Saturday, March 01, 2008
Kinetic energy
A major assumption of previous U.S. commanders in Iraq had been that "kinetic" operations--the favored neologism for "combat"--were counter-productive, producing more resentment and more insurgents. They emphasized the need to win hearts and minds and to avoid alienating the population. While major combat operations generate resentment among the population, and may encourage indigenous forces to become dependent on outside assistance, Petraeus and Odierno recognized that such problems pale in comparison with allowing the enemy to control key terrain and attack targets at will. Duhhh... I mean, do you need to be a military genius to understand that, in war, an Army needs to conduct combat operations?
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23 comments:
Not so fast, AI. Yeah, you have t go and get important assets from the enemy, but as Petraeus points out, you are not going to kill your way out of an insurgency.
Yes, he's very smart. And, for the record, our genius Rumsfeld was dead wrong and nearly lost us this war and gave the whole country to the Obamas of the world.
The thing about battles creating insurgents is true. The point is not to avoid battle, but to get local proxies to fight them if possible. It's impossible if they hate you.
I am glad Pepe is back because for all his vicious characterizations, he had some points to make.
I also am a little sick of people pissing on the NYT now, too. It was they that wrote a huge glowing bio on Petraeus while we were still in the Bremer-Sanchez quagmire.
A little respect for the guy that's right in some sense from those of us that were wrong in every sense.
JJ: I'm still not quite sure what point you are trying to make. But this is an important post-mortem -- we should try and get to a more-or-less common agreement on what went right, and what went wrong, so as to learn how to do it better next time. I for one, remain firmly in the Sherman-Patton tradition -- no pussy-farting Westmoreland types for me.
And, by the way, since you brought it up: did you know where Sanchez went to college? Hmmm... Looks like he took Hughes-Hallett type of Calculus there, instead of the real McCoy. Powwwww!! Where's my magnum of VCP?:
"A little respect for the guy that's right in some sense from those of us that were wrong in every sense."
Who is this "guy", and who is "us"?
I was way too generous. The wrong ones were the daisy cutter crowd and the Fallujah cheerers. That shit don't win.
I know exactly where Sanchez is from. He grew up 13 miles from me. How far did you grow up from Petraeus, AI?
Without the willingness to do battle to eliminate enemy control of a region, you have no chance of engaging the locals and forming alliances with them.No movement into Fallujah, then no way AQIraq loses control of Fallujah.
Petraeus is clearly a believer in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. You form alliances as needed and useful, and you fight hard to back these up and achieve the ground conditions for the ally's assurance he has not entered into a suicide pact. The Surge, for example, bucko, would have been pure shit if it had been simply about trying to forge alliances on the Vietnam "winning hearts and minds" level.
So, again, JJ, who is this "guy" and who is "us"?
You and Tecumseh.
Well, strictly speaking shouldn't that be "you" [since you are neither I nor Tecumseh]?
Also, how exactly does:
"While major combat operations generate resentment among the population, and may encourage indigenous forces to become dependent on outside assistance, Petraeus and Odierno recognized that such problems pale in comparison with allowing the enemy to control key terrain and attack targets at will."
fit with your assertion that Petraeus has shown that actions such as clearing AQI out of Fallujah were "wrong in every sense"??
Are the waters of El Rio Grande natural ouzifiers?
The Thirteen Miles of JJ Prufrock
If you miss the place that I'm in
You will know that I am Done
You can hear the Wind so blow
For thirteen miles
Thirteen miles, Thirteen miles
Thirteen miles, Thirteen miles
You can hear the Wind so blow
For thirteen miles
Petraeus, I’m one, Petraeus, I’m two
Petraeus, I’m three, Petraeus, I’m four
Petraeus, I’m thirteen miles from your home
Away from home, you are Gone
Buried at home, I am Done
Petraeus, I’m thirteen bloody miles
From your home
Not a shirt on my back
Not a penny to my name
Petraeus, I can’t be back home this a-way
This a-away, I can't Stay
This a-way, Desole'
Oh Petraeus, I can’t be home
This a-way
[to be sung to the tune of La Cucaracha, of course]
All he bad guys we killed in Fallujah came back to life just like all the guys we killed on the Ho Chih Minh trail, AA. The Douhet-Rumsfeld-Tecumseh crap has never worked against an insurgency.
Pepe was right to see that Rumsfeld was an idiot, and we didn't. That's te long and the short of it. You blamed Bush because he didn't go out and hate Islam enough (and so you were rooting for Kerry--whatever). AI, just wanted more flyboys and daisycutters.
Wonderful ways to lose and be bigger butchers than the headhackers.
As for Prufrock, you measuring out your idiocy in coffeespoons, AA?
I just absorbed this thread and it appears there's much more disagreement than necessary. A month or two ago The Atlantic reported on how the brute throat-slitting of AQI helped bring many former Iraqi counterinsurgents to side with the U.S. And I doubt any of us are in disagreement over whether it's better to first try to win hearts and minds than to immediately jump to MOAB carpet-bombing across all of Iraq (real precision like though, right?).
The U.S. military learned the lessons of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the Battle of Greasy Grass (aka, Little Big Horn), and the massacre at Ft. Phil Kearny (although the troops in this latter conflict were incredibly under-staffed and -equipped). From Little Big Horn we learned not to send overzealous Lt. Cols to the front lines. An All-Patton-Sherman-Team is fun to think about in the atavistic sense, but it isn't in accord with the more balanced and civilized Ike-Patton-Marshal Team. Ike moderated between allies; Patton was the spear-point; Marshal was for reconstruction and clean-up. From Bury My Heart we learned (or thought we learned) not to go Blackwater on the locals.
The U.S. Military is definitely a fighting force, but they are a lot more intelligent than just to continuously slam into a country with Brute Force, as much as Pepe likes us to think it does.
How do I know this? Follow Cpt. Cook's blog, and keep in touch with the various company newsletters coming out of Iraq.
I was never for the daisycutter, mft, but I had my doubts as to the 'let's be nice to them'-civilian security first thing. I thought it was impossible because it obviously would have been tried if there were anyone intelligent in charge. Alas, there was only Rumsfeld.
That's why Petraeus is in charge and I am not.
Uh, JJ, first, Pepe may have have called Rummy an "Idiot", but I don't think it had anything to do with his [Rummy's] reluctance for major ops like Fallujah. He was calling Ricains of all non Pepean stripes Idiots long before that.
Second, although I did not call Rummy an Idiot [I don't think he is an idiot at all. Just a stubborn old coot who was the wrong choice for micromanager of the post-invasion period]. I was very early in disagreeing with farcical nature of the Pseudo-occupation. If you recall, I was gonna vote for Kerry-McCain if that had materialized, and that because the promise was that McCain would manage the war, and I had confidence he would bring the war to the enemy in the way the Bush WH was obviously reluctant to do [yes, in the end the buck stopped on Georgie's TexMex desk, not Rummy's].
Third, the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail, without any attempt to occupy that land and deny it's use to the enemy, was precisely the sort of "Vietnam" shit which seeped into our Iraq policy and would see us carry out the occasional raid under Rummy without any attempt to keep the land and deny it to AQI et al.
Which is why, as you don't seem to recall, I and AI were so pissed off at that first aborted move into Fallujah, and the long wait before more Petraeuestic folk got the cojones to do it right and blast AQI out of there [time wasted, and many lives lost in the wait].
So Petraeus, once he is put in charge, carries out the hardnosed policy which I, and AI in a different fashion, had been calling out for since 2003--and you posit that what Petraeus has done somehow shows us to be so wrong?
Speak for yourself, bucko.
As for Pepe, he was only for Ricain defeat in Iraq, and prognosticating it's coming to the Internationale as Red Rockets flared over Versailles. There was not a single point where our fave French Aristo called for our success, never mind espousing a strategy for that success.
Now ponder that gulf of thirteen miles that separates you from the birthplace of General Petraeus, JJ, and savor the fizzy goodness of El Rio Grande.
Oh, yes, I did point out that Iraq was just a battleground, if very important one, in the war against Islam Militant. Not a war sui generis...so? In any case, if that offends your sensibilities, JJ, go ahead and sic the Canadian Human Rights Commission on me. There be a gaggle of geezers who also would see shit turned into gold in them thar Pepean molehills.
In case JJ goes all a'flummox at the phrase "hardnosed", note that it does not mean "indiscriminate whacking", "carpetbombing", "the only good Iraqui is the dead Iraqui", or any other odd jumble of misinterpretation JJ's noggin may have joyfully leapt at.
It means precisely what was written in the article posted here.
One can be hardnosed, and do it wrong, and one can be hardnosed and do it right. What it means to do "it right" depends on the nature of the enemy, the nature of the place of combat, the nature of the relation between population and the enemy, etc... So aerial attack was fine as a primary weapon in driving Saddam out of Baghdad, it was not fine as a primary weapon in the occupation. Petraeus' currently "Surge to Alliance" policy [as MFT points out, made more fruitful by an accumulated disgust among many Iraquis over the conduct of AQI] seems an intelligently and carefully thought out, yet definitely hardnosed, approach to making a success out of the occupation [that is, laying out the material ground for a possible--even if definitely not certain-- future Iraq which is a force within Islam against the Militant....we can only hope]. It is absolutely not an embrace of "hearts and minds" as panacea. JJ, read the bloody thing and see for yourself.
Guys, I wish I could say more, but I have a bit of trouble now with my shoulder. There is stuff here for an epic novel. AA's ballad is a good start towards that. We need a title for the epic. Gilgamesh, perhaps?
I think we would be accused of plagiarism if we used "Gilgamesh".
The trick is to plagiarize from all sources, like a good Harvard Prof or NYT journalist [eh, JJ?], and come out with something like this.
"Ulysses' War and Gilgamesh's Rainbow in the Time of the Choleric"
Point is that to you two (and apparently still to John F Kerry-supporter AA) being hard-nosed was blasting the shit out of people instead of using the military to protect them from those other bastards that would blast them too.
You likely didn't plagiarize what you have written here, AA. Most people other than yourself try to be comprehensible when they write.
Note, just in case anyone missed it, my "ballad" of The Thirteen Miles of JJ Prufrock was/is a shameless plagiarizing and mutilation of the song "500 Miles' by The Journeymen. A melodious ditty that sounds nothing like La Cucaracha and...by the way, in case any advogados del Journeymen are reading this... does proud justice to the knowledge among all us common folk that The Journeymen were the Acme of Yankee Folk Music, the Apex of Balladeering, and in general just fine folk who never ever would think of suing those who plagiarize their ditties.
JJ said: "You likely didn't plagiarize what you have written here, AA. Most people other than yourself try to be comprehensible when they write."
Oh, it's comprehensible. You've just got to be able to comprehend.
As example number one, this post by one JJ which purports to be in response to what I wrote.
"Point is that to you two (and apparently still to John F Kerry-supporter AA) being hard-nosed was blasting the shit out of people instead of using the military to protect them from those other bastards that would blast them too."
Nuff said.
Need a translation into Western Castillian?
Point is that to you two (and apparently still to John F Kerry-supporter AA) being hard-nosed was blasting the shit out of people instead of using the military to protect them from those other bastards that would blast them too.
Perhaps a bit more historical context. I recall watching the initial "Shock and Awe" first strike, and even today the History Channel screws it up, interpreting it as one of the most devestating precision missile strikes ever (or some other crap like that). From what the Pentagon (or whoever leaked it) said from the get-go, Shock and Awe was supposed to bring the Ba'ath Party to its knees. From what I watched on CNN (I remember catching about an hour of it in the Memorial Union of the University of North Dakota, G.F.), it was anything but spectacular. It seemed as though true Shock and Awe would be something more along the lines of about 400 tomahawk cruise missiles hitting their targets withing a five minute time frame. Anyhow, we needed a full-on smash-the-enemy-army-face from the start. It sort of happened. Sort of. But sort of doesn't work in modern combat (or traditional, or Ancient). That's likely the area AI and AA wanted improved. Adjustments have been made, however, and we're reading about this in stories from The Atlantic to even the NYT's excellent report about the up-armored transports. I also recall Pepe lobbing some pretty personal insults rather close to home (from personal experience, those tend to sting a lot more when brothers are over there in the shit). But Pepe and I, I think, came to terms with one another.
So we have an evolution of this war that's necessary to take into account if to understand it good and proper: how the Pentagon's acted and reacted; how AQI and counter-insurgents have reacted and acted; and how the Iraqis are, from what I understand, starting to take ruling their own country seriously.
My problem with AA and AI was later when it seemed they wanted more blasting when the enemy were still diffuse IED-planters and kidnappers. Seemed impossible to me to bomb that damned much as to turn the whole hostile country around without killing everyone in it. If that was the option, then it's pretty hard to say we were making the world safe for democracy and a lot easier to say we're killing muslims for the sheer joy of it.
Now a measly 30,000 troops turns this thing around. Why" Uh, tactics.
The tactical change is not more damned bombs either, but co-opting locals.
Not Tecumseh and not Douhet. Duh.
Pepe's views on many occasions were offensive and mean-spirited, but looking at what we were doing, not saying, it sure looked to a disinterested observer that in fact we were over there to kill as many as we could and leave the rest to the extremists to kill.
WFB himself called this one over having lost faith. Well, W didn't and neither did Petraeus and now we have a chance over there with Rumsfeld out of a job and probably subbing for Rush somewhere.
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