Subject: [Homestead] Guerrilla Warfare, a too-small army
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 20:01:20 -0700
Mr. Rumsfeld, however, still seems wedded to his vision, as he's granted
permission to only temporarily enlarge the Army by 30,000 troops.
tvoivozhd---THIRTY THOUSAND???---the driveling idiot!---infected by the
Bush Virus--"promise everything but pay for
nothing"---great-great-grandkids in diapers can pay.
I started out as a Captain the the Air Commandos, operating in
Burma---our end of the Composite Group being the guerrilla component,
working with the British behind-the-Japanese-lines guerrillas, which in
turn was commanded by British Corporals, whose squads were West Africans
and Gurkhas. We had some outstanding people, Colonel Philip Cochran (of
Terry And The Pirates comic strip fame), Lt.Colonel Levi R. Chase, A
(maybe THE) leading pilot from U.S. Air Forces in North Africa, and
Major Rebori, whose tropical guerrilla background, left him
shivering-helpless part of each day, eaten up by malaria---died in his
mid-30's, long before the war with the Japanese was over.
When Army Morale Takes a Hit
The demands on America's overstretched armed forces are starting to take
a toll on troop morale. That has consequences beyond soldiers' mental
outlook (which is of itself no minor issue).
Concerned about its ability to retain and recruit soldiers, the Army is
considering reducing its 12-month combat tour in Iraq and Afghanistan to
between six and nine months (the Marine tour is only seven months).
The tour was lengthened last year because the insurgency in Iraq
required maintaining a large military presence there. But feedback from
the front line is that a year is too much of a hardship.
That complaint goes especially for the National Guard's "weekend
soldiers" who never expected to be away from their families and regular
jobs for a year.
Signs of recruitment troubles are beginning to surface in the Guard and
Reserves, the Army's backup. For the first time in 10 years, the
National Guard expects to fall short of its recruitment target - by
about 5,000, or 9 percent. And more than a third of the 1,662 former
soldiers being reactivated from the Individual Ready Reserve had failed
to report for duty in Fort Jackson, S.C., by last week's deadline.
The interplay between morale and recruitment is now hitting home.
Overextending forces threatens morale. Yet morale needs to be improved
in order to maintain and build troop numbers in an all-volunteer military.
And let no doubt linger that the Army needs to increase its size.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's lean-and-mean vision for the
military may have sufficed for attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, but that
hasn't held true for the nation-building missions that came later.
Mr. Rumsfeld, however, still seems wedded to his vision, as he's granted
permission to only temporarily enlarge the Army by 30,000 troops.
A recent report by a Pentagon-appointed panel, the respected Defense
Science Board, says the US military faces several choices: add
"substantial" forces to its numbers of troops, scale back missions, or
depend more on other nations.
Perhaps Rumsfeld is counting on the last two options to support his
temporary fix. Yet the training of Iraqi forces is going slowly, and the
Army plans to maintain current US troop levels in Iraq at least through
2007.
What will motivate recruits and boost morale is confidence that the
Pentagon will increase force numbers and rotation.
Given the troops' outstanding service in what has turned into a
guerrilla war, they deserve it.
"Guerrilla warfare is the most underrated and the most successful form
of warfare in human history," says Ivan Eland, a specialist on national
security at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "It is a
defensive type of war against a foreign invader. If the guerrillas don't
lose, they win. The objective is to wait out your opponent until he goes
home."
From the Filipino insurrection during the Spanish-American War to
Vietnam to El Salvador, American troops have had plenty of experience in
fighting home-grown enemies that look nothing like a conventional army.
As have France in Algeria, Britain in Malaysia and Northern Ireland,
Israel in the occupied territories.
Though "counterinsurgency" calls up memories of Vietnam, there may be as
many differences as similarities.
Different from Vietnam
Iraqi insurgents have no means of deploying battalion-size forces, as
North Vietnam and the Viet Cong did with help from the former Soviet
Union. Iraq won't become a proxy conflict between superpowers, as the
Vietnam War was. There is a heavy criminal dimension to the violence in
Iraq, just as there has been in Algeria, Colombia, and Chechnya. And
there is unlikely to be a negotiated resolution as long as Iraq is seen
as part of the broader war on terrorism.
Still, Iraqi insurgents have the advantage of terrain - not jungles but
an urban setting. They appear to have at least the passive support of
many Iraqis. It's often difficult to tell the fighters from innocent
civilians. And they try to force American forces to overreact, causing
civilian casualties and consequent outrage.
"No two insurgencies are alike," says retired Army Col. Dan Smith of the
Friends Committee on National Legislation. "Except that they are violent
affairs in which noncombatants tend to suffer most and national
infrastructure tends to be destroyed."
Since early April, when the health ministry in Baghdad began keeping
figures, some 3,200 civilians (not including Iraqi police or insurgents)
have been killed - some in terrorist attacks, some by the US-led
coalition. On average, insurgents now are attacking US forces 87 times a
day. More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped, and some 30 of those
killed. Attacks on oil pipelines are occurring nearly every day now.
Four insurgencies
In fact, Iraq at the moment has four simultaneous insurgencies: Sunni
tribalists, former Saddam regime loyalists, fighters loyal to anti-US
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and foreign jihadists.
"Most importantly, the insurgents haven't made much effort to develop a
coherent political program or identify a leadership," says Professor
Steven Metz of the US Army War College. "I see this as their most
serious weakness."
Still, they do have a common enemy: those they see as foreign occupiers,
not liberators.
Within the US military, much of the debate over how to deal with
insurgencies revolves around one assertion: "No more Vietnams."
Army Lt. Col. Robert Cassidy, who has served in Iraq and is now
stationed in Germany, notes that the US military "has had a host of
successful experiences in counterguerrilla war, including some distinct
successes with certain aspects of the Vietnam War."
But, he writes in a recent issue of the Army journal Parameters,
"Because the experience was perceived as anathema to the mainstream
American military, hard lessons learned there about fighting guerrillas
were neither embedded nor preserved in the US Army's institutional memory."
How to win: the hard lessons
"Unconventional war" in fact has been studied, trained for, and
practiced for more than 40 years. But fighting guerrillas doesn't
necessarily allow for the best use of the largest, most technologically
advanced armed force in human history. Nor does it always address the
real basis for defeating an insurgency, which rests more on political,
cultural, and economic factors. Other militarily dominant countries have
learned this as well.
"In many aspects, the French counterinsurgency effort typified the
frustrations faced by modern powers in a classic unconventional
conflict," states a US Marine Corps training document. "Like the US in
Vietnam, the French in Algeria were unable to transform military
successes (of which there were many) into a political victory."
Challenges for US forces
Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute sees two basic
defects in the US-led counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq today.
"First, policymakers wrongly assume that Sunni Arabs can be induced to
join in a democratic government where they are assured of permanent
minority status," says Dr. Thompson, who supported the US invasion of
Iraq. "Second, policymakers insist on viewing violence through the prism
of the war on global terrorism, which obscures the sources of conflict
and requirements for victory." Thompson's controversial answer would be
to partition Iraq into three countries: Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab, and Kurd.
That US military planners did not adequately plan for an organized Iraqi
resistance that would become an insurgency reflects a way of thinking
that has often afflicted governments and militaries, says RAND Corp.
analyst Bruce Hoffman, who spent a month this year in Baghdad advising
the Coalition Provisional Authority on counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency.
Problem unleashed
What this amounts to, writes Dr. Hoffman in a recent RAND paper, is "the
failure not only to recognize the incipient conditions for insurgency,
but also to ignore its nascent manifestations and arrest its growth
before it is able to gain initial traction and in turn momentum."
With the insurgency apparently gaining traction and momentum, such
criticisms now are coming from prominent Republicans in Congress. "The
lack of planning is apparent," Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana said last week. Sen. Chuck Hagel
(R) Nebraska, a decorated infantry squad leader in Vietnam, says the
recently announced shifting of reconstruction funds to security is "an
acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."
Classified British documents, reported in the Daily Telegraph newspaper
over the weekend, warned a year before the invasion of Iraq that even if
a democratic government could be created there, "it would require the US
and others to commit to nation-building for many years" and that this
would "entail a substantial international security force."
What a few can do
Even if the insurgents dwindle to a handful of terrorists, their impact
on security and stability in Iraq could far outweigh their numbers.
RAND's Hoffman points out that just 20-30 members of the Baader Meinhof
Gang terrorized the former West Germany for two decades; 50-75 Red
Brigadists did the same in Italy; and some 200-400 IRA gunmen and
bombers required the prolonged deployment of tens of thousands of
British troops in Northern Ireland.
Is it possible to prevail over the Iraqi insurgency?
First, says John Pike of the group GlobalSecurity.org, enemy combatants
must be killed, captured, or demoralized faster than new ones can be
recruited, and the majority of the population must come to see the
insurgency as illegitimate and its defeat as inevitable.
It's a tough job, one that's likely to take years - as long as 10 years,
says Dr. Metz at the Army War College. And the outcome is by no means
assured.
"The government must appear to be legitimate, inevitable, and effective
at providing security and services," says Mr. Pike. "As long as Iran
does not stir the pot, these objectives could be approached by the end
of this decade, with luck."
[Homestead] Guerrilla Warfare, a too-small army,
Tvoivozhd, 10/01/2004