This is the fatal triangle of modern military failure: the attempt to exploit a short term opening leads to the selection of shock tactics. This works if the target is, in fact, of either limited value, or its value is in fragile infrastructure: capital equipment and cities. If its value is in resources, however, the very indestructability of the real value - oil in Iraq, minerals in the Congo - leads to an every escalating cycle.
Shock tactics do not break the opponents will to resist, which, in turn, leads to attrition strategies on the misguided belief that it is a few people who "don't get it". This is costly, and increases the need for a territorial pay off. It is a logic similar, though not the same, as the one that drives the failed "war on drugs".
The Fallujah operation was a classic "chomp and stomp" - a mission type going back to the time when ships could bombard coastal ports and then land marine contingents. However, in the air and artillery age, it went from being a naval coup, to being a operational style. The "revolution in military affairs" which has yielded the "air land battle", was an attempt to learn from the mistakes of the Vietnam era chomp and stomp operations, by giving the military the tools to execute and prevail in this form of using distant firepower to break the target area's defensibility, and then using overwhelming armor to over run it.
The strange result we see in Fallujah is that the US military is now rapidly becoming a mirror of the late Soviet "Ground Forces", the successor to the "Red Army": a static defending army which uses a massive rush and then an attempt to dig in later.
The lessons from the Iran-Iraq war are instructive here: it was, in a sense, the last "modern" war, fought between massive formation attrition armies seeking to inflict sufficient punishment at scale to break the other side's will to resist.
It rapidly asserted the "fatal triangle": the need for fast results made the exploitation of a seemingly limited objective irresistable. The frustration of these fast results lead to the desire to "punish" the other side into accepting the short term situation with attrition, which lead to greater need for a payoff, which lead to more territorial ambition and the search for the next "quick fix" of shock attack.
The Iraqi army at the beginning of the war was a Soviet doctrine, largely soviet equipped, force. On September 4th, according to Iraqi and Iranian defense statements, Iraq began artillery barrages to open lines for the tank invasion, and air strikes against Iranian airports which could be used as forward bases. They also destroyed 7 F-4's on the ground. Iran, then virtually a global pariah for holding hostages in the US embassy, did not appeal for outside intervention, but, instead, relied upon the military equipment that the Shah of Iran, the deposed monarch, had purchased from the US and the West, and a military which, if not particularly friendly to the revolutionary government, was certainly not interested in being overrun by Saddam's Baathist state.
Early on September 22nd 1980, MiG-21 and a few MiG-25 "Foxbat" jets were launched in attacks coordinated with the first ground offensive of the war - a massive tank push ino the oil rich Khûzestân province - over running most of it within the first month. But then, rather than striking for a decisive blow, which his generals thought might well energize the Iranian people, the Iraqi army dug in and began to try and hold what they had taken.
The paradigm - of a limited war by unlimited means - is a stragne hybrid. The war aim itself, like the war aim of the Franco-Prussian war, and of the original German plan for what became "The Great War", was to sieze a particular area and rebalance the geo-political position between two nations. In a sense, Saddam's war aim was very similat to Bismarck's invasion of France or wars against Denmark or Austria - to secure the position of the government by siezing territory and humiliating the armed forces of the other side.
The operational paradigm was to use attack jets against fixed targets, and then overrun with tank columns screened by infantry. However, instead of, as total war tactical doctrine would dictate, following each period of entrenchment with a new operational strike deeper into enemy territory, the lines hardened.
The Iraqi army laid siege to Abadan, and expected that when this city fell, they would be able to dictate peace and secure a vast area of profit for themselves. It was failed military strategy, and dramatically underestimated the political will of the Iranian regime.
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In January of 1981 was against this hardened position that then Iranian President Bani-Sadr launched an illconceived attack with armoured columns against Susangerd. These columns bogged down in rainy-season mud, were encircled and destroyed as effective forces. It was an a failed chomp and stomp operation, and the results were a large number of lost tanks and an operational disaster for Iranian supply. However, the Iraqi army, also locked in the same paradigm, refused to follow up by seizing the launch points for the attack, and strangling the Iranian supply road in.
As a result, the next Iranian offensive - screening armor with religions "Pashdan" units - was able to reach, and then lift, the siege of Abadan. It was at this point that Tehran finally realized the military instrument which it had in its possession, and how to use it.
First, they realized that they had superiority in the air, which while not total, was at the level of being in the attrition advantage - they could kill more of the valuable MiG fighters that the Iraqis had from the Soviets - which were repaired and maintained by Soviet advisors - with cheaper, older F-5S interceptors. Their F-14's were able to win "stand off" duels with the MiG's, even with the MiG 25 Foxbats - based on the superiority of targeting, avionics, and ordinance. The superiority of American "Sidewinder" heat-seeking air to air missiles was particularly important. In gunfire duels the MiG-25's were more than capable of holding their own, but it seldom came to that.
Second, they realized that the tanks in their arsenal were capable of moving much farther and faster than the Soviet built Iraqi tanks, and they could encircle, envelope and destroy fixed Iraqi positions. This required that offensive operations be conducted before the rains and outside of the heat - creating a "spring-fall" offensive pattern which was first learned by Chinese generals some 1800 years ago - attack between the sun and the rain.
Third, they realized that they had the ability to sustain higher casualties than the otherside, and could force withdrawl of key units without having to actually over-run them. Merely inflicting sufficient punishment was enough.
These three realizations lead to a series of operational victories in the fall of 1981 which broke the Iraqi frontlines. Again the Iraqi's, locked into defending oil and other "strategic" points, could launch offensive operations, even though the rather haphazard planning of the operations by the Iranian staff left huge openings for exploitation.
But an offensive, from the point of view of territory, was pointless: Iraq held most of Iran worth holding. They did not launch an offensive, because they offensive they wanted to launch would not have been useful.
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It was in March of 1982 that the Iranians launched their most effectively planned - and militarily successful - operation. That mission, code named "Undeniable Victory", repeatedly encircled Iraqi armor and destroyed it leading to a disintegration of the forward Iraqi positions, and the destruction of three armored divisions. In May, at the end of the spring cycle Khorramshahr was retaken, and the Iranians had destroyed most of the offensive capability of the Iraqi army. Iraq withdrew from Iranian territory in June of 1982, and signalled a willingness to open peace negotiations.
Iran would fail to avail itself of this moment, and would launch its own punative offensives. The war would drag on for 6 years of failed attacks by both sides. Iraq gradually established military superiority, but its economy was pulverized. Iran, while it was losing the final engagements of the war, had the economic ability to sustain conflict. The UN would broker an armistice in 1988, a peace of exhuastion.
Iran's failure to exploit military victory was, again, a mismatch of strategy and objective. Where as Iraq failed to launch an offensive to follow up on the defeat of Bani-Sadr's premature attack in January of 1981 - the Iranians launched the wrong offensive.
Had they desired to topple Saddam - which was a difficult but possibly achievable goal, the road would have been to attack far inland, and the Shia heartland, equiping dissidents - many of whom fought with Iraq - to act as forward infantry to sow rebellion. With rebellions tying down Saddam's military forces, a deep inland thrust could have reached Nasiriya, and then rolled flanks moving south to Basra and North as far as Najaf.
Instead, they sought control over territory in the South, assuming that they could then strangle Saddam. The experience of UN sanctions in the 1990's shows how misguided this entire line of thinking is, but even without hindsight, they should have realized that while taking the port access would make life more difficult -that shipping oil out by road, or through the north to Turkey was feasible, and therefore the result would have merely forced Iraq to pump more oil, and further depress world oil prices.
Had Iran sued for peace, the economic cost of the war would have been contained, and oil prices might well have remained high for much longer. It was, to some extent, the need to pump that helped push the rapid fall in oil prices in 1986.
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When looking at the past, people look for clear analogs - where one side was in an exactly similar position to the present. This is hazardous, history, while promiscuous, is not a whore, and will not generally be compliant to our momentary whims. The lessons are often more tangled: the US, as a super-power, is in positions very similiar only to other monopower moments: the British Empire, the Hapsburg zenith, Louis XIV, China under its most powerful dynasties. But in terms of technological and miltary conditions - the parallels are all more recent and murky.
The lessons of the monopower moments suggest that over-reach is the disease of success: that at each moment of seeming unstoppable power, the monopower assumes that its superiority in armaments and economy will be sufficient to crush opposition and impose its will, extracting profit from doing so. The military parallels in the past, however, suggest that the very act of seeking occupation and domination is what is fatal: that the unwillingness to take casualties, the reduction to fixed positions, and the need to protect a civilian infrastructure sufficient to exploit resources nullifies the advantages of the modern military: mobility and manuever with their attendant ability to generate surprise; concentration of firepower from coordination of air and ground elements; and the combination of these which allows the attack to cause opposition to simply disintegrate.
In three reverses of initiative, the power with that initiative in the Iran-Iraq War made exactly the same mistake: seeking to minimize risk by "holding territory", it gave up the initiative for territory, and thus gave the otherside the crucial initiative and the ability to inflict disabling damage. Giving up the offensive, in itself, leads to losing the capability to maintain the offensive.
In the occupation setting of Iraq currently, the result of this lesson is that the very act of "taking" is, in itself, fatal. It gives the opposing side the ability to select some other location for an uprising. While the loss of manpower and equipment is painful, the vastly liquid world arms trade can resupply almost everything that was lost.
The US, by hardening its positions, is in a spiral of having fewer and fewer troops to engage in offensive operations with, while creating more and more locations for guerilla counter-attack. More over, with each operation, the M1-A1 tank, the main battle tank and most effective armor piece in the US arsenal, has its "security through obscurity" advantage degraded. As weak points become better known, they become more and more easily exploited. Since the US arsenal is not designed for urban combat, these vulnerabilities are multiplied in the environment we are using them in.
The result is that each cycle through becomes increasingly painful: the US lost more tanks to enemy fire in this assault on Fallujah than it lost last spring.
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Clearly the objective of the Fallujah attack was to deny the rebels their static base from which to launch attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad, it was a defensive, not offensive, logic that impelled the move at this time. It was just as clearly intended to bring a false peace to allow elections in January to seem more "normal". Installing an "elected" figurehead is now part of the road map that is driving US military strategy - "whack a mole".
But rather than making an example out of Fallujah, Fallujah is now an example: it is now an example of how a relatively small band of snipers and lightly armed infantry partisans can slash and bleed a much larger force. The US went in with 6,500 crack troops, backed by 3,500 Iterim government army forces. It was arrayed against some 2,000 bitter enders in Fallujah. That is, 5 to 1, with massive air and firepower superiority. The reports of evacs to Germany - a virtual equivalent of "casualty", plus reported fatalities, show that the Iraqi rebellion was able to score 1 casualty inflicted for every 3 taken. For an occupying power with only a few thousand "teeth" for a nation the size of Iraq, this is not a sustainable ratio. At this rate, the US will have tapped every store of crack offensive military capability within 3 years.
And this is the other lesson of the Iran-Iraq war. The war saw 2.7 million casualties, including 1 million dead. It saw 500,000 military fatalities - at minimum. The Iraq of the present has seen 100,000 civilian dead. The Iraqi people are capable of sustaining high fatalities to their body politic, and continuing to function - as was the United States during the Civil War.
The expectation that killing a few thousand Iraqi rebels will serve as a deterent is to miss the point: Iraq's pool of recruits for the rebellion is, by the admission of the US military, makes between 14-46, these being the males declared "combat age" by our security cordon. The US pool is only males between 18-26, and our tolerance for fatalities is far lower.
In short, we are engaged in a war of attrition against an enemy who can take far higher casualties than we can, who has greater political legitimacy.
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The key failure is this: marrying shock attack operational tactics, to an attrition grand strategy for the purpose of holding territory.
In 1981, Iraq failed to see an opening to knock Iran out of the war. In 1982, Iran failed to see how to accomplish a geo-political objective, and launched the wrong attack. In the following years, each side would make strikes designed at grabbing a foothold in the otherside, and the result was a meat grinder war.
In each case the attempt was made to marry shock tactics to attrition grand strategy, in pursuit of territory. In each case, the assumption was that the failure to hold territory was a failure to correctly implement the shock tactics or attrition strategy correctly.
In the current war the United States has tested the thesis that the territorial failure is a question of military firepower, or operational shock. In repeated shock attacks - the original invasion, the smaller attacks to take key cities, the Spring and Fall of '04 - there have been overwhelmingly narrow shock attacks, which have, in each case, failed to end resistence. After each chomp and stomp "victory", the captured hardware or hulked out city squares are pointed to, and the sense of "momentum" is portrayed by the press.
However, in each case, the rebellion against the US metastasizes, and more, not fewer, US causalties are the result. Less, not more, security for the civilian infrastructure is the result.
The fundamental problem is that oil infrastructure is brittle, and easily reconstituteable. The attack does not care about destroying oil wells or production facilities, because, as Kuwait proved after the First American-Iraq War, the capital is trivial to rebuild even if lit on fire. The value is in the oil below, not in the scraps of metal above. Thus, there is no reason to preserve it.
The two facts - brittle and replacable - means that winning a war over oil results in a lot of broken eggs.
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This means that it is the attempt to combine shock-attrition-territory itself which is the problem. Shock tactics do not lead to successful attrition of irreplacable material and men. Attrition does not lead to successful acquisition of territory. Since the losing side can easily use mobility to strike at some brittle part of the infrastructure, they have no reason to give up after losing what was, essentially, merely a fire base.
The conclusion then is that current US tactics do not lead to final victory in Iraq.
What should be our strategy? A great deal of noise is made about allies and the rest, but this is irrelevant in the strategic sense. French or German or British planes executing the same chomp and stomp will merely broaden the economic base to pursue a failed strategy with. One set of proposals has been for a much larger US presence. While this could be helpful, it is also far more expensive, and it does not touch the problem of the fatal triangle of "shock-attrition-territory"