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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (151752)	11/16/2004 2:02:16 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The point of an insurgency is to blend with the population and strike when you can cause a little successful damage. Controlling real estate simply invites what we are seeing in Fallujah. I stand by my assessment that the insurgents in Iraq are appallingly stupid tactically, which is the ONLY thing saving our bacon. You need to consider the following: 1) They are very willing to die. 2) We stand out like sore thumbs in the population. 3) The population by and large does not love us, so will not help protect us. 4) To date, the insurgents like big bangs and lots of auto weapons fire (head down, gun pointed around a corner as near as I can tell). The ratio of explosives used to casualties is very high. Most of the bomb size/deaths must exceed 50lbs/person and the ratio of bombers/victims is also high. If you are willing to die and have weapons, you can do much much better than that. I think many people attribute this to good US military tactics. I don't. I attribute it to the blessing of a confused enemy. It is possible, that people willing to die so easily, shut down mentally, i.e. they just focus on dying for Allah and want to go out with a bang. In southern Africa I remember that insurgents used to use fire, gas on tires tossed around your neck. In Iraq, where they have oil and we want it, they behead people. I would rather be beheaded then burned to death. Look at the US outrage over those Fallujah contractor deaths. What will happen if isolated cases all over Iraq start popping up with US soldiers getting five gallons of gas tossed on them along with a match? Does that require control of territory? Does it require weapons? Hell no, just gas and the willingness to die and the smarts to take one or two US guys with you. AFAIK, they have two out of three of those elements. Thank God they seem to lack the third. We would never win that war!

To: michael97123 who wrote (151752)	11/17/2004 5:05:04 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Insurgents are relieved from the need to hold territory, because their fundamental strategy is to make it so costly to the power ostensibly holding the territory that it withdraw. But they are not absolved from all military basics, for example, the establishment of reliable logistical support, the need to avoid intelligence penetration, and the ability to maintain some command and control capabilities. This means that they cannot merely "blend in" with the surrounding population, they must also have their supply routes, their armories, their "safe neighborhoods", their communications networks, and so forth. Thus, they develop assets that are discoverable and attackable. The romantic notion of "blending in" is wrong: there is a whole infrastructure that is vulnerable to intelligence penetration and interdiction.