Posted on 04/03/2003 4:37:12 PM PST by JudgeAmint
"America's Stunning Victory"
by J. R. Nyquist
It is now apparent that Iraq is on the verge of defeat. The threat to U.S. lines of communications has been countered. Any delays to America’s forward advance were therefore insignificant. At the same time, Iraqi forces were unable to launch an effective counterattack. As these words are written, Iraq’s best divisions are being shredded, the Iraqi people are turning against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the prospect of a sudden Iraqi collapse is before us.
If Saddam’s army collapses or surrenders in the next two or three weeks the war will be nothing short of a blitzkrieg operation. The word “blitzkrieg” is German for lightning war. Instead of fighting for many months or years to defeat a country, lightning warfare collapses a country in a matter of weeks. This method of warfare is chiefly attributed to two British military theorists, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart. In describing the application of the blitzkrieg technique against Poland in World War II, Fuller explained: “German armoured tactics were based on speed more so than on firepower, for their object was to accelerate confusion.” This passage helps us to understand why British and American troops were ordered to advance rapidly into the very heart of Iraq. The object was, as Fuller stated, “to accelerate confusion.” Fuller also noted that “points of resistance, fortified areas, anti-tank positions, woods and villages were normally avoided, and the lines of least resistance leading to the enemy’s rear were sought out.” This is exactly what U.S. and British forces have done in Iraq. And just as this technique worked in the Second World War, it works today.
The speed of the coalition advance, the massive bombing campaign and the direct strike at the dictator himself,
accelerated Iraqi confusion as allied forces bypassed fortifications and heavily defended urban areas. In 1939 the German forces collapsed Poland in 27 days. The coalition timetable in Iraq appears to be of similar length. What is astonishing is the small size of the invading forces in the Iraq operation. We are now seeing the effectiveness of real-time battle management. In the divisional engagements now taking place we see that Iraqi forces cannot react or coordinate their moves in a timely fashion. This is not only due to bombing, but is also due to rapid U.S. troop movements. Consequently, the Third Infantry and First Marine divisions are picking apart the Republican Guard divisions in front of Baghdad.
The American operational method differs from the German blitzkrieg in the incredible precision of America’s firepower. United States forces now combine firepower superiority with high maneuverability. Add to this the real-time management of friendly forces that gives U.S. troops a rare invulnerability. We are seeing this demonstrated before our eyes. The only way to cope with this kind of advantage is to use weapons of mass destruction, including electromagnetic (EMP) warheads, to disrupt America’s decisive command-and-control advantage and to counter America’s firepower advantage. It is safe to say that the Iraqi position has deteriorated to such an extent that a coalition victory can only be disrupted if Iraq uses biological, chemical or atomic weapons. Even in that event, it is probable that such attacks would be self-defeating for the Iraqi regime, both morally and militarily.
It was recently acknowledged that the Pentagon planned a 30 day operation against Saddam Hussein. Despite the disruption of this plan by Turkey’s refusal to allow the Fourth Infantry Division to pass through Turkish territory and attack from the north, the operation will probably be accomplished within the allotted 30 days. Those in the media who erroneously allege that U.S. officials promised victory in hours or days have been lying, and their ulterior motives deserve closer scrutiny. Such reports reveal a sour impulse to portray victories as defeats and rapid advances as “setbacks.” Politically distorted persons, some of them military professionals, have mischaracterized this campaign in a way that is unfair to the Bush administration and the Pentagon. Retired U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark recently suggested that a quick coalition victory is “not going to happen.” Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter told a Lisbon radio interviewer on Tuesday, “The U.S. is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we cannot win.”
Those who oppose the war out of ideological hatred, who are eager to gloat over an American defeat, have dug a pit for themselves. When this war is over, who will want to be associated with the wrongheaded claims of those who secretly looked forward to America’s defeat? Evidence of Iraqi duplicity and the horror of Saddam’s terror regime will be proved. For those too lazy to read the documentary evidence before the war, there will be pictures and eyewitness testimonials broadcast on television in the aftermath. Of course, persons animated by anti-American ideology will cling to their bitter rhetoric; but these will be separated from sane opinion by a clear and ever-widening divide.
Through all of this, America’s real enemies have learned an important lesson: namely, that U.S. military power can only be effectively opposed by employing mass destruction weapons at the outset of a conflict. If U.S. power is to be overthrown in the world, that overthrow must rely upon nuclear, biological and chemical munitions. Only an attack that destroys U.S. conventional military advantages is workable, and this attack must be overwhelming. In order to work effectively a mass destruction attack must decapitate the U.S. leadership. It must cripple the U.S. economy and paralyze the American military. Anything short of this merely invites destruction in turn. The same lesson can be drawn from the terror attacks of Sept. 11. As destructive as the attacks were, the United States is a huge country with nearly 290 million people. Killing 3,000 persons and destroying two large buildings only served to stir the sleeping giant into action.
Ironically, those in Iraq and Afghanistan who celebrated Sept. 11 as a victory are now stewing in defeat. This is the fruit of Sept. 11. Instead of stimulating an Islamic holy war against the West, the United States will have effectively eliminated two hostile regimes. We may shortly learn that both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are dead. The lesson of these actions will not be missed in Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang or Beijing. Dictatorships suffer from intrinsic weaknesses. They are economically brittle, technologically backward and administratively challenged. It cannot be repeated too often that the weapons of choice for such regimes must therefore be nuclear, chemical and biological. Only by leveling the playing field with such weapons do the inferior states of the totalitarian periphery stand a chance against American technological and administrative vitality.
The Soviet theorists of the 1960s were correct when they wrote: “Strategic missile troops will be the basic troops of modern massive armed forces. They are the decisive force at the disposal of supreme commands.” If you cannot win with conventional forces, if you are thoroughly outclassed on the battlefield, you must turn to the great equalizer. What the United States must do now, in the wake of its victory in Iraq, is anticipate the anti-American coalition’s intensification of WMD proliferation. This will be their response to America’s victory. Since this is a potentially effective strategy, the United States must solidify its defenses against such weapons.
© 2003 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
April 2, 2003
No, the *only* answer to American military power is to channel any conflict with the U.S. away from our storng suits (e.g. economic or military wars) into areas in which we've traditionally been more vulnerable, such as diplomacy, negotiations, and trade relations.
...But it won't hurt my feelings if the rest of the world never figures that fact out.
America can be undermined through the use of "diplomacy, negotiations, and trade relations" by a nation who's outlook is measured in decades and centuries. China has been on this track since Mao. There was a brief direct military confrontation in Korea. Afterward, they reverted course back to plan A.
I completely agree. The solution the Israelis adopted in 1973 seems appropriate here. They were leading with tanks and took heavy losses from dismounted and concealed ATGM's. The solution was to employ mixed or "combined arms" teams (which we do) leading the advance with suppressing artillery, mortar and machine gun (or in our case 20mm) fire to destroy or compromise the location of the position. The Crusader would have helped a lot with this type of mission. They didn't have attack helicopters, which can also provide suppressing fire, but they must be careful, obviously. Air support and precision weapons can help if the ATGM's are vehicle mounted, but are of little use against dismounted teams unless their location has been compromised.
Using light armor such as Stryker does not seem a viable solution to the ATGM problem. No M-1's have been lost to frontal ATGM fire, so far as I know, but only to rear shots. A Stryker can be destroyed from any angle by an ATGM(or RPG or heavy caliber weapon, for that matter.) Despite the criticism of the term, the fight so far has been a "cakewalk" to what we would face from a better armed and better led enemy.
When nuclear bombs explode in our cities, they will not be delivered in a classic way, by missile or aircraft. They will have been smuggled in, and they will do real damage. As the number of countries with nuclear weapons increases, the possibility of 'anonymous' nuclear attack increases.
The Chinese are proliferating nuclear weapons, but under 'plausible deniability'. First, they gave them to Pakistan (denied, of course), Pakistan is helping NKs program, NK is helping Iran, etc. These countries have relations with non-governmental 'terrorist' groups. As nuclear weapons become common in the worst countries in the world, America will have a difficult time finding a culprit to retaliate against.
The next major attack against us will not be by a clear adversary. The world has seen that our adversaries are crushed. The attacks will be done anonymously, with the entire world professing shock and horror and sympathy.
Although it is remotely feasible to smuggle a nuke in once, it isn't very easy.
Contrary to common wisdom, nukes actually require an enormous amount of maintenance. The radioactivity is very destructive to the electronics, which require frequent replacing, and the radioactive decay in the trigger and booster elements requires frequent re-injections of new fissionable material (not something that one can do in the back of a bus or in the belly of a smelly oil tanker).
But not only is the half-life of the trigger and booster isotopes an enormous logistical hurdle, but so too is the decay of the slower-deforming core fissionable materials.
The precise, size, shape, and purity level is critical, yet when one is dealing with metals that decay over time, all of those prerequisites vary.
There have been a couple of threads posted here on FR about this subject, although I don't readily see them today. One of them showed the math that pretty much limits "smuggled" nukes to being weapons-ready for a little less than 90 days without having access to a full-size, modern nuclear support laboratory (something that fewer than a dozen nations manage to keep active on their own soil with no restrictions being imposed upon said labs to be "clandestine" or mobile).
So what does all of this mean?
It means that the control of military timing becomes an issue. A nuclear adversary can't simply bury a few smuggled nukes in various American cities and expect them to be ready later (at least, to be anything other than dirty bombs as time passes).
Moreover, the U.S. has equipped all of our customs agents, Coast Guard, and many of our police departments with extremely sensitive radiation detectors. One of those detectors picked up a suitcase in the North-East that merely had a few Mexican Floor tiles and bananas inside (both emit radiation), causing a bomb squad to investigate said suitcase on the spot.
Bringing in even larger amounts of radioactive materials would be even easier for our equipment to spot, and the level of shielding required to slip by our detection systems would rule out ground transportation of any kind (though cargo ships are still an option).
Thus, if America is hit with a nuke, rest assured that it will be in a port city, and that cargo traffic will be forever checked and routed after such an attack so that no more seaboard hits are feasible.
Now, with that understood, what are the military implications? Clearly our navy would still exist after a port was destroyed. Certainly we would still have our air force and our army as well as our strategic nuclear forces; thus, retaliation on a scale never before seen would be unleashed (up to and perhaps including depopulating the rest of the entire planet), and since only 15% of the U.S. annual GDP is dependent upon imports and exports, our core economy would still be viable.
Ergo, it would be a pretty bad idea on the part of any of our adversaries. Such an attack would have little military value, no more than 15% economic value, yet would open up the possibility of planet-wide depopulation outside of the U.S.
Yeah sure, throw us in that briar patch...
China has used force against Taiwan, South Korea/U.S., India, Vietnam, and Russia.
In each case, it used force because it was too impatient to wait for its prize, and in each case, China failed to achieve victory. India (circa 1962) and Vietnam (circa 1979) devastated the Chinese Army (PLA) in ground wars, for instance.
Call me when China has triumphed over all of Taiwan, Vietnam, and India. Until then, China has bigger things to worry about than expanding its borders or cutting world powers down to size.
I'm not a historian by any means, but I am certain the Japanese culture was much much different than Saddam's Iraq.
Also, Japan's government was not in direct possession of 90% of the countries wealth (oil). There was no huge wealth incentive (like the State owned oil in Iraq) for the criminals, parasites, and power mongers to return to in the post war Japanese government.
Suggesting what we were able to do with Japan after WWII might work in Iraq is naive, in my opinion.
Yawn...
The "powder keg of fanaticism" can't even carry out the fatwah to kill Rushdie over his book. Ooooh, a little book got them all upset. The Satanic Verses isn't even that good.
That "powder keg" can't defeat the vastly outnumbered Israel or Taiwan, either (much less the world's only economic and military super-power).
You'll forgive me if I don't shake in my steel-toed boots with fear at the powder keg of fanaticism.
Look around. There are very few regions on this planet that innovate (at least in the last 1,000 years or so). About a dozen countries have finally managed, in peace-time, to duplicate the nuclear feat that the U.S. achieved over half a century ago in wartime. The list gets even smaller when you look at how few nations have managed to put a man into Earth-orbit, a feat that the U.S. and Russia managed to do over 40 years ago (and no one else has done it since then).
The vast majority of nations can't even machine parts to aircraft tolerances, much less work with the vastly more brittle and dangerous fissionable metals like uranium and plutonium, so again, forgive me if I'm not living in fear from the "great" minds of the rest of the world.
Who knows, over time several other nations and perhaps even a rogue terrorist group or two will figure out our World War 2 technology, but what's missing is how they are going to catch up to our level today (much less tomorrow), and fighting the U.S. military today with World war 2 technology is hardly a recipe for military victory.
No, the answer for the next half century or more is for every adversary of the U.S. to either self-impale itself upon our might or else channel all conflicts away from our economic and military strong suits.
Anything else is just fanciful ranting.
Agreed...although, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to envision several detonations in port cities nearly simultaneously.
Ergo, it would be a pretty bad idea on the part of any of our adversaries. Such an attack would have little military value, no more than 15% economic value, yet would open up the possibility of planet-wide depopulation outside of the U.S.
An anonymous attack would be difficult to reply to militarily. Yes, we could just nuke the likely suspects, but I wonder if we would really do that. And I suspect the economic effect might be larger than 15%. A comparatively insignificant attack in NY on 9/11 had an economic effect wildly out of proportion to the scale of the attack. Economics are based in very large part on human mentality. Can you imagine the hysteria? IMHO, economic activity would be curtailed far beyond the effect of the physical damage. People's priorities would change, populations shifts might occur...the concept that a piece of paper with a $ on it is actually worth something might come into question.
Hegel spoke of historical dialectics...I know the Marxists have corrupted the concept, but I think the concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis taps into something fundamentally true. America is the current thesis, and simply because of that, there are our enemies, the antithesis, be they the Chinese, the Islamics, (the French??:-) ). They despise what we are with an irrational but passionate fervor. They simply want us to be hurt and brought down, whether it be with stones or with nukes.
While this is true, the example of Japan was mentioned because in 1946 many people would have felt the Japan was a feudal militaristic socielty incapable of becoming a Modern Demoracy with a capitalistic economy.
Perhaps I am falling into this same line of thinking conerning Iraq, and I would be glad to be proven wrong.
Only the future holds the answer.
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