Hi frankw1900; Re: "You are assuming Iraqis hate the US and Kurds, and that sunnis and shias hate each other more than they all hate the secret police and Saddam." I'm assuming nada. I just read the papers. Here's today's LA Times:
The idea behind the sanctions was to weaken the regime, and for a time, they did. But these days, when Iraqis can't get medicine, they don't blame their president. When they have to carry bagfuls of their devalued currency to pay for a small meal, they don't blame their president. When their electricity shuts off or sewage runs into their streets, they don't blame their president. They blame America.
latimes.com
Yeah, I know that dissidents say that the Iraqi people hate Saddam, but dissidents from every dictator say that. In addition, they say that the Iraqi military is weakened by desertions. Heck, that's why they're dissidents.
If the stories from the dissidents are true, then all we have to do is wait and Saddam's regime will fall without our pushing it. If they're false, then we'll have an ugly war on our hands. In either case, our best move is simply to wait. My bets are that the dissidents are wrong. They've been selling the same soap for 10 years and Saddam is still in power.
Re: "You are assuming Saddam and his military people have learned from the Gulf War in which they tried to re-fight the war with Iran. They were damn stupid the last two times."
This concept that Iraqis are stupid and can't learn is the same sort of hubris that got the US hurt in Vietnam. The Iraqis are humans, just like the rest of the planet (including the obscene dictator Hitler's very efficient military), and humans are the most dangerous creature to attack. Thank God the US military, through hard lessons, doesn't believe in demeaning their enemies. The Iraqis have had 10 years to think about how they could have done a better job. I don't know what current Iraqi doctrine is. But let's take a look at how they changed their tactics during the 43 days of the air war. If they were able to learn in 43 days, don't you agree that they could figure something out in 10 years? And let's use a US Airforce paper as our resource. Remember the Republican Guard? I've also included some notes on how the Republican Guard learned during the war with Iran.
Airpower Against An Army
Challenge and Response in CENTAF's Duel with the Republican Guard.
Lt. Col William F. Andrews, USAF, Frebruary 1998
...
The Republican Guard
...
By 1986 the Republican Guard had expanded to five brigades, the bulk of which were committed to an ill-fated counterattack on the Al-Faw peninsula. 36 This Iraqi defeat has been convincingly described as the turning point of the Iran-Iraq War, the catalyst for a shift from the static defensive strategy to an offensive strategy that would ultimately end the war.37 Guard recruiting was expanded to include previously deferred university students, and guard formations soon grew to 25 brigades.38 These units were extensively trained in offensive combined arms tactics, signifying a major departure from the static-defensive mind-set gripping the rest of the Iraqi Army. Committed to a series of well-planned, set-piece offensives from April to August of 1988, these Republican Guard formations quickly swept away depleted Iranian formations, helping to bring decision to long-stalemated battlefields and a brief peace to the northern Persian Gulf.
...
Three days of wing-sized attacks on the Tawakalna Division appeared to have had a powerful effect. The division offered little further resistance and seemed to have begun digging in deeper. The Iraqis began to dig deep inside their revetments to decrease weapons effects and to use covers to mask the contents of the many revetments. They increased their use of deception tactics, including moving live vehicles to revetments that were scorched by previous kills and use of decoys in others. Active measures included the lighting of fires beside vehicles when fighters were in the area to give the impression that the vehicle had already been attacked.
...
The pilots estimated the Tawakalna Division’s strength at 50 percent or less; but more significantly, extensive Iraqi countermeasures to coalition bombing became apparent to the low-flying pilots. The pilots noted roughly half of the revetments were filled with targets and the rest with “old farm equipment, plywood decoys, old pickups, and barrels of oil.” From higher altitudes the decoys were indistinguishable from the live targets. Reflecting these findings, the A-10 wing commanders reported that “we’re looking in the revetments from four to six thousand feet. It’s nearly impossible to tell what’s in them. . . . Our general impression is that we’re hitting revetments that may or not be lucrative.”
Iraqi deception tactics represented a major obstacle to the coalition air effort. Camouflage and decoys denied any certainty that air strikes would hit valid targets. With live and false targets indistinguishable from altitude and only 50 percent of the revetments with valid targets, the potential existed for half of CENTAF’s blows to be deflected. If air attention could be further drawn away from live targets by giving them the appearance of destroyed targets (e.g., blackening with oil), the probabilities become even worse. Iraqi movement between revetments compounded the coalition problem because “frequent movement compounds the enemy’s problem of targeting in the absence of continuous observation.”
The problems posed by Iraqi countermeasures were not uniformly perceived throughout CENTAF. Units using nonvisual deliveries had little awareness of a decoy problem. Pilots performing visual attacks from high altitudes were aware of their inability to determine live from dead targets, but probably underestimated the Iraqi decoy effort. The following excerpts are from an F-16 pilot’s war journal, illuminating the problems with target discrimination.
...
It is unlikely Riyadh appreciated the extent of the Iraqi deception effort. Postwar comments of an Army officer assigned to CENTAF’s battlefield coordination element indicate a complete lack of awareness of the deception problem: “We faced totally exposed target arrays that didn’t move. The Iraqi forces made few attempts to camouflage themselves or deceive us.” (Emphasis added)
...
The general underappreciation of the deception problem appears to have inhibited innovations to deny its effects (orientation on the problem is a necessary condition for successful adaptation).
...
Although the scouts flew with binoculars and were the pilots most familiar with the KTO, there were limits to what could be discerned, and some Iraqi deception measures were very difficult to penetrate.
...
The depots south of the Euphrates would have been largely unaffected by the bridge effort, and they were subjected to B-52 attack. The depots, however, were so hardened and vast they were nearly invulnerable to air attack. Gen Barry R. McCaffrey, USA, described one area as the largest concentration of ammunition he had ever seen, spanning an area of 100 km by 80 km, including underground bunkers, hospitals, and command posts. CENTAF planes were able to reduce substantially Iraqi access to their logistics sites by continuous attacks of logistics vehicles.
...
The experience of the Gulf War appears to corroborate Michael Howard’s assertion that “whatever doctrine the armed forces are working on now, they have got it wrong.” Neither side’s doctrine was right: the USAF’s air offensive against the Republican Guard looked entirely different than what had been envisioned in deep air attack doctrine. The objective changed from delay and disruption of a rapidly advancing ground force to destruction of a dug-in ground force, a task enormously harder to achieve and to measure.
...
research.maxwell.af.mil
Try and imagine yourself as an Iraqi officer. You've see the most brutal combat. At night you wake sweating and shaking from horrible dreams of what was once reality. What does your mind think about? Can you really imagine not thinking about how you could have done better? The Iraqis are humans, and this sort of activity is universal human nature. Of course they've been improving things since the Gulf War. Here's some ideas that it would be a miracle if the Iraqis haven't discussed:
(1) Shitcan the idea of taking on the US Airforce out in the desert. Defend the cities instead. It makes for better press to make the US bomb civilian areas. It's worked wonders for the Palestinians, it will work for you too.
(2) Don't leave your supplies in central areas, even if they're well defended from air attack. The problem is that you won't be able to get trucks in there to move them. So distribute supplies, as many months worth as you can, among the units that use them. If it turns out (a miracle occurs) that you do have the ability to move supplies around you can always move them back.
(3) Build a heck of a lot more decoys. The Americans' targeting has improved, so your decoys are going to have to improve too. Use netting and the like to hide what you're putting revetments, and make 20 empty positions for each real one instead of just one. What the heck, you've had 10 years to dig them, and you have an infinite supply of oil to run the bull dozers. Build them into your line of retreat, so that you can leapfrog back through them.
(4) Put more effort into the large scale use of smoke to obfuscate your forces.
Re: "They are? This is a stalinist country." I hate to have to tell you this, but Stalin fought one hell of an effective war against the Germans. In fact he beat them.
Re: "In a previous post you dismissed the idea of Turkish support as a non starter. The Turkish govt has been saying publicly that Saddam is a great pain in the ass ..."
I really don't know how to say this. My analysis is that it's not diplomaticall feasible to attack Iraq while the Palestinian issue is unsolved. My analysis says that Iraq is not a threat to the US at all, and isn't a real threat to its neighbors either. My analysis says that if we (try to) use the Kurds to overthrow Saddam it will contribute to the destabilization of Turkey because of their Kurdish minority. All these things are plainly obvious to me. What's more, the Prime Minister of Turkey agrees with me precisely and completely:
Turkey warns US against Iraq attack
Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has urged the United States to focus on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of tackling Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He said there was no need for US military strikes on Iraq, even if Baghdad did not allow UN arms inspectors back, arguing that the country posed little threat.
...
Turkey, a key US ally in the region, has suffered from the economic sanctions on its Iraqi neighbour and is wary of the effect of a potential conflict on its Kurdish minority.
...
news.bbc.co.uk
An alternative view of reality is that the Turkish Prime Minister is lying and secretly supports a US attack. I say that if that were the case, he'd have found something else to say at the UN. Generally speaking, it's a good idea to look for alternative meanings to people's statements when they are outlandish or unrealistic, but since the Turkish Prime Minister's statements have an obvious meaning that most of the world agrees with, I think that the odds are that he was telling the truth. Remember, the primary technique of self-deception is to ignore contrary evidence.
Re: "... and has cost them [the Turks] a lot of money."
From the same article linked above: "Turkey believes it has lost $80bn in trade because of the decade-long trade embargo against Iraq." This is quite distinct from how you are reporting it. When the Turks talk about how much money they lost because of the trade embargo with Iraq they are not hinting that they want Saddam removed. Instead, the simple and uncontrived conclusion is that they're saying that they either want the embargo lifted, or alternatively, for the US to pay their costs.
Re: "You are assuming the army Hussein will not give amunition and fuel to ..." (1) Iraq is an oil exporter, they probably have excess fuel. (2) Even if they don't have excess fuel, one of the lessons from the last war, is that they can't move stuff around during battle because of US air superiority. (3) As far as ammunition, see:
Myths of the Gulf War
Grant T. Hammond, (BA, Harvard University; MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins University) is professor of international relations, teaching in the Department of Strategy, Doctrine, and Airpower and the Department of Future Conflict at the Air War College (AWC), Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama.
...
Ammunition stocks were not seriously depleted in most ground units because little fighting occurred. Many items, save combat aircraft, destroyed in the war have been replaced over the years.
airpower.maxwell.af.mil
Note that the above article is refuted here, but not the part about Iraqi ammunition supplies:
airpower.maxwell.af.mil
Also see:
dtic.mil
-- Carl |
