I would appreciate your expanding on your comments. What are we doing out there? What tactics are we using and why?
Phase four stabilization and pacification.
In case you don't know there are four phases.
Phase 1 Movement into position.
Phase 2 The air war softening up targets comms logs defensive positions.
Phase 3 the land war.
Phase 4 occupation stabilization and pacification.
The reason for phase 4 is because with the removal of Saddam there was a major power vacuum, no government, no stability in fact anarchy started to take hold, in fact we could of ended up with another Afghanistan scenario with a Taliban type movement taking control as did happen with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
re :What tactics are we using and why?
Tactics and Strategy a common compliant is we are fighting a war why aren't we fighting it like it is a war.
Well we are but there are different types of war High Intensity like the Second World War, liberation of Kuwait, the Arab Middle east wars, and low intensity such as North Ireland Algeria and a host of colonial wars.
Vietnam was both high and low intensity which led to a mismatch of tactics and strategy.
Over the years many tactics and stretefies have evolved in fighting low intensity wars thse are covered by the term COIN.
Counter Insurgency.
We are fighting a Counter Insurgency War in Iraq. Our role is to stabilise the region until such a time as we either defeat the terrorists military or we hand over to a stable Iraqi government with a unified and professional strong Iraqi Security force.
I think the latter is what we are aiming for. An important component in dealing with an insurgency/terrorist movement is denying the support of the local population to the insurgents/terrorists. (ps : military term is insurgent, Civilian term is terrorist). There are two schools of fault here, use of terrors and reprisals, or winning the support of the local population. If we take the Second World War as an example, The Germans occupied most of Europe and practised differing methods of occupation policy. What was found was the more brutal the repression the more organised was the resistance and more supported by the local population.
Poland, which experienced the most brutal repressive measures of all the occupied nations, had the most organised resistant group.
In Czech Hedrich who favoured Terror with terror ran such a liberal regime that Czech became a very important part of the German Armnements Industry, he was assassinated, the Germans switched to an oppressive regime, which resulted in more sabotage in the factories and more organised resistance, this was the same in the other occupied countries.
I can give you other examples , the Soviets in Afghanistan, Stalin’s repression, France in the Algerian War, third world examples such as Rwanda. My own country when we decided to teach the Irish nationalists a lesson resulting in Bloody Sunday, best recruiting tool the IRA ever had. The same in India in the 30s when General Dhafor decided to teach the Indians a lesson they will never forget.
There are so many examples of where meeting terror with terror failed.
Today we look at winning the support of the local population, and denying that support to the terrorists. Hearts and Minds as it is called.
There have been notable successes where local intelligence has led to a number of captures of leading terrorists who will supply us with a wealth of intelligence leading to more captures.
It may not be sexy, it may not be visual with pictures of fast moving jets, aircraft carriers, MI tanks spurting over a battlefield job, but it does get the job done. Which is what counts.