The Redhunter

The IEDs are of Limited Usefulness

From StrategyPage

While only 5,607 IEDs were placed in 2004, there were 10,953 encountered in 2005. But American troops responded to the threat. In 2004, about a quarter of IEDs actually went off and hurt someone. In 2005, that rate declined to ten percent, and is still falling. This has been very frustrating for the terrorists and nerve wracking for the American troops on the receiving end. While billions of dollars has been put into developing new devices to counter IEDs, the best defensive tool is still alert troops, who have been briefed on the latest intel about what kind of IEDs are being planted.

There are essentially two reasons why the insurgents use IEDs and suicide bombers; our troops are so good and theirs are so bad. StrategyPage again

IEDs were used in Vietnam, but caused (with mines and booby traps in general) only 13 percent of the casualties, compared to over 60 percent in Iraq. The reason for this is one that few journalists want to discuss openly. But historians can tell you; Arabs are lousy fighters. Hasn't always been this way, but for the last century or so, it has. This has more to do with poor leadership, and a culture that simply does not encourage those traits that are needed to produce a superior soldier. In a word, the North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas were better, and more deadly, fighters. Contributing factors include better training and equipment for American and Coalition troops. But most of the reason for the historically low casualty rates in Iraq have to do with Iraqis who don't know how to fight effectively.

Anybody who's read the first thing about the Vietnam war knows this to be true. This is also what makes creating a new Iraqi Army so difficult, and yet another reason why we were exactly right not to keep the old one.

Our Troops Have Gotten Very Good

The Washington Post had two articles this past week that could well have been written by CENTCOM. Both essentially tell the same story; that in 2003-2004 many of our tactics and strategies were flawed, but all that has changed.

The first story, titled "The Lessons of Counterinsurgency", tells of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The unit did poorly during it's first tour in 2003-2004, but has performed magnificently this time around.

In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

The second story, "U.S. Counterinsurgency Academy Giving Officers a New Mind-Set" is about "COIN", the new counterinsurgency school the army has set up in Taji, Iraq.

The purpose of the school north of Baghdad is to try to bring about a different outcome than the U.S. military achieved in 2003-04, when Army commanders committed mistakes typical of a conventional military facing an insurgency. "When the insurgency started, we came in very conventional," said Col. Chris Short, the District native and recent Manassas resident who is the new school's commandant.

Back then, U.S. forces rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqis, mixing innocent people in detention with hard-core Islamic extremists. Commanders permitted troops to shoot at anything mildly threatening. And they failed to give their troops the basic conceptual and cultural tools needed to operate in the complex environment of Iraq, from how to deal with a sheik to understanding why killing insurgents usually is the least desirable outcome in dealing with them. (It is more effective, they are now taught, to persuade them either to desert or to join the political process.)

Last year, an internal study by Army experts of U.S. commanders here found that some understood the principles of counterinsurgency and applied them well, while others faltered. "If the commander had it, the unit had it, but if the commander got it halfway, then the unit got it halfway," Casey said in a recent interview. The new school is designed to ensure that all the commanders get it.

...
"I didn't want to come," concurred Lt. Col. David Furness, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, now operating between Baghdad and Fallujah. "But I'm glad I came."

Live and Learn

The Way of the World

If you're a leftie Bush-hater reading this I know exactly what you're going to say: "Ah ha! Told you Bushitler didn't know what he was doing! If only Al Gore had been elected WE'D HAVE GOTTEN IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!"

Yeah sure.

Tell me then what you would say about a president who led us into war with a military this unprepared:

- 80% of our torpedoes were defective to the point of being duds
- Every single one of our single and twin-engined fighter and bomber aircraft were inferior to those of our enemy. Every single one
- Our navy was allowed to spend precious dollars building and keeping the wrong type of capital ships
- Not only were all of our tanks inferior to those of the enemy at the start of the war, they were inferior at the end too
- The stated purpose of the war was to end dictatorship in _______, yet at the end as many people lived under tyranny as at the beginning.
Most people in ________ simply traded one dictator for another
- Two years after the war, many major US papers were calling the occupation "botched"
- Americans expected all of their troops to quickly return home after the war, and were upset when they learned that many would have to stay there for an indefinate period of time

The president responsible for all this wasn't elected right before the war started. He'd been in office for almost 9 years.

And guess what? We won this war.

Details and background on the above are in a post of mine that can be found here.

Don't Let them Crow

The point, if I need to spell it out, is that this is how wars always work. No matter how prepared you are, things don't work out the way you thought they would. If the administration is guilty of anything, it is believing that combat would end with the defeat of the regular Iraqi Army. It was no doubt a mistake to declare victory on the aircraft carrier in 2003, oh well.

But FDR is seen as one of our greatest wartime presidents for a reason; he was one. Yes there were terrible mistakes, both before and during the war. But victory does not go to the side that gets everything right, but to the side that makes the fewest mistakes.

Some now say that Iraq stands on the brink of civil war. Perhaps so, though I doubt it. Few of the criteria that Bill Roggio laid out seem to be occuring.

Bottom line; if we can get through this current crisis we're on the road to victory.