. They've been taking it for decades and still serve it up.
Re: "Generally a competent army that is well armed and capable of fighting a conventional war will inflict more casualties on its enemy then a guerilla force (unless it is swiftly defeated like Saddam's conventional forces where). Usually guerilla forces only inflict a lot of casualties if they can either drag out the conflict for a long time or mature in to a force capable of conventional operations."
The efficacy of guerilla fighters depends on their training. In cases where the guerillas are fighting against their own government (your example of the Vietcong in South Vietnam), the guerillas are all but untrained. This is especially important in the officer and senior enlisted components.
Unfortunately, the analogy fails in Iraq because every male in the country spent time in the armed services, and we're not fighting guerillas led by self taught amateurs, but instead fighting against guerillas led by Iraqi officers.
There is another factor that is against us, and that is that we are fighting for the liberal / pacifistic / left-wing side of Iraq. As with President slimeball, there is a strong tendency for liberals to "loathe the military". Because of this, liberals tend to avoid military service, avoid even thinking of things military much less practicing such useful arts as hunting, and end up inevitably being inconvenienced by their naivete, scruples, and lack of practice in warfare.
In the absence of any other information, always bet on the right wing to win a fight. There are numerous examples of this in history. Cities tend to be more liberal, while rural areas more conservative (not just in the US, this is a world-wide phenomenon). This does not mean that the rurals always beat the urbans. The urbans usually have the advantage of numbers. But rural raised armies are tough to beat.
Examples of this that are familiar in the US include the American revolution, which pitted a rural American against an urban England, and the Civil war, where a rural South held off the far more numerous urban North for some years. Other examples include the French revolution where the urban liberals and rural conservatives repeatedly came to blows. The left wing usually managed to control Paris, but then ended up losing to armies raised from the provinces.
Re: "Guerilla warfare is low (at least lower) intensity warfare. And guerillas facing a powerful conventional force usually can only hope to achieve the combination of being a major annoyance and continuing to survive as an intact force."
This "usual" only applies to guerillas that are fighting against a government of their own people. When guerillas are fighting against western "oppressors", their track record is quite good.
For that matter, few are arguing that the insurgents in Iraq are, even now, an "intact force". All indications are that there are something like a hundred different groups shooting at us.
-- Carl |
