Iraq War: Then and now

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

The Iraq War has brought a distinct dilemma about the military power of the "world's first hyperpower," or whatever image one chooses to use for the bizarre situation in which the United States spends more on the military than all other nations combined.

And, yet, when counterinsurgency warfare is required, 50%+ of the military spending of the entire world hasn't created a military prepared for that.

H. John Poole in Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods (2004) writes about the implications of this situation (my emphasis):

For most Americans, the Iraqi insurgency has few comparisons to Vietnam. In the Middle East, there are no jungles in which to hide. There is no sister country in search of unification. Yet, one thing hasn't changed—U.S. troops are still having trouble distinguishing friend from foe. Theirs is a firepower ethos. As they get injured by people of every sex, age, and description, they may come to distrust Iraqis and Muslims in general. Most have never been told that there is another, widely practiced style of warfare—one in which disguise and deception are the norm. They don't realize that "establishing firepower superiority" fuels the popular support on which the guerrilla so badly depends. Most have no other way to fight back. They lack the movement skills to close safely with an elusive enemy. America must now do one of two things: (1) stop getting embroiled in unconventional wars, or (2) give U.S. enlisted personnel better training.

The latter point is an extremelly important one.  If we think that we need to have the capability to occupy countries as we've done in Iraq and fight counterinsurgency wars there successfully, that requires some drastic changes in the services that in many ways would be the opposite of the current effort at "military transformation".

And if the US is not going to prepare for counterinsurgency wars, that means that we had better pursue foreign and military policies that minimize the chances of being involved in such wars.  That would be a very different approach than the Bush Doctrine of preventive wars/wars of liberation.

I was intrigued to see in Jeffrey Record's 1993 book on the Gulf War, Hollow Victory, how the focus on conventional warfare mislead the US military on the nature of Iraq's power.  American intelligence greatly overestimated the strength of Iraq's armed forces.  But - in dramatic contrast to the fiasco used to justified the current Iraq War - Iraq's unconventional capabilities in chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry were far more advanced than US intelligence had thought.

One of the problems on which Record focuses in that book is the question of why those estimates were so far off.  He writes (my emphasis):

In the end ... it made little difference how many tanks and planes the Iraqis had in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations, or how good they were. The Iraqi army was big and brutal, but also, against the Western foes it faced in 1991, clumsy, dim-witted, and technologically blind. Unlike Chinese forces in Korea and Communist forces in Indochina, whose strategy and tactics reflected a systematic and effective attempt to confront Western military power via a different style of warfare, the Iraqis tried to beat the United States at its own game. The Iraqi army represented an attempt to "ape" the armies of advanced industrial countries—to buy into military modernity by acquiring its outward material and organizational trappings. Like many, though by no means all, aspiring Third World hegemons, Saddam Hussein seems to have believed that military effectiveness was little more than a function of front-line troop strength and aggregate firepower. Paradoxically, the Coalition seemed almost as mesmerized by Saddam's military "trappings" as the dictator himself. The Coalition mistakenly judged Iraq's military capability on the basis of quantity rather than quality.

In the Gulf War, Saddam attempted to fight the US armed forces with First World War methods, and even those were executed poorly.  But prior to the war, the US overestimated their conventional capabilities because intelligence collection focused on quantifiable factors like numbers of troops and planes.

And the US and the (then-real) Coalition won the war very rapidly because the Iraqis fought exactly the war the US military was prepared to fight.  As Record observed, "Saddam's army [in 1991] was little more than a smaller, and in many respects, cheap copy of the very Soviet conventional forces against which American military planners had planned to fight for over forty years."

Record noted that other "aspiring regional hegemons" could be expected to learn some lessons from Iraq's crushing defeat in the Gulf War, among them: "above all, don't try to beat Western military establishments at their own game."  The insurgents in Iraq have clearly learned that lesson, as well.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05