I rarely add a new blog to my list of daily visits, but Belmont Club makes the cut.
What does Belmont Club bring to the blog party, you ask? Adamantine analysis of the military situation in Iraq, for one thing, as well as a very interesting look at the pending takeover of the European left by radical Islamists.
As for the Iraqi situation, Mr. Wretchard thinks that the Baathists and Islamists are getting their asses handed to them,
and backs it up with trenchant strategic analysis.
In contrast to Giap, Saddam’s Ba’athist strategy could have come straight from the pages of the Republic Serials. Episode to episode with nothing leading to anything else. His donkey rockets, so beloved by the Western press, did not help his fancy uniformed feyadeen in the slightest when it attempted to ambush the 4th ID. His earlier campaigns against Iraqi infrastructure in their turn had no connection with the donkey rockets. His attacks on Iraqi policemen did not materially assist his campaign to shoot down American helicopters. And his campaign against the helicopters no connection with the attacks on the police. You can almost imagine the stupid working of his mind: ‘after I kill the Spaniards and the Japanese and the Koreans, I will crown it all by destroying two 4th ID columns like Groupment Mobile 100’. But no military thread ran through them; simply a media thread. Giap knew that strategy has meaning only if it is cumulative. He would have asked, ‘how will killing Spaniards help me destroy a 4th ID column?’ without which he would have left the Spaniards alone. But then Giap was a genius, whereas Saddam is … well, his donkey rockets impress the media.
In each case, Saddam Hussein has invested time and resources to achieve an indecisive result. He has not materially affected the function of the targeted system in any single case, be it infrastructure, logistics, air transportation, or the organization of Iraqi government agencies. Every thing America has attempted has been sheeted home, despite the churnings of his genius campaign, though much admired by the press. The Saddamite insurgency bears all the hallmarks of his previous erratic campaigns, with their reliance on showy military effects to achieve a political result. To Saddam the battlefield is a theatrical prop to support a political gesture. (Remember Khafji? Remember the intentional oil spills?) But CENTCOM to the puzzlement of the media, fights to win. It has been boringly predictable. It captures enemy personnel, including key officers in the Ba’ath, seizes arms caches, intelligence documents by the truckload and ceaselessly sows informers among the enemy ranks. It has a touching belief in power of arithmetic, especially subtraction as applied to the numbers of foemen, coupled with a traditional attachment to the adage that it is better to do unto others before they do unto you.
Serious historians may recall the fate of combatants who gadfly over the battlefield without achieving serious or decisive results while being pummelled in their vitals by their enemy. It will be the fate of Saddam. The Belmont Club’s fearless prediction. CENTCOM by a knockout.
Go to Belmont Club. Read and learn.
I do believe I will.
HA! I thumb my nose at you, now everyone must see my comment! HAHAHA!
Such a shallow victory.
” It has a touching belief in power of arithmetic, especially subtraction as applied to the numbers of foemen, coupled with a traditional attachment to the adage that it is better to do unto others before they do unto you.”
That quote gave the guy one more follower.
” It has a touching belief in power of arithmetic, especially subtraction as applied to the numbers of foemen, coupled with a traditional attachment to the adage that it is better to do unto others before they do unto you.”
I think the US Administration has been studiously avoiding basing progress on that kind of arithmetic, as it was shown to be tragically irrelevant in Vietnam.
Mark, being a survivor of the Viet Nam era, that was my first reaction too, but the analysis can’t be discounted on that basis. First off, Iraq Is Not Viet Nam. We don’t have any reason to imagine that there is any but the most grudging support for the Ba’athists in the population in general. Second, the Belmont Club analysis makes some fairly strong predictions which can be tested.
In any case, “body count” was an issue in Viet Nam primarily because it was turned into a measure of effectiveness in a way that made spoofing it too attractive. None the less, if we’d have maintained a high body count, the NVA would have eventually had to give in; it just turned out to be longer for that to happen than for Walter Cronkite to give in.
The problem with a high body count is that it is usually purchased with a body count of your own. If you have a low opinion of the value of the lives of your infantrymen, then this sort of war of attrition is acceptable. I read once that Wellington, in response to the horror of one of his aides after an especially bloody battle in the Penninsular War, said something to the effect that ‘all these losses will by made up by the bastards conceived next Saturday night in London’. Carried to its logical extreme, this leads to the meat grinders of the Somme and Verdun.
There might have been some cold logic to this approach when we mass produced cheap weapons and cheap soldiers. Even then, leaders like Patton and Sherman – niggardly in spending the lives of their men – were the captains who got the best results.
Those days are gone. Soldiers will always die – it’s an occupational hazard – but victory demands that losses be minimized.
I discovered them via their “Three Conjectures” article. Scroll down about 40%.
The problem with a high body count is that it is usually purchased with a body count of your own.
Well, duh. Its a war. Its all about killing the ohter guy and breaking his stuff. Can’t do that without producing bodies that can be counted. Hell, the US kills dozens of its own soldiers every year in training accidents. If you try to fight a war, or even run an army in peacetime, with no casualties on your side, you will likely lose. The US excels at fighting wars with low casualty counts on its side.
What Mr. Wretchard is referring to isn’t anything so crude as body counts. He is referring to the US doctrine of inflicting unsustainable losses on the other guy. What counts as unsustainable varies, of course, but the body count is part of it.
“Body count” is one of those terms that is radioactive only because of its association with Vietnam. Knowing the damage you are inflicting on the enemy is of course a good thing. Inflicting far more on him than he inflicts on you is how wars are won.
Don Winslow was my favorite serial.
Don’t recall if it was Republic.
I posted this in another thread but just in case you missed it:
http://www.lastsuperpower.net/docs/Document.2003-12-02.0041
A Marxist makes an intelligent comment on the Iraq War. I believe they are Brit Marxists.
The latest attack in which the body count is a matter of dispute was an attempt at bank robbery.
The Islamics are probably running low on cash.
After I posted my comment criticizing body count as a means to judge success, I realized that success could be the combination of two things, which Charlie did point out:
1. Casualties Inflicted
2. Will of combatants to endure casualties
Body count certainly can matter. The problem is that body count usually (nowadays) matters more to us (US/UK) than to our opponents. In Vietnam and say, Somalia, body count mattered more to us than to our opponents. In WWII, it was more of an equal thing. In Iraq, who knows for sure?
R.C. Dean wrote:
“Well, duh. Its a war. Its all about killing the ohter guy and breaking his stuff. Can’t do that without producing bodies that can be counted.”
I think he missed my point. Body count warfare or -if we are to call a spade a spade- warfare by attrition, generally inflicts an extra cost on your own side as well as on the enemy. If you are not also suffering casualties, there would be no reason for the enemy to continue fighting you.
I realize that war causes casualties on our side. I was in the service too once and I understand the obvious. In fact, I once lost an argument with an ex Foreign Legion Paratrooper who claimed the US Army doesn’t have enough training casualties.
Nonetheless, I maintain the opinion that attrition tactics should be a last resort, to be used when the commander has either no other options or -worse- no other ideas. War is not just “all about killing the other guy and breaking his stuff”. That was a good throwaway line for Rush Limbaugh, but is poor strategy.
War is about eliminating the enemy’s ability to resist. From the point of view of the infantryman it is closing with, and killing, capturing or destroying the enemy. That does not necessarily mean trading deaths with him. If you want a throwaway line, I suggest Patton’s: “Making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country”.
I thought we were right to go into Viet Nam. I still think so. The VC were as murderous and nasty a bunch of thugs as any of the Baathists. I also think we are right in cleaning out the gangsters in Iraq. What worries me is the tendency to think a pile of bodies is a military objective. A pile of bodies is something a bureaucrat understands. It can be treated by accounting methods. You can come up with a dollar cost per body, a Coalition casualty cost per body and so on. If the numbers start going against you, why then you can start the old refrain: “I need more funding. I need more personel. I need a larger bureaucratic empire”. All the while real military objectives are likely to be ignored and overlooked. That attitude led to the Saigon bugout in 1975. When I start hearing our leaders making those same noises again, I get alarmed, not because it is radioactive in association with Viet Nam but because it may be an indicator of a dangerous shift in objectives and perhaps even in leadership, with the bureaucrats supplanting the soldiers.
When we interdict border traffic with Syria and Iran, when we blow up arms caches, when we improve the Iraqi police forces and our intelligence, when we are able to turn the population against the Baathists, then we are destroying the enemies ability to resist. Those sorts of things are proper military objectives in a guerilla war. They are steps toward ultimately destroying the enemy. I don’t know if it is still taught, but there was a pithy formula for infantry tactics years ago: The 5 F’s. Find’em, Fix’em, F–k’em, Fight’em and Finish’em. The body count doesn’t come until the last F. Until then, bodies are pretty inconsequential. Unless you are a bureaucrat.
Having said all that, I still added the Belmont Club to my bookmarks. The body count matter is a side issue. Thanks for the tip.
People don’t seem to be getting the same reading from this as I am.
“It has a touching belief in power of arithmetic, especially subtraction as applied to the numbers of foemen, coupled with a traditional attachment to the adage that it is better to do unto others before they do unto you”
What’s the dealio people? It’s a funny way of saying that yanks are shooting bad iraqis and doing it alot.
Doug – as expanded, I have little to argue with in your comments. I think that “body counts” in isolation tell us little that is very useful. However, knowing how many of the enemy you are killing is a vital data point in all kinds of intelligence analysis.
Warfare by attrition may be more costly than warfare by maneuver. As a generalization, in fact, I would say this is so. However, I don’t think the US Army has really engaged in the kind of attrition warfare you refer to since at least Vietnam, and maybe even earlier than that.
Patton’s comment about making the other guy die for his country is perfectly consistent with all types of warfare, including attrition, where the game is to have a high “exhange ratio”. The only way to know the other guy is dying is to, yes, count the bodies.
Body counts in Vietnam were part of the early bureaucratic nature of that war. I would guess they were a MacNamara invention.
But in Vietnam, the enemy was willing to literally breed soldiers to be killed, while we were unwilling to accept the corresponding, if much smaller, death count on our side. It was only when Nixon made it clear (by doingn it) that he would attack the heart of the North and effectively interdict its supplies that an end to the fighting was reached, with South Vietnam still independent.
Unfortunately, by that time, the political damage had been done… by the casualties, by the draft, and by the left-wing press with its highly biased reporting, and hence subsequently the US abandoned South Vietnam to an unnecessary fate.
In Iraq, the situation is significantly different. We can more or less control the borders. There is (so far) no nuclear armed deep pockets supplier of material to the enemy. There is no sanctuary for the Baathists to acquire new forces, and no place to train and equip them.
Thus when we kill one of them, we destroy a person far more important (in a military sense) than when we killed an NVA or VC soldier.
In that sense, body counts, well… count! However, I think the military is keeping quiet about them to attempt to keep the media from doing what it most wants to do: equating Vietnam and Iraq. Also, they recognize that no such simple figure of merit is adequate to measure progress. The military of today is far more professional and well educated than the military of the past, with many of the Generals (such as the commander of the 101st) holding Doctorate degress in relevant subjects.
Warfare by maneuver doesn’t mean much when there are no enemy formations. We can attack the enemy only by interdicting their supplies (money, arms, lunatics from Iran and Syria), by killing them when they attack us (war by sitting duck tactics), and developing good intelligence (helped by the natural American tendency towards “good works”) so that we can find and capture them.
As a participant in the Vietnam War from several sides (soldier, citizen, and curious attendant at anti-war rallies), I can see radical differences both in the military situation and in the domestic situation. Also, today, the anti-war folks are much more of a lunatic fringe than before (because there is no draft driving kids to protest). Interestingly, many ARE the same folks with the same signs!
If you haven’t read “Chief Wiggles'” blog, I highly recommend it. He is an intelligence officer and interrogator who started a charity – essentially by coincidence – not part of any plan. He is doing the intelligence gathering and the good works.