TRAPPED!

New York Post ^ | March 26, 2003 | RALPH PETERS

[sarcasm]

PERHAPS the craziest notion bouncing around the media is that Saddam Hussein is a brilliant military strategist. He may be a champion dictator, good at slaughtering, torturing, raping and starving his own people. But his military schemes are masterpieces of incompetence.

[2penguins]

What I can't understand is why the media is suddenly telling us that the US has understated the difficuly they would have doing this....The only people I heard saying this was going to be easy was the damned media....

Taking ground with people shooting at you is never easy, but good troops make it look easy and you are looking at the best in the world.

[BullDog108]

As Rummy said in a news conference two days ago: "These retired military commentators do not have access to the real plans". (paraphrased)

[goldstategop]

I should add the heavy armor division originally due to be sent in from Turkey would play a part in this war. It has to be sent through Kuwait. Donald Rumsfeld took a big risk but it was a calculated one. In life like so many things, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And the theory of light mobile forces backed by massive airpower against heavily armored units than aren't as flexible seems to emerging from its trial of baptism on the battlefield. Of course eventually we'll have to send in relief units. But right now there is nothing our troops can't handle and they've handled all the challenges thrown at them rather impressively. The pundits ridiculed the idea that a force half the size of the one we assembled in the Gulf War could even take on the Republican Guards. As we've seen its not manpower that matters, its how you deploy it. The Israelis have always been outnumbered by the Arabs and have always had to do more with less. Now the United States is discovering how to do the same on the battlefield.

[xm177e2]

This is BS. We're not worried about the Republican Guard fighting against us in conventional battles. Hiding in cities is exactly Saddam's best strategy: to make the war as costly as possible for us, to slow us at every opportunity, to raise the morale of the populace to fight against us, in hopes that we will give up and go home.

[goldstategop]

That has been the heart of Saddam's strategy. He's slowed us down a bit but hasn't been able to stop our advance on his capital. And the uprising in Basra reveals that he can't tie us down in the southern cities indefinitely. All he can really do is pray we can't get into Baghdad fast enough to blindside its defenders.

[gonzo]

Remember that Rummy, like GW, is an honest-to-God fighter pilot.

He knows what he's doing...............FRegards

[driftless]

You are correct. Saddam is not that big of an idiot that he doesn't know massing his troops and armor will result in a very short war and his quick death. The Japanese used the same tactics when they realized mass assaults against Marines in the Pacific during WWII made for very short battles. I'm sure Hussein already has plans in the works to slaughter more of his own people in front of the coalition advance and other dirty tricks to make us seem to be the villains. His only hope to live longer is to prolong things.

[wretchard]

The roots of the debate over whether Tommmy Franks has enough strength in hand to win this war handily arise from the postmortems of Desert Storm. A number postbellum analyses concluded that Norman Schwartzkopf had too much army available to him and it was too little used. In the comparison of relative forces leading up to Iraqi Freedom, it was conventional wisdom that Iraq was militarily weaker than in 1991.

This appreciation ignored factors of relative distance and defensive terrain. The heart of Iraq is an elongated rectangle bounded by two rivers, the interior of which is crisscrossed with dikes, streams and rivers. It is a kind of riverine bocage, older by several millenia than its arborial counterpart in Normandy.

During Desert Storm, the equivalent of 5 US armored or mechanized infantry divisions had to travel only about 100 miles to close the Republican Guard, with no extended lines of communication. In Iraqi Freedom a single mechanized infantry division had to march 300 miles simply to gain contact with the main enemy force around Baghdad, six times larger than itself.

Tommy Franks attempted this because the same river barriers that protected the Iraqis also protected his flanks from them. The length of V Corps march may have argued for smaller forces as well. It is a campaign in which truck and maintenance companies may count for more than armor.

It is all the more remarkable, given the small size of Tommy Franks' combat units, that he has attempted to cross the Euphrates below Baghdad at all. And herein may lie one of the least appreciated aspects of the campaign. On March 26th, 3-7 Cavalry crossed the Euphrates (only the second crossing) some 30 miles below An Najaf and stopped just outside of Ad Diwaniyah, nearly halfway to the Tigris. From the south, the 2nd Marine Division has broken out of Nasiriyah. It is widely assumed that it is heading north, but in fact, the road heads northeast, directly toward Al Kut, which is on the other side of the Land Between the Rivers, on the Tigris.

A plain reading of the map suggests that both the 3-7th and 2nd MARDIV aren't heading for Baghdad -- not yet at least -- they are aiming to cut Iraq in two. Once in possession of the Ad Diwaniyah-Al Gharib-Al Kut line, all of southern Iraq, nearly coextensive with the Shia area, will be severed from Baghdad. Saddam's feyadeen and IRG die-hards will essentially be trapped in towns deep in Shiite territory.

Even the obtuse press can see that this would obviously be fatal to the Baath regime. Yet worse may be to come. It hinges on the possible role of the airborne. On the third day of the ground campaign, the 101st Airborne captured the western Iraqi airbases of H2 and H3. These are huge facilities each twice the size of London's Heathrow airport. But even the closer, H2, is 240 miles west of Baghdad. Air assaults are not usually planned further than 100 miles from base, or else the round trip times for the assault elements becomes too great. Yet the map also shows oil pipeline roads leading from H2 and H3 east, right to the Land Between the Rivers. This is highly suggestive. The 101st can put down Forward Air Refueling Points (FARPs) along the roads, fed by logistics flown into H2 and H3 and be in range to attack anywhere along the Baghdad-Tikrit line.

This raises the possibility of an airborne assault on the Baghdad-Tikrit highway. The classic defensive response to airborne assault, which is an armored counterattack is nullified because the IRG is dug in in an arc around south and western Baghdad. In any case, it cannot maneuver under US air attack. And the 3rd ID is close enough for possible mutual support. We know that one of the 101st's brigades, the Rakkasans, is in column with the 3rd ID.

So here then, are the dangers facing Iraq:

• it will soon be cut in two on the An Najaf-Al Kut line.
• it will may be cut off from the north by the interdiction of the Samarra-Tikrit highway.
  
  Then there are three brigades of 3rd ID waiting at the Karbalah gap. If this eventuated, it would be game, set and match in military terms. More important, it would have broken Iraq back down into its contituents parts: the Shia, the Kurds and the Sunnis, with the Sunnis surrounded.

[americafirst]

"What I can't understand is why the media is suddenly telling us that the US has understated the difficuly they would have doing this....The only people I heard saying this was going to be easy was the damned media...."

Exactlty!! And the commanders tell us we're on track - yet even this morning, WMAL tells us that we we are well behind schedule and should have been "in Bagdhad" this morning. Geez. Even FoxNews is guilty of way-excessive punditry - what I would give for a straight reporting of the facts: sans rumors, sans speculation, sans nifty little headlines taking up a third of the screen.

[Glenn]

Wow! Impressive and thoughtful data. How'd you put all the pieces together?

[goldstategop]

Giving the Sunni Arabs incentive to get rid of Saddam before the other constituent parts of Iraq break away into separate statelets. Brilliant!

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #9

Thanks for your good insight. I have also thought that America should isolate Sunni area, especially Baghdad, by surrounding them. And crush resistence in Kurdish and Shi'ite area. When Saddams' troops and goons began to be cut down in significant numbers, the locals will rise up and help mop up the remnants.

Then set up a new provisional government and start administering the liberated regions ASAP. This will build the political momentum for the collase of Saddam's regime by making the collapse a forgone conclusion among folks in Baghdad. This political momentum along with tightening siege and relentless attacks by the coalition forces will break down the resistance inside Baghdad. I am sure SepcOps and CIA paramilitaries will be hard at work to get this momentum going inside the city.

[fporretto]

It's even more insidious than that, XM. You might call this "Tet II." The Iraqis cannot defeat us in the field... but they might be able to operate on our home front, as the North Vietnamese did, by:

1. Inflicting unacceptable losses on American troops, or:
2. Forcing our troops to slaughter civilians in sufficient numbers to invoke huge moral qualms against prosecuting the war to a conclusion.

The United States fights under moral constraints. Saddam Hussein does not. Yet one more asymmetry for the Era of Asymmetric Warfare.

For further thoughts, please see:

The Evolution Of Victory

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com

[randita]

Excellent analysis! You have a great military mind.

Your explanation of the role of the 101st Airborne makes perfect sense to me. Last week, we got periodic reports from an imbedded reporter with the 101st (I forget who it was). Since then, nada. Other than the fragging incident, nothing about the movement of the 101st Airborne has been reported since last Friday. It was speculated that they had headed into the west and had recently secured H1, but not confirmed.

I'm saving your analysis and will watch how it plays out in the next week or two.

Do you have an estimate on a time frame when all our forces will be dug into their desired positions?

[randita]

Another comment. Your rationale that the goal is to sever Iraq in two makes perfect sense with the pace of the war and why, despite the good face our commanders wanted to put on it, they were clearly frustrated with the sand storm that halted the push.

Also the rush to cut off and isolate Iraq's various military strongholds from each other would explain why they completely bypassed Basra. The Baathists in Basra were clearly itching for a fight, but we left them high and dry for later, knowing that time was on our side, not theirs.

[COBOL2Java]

And the commanders tell us we're on track - yet even this morning, WMAL tells us that we we are well behind schedule and should have been "in Bagdhad" this morning.

LOL. Have you been listening to that military genius (sic) Bill Press too? I can only take this moron in small doses myself...

Bill Press, 6-star Armchair General

[h-roark]

Look I tend to write off most of these pundits, also; however Peters is truly a very intelligent and thoughtful writer on the subject of modern warfare with the actual experience to back it up. He is not the equivalent of a "PERFUMED PRINCE" like Wesley Clark What's more, if Rumsfeld ignored the advice of his military commanders and I have heard this reported a number of times from conservative sources, then he should suffer the same fate as Aspin. If you needlessly kill your own because you are afraid of the political implications of sending too big of a force package that's inexusable.

And BTW, being a fighter pilot may be great but the best President the military has had in recent years is RR because he got out of the way of the military people. I admire W for doing much the same thing but if Rumsfeld directly contradicts what the warfighters think they need to accomplish the task while it just sits here stateside that is just plain wrong- fighter pilot or not.

[MHGinTN]

What Peters has failed to include in the equations is Saddam's use of poisons that will mostly kill Iraqis, with the resulting international outcry for our 'invasion of Iraq' to stop immediately before we are responsible for the deaths of all Shiites in Southern Iraq.

Saddam's game is to manipulate the international community. He was coordinating his moves with France and Russia, and will try to do so further, sacrificing (hardly a sacrifice since he wants Iraqi population to shrink to 5 million, mostly Sunnis) Iraqi civilians to raise the outrage coefficient.