Why not? Let's do Laos. Let's do Cambodia. Stop dem Commies.
Next stop Tehran, Iran...
Hot Pursuit are da werds of da day.
Ho Chi Minh Trail vs the Euphrates Line of Communications
June 05, 2005
On Saturday, the New York Times published an article by John Burns entitled Iraq's Ho Chi Minh Trail, wherein he makes several errors of analogy:
From Husayba on the Syrian frontier through Qaim and the sand-blown towns of Rawa, Haditha, Asad and Hit, onward through Ramadi and Falluja to Baghdad, the corridor has become the Ho Chi Minh trail of this war.
Like the bane of American commanders in Vietnam, the 300-mile stretch of river is not so much a single route as a multi-stranded network of passages, some hewing close to the lush silted landscape of palms and reeds that run along the banks, others crossing vast reaches of stony desert on either side . . .
For their part, the insurgents have access to a resource network of their own - Sunni Arab mosques sympathetic to the insurgency in almost every village and town from Damascus to Baghdad. American officers say they have become stations on a relay run straight into the heart of Iraq.
In numbers, the foreign Arab recruits account for a fraction of the insurgents operating across Iraq, whose total is estimated by the American command to range from 12,000 to 20,000. How small a fraction can be guessed from the fact that, as of last week, only 370 of the 14,000 men held as suspected insurgents in American-run detention centers in Iraq were foreigners, according to figures provided by the American command . . .
Nor is there much doubt that the foreign Arabs' impact has been out of proportion to their numbers, primarily because of the willingness of the non-Iraqis to die in suicide bombings. According to a tally kept by the American command, more than 60 of these bombings took place across the country in May, responsible for about two-thirds of the civilians who died.
Iraqis commonly insist that suicide bombing is alien to the Iraqi character, and American commanders agree. "In every case we've seen, the driver has been a foreigner," an American officer who has studied the bombings said last week.
The officer said intelligence reports had established that many bombers passed through mosques in Damascus, Syria's capital, or Aleppo, another Syrian city, and from there through a network of mosques that filtered, in many cases, down the Euphrates, through Qaim, Haditha and Ramadi. At every stage, the officer said, the handlers were organized in cells, each separate from the next, so as to guard the network's secrecy.
As for the bombers, he said their sojourns in Iraq were generally short.
"They don't stay in Iraq very long," the officer said. "They get a lot of indoctrination along the way, but once they're here they are moved into operations very, very fast."
Consider the two maps below. First, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, running through Laos and Cambodia, adjacent to Vietnam:
Next, two maps of the Euphrates Lines of Communications. The top map focusing on political geography, and the bottom on population density:
The only thing that the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Euphrates LOC have in common is that they are lines of communications. Beyond that, the similarities are harder to come by.
First, geography: The Ho Chi Minh trail ran adjacent to the length of South Viet Nam through two other sovereign states, Laos and Cambodia. The Euphrates rat line on the other hand, is within the area of operations of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force. In fact, as Belmont Club noted recently, this war provides an unusual case of both sides sharing the same LOC or Main Supply Route (MSR).
Second, law: According to the RAND study, Special Operations Forces and Elusive Enemy Ground Targets: Lessons from Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War,
The 1962 Geneva Accords, however, had ostensibly neutralized Laos. Under the terms of that agreement, neither the United States nor North Vietnam, nor their allies, were permitted to conduct ground operations within Laos. Although Hanoi ignored this provision, the United States ruled out the commitment of ground troops . . .
There is no such law or treaty forbidding "hot pursuit" of terrorists into Syria. The only thing preventing this technique, or others, such as airstrikes against bases in the Syrian desert, is the forbearance of American political leaders. There is no reason to think that this forbearance does not have a limit.
Third, geography again: Whereas the Ho Chi Minh trail had multiple entry points into Vietnam throughout its length -- analogous to exits on a freeway -- the Euphrates LOC's entrance into Iraq is confined to one area in and around the intersection of the Euphrates River and the Syrian border. Interdicting this area is thus much simpler than was the case in Vietnam.
Fourth, terrain: as noted in the RAND study, the US Ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, observed in 1965 that the area around the trail was
impenetrable tree canopy which high-speed, high-flying jets literally can not see through . . . [N]owhere on this road, except for two limited areas, was it open to the sky. Even flying over it slowly with a helicopter, road was not discernable from above. It seems clear to me . . . that significant quantities of logistics can still be moving over routes which . . . our strike aircraft are unable to discern.
Iraq on the other hand, as noted by Burns, offers much more favorable visibility, observation, and mobility. The terrain is largely desert, with the areas immediately next to the Euphrates somewhat more vegetated. Thus our forces can operate much more easily when interdicting the LOC.
Fifth, the scope of the trail: From 1959-1964, according to RAND, Hanoi "created the trail's key logistical infrastructure, including truck parks, repair depots, vehicle shelters, and food storage and distribution facilities." Moreover, the People's Army of Vietnam employed the 559th Transportation Group in trail construction, maintenance, and security, and the unit developed elaborate deception techniques to deceive American observers. "By the end of the war, the 559th Group had camouglaged nearly 2000 miles" of the trail. And, "at any given time, approximately 100,000 people were employed along the trail as drivers, mechanics, engineers, and porters, and in ground security, and aircraft units." By 1970, the trail even had anti-aircraft guns running its entire length, some with radar.
These facts indicate a logistical infrastructure an order of magnitude greater than the arrangements of the Iraqi insurgency.
Finally, volume and nature of materiel: On the materiel side, RAND notes that between 1966-67, US aircraft found 49,371 trucks along the trail. Remember that this was nearly primarily a military logistics route, not a dual-purpose route for civilian movement as well. So nearly 50,000 logistics vehicles over the course of two years were on the trail. A materiel logistics effort of this kind is certainly not underway in Iraq today.
On the human side, North Vietnam infiltrated entire units of NVA troops and other personnel to assist the Viet Cong in the South. In Iraq on the contrary, the primary human cargo that is trafficked through the rat line consists of young, untrained Arab youth, most of who become suicide bombers (willingly or not). This is a far cry from the infiltration of hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel.
Given all of these factors, the leap to compare our current difficulties in inducing Syrian cooperation to staunch the flow of insurgents into Iraq with that of stopping the pipeline of the Ho Chi Minh trail is tendentious at best. One must certainly not make light of the logistical tentacles of the insurgency, which stretch back into Syria. But to compare this logistics route with the Ho Chi Minh trail is to offer a study more in contrasts than in similarities.
[The Iraq maps use base maps via GlobalSecurity.org.
The map of Vietnam is via here, and I manually drew the Ho Chi Minh trail based as much as I could on this map.]
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