Posted on 04/20/2003 8:14:30 PM PDT by knuthom
With the Iraqi people dancing atop a dictator's fallen statues, the pundits who forecast an American bloodbath have begun to change their story. Implying that our military achievement wasn't all that grand, they tell us Saddam didn't even have much of a plan to defend his country.
Absolute bull.
Saddam had a classic 20th-century, industrial-age war plan. But our forces fought a 21st-century, post-industrial war.
We have witnessed the end of an era along the road to Baghdad. Every other military establishment and government in the world witnessed it, too.
We shall hear a great deal from think tanks in the coming months, warning that other armies have learned their lesson and will devise clever, asymmetrical strategies to defeat the United States armed forces.
To an extent, that's a valid concern. But it's also secondary. The basic lesson that governments and militaries around the world just learned was this: Don't fight the United States. Period. This stunning war did more to foster peace than a hundred treaties could begin to do.
Our officials are right to warn that there's a great deal of work still ahead to complete this victory. But the world knows that Saddam lost, the allies won – and there ain't going to be no re-match.
So which military lessons will potential enemies and even our allies draw from this grand American triumph?
Yes, Saddam's forces may have failed to fight for him as stalwartly as he hoped. And no one can deny the technological overmatch between the rival armies. But generals from Moscow to Damascus to Pyongyang will look at how Saddam planned to fight and recognize their own weakness.
Far from technically incompetent, Saddam's plan was right out of Clausewitz. Its models were the lessons of the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Soviet victory over the Germans in World War II.
The principles were: Delay your enemy, attrit his forces, trade space for time, harass his supply lines and husband your best forces for a mighty counterattack. Wait until the attacker has advanced so far into your country that he reaches a "culminating point" at which he has lost his momentum and his supply lines are overextended. Then strike.
Saddam didn't so much plan the defense of Baghdad as he tried to refight the defense of Moscow.
His plan was a textbook model for a modern war to be fought by a nation in arms, containing the wisdom of historical experience. Had Saddam faced any other military in the world, he would have extracted a far higher price – and might even have won in a war of attrition.
But the campaign the U.S. military fought cast off the rules of the modern era. We fought the first post-modern war. In the final grudge match between Clausewitz and GI Joe, it was a shutout. And no other military on earth could have done it.
What remains remarkable is how little the Iraqis – and the Russian advisers who helped plan their defense – grasped the profound changes in our military and the American way of war. They clearly had no sense of the battlefield awareness, speed, precision and tactical ferocity of America's 21st century forces.
The Iraqis had not advanced beyond Desert Storm in their understanding of our military. The Russian generals – one a former paratrooper chief, the other an air-defense expert – who advised them don't seem to have advanced beyond mid-Cold War thinking.
There was no appreciation of the effect of combined arms and joint synergy supercharged by information systems, of American flexibility and agility, of our intelligence capabilities – or even of American grit and determination.
But the worst sin in which the planners indulged (and it's one to which Russians and those they've trained are particularly susceptible) was to rely too much on the book. They fought a printing-press war. We fought a digital one.
Consider the fear and impotent anger would-be opponents of the United States must feel today. Begin with the Russian military, in which a generation of mentally poisoned generals must die off before we can begin to build a healthy, cooperative relationship.
First, the Russian heirs of the once-dreaded Soviet military had to watch in humiliation as a handful of U.S. forces in Afghanistan did in a few months what they could not do in a decade. Now they have witnessed the swift collapse of a conventional military that Moscow had equipped, trained and advised.
Iraq embraced the Russian general staff academy's "school solution" for this war. The potbellied generals in Moscow must be squirming in their vodka-addled shame. Meanwhile, the Russians can't even defeat a provincial rebellion in Chechnya.
After its inept attempt at strategic blackmail, North Korea has grown very quiet. Doubtless, we shall hear a great deal more rhetoric as the shock of our victory begins to wear off. But North Korean tanks are not going to head south anytime soon.
Syria is getting a well-deserved helping of fear served up on its bloodstained plate. Bully-boy Bashar Assad may hate us, but he is unlikely to make a further move to harm us. And if he does, it will be an act of folly tantamount to Saddam's defiance.
One does not imagine that the Syrian military is anxious to face the armed forces of the United States.
The Chinese long have studied our superiority – yet nothing could have prepared them for the effectiveness and efficiency of this campaign. When even our own military is surprised at how well things went, you may be certain that the boys in Beijing are following events avidly.
The Iraqi defeat was a defeat for every other military in the world – in a sense, even for our allies, whose forces cannot begin to keep pace with our own. Faced with America's military might and prowess, no other power could have devised a better general war plan than the one Saddam tried to execute.
The Marine Corps Hymn might serve uncannily well as this campaign's anthem, with its opening line, "From the Halls of Montezuma..." Although the lyrics refer to America's Mexican War, we have just witnessed the destruction of one military civilization by another immeasurably more advanced. The impact is as shattering and epochal as the triumph of Cortez over Montezuma's Aztecs – a regime with marked similarities to Saddam's.
Clinton and the anti-war crowd cannot comprehend this.
Saddam started out with an air force, back in Gulf I. Lasted a couple of days . . .
Yelp, that's the sentence that stuck out from all the others for me too.
Power hungry people only understand power. Leftist want to win by running away. Sometimes you must stand and fight.
One of the hallmarks of this was proportionality. Simply put, if we face a tougher foe, we would take the gloves off. If we feared for our survival, we would get mean and nasty.
This was a swat team operation, designed not to kill anyone or break anything. Makes it all the sweeter for us and scarier for our enemies.
our modern force would have a much more difficult time against a nation
with any Air Force at all..
And what nation would that be? That could hold any part of the air against our
Air Force?
Operation Iraqi Freedom has shown that with heavy use of precision weapons, the US military can seriously damage enemy forces with surprisingly low civilian casualties, since we no longer need to drop hundreds of weapons just to hit ONE target.
None. But victory would not be as easy or come without a higher cost.
As I understand it, only the Russians, Brits, and French make fighters anywhere in the same ballpark. No, the US air force is second to none, but in IRAQ, our control of the skies dictated the outcome more than our "21st century strategy."
IMHO...
Exactly my point, almost word for word. I believe I said "a few weeks."
If it were so simple, then why didn't we win quickly and decisively in Vietnam? This is a real question I am asking. Though I don't like the tone of the entire article, I do agree with the premise that many components worked together in new ways.
We now fight wars in a new way and it took everyone by surprise as much as using planes as bombs took us by surprise. For example, the critics could get a complaint out fast enough, before it was proven wrong; nor could the Arab states even bring up the matter before the UN before it was done. We will need to keep ahead of the curve, because you can bet others will be trying to learn from this.
And, YES, I heartily agree that this war has done more for peace than a hundred treaties.
I think our "secret" is that there is no secret. Except for intel assests in place for months, everything else was done in the open on TV. The American economy, and American spirit, developed weapons that kill important targets with one shot, and sensor systems that give commanders at all levels more of a god's-eye view of the battle. And we have professional troops and leaders with the skill and spirit to not only use the stuff properly, but improvise as needed. All of this despite the best efforts of the klintons to harm our military.
I think it was Satchel Paige who said, "it ain't braggin' if you can actually do it."
No-one has an air force that can match ours. My point was that our air superiority had more to do with the lighting wuickness of thewar than our 21st century strategy. After rereading, however, I do give credence to the argument that our newfound coordination between the various branches of the service and intelligence has made a big difference.
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