Expert: Concern over material, Clintonite "battle managers

Tuesday March 25, 2003 1:30 p.m. EST Expert: Concern Over Materiel, Clintonite 'Battle Managers'

Aside from the grousing coming out of some media outlets, and other critics, that we haven’t won the war in Iraq already, there is genuine concern among military analysts that the battles around Baghdad will be more than tough, and some might actually be lost.

The concern is not over the prowess nor the will of our amazing troops, but the lack of enough sound planning and armored equipment that seems to be evidencing itself.

For example, military analyst and former Green Beret Lonnie Shoultz summed up those fears to NewsMax this way:

”The ‘small detail’ that Clinton’s ‘battle managers’ left out of their plans was overlooking the fact the Turkey’s internal politics might not allow ... dispersal of armored American troops through that country until it’s internal political changes were complete. "The 4th Infantry Division is our most lethal, mobile and digitized armored division. While it’s 14,000 pieces of equipment have been bobbing around on the ocean on over 30 ships waiting to land in Turkey, 20,000 members of the division are securing the equipment aboard the ships and another 13,000 members of the division have been living out of their duffle bags at Ft. Hood waiting to leave by air to join their equipment.

"Once the Army’s planners ‘abandoned their plans’ to land the 4th Infantry through Turkey, they ordered the 30+ ships carrying it’s [the 4th Infantry Division’s] equipment to turn around, pass through the Suez Canal and land the equipment at either Kuwait or the Iraqi port our units captured over the weekend.

"The most obvious cost of this enormous mistake is that the 3rd Infantry Division is now only 100 miles south of Baghdad and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) that has no armor is trailing it as some kind of reserve force. When the 3rd Infantry Division and the light infantry 101st Airborne Division attack the Republican Guards, our best armored division, the digitized 4th Infantry Division, will still have its equipment at sea and its personnel in the air flying to the theatre to meet their equipment still embarked aboard ships.

"We only have two Army divisions on the ground in Iraq to oppose the entire Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard and one of them has no armor.”

Mr. Shoultz continued: "The Russian T-62 and T-72 [tanks] of the Iraqi military cannot stand toe to toe with our Abrams M1A2 main battle tanks but they can take us from the side. A tank battle is like an aerial dogfight where all of the units are mixed together and you shoot at whatever is in front of you. If our tanks can’t stop the Republican Guard units on their first pass, it allows the Iraqis to get to the Bradleys. They have teeth also with their 25mm chain guns, but nothing to match the 120mm main guns on the tanks. But any Iraqi tank that slips through both battle lines gets into the truckloads of troops and fuel behind them … that could be a slaughter.”

He said if our Abrams tanks "are stopped, they are dead. There is another Republican Guard unit 30 miles from the Medina Division. Once the battle begins, the next unit will close on the first and mass their fire. If the Russian shells that were sold to Iraq punch holes in the Abrams, we’re done. The depleted uranium in our armored units would stop anything the Iraqis had before, but the Russians reportedly sold them a more lethal round for their tanks.

"That could be the undoing of the 3rd Infantry Division. If the 3rd can’t stop them, the Marines and Brits don’t have a chance. The Marines only have 188 M1A1 Abrams (not upgraded) and the Brits use the Challenger II tank that has sort of brittle armor.”

So how did it happen that we went to war without our best armor, and without all of our troops in place?

Shoultz said: "We have many assets and I’d rather be lucky than good but any Middle Eastern war is an armored war. That should have been the backbone of any plan for this campaign. We saw yesterday that the Apache anti-tank helicopters can get in their licks but they are vulnerable to everything from a soldier getting in a lucky shot to anti-aircraft artillery.

"General Franks was forced to attack Iraq without two armored divisions that he had requested and that had been assigned to the war in Iraq. This is Clinton’s "COO” military at its finest. Its planners have MBAs from the finest schools all paid for by the U.S. military but they have a minimal amount of time commanding troops. So, the entire Clinton ‘experiment with the military’ has left our Army scattered around the world from Ft. Hood, Texas to the battle area in Iraq.

"I’ve tried to emphasize how poor the planning function at the Pentagon was left by Secretary of Defense Cohen who believed, as did his bosses, Bill and Hillary Clinton, that all military planners needed to be "battle mangers” with advanced business degrees instead of field commanders with dirt on their hands. The Bush team has not had time since it was confirmed by the Senate to make the necessary changes at the Pentagon due to 9/11 occurring eight months after Bush and his appointees took over.

"This disconnect with reality would not have occurred if we had proven troop commanders doing the planning for mobilizations. Veteran troop handlers and war fighters know what they need to fight and they would not take ANY chances that ALL of it would not on hand when battle is joined. This is a great argument for requiring the planners to command the first waves of the assault troops. That would make them more careful in their planning.

"The 101st Airborne has zero armored units. They do have over 75 ‘Apache’ Longbows and they should give a good account of themselves but I don’t see how we can separate the ‘Clinton factor’ out of this planning SNAFU. If we had soldiers instead of ‘battle managers’ doing the planning, we would be advancing on Baghdad with three Army armored columns (1st Cav, 3rd Infantry and the 4th Infantry divisions) and the armored column in the east consisting of the Marines and the Brits.

That would allow Franks to use the 101st for what it is – a quick, mobile, lethal strike force that can use its 270 helicopters to place it’s three Brigades all over the battlefield to take out specific targets that may be holding up or distracting the armored columns in their march to Baghdad FROM FOUR SIDES. What we’ve got now is best described as a military abortion on worldwide television.”

The two factors not included in this analysis are our superior air power, and the possible uprising of the people of Iraq against Saddam Hussein.

Hopefully, those two factors, along with some luck and the arrival of more of our brave boys, will give the coalition victory, and give Iraq back to its people.

BS...Tow missiles fired from Hummers took out more tanks than any other ground vehicle during GWI. This system allows 2.75 mile day or night sniper shots that can take out anything on the battle field. Tows are at their best in open flat terrain, like Kuwait or around Baghdad.

Cakewalk, no way, but Brits and Marines not having a chance, I don't think so.

Maybe I have misunderstood some of the logistical points. but it sounds to me like it was not a Pentagon screw-up so much as it was our State Department's failure to read the Turkey situation correctly.

Besides, Rumsfeld himself was originally arguing pretty vociferously with General Franks about the size of the force he needed. (Rumsfeld was not inclined to give Franks as big a force as Franks felt he needed.) So, I don't see the alleged "Clinton effect" in great evidence.

My point is not to slam the State Department or Rumsfeld. My point is that I think the "analyst" is not to be trusted in his naysaying. Gosh, Franks has the discretion to wait until he is fully ready to go in the assault on Baghdad. And I assume he will be very careful in the meantime. (He has already proven to my satisfaction that he is pretty careful.)

My bottom-line point: General Franks already knows everything the analyst is saying. (A lot of analysts are four-star wannabes. Franks is apparently the real thing.)

The Main Battle Tank has always been the Queen of Battle. The appearence of a capable MBT has, is, and always will dominate the battlefield. Countless revisionists have tried to announce the end of the MBT and have been proven wrong.

IMHO we have too few MBT's in Iraq. The latest Abrahms M1A2 is the most capable MBT in the field. We have only a few hundred in theater right now. We need more. The fact the Marines still have the older M1A1 is not encouraging.

The most recent example of being too armor light is Somalia. A debacle (IMHO) due to the lack of serious armor. Twenty Abrahms MBT and forty Bradley IFV would have been decisive. Instead the Clintonistas forced us to rely on old Pakistani MBT's and German Fox (Fuchs) wheeled armored cars to extricate our forces.

We need to hold up outside of Bagdahd and wait for more Abrahms to be delivered to the battlefield. Otherwise we will again suffer casualties that need not occur.

My bottom-line point: General Franks already knows everything the analyst is saying. (A lot of analysts are four-star wannabes. Franks is apparently the real thing.)

As I look at the body count for both sides, apparently you are absolutely correct!!!

As much as I like NewsMax, I gotta just tune them out sometimes. Sure, Clinton FUBARed his whole 8 years, sure, Clinton was the everloving worst man to ever occupy the office of President of the United States, but that has all been taken into the equasion by GW and the boys & girl. If you think for one minute that our President and his staff didn't go into this thing knowing full well what cards they had to play and the outcome of this thing, then you'd believe Bill Clinton was an honest man.

I get a little pissed off when, in a time of war, when we start blaming Clinton. He is the most peutrid scum of the earth, but to blame him is to overlook our ability to adapt, and overcome. And we have, and will, adapt, and overcome.

Put Clinton in his place right now, in some outhouse pit in upper New York. Clinton is irrelivant, especially now, it's a war, and you know how he runs from that.

Focus on the task at hand and support a President that knows how to protect us. Cluck Flinton, he's an idiot!

There is another Republican Guard unit 30 miles from the Medina Division. Once the battle begins, the next unit will close on the first and mass their fire.

Not an expert here, but this whole disaster scenario seems to presuppose that the Americans' close air support will be off in another time zone.

Massed Republican Guard units would, I imagine, be a Christmas present for Coalition air.

Yeah, almost all of our casualties thus far can be accounted for as mechanical failures and friendly fire and a maintenance group getting lost in a poorly marked desert and a couple of ambushes in phony surrenders. So, our tactical blunders have been essentially zero.

I wouldn't get in a big hurry to ruin this record.

This so called expert whose name is not even on this garbage sounds worse than a Reuters spin master.

What a bunch of Bravo Sierra and an insult to our military leaders and SoD Rumsfield this crapola is!

For a better look and a more fair balance look, this thread might be looked at:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/875529/posts

I asked dh (Marine (R)O-5. AV-8B pilot, been deployed overseas and aboard ship, did a year with 3rd LAR as a FAC, and recently completed several years of reserve time with 4th ANGLICO.) to have a look at this article over my shoulder, and his comment was..."that's actually a pretty good analysis."

What I still don't understand is...if this is true, why didn't we wait to begin the forward movement, so as to time it with the arrival of the division still at sea? Isn't this uh...sort of unsafe, and a risk that gambles with the lives of the U.S. military?

I'm just a military wife, looking for viewpoints other than dh's.

"The two factors not included in this analysis are our superior air power, and the possible uprising of the people of Iraq against Saddam Hussein."

I think at least one of those factors, superior air power, is a rather large factor to ignore in an analysis of this type. Any reference to the USN is also missing. I have zero ground force experience and no way of judging that aspect, but it seems to me this paper is essentially pointless.

Strictly from an analytical viewpoint.

Purely from experiencing a dark time in the DOD, the Carter years, I am aware that the military, including the highest brass, raised making things work with what you actually have at hand, to an art form.

I think General Franks has the situation in hand.

I've heard rumors of the improved tank rounds the Russians have supposedly sold to the Iraqis. If true, this would be another blatant violation of the arms embargo slapped on Iraq after the Gulf War. But the question reamins: even if the rounds are better, and have a chance to penetate the Abrams (of which I'm skeptical, since the Russians probably didn't test their ammo on an actual Abrams), can the Iraqis actually hit our Abrams before the M1A2s/M1A1s hit the Iraqi tanks. We are absolutely sure of the result in the latter case, and our tanks have better range, better sights, CITVs that sllow the commander to line up the next shot, and better crews.

We are not outnumbered 5 or 6 to 1 in tank numbers. Estimates are that we will have 400 tanks to the Iraqi's 500 tanks when the battle is joined.

Do I wish that we had 3 heavy Army divisions closing in on Baghdad, along with the Brits and Marines? Sure. But I still believe things are going to get major ugly for the Iraqis when our actually positioned forces crash into the RG about 3-5 days from now.

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