We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Pentagon planners must have been grinding their teeth with irritation when the Turkish parliament refused to allow a US division to unload in a Turkish port and move into Northern Iraq. Clearly having major US assets approach from an entirely different strategic direction would have enormously complicated the Iraqi military’s defensive dilemmas. In the event, the Iraqi army has been able to concentrate its the majority of its efforts against the allied moves in the south. Although it seems that allied special forces have run riot in the west of the country, that is really just desert of little real strategic importance to Iraq’s national cohesion. So far so good for the bad guys (well, sort of).
And yet…
The army which has attacked Iraq is much smaller than the one which ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The thinking here was clearly that the advances in technology and war fighting generally meant that a much smaller but ‘smarter’ force was all that was required to defeat Saddam’s armies in the field. The down side to this is that the sheer size of Iraq means that lines of communications are far longer than was the case in 1991 and in addition are running through enemy territory almost entirely… and there are far less troops to keep them secure.
If the allies have made any miscalculations, it is not with regard to the Iraqi army or Republican Guard: although both have resisted, they have been signally unable to prevent the overrunning of nearly half of Iraq and in every major battle so far against US and UK forces, their formations have been smashed and the survivors thrown back.
No, the unknown and more importantly, the unplanned for factor is the Fedayeen Saddam and sundry Ba’athist militias. These irregular forces, like all, irregular forces, have little real combat power but are able to disrupt logistics, cause irritation out of all proportion to their numbers and equipment, and most importantly for Saddam’s cause, maintain Ba’athist authority and political presence in areas nominally under the control of the allies. I lost track of how many times the allies reported that “The US Marines have taken Umm Qasr” day after day. What, again?
In reality it was only in the last two days that the Fedayeen and Ba’athist infrastructure in Umm Qasr had been sufficiently crushed by Royal Marines doing painstaking house to house clearances that Iraqi civilians felt safe enough to openly apply for jobs with the allied forces in the port city.
Similarly, the roads north to the bulk of the US forces are being called ‘ambush ally’ by the rear echelon troops tasked with the essential logistic task of keeping the heavy divisions rolling and shooting around Karabala and Nasiriyah.
And so if the tank, artillery and AFV heavy Iraqi units around Baghdad are not really what is causing the allies difficulties, then the fact irregular forces are able to attack overstretched supply lines is the thing that should be worrying us, give the lack of absolute numbers of infantry the attacking allied armies.
Well, the forces that would have moved into Northern Iraq are about to arrive in Southern Iraq. If my guestimates are correct, their ships should be reaching the appropriate Gulf ports any time now.
In Northern Iraq, they would have faced much the same problems as their colleagues in the south… but deployed in the south, they will increase the feet-on-the-ground per square mile considerably, which can only be very bad news indeed for the Fedayeen.
Perhaps this cloud has a silver lining.
During my search for breaking news for fast & furious warblogging on the Command Post, I came across this precious announcement:
The fledgling Euro-army launched its first military operation yesterday, picking the Balkan state of Macedonia as a trial run for future missions in Bosnia, Africa and the Caucasus.
A force of 320 soldiers wearing “Eufor” badges with the European Union’s blue and gold stars on their right shoulders took over peacekeeping duties at a ceremony in Skopje, replacing Nato troops who have already done the hard work of pacifying Macedonia over the past two years.
EU officials cite the mission as proof that joint defence plans agreed by France and Britain in 1998, and further honed by the EU a year later, remain on track despite the bitter differences over Iraq. While volleys of insults go back and forth across the Channel, British and French officials are meeting twice a week to lay the groundwork for a joint aircraft carrier battle group designed to project EU power around the world.
“You might not believe it, but Franco-British defence is going great guns”, said a senior diplomat. The general assumption in Brussels is that Tony Blair will commit Britain deeper to EU defence once the Iraq conflict is over.
Somebody please tell me that this is a joke…
Also posted on the Command Post
Ten days onto the offensive, it is clear that the Wehrmacht is exactly where the French want them, as evidenced by their pause to refuel their tanks and rearm with more ammunition.
We are told by various reporters that the war is bogging down. that casualties are ‘heavy’, that Iraqi resistance is ‘stiff’. We hear that thing are going badly and the allied military leaders have miscalculated.
Yet although the allied forces have taken loses, for sure, and each of those is a tragedy, the cold facts are that in military and historical terms, UK and US casualties have been insignificant, trivial in fact.
The allies have overrun a huge chunk of Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary militia, smashing the Ba’athist Socialist infrastructure of repression and hammering targets of military importance at will. The fact that not everything has gone the way UK and US planners expected will not be an earth shattering surprise to them as there is a well known military axiom that they will all be very familar with: “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.
It seems that any war which does not result in single figure losses and which is not over in time to not interfere with the screening of the Oscars is going to be deemed a ‘catastrophe’ by a media which knows nothing about either military affairs or history. The British took 58,000 casualties (one third of them killed) on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. That is what ‘heavy casualties’ means.
British forces are continuing their aggressive incursions into Basra, capturing some senior Iraqi Army Officers and killing a Republican Guard colonel in the process.
My guess is that the object of this is keeping the Iraqi forces off-balance and probably trying to demonstrate to the population of Basra that Ba’athist control is decaying daily… hence the day before yesterday’s foray into the city by British Challenger Tanks for the decidedly non-military objective of blowing up a statue of Saddam Hussain in a public square with the tank’s 120mm gun!
There has been some speculation about why the Australian military contribution to the war in Iraq has not received anything like the coverage that the American (obviously) and British forces have.
Well the reasons are twofold: firstly, the size of the force is a great deal smaller as it is made up of the elite Australian Special Air Service (which is operating in conjunction with their British SAS and American Delta Force & SEAL counterparts)… and secondly the fact they are special forces means operational security is paramount. The Aussies are famous in Special Forces circles for their ability to survive without resupply for long periods of time, something very useful when operating behind enemy lines. Just how they do this is a closely guarded secret.
However there is another more… puzzling… aspect to the lack of news, considering the Australians are the only group to invite the Al-Jazeera TV channel to embed journalists with them. A recently broadcast signal from a Australian SAS unit ‘somewhere in Iraq’ made mention that they had run out of embedded journalists and could they send a couple more out, preferably less stringy ones this time. It is unclear what the significance of that last remark was.
John Keegan asks whether trying to avoid civilian casualties may cause more deaths:
How much more difficult are the allies making this war for themselves by their determination to spare the Iraqi civilian population as much suffering as is humanly possible? That is certainly a condition of the strategy being pursued.
…is the effort to minimise civilian mortality counter-productive? Do slow and careful operational procedures actually increase the number of civilian deaths and the amount of suffering, when a less precautionary and more peremptory approach might achieve the same, or even a better effect, by hastening the end?
A good analysis of the classic military dilemma. Also, an important reminder that it is Saddam’s ba’athists who are using civilians as a proxy:
Saddam and his apparatchiks have absolutely no compunction about employing violence to keep themselves in power. They will shoot anyone who looks like changing sides or trying to escape from the regime’s control. They benefit from the indisputably powerful effect of displaying force. They equally benefit from the reluctance of the allies to display any more force than they believe to be necessary.
There is some remarkable information in a larger article about Basra, relating to how Royal Marine infantry and 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards with light reconnaissance vehicles successfully took on Iraqi battle tanks yesterday.
Whilst the Soviet era T-55 is an older tank, facing such heavy armour and 100mm guns in an agile vehicle armed with a 30mm RARDEN cannon and designed only to protect the crew against small arms fire and fragmentation does not leave a whole lot of room for error.
Last Friday, the Mises Institute published a special edition of their daily article containing nothing else but quotes by von Mises on the subject of war.
The quotes are hard to disagree with, apart from their mistaken application to the current situation. No distinction is made between using war as a means of conquest, expanding one’s power and using war as a defensive measure, protecting one’s security, freedom etc. For those who believe the US and the UK are engaged in the former, I shall leave them to their struggle against the neo-imperialists…
For the rest, I retaliate with a small collection of quotes that make such a distinction:
We make war that we may live in peace.
– Aristotle
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
– John Adams
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
– John Stuart Mill
That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.
– G.K. Chesterton
I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called “the sacred right of insurrection.” Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death.
– G.K. Chesterton
OK, this is not going to win the war, but it will have to do while we are waiting for our logins for The Command Post warblog!
For years now the British soldier-in-the-field has been bitching about the crappy Light Support Weapon version of the bug-ridden SA-80 rifle that they have been saddled with.
So I was delighted to see picture after picture of British Army and Royal Marines using the excellent Fabrique National Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon. British soldiers deserve proper weapons and at last they seem to be getting them.
Soldier of the 1st bn Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in action in Iraq, using the FN Minimi SAW
This is not altogether surprising but, nonetheless, it is a potentially serious complication:
A Turkish military source told Reuters about 1,500 commandos crossed Turkey’s southern border at three points late on Friday, aiming to secure access for subsequent, larger deployments.
“Turkish units have begun crossing into northern Iraq to take security measures at various points,” the official said.
The United States has told Turkey it would not welcome a unilateral incursion into northern Iraq, where local Kurds are suspicious of Turkish motives and have said such a move could lead to conflict.
Fighting between Kurds and Turks in the North of Iraq? Not impossible by any means.
16:30 GMT: If my time-of-flight guestimate is correct, the B-52s which took off earlier from RAF Fairford in Britain will be over Iraq in the next hour.
Stand by for the promised ‘shock and awe’.
More information from the just finished Ministry of Defence briefing suggests the fighting in Umm Qasr was considerably harder that expected as the last section of the town containing some Iraqi die hards has only recently fallen.
Reports are also coming in that suggest forward elements of 7 (UK) Armoured Brigade and US mechanized forces have reached the outskirts of the very important city of Basra, scene of bitter fighting in the Iran-Iraq War and viewed by many Iraqis as their ‘Verdun’. It may prove to be very psychologically important if Basra can be taken quickly by the Allies, but I expect they will first encircle and isolate the city from the north rather than try a risky coup de main today.
Update: 17:20 GMT: …or then again, maybe they are indeed going for a daring coup-de-main against Basra! Reports on SkyNews just in are saying unconfirmed reports indicate the allies (unspecified which units) have already seized part of downtown Basra! Blimey!
Eight Royal Marines and four Americans were killed in a non-combat related helicopter crash last night.
In an interesting Order of Battle snippet, it is also now clear that 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines) is fighting with a battalion of US Marines under the control of its HQ. As RM and USMC often train together and have famously cordial relations, I suppose this is not all that surprising.
Also, it is being reported that 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines) have secured the strategic Al Faw Oil Facility. I assume the success of this operation on the Al Faw peninsula will lead to a move towards Basra next, which Sky News reported has come under air attack this morning.
Astonishing pictures of some significant fighting in the town of Safwan were coming out live on television this morning (UK time), showing that some elements of the Iraqi army were putting up a fight against USMC forces. A group of USMC vehicles could be seen pouring machinegun and grenade launcher fire into Iraqi positions, and gunship helicopters were seen firing cannon and rocket fire to suppress outgoing Iraqi gunfire.
It now seems that taking the border town of Umm Qasr, reported to have fallen to the allies last night, required more fighting that was initially claimed by US news reports. USMC mechanized infantry was apparently pinned down by Iraqi fire for two hours, requiring Royal Marine artillery support before the advance could resume.
On the left flank of the allied move into Iraq, forward elements of the US 3rd Infantry Division are reported to be as much as 90 miles in from the Kuwaiti border and although as of now (08:40 GMT) the US division is reported to be stationary whilst it refuels, there does not seem to have been any serious opposition yet to what is probably the main American advance.
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