Armchair Generals

There’s a lot of criticism that Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration blew execution of the war; the latest with the generals attacking Rummy. In order to understand or intelligently discuss if or if not this is the case, you must have a basic understanding or military history as well as military politics; something most of the Press, and those that are attacking Bush and Rumsfeld obviously do not have.

There was a traditional “American way of war”, a phrase popularized by the military historian Russell Weigley in his 1973 book, but the actual concept and way we fought a war is much older. In the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, we fought by using overwhelming numbers, and a strategy of grinding the enemy down through attrition; using tactics and strategies far older than our country. It was a brutal and expensive way of fighting a war. It worked, but in all these conflicts, U.S. armies suffered and inflicted massive casualties. Look at American death totals of CW=365,000, WWI= 116,000, WWII=405,000, Korea=36,000, Vietnam=58,000. Now compare that to the new (Rumsfeld) way we fought war in Iraq, and the death total of 161 American deaths, and according to the greatest exaggerations of the Saddam regime, we killed no more than 1,100 civilians (collateral damage); a miniscule number compared to prior wars.

The military has a long and proud history of sticking with tradition over sanity. For example in WWI and WWII, it took a long time to realize the effectiveness of airpower, the concepts of using combined forces and rapid advancement without digging in (blitzkrieg), failure to adapt to armor well, to use new technologies effectively (like Radar and the Pearl Harbor attack), the change-over from Battleships to Aircraft carriers as capital ships, and so on. The military in general, and our military especially, has a history of not always adapting to new methods of fighting wars and changes in military doctrines; and that costing many more lives than necessary.

The good news is occasionally we get it right. We get some autocratic prick, who knows better than the military establishment, and proves it. Driving this change through the military is hated, and revolutionary. Whether it was allowing the Army and Marines to use helicopters, M.A.S.H. units in Korea, “civilian” directed projects like the Manhattan project, or force restructuring and new fighting methods like Rumsfeld did, these revolutions in warfare often save thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives. And that’s what’s really going on about Iraq. Old school generals versus new school doctrines (advocated and used by Rummy).

Traditionally, war colleges have taught that to be sure of success, an attacking force must have a 3 to 1 advantage — a ratio that goes up to 6 to 1 in difficult terrain such as urban areas. Iraq had roughly 500,000 troops (450,000 troops). This meant that according the military traditionalists, for us to be able to win a war against Iraq, we’d need a force of 1.5 – 3 Million troops. Rumsfeld said, “No”. This wasn’t 1911, and war had changed — we were going to use new Doctrines that many of the new military advocated, and many of the old schoolers hated! The old-schoolers were outraged, and already pissed because the Army had been gutted over the prior decade; going from 18 active divisions to 10. The old Army men, were justifying their existence and traditions, and Rummy was contradicting them. Far from having a 3 to 1 advantage in Iraq, coalition ground forces (in country) was about 100,000 troops (200,000 total, but many were in reserve in Kuwait or elsewhere), and faced a 3 to 1 or even 5 to 1 disadvantage. The old generals said, “No way” it was going to be a bloodbath and was not the way wars were fought.

Of course it was the most impressive results ever. The Germans managed to conquer France, (through the Netherlands, and Belgium) in just 44 days, at a cost of “only” 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison. This was against a numerically superior force, and often in the worst kind of terrain (urban conflict).

This spectacular success was not achieved easily, it required overcoming the traditional mentality of some active and retired officers who sniped relentlessly at Rumsfeld during the lead up to the war, and during the war, right up until the giant statue of Saddam fell in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. Winning the war in Iraq first required rooting out the old American way of war from its Washington redoubts. But they did, and proved their way was far better than the old way. Rumsfeld and Bush was totally vindicated. This war changed the way all future wars will be fought by the U.S.

In Iraq, instead of using overwhelming numbers, we used a new doctrine of special operations of much smaller forces to take out key objectives, as well smaller troop movements which can move quicker and require fewer supplies. We used technology, communication and rapid adaptation to be everywhere at once, and to know exactly what the enemy was doing (while disrupting their ability to know about what we were doing). Force multipliers like combined forces, rapid airpower support, near-instant decision making, smart weapons, and layered communication and observation tools, as well as superior training, all meant a new way of fighting a war, that was astoundingly effective, and in complete contradiction with what the old-schoolers thought. This was exactly what many generals, the “new schoolers”, had been saying about war for decades. But which made the old-school generals even more pissed at Rummy. It meant that we needed fewer troops, and fewer generals, to fight future wars.

Also, note that we had planned on using more troops. We’d had the 4th Army ready to go in, sitting in the Mediterranean and planning on going through Turkey, and pincer the Iraqi military, which would have made the victory even quicker and more decisive, and have made it much harder for their army to flee. But our “Allies” in France, actively threatened Turkey to block their EU membership application, so they wouldn’t let us use our bases there, or ferry through their country. When you look at American lives lost because of the war or insurgency, certainly both Turkey and France deserve to pay for a few of those burials. And when you talk about we needed more forces in country, France and Turkey deserve far more blame than Rumsfeld and Bush. But Tommy Franks felt they were unneeded, and proved it. But remember, it was just Bush against common sense; it was Rumsfeld and new schoolers in the military, versus old-schoolers, and bitter old men that had been driven our or retired, playing armchair military strategists and second guessing the most effective campaign ever fought, in the history of mankind.

Now long after the war objectives were completed, the generals changed the story; claiming that what they’d meant was not that we’d needed more troops not to win the war (which is what they had been saying), but they revised it to say that we needed more troops to “secure the peace” (population). This revisionist crap is easy to prove wrong by reviewing their quotes — and more than that, we can just look at historical troop requirements.

Traditionally, based on past wars, it required between 1 to 4 troops per thousand people to secure a population. Even at the highest number of 4/1000, it means we would have needed 120,000 troops max, and gosh, we had numbers far surpassing that (not counting the Iraqi’s). So besides the bullshit of revisionism, we’d have no idea where they would have gotten their numbers from to make their suggestion in the first place.

Now if we had waited to get the numbers up, and been far more cautious, we would have given the enemy more time to prepare, and it would have cost far more to us. We would have had to build-up those troops, supply those troops, and it would have meant more targets for the enemy, more friendly fire incidents, more enemy kills (of us), and much more cost. So in the end, it would have decreased the successful execution of the war, and increased the political pressure against it because of those costs. That’s fine with some, just not those who wanted victory.

It also would have also told everyone in the future that America will only attack if we can first field a force far larger than them. So our ability to apply diplomatic pressure (though military force) would have been diminished. Iran or others would just field large numbers of untrained troops as fodder, and known that the U.S. could never field an army big enough that we’d ever attack. The way we did it, we proved that they need to be scared, because we could annihilate armies 5 times our size, in just a few weeks. And that was without using a big “softening up” phase, like we did in the first Iraq war — which would have increased the efficacy of our military. They don’ t know how much larger a force we’ll attack, and they have to negotiate more honestly out of fear — that’s called diplomatic influence.

If we had come in with the 3 Million troops, it would have felt like a complete invasion/occupation. There is a strong likelihood that it wouldn’t have secured the peace, but enraged the populous even more and turned more against us. For the most part, the population has realized that we toppled Saddam, but didn’t bring in the numbers to make them a puppet state. Had we brought in the numbers to do the latter, we might not only have turned the population of Iraq against us, but also much more of the Muslim middle east. Despite the problems with order we have, they know it is up to them to fix their country, and not us. This puts a burden and responsibility on them to support us, that they would not have if we had 5, 10 or 20 times the troop levels. So if you think there are problems now, imagine if we’d been making bases everywhere in their country, and they saw hated Americans on every street corner. And the policing difficulties against our own troops, and so on. It would have likely made most problems we’re having over there, even worse.

Another complaint is that we disbanded the Iraqi military and police force. However, they didn’t really have a military or police force as we know it. What they had was bands of thugs and who spied for Saddam and who brutalized the public. We had to scrap the whole mess, and start over clean. Even to this day, there’s a problem with those types, who are allowed in the new MIlitary and Police, but even after total retraining, they are still acting as death squads and corrupt brutes of their past. Imagine how much worse it would be if we’d left their old infrastructure and hierarchy in place! They certainly wouldn’t have had the chance of democracy that they have had.

Conclusion

So those claiming Bush screwed up because we didn’t have more troops, are not only ignoring the results, but also the consequences of their alternative. Most just don’t get the basics. Some do — but you need to understand why some of those generals are picking at Rumsfeld, and it isn’t pure or unbiased professional opinion, it is about greed, self-interests, and political motivations. Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a small percentage that do get the basics, and still sincerely think it was worth the political risks, cost in lives, money, and so on. But the gross majority complaining are doing so from either a position of complete ignorance, complete malice (those who wanted us to do it because it increases the chances of failure), or from a position of complete dishonesty (they know better, but advocate the position because it makes the administration look bad).

Of course, I’m sure that many mistakes were made. Especially at the tactical level. Not defining what constituted “coerced interrogation” certainly lead to over enthusiasm and outright abuse (Abu Ghraib). Not securing the borders quicker, not securing the munitions dumps helped the insurgency, and so on. Which all lead to more lives lost than necessary. Even some of those had some excuses; like we had to try to find the WMD’s for political reasons as well as tactical/strategic ones, and so on. And still, in the end and grand scheme of things, this was one of the best executed wars in human history. But I’m not going to say there were no SNAFU’s. However, in the face of a lot of armchair and wannabe’s criticizing everything Bush or Rumsfeld did, I’m going to try to remind the world of at least a few things that went right, or at least could have gone far worse, and what their alternatives could have really meant.
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http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030701faessay15404-p10/max-boot/the-new-american-way-of-war.html