Who Won the Battle of Fallujah

One point I got from this article was that the margin of victory in the battle was insufficient. War is always the continuation of politics, diplomacy by other means and success depends a prior war of words to prepare the battlefield. In this case prior supremacy was not established, so important doctrines from the Marine urban warfare manual could not be applied. Instead the battle more closely aligned with IDF doctrine, which resulted from Israel being hammered politically for decades. Doing our bit on the home front means writing and speaking to win the battle of ideas, so military force becomes ever more coercively violent, and the words of diplomacy carry ever more weight.

They don't have a nation as a base, let alone one of the largest ones in the world. Let alone one of the richest. it is just ridiculous to analyze these things as though we aer somehow outnumbered or can't afford losses as much as they can, when the reverse is obviously true, by every objective measure. It lends an entirely fictious strength to pathetically weak opponents.

As for Nam, the NVA didn't win any war of attrition. First the VC were destroyed by it, and then the US left. The NVA had been forced to dial down the op tempo to remain in the war at all. Even after US ground forces were gone, ARVN was able to stop them when fully backed by US airpower, as the Easter offensive in 72 showed. Nor did they win by guerilla tactics. It took a full scale invasion by multiple divisions of Russian armor, and the absence of US air support for the ARVN, to defeat SVN. Nor did the US public pull support for the war. McGovern's peacenik platform lost in a landslide. Nixon lost his presidency in the watergate building, not the rice paddies. ARVN lost in the US congress.

There is nothing wrong with the American way of war as traditionally conceived and applied. It wins every time it is allowed to. It has consistently delivered lopsided exchanges in our favor against states of almost comparable power, and against lesser ones, easily so. The more firepower is allowed the truer this is, but it has regularly and reliably been the case. Firepower kills. And killing the enemy wins wars.

The disfunctional system is not the military. There is nothing wrong with what it is accomplishing in Iraq. The disfunctional system is the US political system, owing not to any military failings, but to deliberate political choices by the American left. The US military is not in charge of defeating the US left at the ballot box. We are, as citizens, as patriots, as conservatives, and (many of us anyway) as Republicans.

It is a fool's errand trying to fix the perfectly successful subsystem to make up for failures elsewhere. One, you will break the working subsystem. Two, you can never meet the standards set by the left, because they are not predicated upon military failure, but on military success. 22 fatalities are quite sufficient if the place is Somalia and our boy Bill is at the wheel. A thousand would have been quite enough for Monsieur Kerry. There is no national policy to be had, in trying to avoid even those levels of losses, by military changes. The only change that could do so is surrender, because that is the end actually desired, not clean victory. The cleaner the victory the more livid the left will get about it, because defeat is what they want, not cheap success.

The US military is the most successful in recorded history and is functioning just fine. It does not need re-engineering as though something is systematically wrong with it. Nothing is. It should not be held to a standard of perfection, and those attempting to do so are not helping matters. I understand the desire of military professionals to push the boundaries of their art, to strive to excel and improve regardless. But by any reasonable measure, they are not failing, Fallujah was a crushing victory, and they have only to keep it up. As for our political system problems, that is our duty to fix, not theirs.

If the Northern States had had the news media and politicians they have now, they would have declared the Civil War a quagmire and declared defeat the day after First Bull Run.

I don't know how much you've read about the war between the states, but actually not much was different then. On both sides.

While there were indeed Copperheads in the North, they did not dominate the major newspapers of the time such as the New York Times or Harpers Weekly and every Northern Congressional delegation was not populated by politicians in the style of Fernando Wood and Clement Vallandigham.

Today, it is difficult to find any major news outlet outside of FOX News that is not blatantly biased or even actively undermining the war effort and most Northeastern Congressmen and Senators are ready to yell "Quagmire" at the drop of a hat.

To start off with the first sentence, I didn’t compare Iraq to Vietnam. But even if it were done, that sentence is still wrong because several countries DO act as their base and one IS “among the richest”. I brought Ho Chi Minh’s statement up not because Iraq is Vietnam, but because he understood how a people living in a closed tyrannical society can attrite an outside democrat force politically rather than in a conventional military way.

I’ll read through the rest of your post tomorrow, but I haven’t read but a few paragraphs of the article yet. Priorities, but after last night’s mismatched apple/orange comparison of yours and that opening paragraph, I wanted to comment briefly.

The strongest country they actually control is Iran, which has a fifth our population and less than a twentieth of our wealth. When they had Iraq and its army - the third largest in the world at one time, in conventional equipment terms - we took it away from them inside of a month. They are pathetically weak compared to us. Democracies are vastly stronger than tyrannies for perfectly obvious reasons. And we've had plenty of times in the past where our political system has handled foreign wars just fine. That it isn't now is not due to democracy, but to sectarianism. Sects follow their ideological leaders not their country's governments, and we've got one, in spades. Same thing has happened to monarchies (and aristocracies, at times) throughout the ages, there is nothing particularly democratic about it. It is not, however, a weakness of our military or their manner of warfighting. It is our domestic political problem, to be fixed by domestic political means. It should not dictate impossible tasks to military strategists, who need to be able to worry about their own military matters not extraneous political ones, that they cannot directly alter anyway.

Okay, it looks like the author is just critical of tactical victories that don’t support strategy. You take issue and imply that success is still supported by body count metrics.

The author is just subtlety recommending more aggressive and less restrictive applications of force in order to deprive the enemy of propaganda political victories.

Most pundits I’ve seen recognize that our 20-1 kill ratio in Valiant Resolve was overshadowed by our loss of Fallujah and the Marine’s loss of their mystique as being unstoppable. Defeated militarily or politically is irrelevant. They were stopped, and militant Islam was never electrified more since 9-11.

I think the best definition of victory is to defeat the enemies’ will to fight. Five or ten more battles with kill-ratios and results like Valiant Resolve and most of Iraq would be under enemy control. And the majority of Americans would have lost our will to fight. Therefore I don’t think kill matrixes are dominate indicators of success, especially in asymmetrical war.

On the same principle, I disagree with Madden’s suggestion that al-Fajr was also a strategic loss. With 5 more instances where half the muj “escaped while putting up a good fight without ever expecting to win”, they’d be no more relevant than the Taliban.

I suspect that if our response was more brutal and took place earlier that Iraqi terrorism would be further along to defeat. And more importantly, I think Syria and others would be much more intimidated by our presence. I think that’s the central point that he’s diplomatically trying to get across, perhaps without terminating his career ;^)

He is looking for military solutions to a political problem, and there aren't any. If the Marines did something wrong on the ground it might be corrected by some change in tactics. They didn't. They were stopped by their commanders because they were killing so many terrorists so successfully on al Jaz that Iraqi politicians were getting nervous. Then there was abu-grab and all that, as well.

The rate determining step, the weak link, in our fight in Iraq is not military. And it isn't in Iraq, it is here in the US. It makes no sense to put additional strains on the US political system to change tactics to help guys who are already winning lopsidedly, do so more lopsidedly. If it relieved pressure on the US political system it might make some sense, but it doesn't. Going slow in April was the right call, because the Iraqis weren't the relevant opponents. The democrats were. As soon as the democrats were defeated, the Marines could be and were turned loose, with firepower allowed, and predictably cleared Fallujah in short order with minimal fuss.

Political problems domestically have to be solved by political means. There are no military solutions to them. More indiscrimate use of firepower would not have reduced pressure on the US political system.

The army is not broken and is not losing anything. The political system was much more severely stressed, but passed its own test, this past November. Now the terrorists are just going to lose. With no grand change in tactics required.

" He is looking for military solutions to a political problem, and there aren't any."

I don’t understand how you can say that. Nothing that Madden writes indicates that he’s looking for it, but from what you just wrote, that’s what you’re promoting.

Madden’s simply critical of some political restrictions and their erosive effect on our battlefield dominance. That’s what lost Fallujah in Valliant Resolve and gave the enemy the hope that contributed to the hard battles we fought across the country until we were ready to retake it in November. He didn’t bring political problems into his discussion.

General Conway who commanded I MEF said that he didn’t choose to go into Fallujah as we did or like the decision to halt the advance. Those orders were directing a military operation as a solution to a political problem, something that you say was right but that you also say you are against.

The political problem is not politicians directing the military. The political problem is a treasonous sect and party at home, that wants us to lose every war we are engaged in, whenever we are engaged in one. That political problem cannot be fixed by changing military tactics to make casualties impossible, in the hopes a perfectly immaculate war will retain political support. First, it is physically and militarily impossible. Second, it won't gain political support from the objecting sect, because that sect does not object to casualties but to victory.

There is nothing wrong with present military tactics being used in Iraq. Not a thing. They are working. They are delivering complete military paralysis to the other side, as far as their ability to achieve any real military objective, at very low cost in blood, and at high rates of loss to our enemies. That is quite precisely *all* that can be expected of military tactics. Expecting nuances of military tactics to make communist traitors love the victory of leading capitalist powers is not going to happen and is a fool's errand.

Depriving commie traitors here at home of their ability to control the US military and to inflict political defeats by throwing away victories the men in the field have already achieved, is not the military's job. It is our job as citizens, and supporters of patriotic rather than treasonous politicians.

Can the military do whatever the heck in likes, in a strategic situation in which the military problems we face are minor annoyances and the real problems we face are all domestic political, or diplomatic versions of the same sectarian struggle? No. Do so officers dislike that? Sure, but tough toenails. Their system isn't broken and can't fix the one that is. But must work with the broken system, not pretend it is functioning perfectly when it obviously isn't.

We don't need new military ideas. The military isn't failing and isn't broken. We do need greater political cohesion in support of national policy. The military cannot make that happen. We can. In the meantime, the military's job is to continue the excellent performance they are already delivering, and as for the political constraints they operate under, suck it the hell up and stop whining about it. It is reality, deal.

"The political problem is not politicians directing the military. The political problem is a treasonous sect and party at home"

I recognized that from the beginning. So does Madden. But you want the military directed by politician in such a way as to throttle it down rather than trusting them with more autonomy to manage their military objectives. It’s you that is promoting the use of the military to solve political objectives, not Madden.

Madden is not trying to make casualties low in order to appease the left, he is trying to make casualties low only so that more Marines don’t die. That’s how virtually all Marines want to fight this war, ratcheting up the force so that the enemy is more intimidated, but many politicians (and you) pressure them with restrictions in order to manage domestic political problems which you recognize is a losing battle, but still want done.

Reread it. Madden is speaking from a nearly pure military perspective, critical of what you claim to be against. You’re reading something into this article that doesn’t exist, arguing with ghosts and talking absolute nonsense.

Horsefeathers. He thinks strategic victory requires an aura of invincibility that he thinks can be created by entirely military means. He is completely wrong about that. He thinks it is possible to win strategically by the right military formula. He faults the achievements of present tactics because he does not see them leading automatically and on their own to a strategic victory.

There is nothing the Marines can do on the ground in Iraq that will make their enemies think they are undefeatable, when those enemies aren't expecting to defeat them on the ground in Iraq, but in elections in the US. As long as they think our domestic commies will pull the plug a few months down the line, nothing would make them give up. You could nuke ten million of them and they'd still think victory would be theirs for the asking on January 20th.

There wasn't any military victory to be had, on the ground, in Iraq, in April of last year. Failure of the tactics employed to deliver such a strategic victory, on that occasion, are not a failure. It is a windmill chase. As soon as the election was secured, the Marines had everything they needed to clean out Fallujah and they did so. There is no defeat there, anywhere. He sees one, and it isn't there. He is just wrong.

The source of his error is thinking the bar to be cleared by purely military tactics is securing strategic victory regardless of political environment. That is a common reaction of military officers to the presence of political constraints, but it is not a realistic one. It is a man with a hammer looking for nails. As a military officer giving advice on tactics, he does not have access to the actually broken subsystem - US domestic politics - so he whangs away at whatever is sticking up, even though it is working perfectly.

That the military is directed by politicians for political objectives is not a anomoly or mistake or a problem to be solved, least of all by altering military tactics rather than political goals. It is just Clauswitz chapter one, reality, deal with it. That our present political situation is bad due to domestic traitors is indeed a problem we have to deal with. But short of military coups, not one the military can help address, at all. We have to address it as citizens through the political process.

And military men need to understand that, stop trying to fix military systems that are not broken or to hold them to unrealistic and unsatisfiable standards (win so big even commies love you - ain't going to happen). Do your job, bleed the enemy as directed, stay within the op tempo limits prescribed by political authorities, stop whining, and suck it the freak up. The pols are the ones facing the real enemy and the real problems, and they don't need your moaning.

"Was the battle of Fallujah a victory or a defeat? The Marine Corps’ military operations in urban terrain doctrine recognizes that tactical success does not necessarily translate to strategic victory. It notes the Israeli’s tactical victory in Beirut was a strategic defeat...Much the same can be said of Fallujah’s defenders."

Why? Because they weren't allowed to run them over with adequate force back in April. Ergo, it was a strategic defeat. He says repeatedly, "with arguably disasterous results for the US in Iraq". He is saying Fallujah was a strategic disaster. He thinks the only outcome that wouldn't have been a strategic disaster is an extremely low casualty (lower than several hundred as in November), very high firepower, immediate and initial victory, back in April. And this is nonsense, setting a strategic political task for military tactics. And it doesn't matter how many times you repeat yourself or try to insult me. He sees a defeat where there simply hasn't been one. There was a delay to deal with a non-military problem that the military could not address by anything it could do, then a clear-cut victory, both military and political.

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