From Belmontclub posts on Libya:
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Aviation Week describes how combat in Libya is being shaped by principally by sensor-weapon fusion, rather than by any cooperation with rebel ground forces. As matters stand, the rebels are useful principally to lure Khadaffi’s forces out into the open. They are bait. The more tempting a military target the rebel forces are, the worse for Khadaffi.
The battle being fought along the coast between Benghazi and Tripoli in Libya is beginning to take shape despite the absence of military to military connections between coalition air forces and rebel ground forces.
The coalition monitors, identifies and bombs armored forces on the move, command and control sites, communications and supply lines of the Libyan government. The rebel forces occupy areas vacated by the retreating army. The rebels appear to avoid launching attacks into urban areas occupied by the government, preferring to engage in open areas where government forces can be readily identified.
Once they are out in the open Khadaffi’s forces have no chance. In addition to destroying Libyan military units, the air war has been relentlessly targeting the morale of the Duck’s supporters. “The other trend is non-kinetic — undermining the enthusiasm of Tripoli’s leadership to continue fighting. Inducements include the equivalent of a “get out of jail free card” for defection.” Libya’ officers can buy safety from the coalition by selling information or simply bugging out.
The role of the rebels is apparently to fix Khadaffi’s forces anyplace. The military effect of the rebels is inconsequential. All that matters is that they force the Libyan government units to engage. That automatically creates a logistical tail for Khadaffi’s forces which the air campaign unremittingly destroys. Basically the coalition gets the Khadaffi snake to strike and once its neck has been extended from the hole, they chop it off. It is brutal and probably quite effective.
Rather than plunging into house-to-house fighting to clear towns of government troops, Libyan rebels are fixing government troops in place with attacks on the periphery while edging around the towns under siege. Meanwhile coalition aircraft attack the traffic coming into town carrying supplies, food, weaponry and reinforcements. The rebels save their combat strength by not plunging into built-up urban centers while the government troops become more crippled the longer they stay in place at the end of a tenuous and regularly attacked logistics route. Tripoli’s heavily mechanized troops are more vulnerable to fuel, food and ammunition shortages than the more lightly armed and motorized rebels as long as the latter avoid tightly-packed, urban battlefields.
The US is bringing in even more surveillance assets. Additional P3s, EA-18G and EC-135s are being added to the mix. They are probably going to make sending even barges up the coast a dubious proposition and make any attempts to communicate between units a very dangerous proposition. The object of these is to enforce an internal blockade of Khadaffi’s forces. Soon his forces will be cut off from each other. Then the exhortations to switch sides may start to take effect.
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Given this scenario, what can Khadaffi do? If he is suicidal and cares nothing for political consequences, he will probably attempt to create a humanitarian crisis as soon as possible. Such oil facilities as he cannot hold or feasibly protect, he may dynamite, in the dirtiest possible way. He can attempt to seize as many hostages from among the remaining Westerners as he possibly can. The Duck can also smash the system which brings water to the coast. Finally, he may unleash one last spasm of terrorism against the West and may, as a final act of self-immolation, blow all the oil facilities in his power before giving them up to the enemy. All of these tactics were used, in one way or the other, either by himself or by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, so they will instantly occur to Khadaffi.
If the pressure is kept up is that the Libyan government will probably fall in the next few weeks without a successor regime. This creates an aspect of the Scorched Earth problem to which the US has no aerial counter. The US will have imploded the Duck’s kingdom without replacing with a known and stable set of leaders. The tribal aspect of Libyan politics will mean that divisions will remain but in a state of irresolution. Together with the physical effects of war and the cutback on its oil exports, this implies the coalition will bestride a ruined, ungoverned and conflict ridden stretch of desert between Egypt and Tunisia.
Smashing the Khadaffi regime from the air will have been the easy part. The stabilization and relief operations that follow will be the real challenge, especially since they require ground operations right in the middle of al-Qaeda’s bailiwick in North Africa.
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In summary, Khadaffi is being strangled from the air. In due time it will axphysiate him. His sole counter is to turn the US win into a Pyrrhic victory. He can do this by Scorched Earth and finally, by emulating Saddam’s strategy of opening the arsenals and magazines to all and sundry. If he can give away all the explosive still in his possession at defeat, much of that will wind up as IEDs.
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Update:
The AP reports that Khadaffi’s forces have adopted rebel-like battlewagon vehicles, adapted civilian transport and other strategems essentially aimed at emulating the physical signature of their enemies. This has proved so successful that unnamed sources have suggested that NATO must arm the rebels or come in on the ground to ensure the defeat of Khadaffi.
Reporters described a pell-mell rout of rebel forces traveling east at 100 miles per hour, their vehicles loaded with mattresses and other impedimenta, bringing the contagion of panic with them. Startled civilians watching the headlong flight began to join the exodus. Soon, the road to Benghazi was packed with demoralized rebel families heading east to get away from the Duck’s forces. The rout also adds to the “humanitarian” burden of NATO, which will soon have to feed and care for the battered crowds.
Khadaffi’s tactics echo the “grab the enemy by the belt” methods of the North Vietnamese Army in Vietnam. Their solution to US air dominance was to intermingle, insofar as possible, with US units. Once in close proximity, there was nothing for it but call down stuff in danger close proximity.
Of course it is useful to remember that there are some around who are actually combat effective. Unfortunately they may belong to an organization which starts with “a” has a hyphen and then ends with another “a”. Of all the ironies of war, none may be as great as a ground force of the a*-****a acting as spotters for AC-130s and A-10s for the destruction of forces which until recently was the recipient of military aid.
While President Obama calls Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi a threat to his own people, just one month before attacking Libya the president asked Congress to increase U.S. aid for Qaddafi’s military to $1.7 million.
According to State Department figures, the money was earmarked to train Libyan military officers, improve its air force, secure its borders and to counter terrorism.
But mysterious are the ways of “smart diplomacy” and doubtless we lesser mortals are foolish to question the sagacious logic of the smartest people in the world.
pajamasmedia.com
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8. wretchard
The whole purpose of military force is to facilitate a stable political solution to problems. That solution set was historically called “peace” and was obtained by creating benign successor regimes to replace the malign ones.
Peace is the object of war. War is not an end in itself.
Today, peace is no longer a goal. We don’t want to “win”. Victory is verboten. It’s too triumphalistic. Diplomats want wars to go on. There “conflicts” which have lasted generations because is politically incorrect to triumph. “Palestine” is one. “Congo” is another. I suspect it is because it provides perpetual employment for various classes of crisis resolvers and conflict managers and modern sutlers. But peace is out.
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Secretary Robert Gates, who Wired says, may already be sensing something bad and edging towards the exit. Not that you’d blame him.
In an attempt to reassure skeptical legislators on the Libya war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the U.S. commitment to the conflict is already scaling down now that NATO has assumed command. When it actually ends, he left unsaid.
“Our role has already begun to recede,” Gates told the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon. “We will not be taking an active part in strike activities and we believe our allies can sustain this for some period of time.” He and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to estimate how long the war will last.
But Gates said that the U.S. is now in a “support role,” providing ships, planes and equipment for “electronic warfare, aerial refueling, lift, search and rescue and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support” missions. Mullen added that “starting today” the U.S. contribution to the war will be “significantly reduced,” anticipating cuts in deployments to come “fairly dramatically over the next few days.”
Is Gates saying that whether the rebels need it or not, it’s time to ramp down, that losing is an option? That question is only important if winning was ever a goal. But it never was. The object of the kinetic military event, in case nobody remembers, was humanitarian assistance. Victory is not a word in that lexicon.
Other sources suggest that Gates may actually resign if forced to employ ground troops. The LA Times reports that “in his strongest language since the U.S. deployed warplanes to protect Libyan civilians, Gates ruled out sending any U.S. forces to Libya “as long as I’m in this job” — a viewpoint that he said President Obama shared. But he admitted that the rebels needed help to withstand the assault from Kadafi’s forces, even with NATO warplanes overhead.”
Hot Air writes of Gates, “he didn’t use the R-word but it’s easy to read between lines as broad as these. A vignette from this morning’s House hearings on Libya, in which a glum SecDef gamely tried to choke down the ‘turd sandwich’ currently being served by his boss”.
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Ross Douthat notices a disturbing tendency among some rebels to go out and get medieval on the population. Quoting a Time report, Douthat observes that revenge can happen on the battlefield. This would not have been news to William Tecumseh Sherman who once said, “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
In other words, “war is hell”. But that word is not in the R2P lexicon either. Neverthless Time reported:
After pushing back into Bin Jawad on Tuesday afternoon, the rebels quickly set about searching the streets and homes of the town for hidden troops, mercenaries and traitors. “Alley to alley, house to house,” shouted one man at the fighters as trucks veered down Bin Jawad’s unpaved, bumpy side streets. He used Gaddafi’s own words — an infamous threat from an earlier speech that is often repeated in the rebel-held east. It’s meant to mock the Colonel; it’s even graffitied on the walls. But as the rebels tread into unwelcome territory, they seem to mean it in much the way Gaddafi did — in a kind of unrelenting and paranoid door-to-door campaign to rout their enemies.
Pretty soon it may be apparent to a fair number of people that civilians may actually die in the Libya operation; and said individuals will then forget they were for it before they were against it.
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The problems attending the Libyan operation were all straightforward and foreseeable. Khadaffi’s power rested on the road network, the water supply and the oil infrastructure. Take it from him and he fell. Let him keep them and he remained. But first you had to make up your mind about what you wanted to do. If you didn’t have a destination on the map, not the fastest car in the world would ever get you anywhere. Generations of ordinary military officers understood that kinetic military events were decided largely, if not primarily, by the superiority of conception; by setting the right objectives amid the chatter and confusion of the news.
The utter chaos which has overtaken the Libya operation proceeds primarily from the disorder in the leadership’s mind. The “smartest people in the world” haven’t got a clue what they are doing and that confusion reflects itself in the form of immense waste, gratuitous violence, aimless floundering and complete disorientation on the ground. America’s massive strength is dissipated in projects forgotten almost as soon as they are begun, in aimless marches and counter-marches, in flights of rhetoric no one takes seriously or even knows the provenance of.
“We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” Great. Now what?
The old Prussian Clausewitz argued that War was fundamentally an affair of the mind. You had to imagine where you wanted to go and to translate the political conception into the contours of the ground; into tons of supplies and into the faces of actual men. This first had to be clear in the leader’s mind before anything had a chance of happening. That is something that administration has signally failed to do. So now they are eating their pâté sandwich with great ceremony. And since Hillary doesn’t mind channeling others, maybe she can speak out the words of the long-dead contemporary of Clausewitz, Napoleon Bonaparte, who said: “If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna”.
pajamasmedia.com
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The LA Times says that the Libyan rabbles are now open to negotiating with Khadaffi.
After refusing for weeks to negotiate with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, the top representative of the rebel movement here offered a cease-fire if Kadafi withdraws his forces from besieged Libyan cities and permits peaceful protests.
The offer came from Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, leader of the opposition national council, after meeting with a United Nations envoy to Liyba, Abdelilah Al-Khatib.
ABC News says that military analysis now fear that the withdrawal of US firepower and its replacement by other assets may mean that Khadaffi’s opponents are doomed.
They fear that without U.S. willingness to go after Gadhafi’s troops and equipment from the air, and without U.S. ground controllers pinpointing targets, that the effort to shield the rebels will fail.
“The idea that the AC-130s and the A-10s and American air power is grounded unless the place goes to hell is just so unnerving that I can’t express it adequately,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C. “The only thing I would ask is, please reconsider that.”
Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates wondered out loud whether the NATO airstrikes can succeed without the U.S. in the lead.
In my post, Can NATO Topple the Khadaffi Regime? I wrote:
Yes, if it can impose a blockade lasting several months, is willing to risk to risk the destruction of Libyan oil, and can eventually deploy UAVs over Libya. But the the worst thing they can do is let the fighting drag on, because it will almost inevitably lead to a humanitarian crisis in Libya.
The major problem facing NATO is that the rebels have been driven too far east to secure the facilities and the pipelines which take the product to the coast (see map below). To avoid permanently splitting the country along some kind of No-Man’s Land, it is not enough for the rebels to stop Khadaffi at the gates of Benghazi; they must drive west far enough to take the infrastructure from the Duck of Death. Only then can Libya be reconstituted as a single political entity.
But the administration wasn’t willing to do that. It was unwilling to up the ante to the point where a decisive result could be obtained. It vacillated between “regime change” and “civilian protection”. It would aim for the former, but only go as far as the latter. In its last hours both were simultaneously enunciated as part of a “dual track strategy”. But the political oscillations were nothing as compared to the fragmented military strategy. The US, which provided the bulk of the firepower of NATO would lead the way but it would not finish the job. It was like listening to someone express a desire to buy something, but not to pay for it.
Khadaffi, old and addled as he was, clearly interpreted Obama’s strategy for what it was. A gigantic bluff. The Great Messiah would huff and puff until the Duck’s house was down. But the Great Messiah had asthma, an asthma that gave himself. Obama had all the advantages of strength and power over Khadaffi. But Obama was overmatched in one crucial thing. Khadaffi was smarter than he was. Not by just a little, but by a margin so great that it is embarrassing.
How did he get in over his head?
Victor Davis Hanson’s theory is essentially that the Obama administration psyched itself into this error, first by imagining itself as the leader from behind the teleprompter of the Arab Wave, and second by thinking that by applying a little nudge here and nudge there they could remake the region. Egypt was the first gentle step, but the second step was a doozy.
Second, Europe “pushed” him by upselling what was essentially their idea. Like a salesman who sees a customer returning again and again to a certain display case, Sarkozy pretended to buy the product beside it and by panicking the buyer who now imagined someone else would get his coveted item, sold him the paste in the jewelry display case.
What visions momentarily danced in Barack’s head? Immortal fame was there for the taking. I remember wondering, “why did he think the UN NFZ resolution was ‘historical’?” And now I think I know. Perhaps there the sirens three, Hillary, Samantha and Susan beckoning him onward in the backgound. “Fame, fame!”
But for whatever reason, he stretched out his hand and … it all fell apart. The lights dimmed and certain gentleman of taste flashed up before him with a document already signed and notarized by one of the 10,000 lawyers in hell. “You,” the gentleman said, “have chosen poorly.” The administration hastened to return the paste, but the money had already changed hands.
Now we have buyer’s remorse. Like the man who went into a clip joint and walked out with nothing to show for his money but a black eye and bad case of the clap. Now the finger-pointing begins. Here’s how it begins, “it’s Bush’s fault”.
But that is not the worse of it. The guys who are really going to get pounded here is whoever trusted in America. The Libyan rabbles are still human beings who hoped for freedom, but didn’t know what it would cost.
Which brings us to lesson number one for revolutionaries all over the world. Never, ever, on any account or for whatever reason trust the politicians in Washington DC when they say they will stand with you to the end. Not even when they are Republicans, but most especially when they are Democrats.
Win on your own steam and Washington will come in. Lose and you’re finished. Nobody will know you. Most especially those who only recently claimed to be your fast friends. That is the sad way of the world. Aim straight and the world aims with you. Miss and, boy, you’re on your own.
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YouTube Direkt Kevin Drum described his trust of Obama’s judgement at Mother Jones.
If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.
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So how’s that working out for me?
How is it working out for you? Looks like Louis Farrakhan is going to get to keep the $8 million he borrowed from his friend Khadaffi. The Minister had one big thing going for him in his selection of whose judgement to trust. A degree from the school of hard knocks. Khadaffi has responded to the offer to negotiate with a succinct answer: no negotiations; we are the government and we’re coming for you. Be glad, be ever so glad, Kevin, that you’re not a Libyan rabble.
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