Steve,

Care to hazard a guess as to when "Gulf War II" will actually begin?

Ed

It would be just that, Ed -- a guess.

C3I is soooooo 2000. It's C4I (computers) or in some cases C4RI. (reconaissance)

Don't worry about it though... it'll change again next month.

Kevin,

I've seen lots of references to C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Guess next month's already here?

One key aspect that supports Stephen's general point: If we had taken care of Saddam prior to 9/11, at least TWO of ObL's purported "justifications" for that tragedy would not have been in place.

---There would be no sanctions (I can't imagine any, at least) on Iraq, not w/ a non-Saddam or family government in place.

---There'd be few, if any, US forces in Saudi (since there'd be no threat to the oil fields).

Worth thinking about, I believe---the elimination of Saddam removes the main non-I/P issues from the Middle East table. Sure, we'd like democracy, representative government, etc., and eliminating Saddam will not make those magically appear. But the primary irritants that the Arabs SAY they have w/ us would go away.

Is that worth toppling Saddam? Does that offer a credible shot at reducing terrorism? Sure does, in my book.

I definately dont think that toppling Saddam will ensure a big democracy movement in Iraq. Look at Afghanistan, already you have Americans being setup (with the whole wedding bombing) and a governor talking jihad against us. Kuwait cant wait to get into the streets to cheer our demise and we just freed their freakin asses. The Saudi's? hell they are getting wierder and wierder every day and to me they were the whole reason we started up this whole Gulf War, to protect the Saudis! I kinda get the willies thinking about toppling governments "for the people" because it never turns out the way we planned. Of course that doesnt mean that you can leave them in power... it just means that it gives me the willies.

There must be a move towards democracy in Iraq or the effort to replace Saddam will have been wasted as only a temporary fix.

With Iran slowly moving towards democratic reforms energized by a large educated, and relatively worldly younger generation, we need to be very supportive of democratic changes in Iraq. It will be expensive but worth it.

It'll be expensive in both the war effort and the aid that will be required afterwards. Iraq does have an organized armed force with a ruthless leader. Anything short of a massive concentration of forces will leave too much opportunity for failure in the long-term objectives. Intelligence will be extremely important.

I think it's safe to bet the Bush II will have learned the lessons from Bush the Elder in how difficult it was to find and oust Saddam. They have the will and the capability to do it, hopefully they will have the means (political & diplomatic) to carry it out.

It is interesting that the Senior Senator here in Florida, Bob Graham, from his position with one of the Senate Intelligence committees, is saying that training camps and terror activities in Lebanon and Syria are a more direct threat than Iraq.... My guess is this campaign will include contingency planning for taking care of those issues too.

Stephen -

Very insightful. The reality will probably not be too far off in many respects to what you've described, IMHO.

I agree that there will be an 'instability fallout' for the action, particularly if there are not one, but two democratic countries produced as a result - Iraq, and Kurdistan. My opinion is that Kurdistan is a lot more likely to set up along this model, with a minimum of encouragment. I don't think that moving through 'unfriendly Kurdish areas' will be that much of a problem, on the contrary, despite their distrust due to having the rug pulled out from beneath them on at least two other occaisions, if they are convinced that we mean it this time, they're more than likely to pitch in with us, as it furthers their own interests. More likely, we will encounter either unwillingness or outright refusal for basing and overflight from the Turks in response to an ailignment of convenience with the Kurds. They may not blink however, if they can be convinced that having a place for the Kurds to go and call their own will lessen their 'internal problems' with them.

Agree that the downfall of the house of Saud is going to be pretty ugly, from a local perspective at any rate. The two most likely scenarios I can envision resemble either the rise of a Taliban style group with hard core Wahabbists calling the tune, or a complete devolution into a Somalian re-run. Either alternative is a good recipe for about five to ten years of misery for the locals, at a minimum.

Will Congress Declare War?

How 'bout this.... It's one HELL of a gamble, but try it out.

Basically, throw our chips in with Iran BIG time. That means prepare to give them sovereignty over Shiite (southern) Iraq. This is based on the assumption that the Iranian people are well familiar with fundamentalism, and have learned all they need to know about it's pathetic inability to accomplish a damn thing on planet Earth.

At the same time, that huge gain in Persian/Shiite power would be a body blow to Sunni Araby. Good. That's what happens, guys, when Arabs, even a small number of them, go off the deep end. All the more reason to put the hammer down on them big time. That's not about us, it's ALL about you. Frankly, I say build up Persia to counter-balance Arabia, try to get an equilibrium and stability.... and then bug the hell out of Dodge.

I am sick to death of the whole place. Chinese invade the Gulf? Great. You can have 'em, guys. Good luck with all THAT!

Thanks for confirming there is a third way. I've been disturbed by the talk of dissent in the Pentagon, dividing into two camps: those in favor of Gulf War II (250,000 troops) and those in favor of Afghanistan II (Special Forces only, allied with local resistance).

Both appear to be standard issue bureaucratic cases of preparing to fight your last war, and neither approach seems ideal (or even workable, in the case of Afghanistan II). There's got to be a middle ground, as you propose, that draws on our strengths in the face of highly unique circumstances.

And frankly, I don't want to hear any more about it until I see the "Breaking News" graphic on CNN when the attack is launched. I certainly don't want to read about it in advance in the NY Times.

One big problem I can see with your proposed scenario is command and control, specifically identifying enemy and friendly forces. In Gulf War I, this was done by keeping friendly forces in fairly large columns, and giving planes kill boxes where they had carte blanche to shoot anything that moves. This worked quite well, but there were still numerous friendly fire incidents.

With your scneario, the ground will basically be a mass of small groups, all shooting at one another. There will be no front line, no clearly identifiable masses of forces. This creates two problems.

First, how do you resupply small, isolated advanced forces, as you have described? Such independant units are unlikely to completely clear areas, which leaves resupply convoys vulnerable to enemies that the initaial attacks miss.

Second, the scenario you describe is a command and control nightmare. With no clerly defined lines of operation, how can air forces know which of the 10,000 little vehicles rolling around shooting that the ee in their viewfinders are friendlies, and which are hostile? Making the battlefield a big mixing bowl as you describe has the potential of negating our biggest advantage, which is air power.

Not to mention the strong possibility that several of the columns might run into each other and start shooting. One incident like that could produce more casualties than the entire gulf war I.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm skeptical that existing C3I systems are capable of managing such a dispersed, non-contiguous battlefield.

how do you resupply small, isolated advanced forces, as you have described?

That's what I was wondering. "The amateur talks strategy, the professional talks logistics." Or something like that. (of course, I'm just an amateur who knows a slogan or two)

Will it be difficult? Damn right. And I covered some of the logistical problems in my post.

But Doug & Michael -- you forget that there will be no broad line of Iraqi forces. Instead, we'll find small, hard points of resistance. Some we can safey bypass and cut off, others that we'll have to smash. And if we want to avoid as much bloody street fighting as possibile, we'll have to move fast, stay mobile, and, above all, maintain initiative and surprise.

Advancing in a more traditional manner, our politicians will pale before we're done taking Basra.

Besides, we don't need a huge mess of armored columns, all snaking around unpredictably. Four or five will do, coming from three directions. The fourth direction will come from above -- air assault forces.

This is NOT your father's Gulf War. Fighting it in the same way would be a huge mistake.

Fair enough--it sounds to me like you are describing, sort of, a modern version of the blitzkrieg tactics used in the battle of France. Smash in with a few armored columns, have them roam around killing what they find in the interior, and generally causing chaos, with air power ennabling the movement.

At any rate, it is something more concentrated and directed than I had imagined in my first comment.

It could work, perhaps as well as anything else, although I'm not convinced it's really any better than a massed assault like we did in the first Gulf War. Why would such an attack be a huge mistake?

If the Iraqis form a front line, such an encircling and defeat in detail makes sense. Or just blasting them out of the way--they showed they couldn't begin to compete with our equipment, so we could just roll over them.

If they don't form a front line, or hide in cities, then how you maneuver through the countryside is irrelevant.

I guess the main advantage of the scenario you describe is that it might make the use of chemical weapons more difficult or less effective. It also could be good to make the situation too confusing for the Iraqis to follow with degraded C2 systems, but still managable by the US.

Doug -

The Iraqis won't line up for us this time -- I'm afraid Gulf War I was the last time anyone will be so obliging in playing to our strengths.

And you're absolutely right about chemical weapons. If we line up like we did last time, we play into Saddam's one and only strength. Well, other than lobbing WMD-tipped missiles into Israel.

It won't matter that the Iraqis will not stand idly by while we invade. History has proven time and time again that Arabs are the worst combatants on Earth. Whether it was at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis in the Greek-Persian wars, or the defeats of the Muslims in Spain during the Crusades, or any of the Israeli-Arab wars of the last 50 years one thing remains clear: they are inept soldiers. The only victory I have ever seen from them was at Meggido in WWI when Lawrence of Arabia led them. They will fold like a house of cards.

The BIG unknown will be Saddam's last move when his back is against the wall. He knows that there is a meat hook with his name on it and he could care less about the consequences of America's WMD's: he is willing to fight to the very last Iraqi.

Nobody knows whether Saddam possesses smallpox or an equivalent, but if he were to use such a weapon it is important to understand that there is no way that the casualties would be limited to the US. Even if the US were totally successful in dealing with the attack, the rest of the world couldn't possibly deal with it and would suffer horribly.

My guess is that after "Gulf War II" is over, the international community will take draconian measures to abolish both religious fundamentalism and American "unilateralism" in order to prevent that catastrophe from ever reoccurring.

Just to nitpick, the forces invading ancient Greece were largely from the middle east, but they weren't Arabs. At that point in time, the Arabs were still mostly confined to the Arabian peninsula.

And his work may have been superceded, but Hans Delbruck in his classic history of warfare made a convincing case that the Persians were superior warriors to the Greeks. The Greeks relied on lightly trained, civilian militia type forces (which is one reason they fought in a phalanx--it's simple and easy to do), while the Persians were professional mounted knights.

Ray,

That is a real issue, but might we avoid it by allowing Saddam to escape, or to gain refuge in another country, if any would have him? I'm not sure how that would fly politically, since Bush I and Clinton personalized the conflict so much, but if we let him know that we wouldnt' try ato hunt him down if he ran away, it might prevent such a desperate gambit.

While he may be a monster, the US interest is not so much capturing him as it is in deposing him and preventing Iraq (especially Iraq ruled by a Hussein) nuclear weapons.

If we toppled his regime and destroyed their WMD capability, but Hussein was living the high life on the beaches of Argentine (or wherever), our national interest would still be served.

I'm kinda wondering why you would use battles such as Thermopylae, with Persian soldiers, as evidence of your thesis that Arabs are cruddy fighters.

While I don't disagree with the basic analysis, that's about like saying German fighters are as bad as Italian ones. Geographical proximity does not a similarity make. Think Israelis & Egyptians.

Sorry to be a jonny-come-lately to the logistics aspect, but, building on what Stephen has already noted (lots of small groups running around in the absence of an Iraqi front-line), it's also important to recognize a couple of things from Gulf War-I:

A. The willingness of US combat commanders to take risks. One US armored column stopped between two minefields in order to get refueled from the line of tankers. You'd never do this if the enemy had air cover, or even decent long-range recon ability [to call in artillery strikes], but in their absence, you can afford to do things that "normally" you wouldn't risk.

B. The power of air mobility. The 101st essentially leap-frogged deep into Iraq, set up a base in the middle of nowhere, and then boot-strapped itself further from there. That was a set-piece battle. I'd venture that small forces, scattered hither-and-yon, can be resupplied from helicopters operating from secure bases, so long as the enemy can't consistently predict your flight-paths. (See "Black Hawk Down" on the badness of predictability.) And even a company of AH-64 Apaches can bring down some hellacious firepower on an armored or mechanized column, so lots of helos leads to lots of dead bad guys, over a MUCH broader area than we're perhaps used to envisioning.

As for C3I/C4ISR and battlefield awareness, one can only hope that a decade of operating w/ JSTARS and the like has improved situational awareness, so that widely divergent columns can be maneuvered AWAY from each other (but the blue-on-blue problem remains a serious and less tractable one).

Just a coupla thoughts....

Doug,

I agree. I believe that the US would be willing to let Saddam live if that would spare us the consequences of a "last ditch attack".

But he is a monster.

I don't think his own people would let him live.

My basic premise is that I do not believe the hype of the fanatic Arab warrior. I used historical battles to prove my point that the peoples of that region were, and still continue to be a pathetic fighting force. To answer previous posters question about Persians supposedly being more able than Greeks, one needs to look no further than the fact that the Athenians and Spartans were outnumbered in some cases 30 to 1 and were still defeated. Historical records of that date put the number closer to 10 to 1, but those are still tremendous advantages to piss away.
One should also note that the Persians of that day were not Muslims. Still look at the advantages Syria, Egypt, and other Arab nations had over Israel in 67 and 73.
They were not only driven back, but pushed into their own territory by smaller and more lethal IDF forces. I fought in the first Gulf War, and can assure you the only reason we didn't completely annihilate those Iraqis is that we were not trained to shoot them while we are doubled over laughing.

More nitpicking. The Muslims in Spain were quite capable of defeating the Visigoths, and the Islamic decline on the Iberian Peninsula was a long time coming. There was virtual parity for a couple of hundred years between the Christians in Castile and Leon and the Muslims in al-Andalus. And when things got tough for the Muslims, they called to the Almoravids for help, who were fierce fighters (though, like much of Muslim Spain, not Arabs) and regained control of Valencia. The cause for the fall of Islam in Spain was more likely due to in-fighting among the Muslims themselves, which gave opportunity to the Christians to slowly reconquer territory until they were again the dominant power.

Great commentary on the upcoming campaign against Iraq, Stephen.

Doug Turnbull is right, this is blitzkrieg and my (very) uneducated guess is that the war will not be fought this way. Blitzkrieg is a tactic by which a well trained and coordinated BUT materially inferior force can slice up and defeat a materially superior force. The Germans used it against materially superior Anglo-French forces in France and against the huge numbers of the Red Army. The Israelis have also used it against the numerically superior Arab armies. We have never used because we have always been materially superior. Concentrating your firepower in a few column allows the defender to concentrate their counter attack forces and maybe achieve local superiority. It is a risk we have never taken before.

Concentrating our firepower in just a few columns also makes us more vulnerable to WMD, not less. Hitting one column with a chemical or radiological weapon will stop the column cold for decontamination. An NBC battlefield is a dispersed battle field. I think it may be a bunch of dots but those dots will be spread out over a large area.

My very uneducated guess as to Saddams special surprise? A chemical/radiological attack of Kuwait City. Contaminate the port bad enough we can't use it to re-supply our forces and our whole attack will grind to a halt. Do this early enough and we can't build up our forces to even start the attack.

Chain, hitting an armored column first involves FINDING it. The whole idea behind the concept is to be where you aren't expected to be, sooner than you're expected to be somewhere else.

By the time the (fairly brief, compared to '91) air campaign is over, Saddam will barely know where his own units are, much less ours.

Speed, shock, decisiveness -- that how one wins modern wars.

Stephen, blitzkrieg is just one of several strategies for achieving speed, shock and decisiveness. It is the concentration of the amour that bothers me.

Good point about finding the columns. I don't want to overplay Iraq's battlefield capabilities, there are very poor. However, at some point, we will have to attack certain strong points. At that point, Saddam will know exactly where we are. A WMD attack would require he take out his own people as well as ours but he has no problem with that.

Funneling everything through Kuwait City is what really bothers me. IMHO, this attack may need to be in two parts. First part, secure supply points and establish a deep beach head along the coast of Iraq. Then launch the invasion.

Stephen, agreed...1991 was waged with conventional bombs in many cases with some well publicized uses of "smart" weaponry. As witnessed in Afghanistan, our smart weapons have become "brilliant." Saddam won't know what hit him.

Chain, I'm not so sure Saddam's Badhdad HQ would know when a particular hardpoint was being attacked.

Anything with a radio, we'll jam. Anything with lines, we'll cut. And anything with the moves, we'll shoot.

Messages more complicated than "We're under attack from the east" will be difficult for Iraq to get to HQ. And even chemical weapons need to be better aimed than that.

Also, confusion will reign because we'll be coming in from four axis. Two from the south, one from the north, and (at least) one from the air. And to poorly-trained and -equipped troops, a helicopter stand-off attack might look and feel like a land attack. They'll be hard-pressed to tell where we're moving from where we're just bombing.

Marcus, don't let an Iranian / Persian hear you calling him an Arab.

Ok, ok, so maybe killing Saddam Insane wouldn't lead immediately to world piece and luv... But c'mon - You know it's be fun to drag that little prick out of his palace and put a hot one in the back of his head...

Next!...

Craig,

Measure the distance from the Iraqi border to Kuwait City on a map, then look up the range of Iraqi artillery rockets. They have only a few with the range to hit Kuwait City, i.e., not enough to have more than an irritant effect even with persistent chemical warheads. And assuming any get through our ABM defenses.

Also check out my articles at

GREETINGS - i know i sure want MY kid to fight and die so my president can make up for a prior family f__k-up. And as he spends his last moments as a bleeding feast for muslim flies, I also want my kid to know that he made the world safe for me to drive wherever and whenever the hell i want without having to shell out more money for gas or buy some hydrogen-guzzling slug of a car! Nosirreee! Oh yeah, I also don't care whether Iraq is really tied into the terror network - they must be because Shrub- excuse me - Our President - says they are, right? Who cares? We can't find Osama so let's go after somebody who'll stand in one place long enough to blow em to hell, right? RIGHT!

Oh, joy -- our first Idiotarian troll in quite some time.

We had to fight World War II because the Brits and French screwed up in 1936. We had to fight Korea because Marshall (I think) forgot to mention South Korea one time. We had to fight in Vietnam because we made a really useless commitment.

History is messy. Sometimes, we have to clean up our messes, and sometimes we have to clean up the messes of other countries.

And, yes, sometimes soldiers die in the process.

Now then, Lackey -- did you have a point to make, other than the usual cliched and mindless sloganeering?

Doug Turnbull writes: "The Greeks relied on lightly trained, civilian militia type forces (which is one reason they fought in a phalanx--it's simple and easy to do), while the Persians were professional mounted knights."

I believe that this is not the case.

The Persian-as-cataphract model belongs to the Sassanid or "New Persian" era, from about the early 3rd to mid-7th centuries CE. The Achaemenid Persians at the time of Marathon, Plataea, et al. were mounted archers, a tactic that they picked up from the Assyrians, probably via the Medes.

this is a great discussion, but i want to address the fella who asked if Congress would declare war on iraq. i hope so, i really hope so. when you declare war a whole body of legislation, not to mention the treason clause in the constitution, comes into effect. i wonder how the idiot left and noam chomsky (but i repeat myself) will feel when someone tells them that there will be actual consequences for committing treason this time around, and if hanoi jane wants to sit on top of a iraqi antiaircraft cannon then she'd better get used to the taste of couscous cuz she aint gonna come back here.

Steve,
I may be late on this, but it's not C3I (Command, Control and Communications), it's C4I - Command, Control Communications, Computers and Intelligence. We will take out the C3 (although Iraq relies primarily, for C2/C3, on landline and cable) thanks to cluster bombs and munitions focusing upon artillery and special forces; however, we will also tear down any computer-controlled systems (SCADA) and computer-controlled communications (ie: cell) via means which will remain unspecified.
Iraq will fall due to the implosion of its society (may I be so bold as to say "civilization"?) - as was seen in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (aka Serbia) - ya take out the lights, ya take out the TV, ya take out the water and...well, there isn't much left.
Iraq is rich for the taking, all we require is fortitude and a likttle bit of patience (not to quote a Guns-N-Roses song!).
Ooooh Rah! Devil Dogs rule!!!!

Dear Mr. Green: In your original post, you wrote:

Dwight Eisenhower wrote to Roosevelt that the occupying nations simply shoot 50,000 random German men, to teach the rest why they didn’t want to start another world war.

I've not been able to find this letter in Eisenhower's papers or the Ferrell edition of his diaries. Could you tell us where he said it? I'd be obliged.

Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster

John,

Thanks for the correction. I could very well be remembering it wrong, and Delbruck's books were written nearly a hundred years ago, so he could have gotten it wrong too. I remembered that the Persians were cavalry oriented while the Greeks relied on infantry, but probably got the details wrong.

The underlying point, though (if Delbruck was right), was that it simply wasn't the case that the Persians were inferior militarily, on a person by person basis, to the Greeks they fought at Marathon and elsewhere.

Then how do you account for the discrepancy in casualties? The Greeks were vastly outnumbered by the Persians...so if they were not quanitatively superior, must not a qualitative edge exist somewhere? As I recall hundreds of Spartans held off and killed many thousands of Persians at Thermopylae...The Athenians routed a huge battle fleet at Salamis with only a few hundred triremes.

It depends on what kind of battle you're fighting, Drake.

At Marathon, the Persians suffered from divided command (the Athenian strategos, Miltiades, united his command by sheer charisma). They were also in absolutely the worst position that light troops could be -- pinned against an obstacle (the sea, in this case) and forced to go head-to-head with heavier-armed soldiers (the classic case is the Lechfeld in 955CE, where Otto the Great defeated the Magyars so decisively that they were never again a threat).

At Thermopylae, the Spartans fought -- and lost (a lot of Greeks besides the Spartans died at Thermopylae, which is often forgotten).

At Salamis, Themistocles used deceit and bribery to get the Persian fleet into an untenable position WRT to the Greek fleet
(the Persians had to attack on a very restricted front, where they could not bring their numbers to bear).

At Plataea, two things came out. First, the Persian C-in-C was Mardonius, cousin and brother-in-law of Xerxes I; bluebloodness does not confer competence on the battlefield. Second, the Persians did seem to be winning until Mrdonius was killed; the Persian then became demoralized, panicked, and fled the battlefield. This is the most dangerous thing that an army can do; the large number of Persian casualties were mostly cut down from behind by vengeful Greeks.

Well, are not deceit and bribery acceptable options during a war of survival? Sun Tzu believed that all warfare was based on that. Whatever reasons for the Persians demise-- whether by their own ineptness or by Greek guile--a numerically superior aggressor was repulsed. If Thermopylae was a tactical defeat for the Spartans as I believe you are saying, then surely it was a strategic disaster for the Persians. The Persian fleet at Salamis may have been bottlenecked and unable to manuver, but whose fault is that? I recall a similar situation in WWII at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. I certainly see where you are coming from regarding soldier for soldier equality, but these are not duels. In the big picture, poor generals can negate any advantage just like superior generals can overachieve. In the first Gulf War, Saddam did have enough of an army to inflict casualties...but poor planning, political isolation, and quality of weapons and soldiers led to a crushing Iraqi defeat. With the Persians it seems like a case of woulda-shoulda-coulda. In your example of Plataea, when the Persians panicked and fled, seems to be a perfect example of faulty battlefield discipline. If that is not a sign of an inferior war machine, what is?