Pentagon planners must have been grinding their teeth with irritation when the Turkish parliament refused to allow a US division to unload in a Turkish port and move into Northern Iraq. Clearly having major US assets approach from an entirely different strategic direction would have enormously complicated the Iraqi military’s defensive dilemmas. In the event, the Iraqi army has been able to concentrate its the majority of its efforts against the allied moves in the south. Although it seems that allied special forces have run riot in the west of the country, that is really just desert of little real strategic importance to Iraq’s national cohesion. So far so good for the bad guys (well, sort of).
And yet…
The army which has attacked Iraq is much smaller than the one which ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The thinking here was clearly that the advances in technology and war fighting generally meant that a much smaller but ‘smarter’ force was all that was required to defeat Saddam’s armies in the field. The down side to this is that the sheer size of Iraq means that lines of communications are far longer than was the case in 1991 and in addition are running through enemy territory almost entirely… and there are far less troops to keep them secure.
If the allies have made any miscalculations, it is not with regard to the Iraqi army or Republican Guard: although both have resisted, they have been signally unable to prevent the overrunning of nearly half of Iraq and in every major battle so far against US and UK forces, their formations have been smashed and the survivors thrown back.
No, the unknown and more importantly, the unplanned for factor is the Fedayeen Saddam and sundry Ba’athist militias. These irregular forces, like all, irregular forces, have little real combat power but are able to disrupt logistics, cause irritation out of all proportion to their numbers and equipment, and most importantly for Saddam’s cause, maintain Ba’athist authority and political presence in areas nominally under the control of the allies. I lost track of how many times the allies reported that “The US Marines have taken Umm Qasr” day after day. What, again?
In reality it was only in the last two days that the Fedayeen and Ba’athist infrastructure in Umm Qasr had been sufficiently crushed by Royal Marines doing painstaking house to house clearances that Iraqi civilians felt safe enough to openly apply for jobs with the allied forces in the port city.
Similarly, the roads north to the bulk of the US forces are being called ‘ambush ally’ by the rear echelon troops tasked with the essential logistic task of keeping the heavy divisions rolling and shooting around Karabala and Nasiriyah.
And so if the tank, artillery and AFV heavy Iraqi units around Baghdad are not really what is causing the allies difficulties, then the fact irregular forces are able to attack overstretched supply lines is the thing that should be worrying us, give the lack of absolute numbers of infantry the attacking allied armies.
Well, the forces that would have moved into Northern Iraq are about to arrive in Southern Iraq. If my guestimates are correct, their ships should be reaching the appropriate Gulf ports any time now.
In Northern Iraq, they would have faced much the same problems as their colleagues in the south… but deployed in the south, they will increase the feet-on-the-ground per square mile considerably, which can only be very bad news indeed for the Fedayeen.
Perhaps this cloud has a silver lining.
Interesting observation. However, I understand that an additional 100,000 US troops have been committed to the 120,000 Coalition troops already in Iraq. Won’t these troops also be moving North from Kuwait when they arrive? That could be a bit of overkill, especially given the alternative of having a sizeable northern force creating a second front north of Baghdad.
There is another benefit. Right now, Kim Jong Il is sitting in his palacial abode, asking himself, “If three American divisions are beating up on Saddam that badly, what in God’s name will happen to me if I attack the ROK?
“There is another benefit. Right now, Kim Jong Il is sitting in his palacial abode, asking himself, “If three American divisions are beating up on Saddam that badly, what in God’s name will happen to me if I attack the ROK?”
I think that’s more a risk than a benefit. If I was Kim Jong Il, I’d be asking myself, “Since Bush will attack me when he’s finished in the Middle East, why shouldn’t I make a preemptive strike while his forces are tied up and hope for the best?”
Kim can’t do a pre-emptive strike, b/c he knows then the entire UN will come down on him as it did against Iraq in Gulf 1. All he can try to do is bait the US into doing something that would appear pre-emptive, giving him the apparent moral right to respond however he sees fit and call it self-defense. Hence all his crazy talk about the US planning to attack him, his missile tests, his kicking out the UN inspectors and restarting his nuke program, his attempt to capture an American SIGINT plane (like the one that crash landed in China after the collision with the Chinese fighter), etc. etc. But he knows he can’t make the first move, all he can do is try to bait the US into making a mistake. That’s why it’s so satisfying that Bush & Co. are completely ignoring him. All he can do is thrash about and throw a tantrum, making himself look even more impotent and stupid.
About those “overextended” supply lines – you would expect a capable adversary to couterattack those lines and try to severe them. It has not happened. The Iraqi army isn’t a capable adversary, and they haven’t given battle – nowhere up to now.
About the Fedayeen attacks (there haven’t been too many of them…) they are a nuisance – not a threat.
jacob: er, and you point is…? Of course the fedayeen cannot actually shut down the US supply lines… the bit where I point out they have ‘little real combat power’ shows that I understand that. But what they can and are doing is tied down troops, slow things down and most importantly, cause casualties. The Iraqi strategy is clear: they hope to exploit the relative weakness of allied dismounted infantry strength, which is even weaker in the rear areas, and thereby cause casualties and prevent a swift resolution of the war with classic guerilla tactics. They then hope that protracted war and mounting casualties will then sap the political will to fight in London and Washington.
Of course that is just wishful thinking by Saddam…Yes, of course they will ultimatly fail and the Ba’athist will fall regardless, but that does not mean these tactics will not cause allied loses in the meantime. The sooner there are troops ‘to spare’ in the rear area, the sooner these tactics can be thwarted.
they are a nuisance – not a threat.
I know what you mean, but I wouldn’t minimize the Fedayeen, especially to the US & Brit soldiers who have to deal with their nuissance.
http://truthout.org/docs_03/040203A.shtml