Posted on 07/13/2014 2:10:02 PM PDT by robowombat
Annually, we spent 10 times the entire Iraqi defense budget on operations in Iraq, an amount that doesn't include wear and tear on equipment. We lost 5000 men despite 24-hour-a-day 365-day-a-year satellite and drone coverage, on-call tube artillery and MLRS support and CAS. We had hundreds of fixed-wing aircraft in Iraq and thousands of choppers in-country. They have a few dozen fixed-wing prop-driven aircraft and a couple of hundred choppers. While I agree that they're not the best trained force around, ultimately the Iraqi Army is under-equipped for the job.
Oh Cool! We can buy them up cheap and market them as anti-Clinton shirts!
The Russians just shipped a dozen SU-25's (Russian A-10 equivalents) to them. But that's just a dozen. Coalition forces had access to hundreds of fixed-wing combat aircraft, and they spent very little time parked.
Interesting observations. Which famous general said, “The material is to the moral as 1 to 100?”
It’s also a major to go into battle with a Westernized technical military, when you don’t know which half of your troops in those tanks and APCs (or driving them) are just looking for the first chance to surrender and pledge loyalty to the Caliphate.
An M1A1 Abrams tank is not effective if the troops inside are only intending to jump out at the first opportunity to run to the black jihad flag of ISIS.
“Material to morale” (typo one)
It’s also a major PROBLEM to go (typo two)
We dumped on the South Vietnamese for collapsing after we left. I wonder how we would have done if we had been subjected to their material limits, especially given that the North Vietnamese received brand new equipment worth billions from the Soviets just before the drive south. At any rate, if morale alone accounted for military victories, we'd all be speaking Arabic today. As Churchill once wrote:
Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
They did pretty well against coalition forces, lay low and gathered their strength after we said were leaving and sprang the trap after we left. No surprise they're doing well against far less well-equipped and -trained Iraqi troops.
How much money, and worse, how many lives did the US waste in trying to train these ass clowns?
Less well equipped? I’ll take armored vehicles over pickup trucks. And whatever little air support the Iraqis have, is vastly more than ISIS has.
Thanks for the up-date. Our operations were against a large and on paper anyway powerful state military. I am still trying to figure out what makes ISIL so powerful. I guess it is just the regional religious tribalism that lends the weight of the indigenous populations to a relatively small group of fighters.
We spent 10x the annual Iraqi military budget to lose 5000 dead. If we had spent the Iraqi military budget, we might have had a lot more situations similar to what happened to that Iraqi armored column. The situations where we did well were when we had the initiative, i.e. conducting raids against insurgents in the small hours of the morning. The ones where we lost most of our men were when they were ambushed with mines and booby traps while on patrol. The Iraqis wandered into one of those situations while advancing pell-mell into Indian country without the benefit of CAS or arty support (tube or MLRS) and paid the price.
Don’t overlook how difficult it is to combat IED attacks. Most are emplaced at night and in many areas we had IR reconnaissance balloons, Specter gunships, Kiowas, Apaches, drones and other IR assets aloft looking for them at night.
Considering the IA’s assets and abilities I think their best tactic is to swarm an area and kill all the fighters and anyone who flees. It’ll be expensive in martyr power but it will work. This is how the Russians defeated the Germans in ‘43 - ‘45.
The Russians were staunch because it was clear that their choice was between (1) beat the Germans back or (2) be exterminated for not being of Aryan blood as Hitler defined it. Shiites can always convert to the majority Sunni sect. Islam triumphed very rapidly during its first centuries in part because the losers knew they could always convert. (Arabia's neighbors had also been decimated by the plague). They were held back only by fear of divine punishment via weather calamities, plagues, et al. Once it became clear their traditional gods were indifferent to their conversion to Islam (or perhaps wholly notional), mass conversions occurred just to avoid having to pay jizya.
Without overwhelming Western material superiority, they will need to fight by the same medieval rules as their ISIS adversaries. There are sound military reasons for fighting that way, which is why medieval armies used to do it. Genghis Khan's small army would have been nickel-and-dimed to death if he hadn't whacked entire cities for daring to revolt against the tiny garrisons he deployed in the conquered lands to his rear.
“Shiites can always convert to the majority Sunni sect.”
Oh, no, you are very mistaken there. They are like oil and water. Even as a visitor I could easily tell them apart in less than a year. There is no way in H they would or could convert to Sunni. They’d sooner convert to Christianity.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.