Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

The firepower differential is great, but it's also irrelevant, because firepower is no substitute for logistics.

Rule 1: you can't supply Mech or Armor units by air.

Rule 2: anything on the other side of a bridge is vulnerable to disrupted supply.

Rule 3: an obstacle not covered by fire is nothing more than a temporary annoyance.

There are a lot of bridges along the supply routes that reach the American strong points; there are long stretches of road, and there's lots of friable soil and dust in the air.

There certainly aren't enough American troops to secure those supply routes. Once the Iraqis stop shooting at the convoys and start making a concerted effort to obstruct supply by blowing bridges, lighting the road on fire (tarmac will burn, if suitably encouraged), and mining the verge, the American ability to cover the obstacles around their strong points becomes limited to the supplies on hand.

Supplies on hand are not ample, and in the case of a full court press (the only really iffy thing in this scenario, because it would require broad co-operation among the various insurgent groups), the available airpower won't be sufficient to maintain the cover of fire on those obstacles.

Which reduces the problem to one of numbers.

Is this going to happen?

I don't know.

Is a military defeat which will utterly destroy two thirds of the combat brigades of the United States Army a real risk?

You damn betcha.

Is the alternative killing some large fraction (like, say a quarter or more) of the population of Iraq the alternative to that defeat?

In the case of a general insurgency, very probably.

Is this another reason not to vote for George Bush?

I sure hope so.

Clearly the neocons have never heard of a place in Afghanistan called Gandamak....

Iraq is so passe. Iran is the place for Kerry to differentiate himself from Bush. I note with alarm that same drumbeat of lies which led to Iraq quagmire are being sounded by the usual suspects.

Speaking of cakewalkers*, has anyone told the American public that kicking over countries for fun and profit is a dying business?

Lately?

-------------------

*Cakewalk In Iraq

By Ken Adelman

Wednesday, February 13, 2002

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1996-2002Feb12?language=printer

But remember in Flashman, the only survivour of an Imperial army screwing up a land war campaign in Asia, besides Dr Brydon, was a cowardly but well connected drunk.

I love Flashman! And have read all of them, glad to see someone else mentioning the series.

Anyhow, one of the criticisms I have always made about our invasion of Afghanistan is that so many people were misled by the hype that we had done what the Soviets could never do.

But that was wrong. What people always forget about Afghanistan is that it is rather quite easy to invade. It's happened so many times. However, it is rather quite hard to HOLD.

Anyway, Flashman is quite a bit of fun. My personal fav is Flashman and the Redskins.

Yeah, Bush is Flashman, without the guts or the skill in language.

Earlier this year I stumbled across "The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia" by Peter Hopkirk.

Even more depressing than Flashman, and not played by Rik Mayall either.

Is the technology gradient really that much greater? The British had firearm and cannon. But they weren't fighting an enemy that has the ability to produce lunch pail size ordinance and drop it nearly anywhere undetected.

When this happens the US army will turn its back on the GOP for the next 100 years.

Another item not to read: Kipling's "Arithmetic on the Frontier". http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm

Love those Flashman books! Also clearly founded
in a good deal of historical research.

On the question of possible military defeat, I'm
afraid I have to agree with the first poster.
Amateurs discuss strategy, professionals worry
about logistics. The US forces have amazing
mobility and ability to put firepower on target;
but tanks and Bradleys need a lot of fuel (not
to mention heavy ammunition and spare parts);
infantry needs ammunition, food, and clean water
(in most wars until recently diseases such as
dysentery are the big killer, not enemy action).

Our ground supply lines are long and vulnerable.
Already there are reports that some units have
run short of food and fuel at times. A
coordinated attack on bridges and roads could
cause a lot of trouble.

In terms of air supply, we have unprecedented
airlift capacity (one website list >800 heavy
airlift planes in US forces worldwide) - but
that gets tricky if the areas close to the
airstrips are infested with mortars and portable
SAMs (I think approx 7000 SAM-7s are unaccounted
for in Iraq, not to mention more advanced SAM-14s
and several hundred Stingers on the world market,
a great legacy of the blessed Reagan's early and
farsighted support for Islamic jihad).

To my knowledge no-one has attempted air supply
of substantial heavy forces surrounded by
guerrillas with portable SAMs. Let's hope we
don't have to make that experiment.

The closest analogy might be Dien Bien Phu,
though there the Vietnamese had a brilliant
general, artillery, and control of the high
ground. But still it isn't an encouraging
precedent.

Even if we get all our forces out of Iraq without
any disasters, you can probably figure that
most of the heavy equipment will be in terrible
condition after a year or three in combat
conditions with abrasive sand, extremes of heat,
shortage of spare parts. This stuff was designed
to hold up the Soviets in Germany for a week or
two while we zapped them with tactical nukes,
not to patrol 350 miles of Iraq-Kuwait desert
highway for years on end.

Love those Flashman books! Also clearly founded
in a good deal of historical research.

On the question of possible military defeat, I'm
afraid I have to agree with the first poster.
Amateurs discuss strategy, professionals worry
about logistics. The US forces have amazing
mobility and ability to put firepower on target;
but tanks and Bradleys need a lot of fuel (not
to mention heavy ammunition and spare parts);
infantry needs ammunition, food, and clean water
(in most wars until recently diseases such as
dysentery are the big killer, not enemy action).

Our ground supply lines are long and vulnerable.
Already there are reports that some units have
run short of food and fuel at times. A
coordinated attack on bridges and roads could
cause a lot of trouble.

In terms of air supply, we have unprecedented
airlift capacity (one website list >800 heavy
airlift planes in US forces worldwide) - but
that gets tricky if the areas close to the
airstrips are infested with mortars and portable
SAMs (I think approx 7000 SAM-7s are unaccounted
for in Iraq, not to mention more advanced SAM-14s
and several hundred Stingers on the world market,
a great legacy of the blessed Reagan's early and
farsighted support for Islamic jihad).

To my knowledge no-one has attempted air supply
of substantial heavy forces surrounded by
guerrillas with portable SAMs. Let's hope we
don't have to make that experiment.

The closest analogy might be Dien Bien Phu,
though there the Vietnamese had a brilliant
general, artillery, and control of the high
ground. But still it isn't an encouraging
precedent.

Even if we get all our forces out of Iraq without
any disasters, you can probably figure that
most of the heavy equipment will be in terrible
condition after a year or three in combat
conditions with abrasive sand, extremes of heat,
shortage of spare parts. This stuff was designed
to hold up the Soviets in Germany for a week or
two while we zapped them with tactical nukes,
not to patrol 350 miles of Iraq-Kuwait desert
highway for years on end.

You people are not reassuring me! Won't somebody say that we're in much better shape than it looks?

Just try to believe everything (or if that's too
difficult, something) that George W says in the
debate tonight and I'm sure you will be reassured
:-)

Wiliam Lind had a column on this topic last May...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind22.html

"But the growing probability is that we will be driven out of Iraq by a general uprising, an intifada in which every American will be the target of every Iraqi and our boys (and, in America’s Neo-Model Army, girls) will have to fight their way out in a scene like that which faced Gordon in the Sudan. It is not a pleasant prospect. It means thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of American and "coalition" casualties, many times more Iraqi casualties, and one of history’s more memorable defeats, right up there with Syracuse, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The aftershocks will be severe, as regimes tumble from Pakistan through the Persian Gulf and Egypt to Britain and America itself. You can look forward to seeing the Dow at 3000, if not 300."

The lack of being reassuring is probably because it's worse than it looks; almost no information is coming out, and very little of it is being publicly collated into an attempt at a cohesive picture of the military situation.

A fighting retreat is a possibility with a broken front and a relative vacuum of transportation routes to retreat into; it isn't generally practical when you're surrounded.

All the forces in Iraq are surrounded. (With the partial exception of the Brits who are holding a port. There's bitter historical experience which might have something to do with their unwillingness to undertake another role in the occupation of Iraq.)

Those forces are intact at present due to organizational superiority and nothing else. (The killer firepower is a help, but not enough if you can't accurately identify targets. This is the reason to stay out of "urbanized terrain", because it's a three dimensional hell of bad target assessments.)

Once the organizational cohesion goes, that's it.

And yeah, it's possible someone as good as George Washington -- one of the best defensive generals of all time -- will manage to get some formed units out. I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't bet on any civilian survivors from the Green Zone, either. Baghdad is well inland; the traditional line of retreat to the sea isn't available.

It's quite possible we're watching the end of the United States. (That's certainly what the folks proposing laws legalizing torture want, and they may well be prepared to exploit the political upheaval associated with an unambiguous defeat.) It's getting unlikely that we're not seeing the end of the United States' status as a Great Power, one able to wage offensive war.

The lack of being reassuring is probably because it's worse than it looks; almost no information is coming out, and very little of it is being publicly collated into an attempt at a cohesive picture of the military situation.

A fighting retreat is a possibility with a broken front and a relative vacuum of transportation routes to retreat into; it isn't generally practical when you're surrounded.

All the forces in Iraq are surrounded. (With the partial exception of the Brits who are holding a port. There's bitter historical experience which might have something to do with their unwillingness to undertake another role in the occupation of Iraq.)

Those forces are intact at present due to organizational superiority and nothing else. (The killer firepower is a help, but not enough if you can't accurately identify targets. This is the reason to stay out of "urbanized terrain", because it's a three dimensional hell of bad target assessments.)

Once the organizational cohesion goes, that's it.

And yeah, it's possible someone as good as George Washington -- one of the best defensive generals of all time -- will manage to get some formed units out. I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't bet on any civilian survivors from the Green Zone, either. Baghdad is well inland; the traditional line of retreat to the sea isn't available.

It's quite possible we're watching the end of the United States. (That's certainly what the folks proposing laws legalizing torture want, and they may well be prepared to exploit the political upheaval associated with an unambiguous defeat.) It's getting unlikely that we're not seeing the end of the United States' status as a Great Power, one able to wage offensive war.

Afghanistan keeps cropping up! This looks fantastic, and I have reserved it at the library. Tangentially, I wanted to know how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan compared to our invasion of Iraq, and a little digging turned up way more similiarities than I expected.

This is not the era of good sleep.

BTW, I put up my notes on Afghanistan/Iraq at ambiguous.org, for anyone wishing to read them.

[OK, so Brad's server didn't like me before.]

Brad DeLong writes:
>
> You people are not reassuring me! Won't somebody say that
> we're in much better shape than it looks?

I think we might be in better shape than some above suggest.  I don't really think we're in an Afghanistan scenario right now, and certainly not in the position of the French in the 1950s.  The biggest problem we face is in fact the potential supply issue.  Now, many of our forces have been at risk for being put out of supply for quite some time now, and yet so far this has not been the most pressing threat we face.  I think the reason for this is not so much that the idea hasn't occurred to the insurgents, but that it is, in practice, quite a bit more difficult to achieve in the brutal and wide open desert environment outside the cities.  Apparently, the most successful insurgent recruiting has been in the cities rather than in whatever very small settlements there might be closer to the longest (and most vulnerable) supply lines.  Which isn't to say that roadside bombs haven't been a spectacular success (they have) but a complete disruption of supply along major roads would require more than the potshots we currently see.  I think the worst case scenario, then, would be for a meaningful number of insurgents in the cities to leave them and simultaneously disrupt major convoy activities in 3 or 4 different places at once.  Such an action would probably require insurgents who can accept a very high rate of casualties, since the fighting would be out in the open, even but partial success could lead to some US forces being left out of effective supply for at least several days.  Depending on what the current supply situation really is, you could end up with a situation where dozens to thousands of troops are stranded, and dozens to hundreds of casualties could be expected in an effort to re-supply or evacuate such forces.

The forces would almost certainly would be re-supplied, but any day on which the US suffers hundreds of casualties would either have to be the beginning of the end of the occupation, or else the point in time where the US commits to the region with several hundred thousand more troops.

The situation in the cities is getting increasingly dire, but I think
the saving grace (as it were) is that the vast majority of the
populace really does hold their own safety as their first and highest priority.  So, the British commanders in Basra pointed out earlier in the year that, if faced with a mob of thousands of Iraqis outside their compound, they would have little choice but to negotiate a retreat or start a slaughter, at which point there would be no strategic goal left in the area.  So the situation there is presumably pretty dire...*IF* enough Iraqis chose to stare down the barrels of British machine guns.  That this hasn't yet happened is, I believe, a positive sign.

So I guess that this post should re-assure you quite a bit, no?

"You people are not reassuring me! Won't somebody say that we're in much better shape than it looks?"

I won't say MUCH better, but I'll try with my own semi-informed assessment.

Historically, the Iraqis have been less warlike and ornery than the Afghans. As Mr. King points out, they've been most successful in the cities -- like the Palestinians, another people who lost every fight lopsidedly until they turned guerilla on their home turf. If we were to base all of our troops in isolated camps and declared the areas around them free-fire zones, I trust our casualties would plummet. But if we did that then it's no different from quitting Iraq altogether.

If it did come down to a fighting retreat I'd foresee something more like the "advance in another direction" by the 1st Marine Division from Chosin in 1950.

Not very reassuring at all, I know.

Yes, the early result of a planned attack on supply
lines could well be a few hundred troops isolated
somewhere, leading to hundreds of casualties
rather than the steady drip of 2 or 3 a day from
the current IED/ambush tactics.

This seems quite likely.

Then you could try the massive reinforcement with
several hundred thousand troops - except that we
don't have those troops! I'm sure we could
scrape together a few, but we're struggling as
it is to keep 140K there.

Or you can cut and run - but some military
analysis I saw mentioned that we don't have
enough forces for force protection in the event
of a withdrawal - so we can't pull out without
a bloody mess.

The plan of course is to train and arm Iraqi
forces, but we seem to have tried that several
times already and a significant proportion
(perhaps 20%) turn out to be working for the
resistance, and probably 50% or more won't fight
against other Iraqis. So that's been useless.

This clown show is not funny.

Looking for a happy ending? Here's Strachey on Gordon: "At any rate, it had all ended very happily--in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring." http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/etext00/mnvct10.txt

Historical precedent would suggest a foot march north through Kurdistan and eastern Turkey, heading for embarkation at Trabzon. In winter.
Good luck trying to get back to Kuwait the way you came - the choke points along that road weren't chokes because they weren't well defended in March/April 2003. I think that might change.

I would have thought, though, that simply pulling out of the cities into the desert altogether would be a good first step - let the cities stew and set up in a nice flat empty desert with a one-mile free fire belt around it. Live rough for a change. Kill anything that comes near the base areas. Casualties would go right down with no patrols except clearance patrols in the free fire belt. Then shake out, destroy all your surplus equipment, blow up every surplus vehicle and weapon, and roll south a brigade at a time for the Saudi border across the desert (if the Saudis will have you). Resupply would be easier if you weren't hauling, say, all your artillery, tentage and so on - all you'd need would be fuel, water and two weeks' food. Take the minimum number of vehicles you can and still cross the desert. Stage at KKMC, embark at Dhahran via the Saudi road grid (I'm sure this could handle, say, a brigade a day), and head home, pushing some helicopters off the flight deck as you go for tradition's sake.

Kurdistan is probably a good plan - the Sunnis
and Shia are sick of the US, the Kurds are
still quite friendly and might even welcome a permanent US military presence as a guarantee
against Sunni domination and an attack from Turkey.

So you move your forces up into Kurdistan, bribe
the Turks to allow resupply through Turkey,
start calling Kurdistan "Iraq" and just ignore
the civil war further south. We did a pretty
good job of ignoring the long and bloody
Iran/Iraq war so this would be feasible in terms
of US politics, maybe even spinnable as a "win".

On the long-term status of the US as a great power,
the problem is to reconcile US ambition to
effectively control everyone else, with the great
reluctance to send large number of troops into
situations where they might meet a bloody end in
front of TV cameras. Mostly Bush has attempted
to address this dilemma by controlling the TV
cameras - though Fallujah was a clear case where
they gave up because the casualty rate was
uncomfortably high.

The military are working on technology to address
this - the plan is hypersonic unmanned planes
which can be based in the US and sent out to
bomb anywhere in the world within a few hours
with zero risk of US casualties. Then we can
have a strange kind of aggressive neo-isolationism
with few troops abroad.

How this helps with, say, genocide in Darfur,
peacekeeping in Bosnia, or an Al Qaeda takeover
of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, remains unclear.

An even better and way more fun book is Flashman and the Mountain of Light, the early history of the Koh-i-Nor diamond and of some of the most remarkable people and events in recorded history, including the real-life American freebooters who served as Kipling's models for "The Man Who Would Be King." Besides the detailed footnotes and abundant sexual escapades, there's also detailed military accounts of British campaigns in Afghanistan. Fascinating.

An even better and way more fun book is Flashman and the Mountain of Light, the early history of the Koh-i-Nor diamond and of some of the most remarkable people and events in recorded history, including the real-life American freebooters who served as Kipling's models for "The Man Who Would Be King." Besides the detailed footnotes and abundant sexual escapades, there's also detailed military accounts of British campaigns in Afghanistan. Fascinating.