Comments Posted By crosspatch
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THE IMMORALITY OF THE DEMOCRATS' POSITION ON THE WAR
Have a look at the June number and you will notice a significant jump. Expect that to continue. One of the reasons for that jump is the completion of natural gas pipelines to some existing generation capacity.
It is not the function of SF to operate as a general occupation force. Yes, they are trainers but really designed to train insurgents or counter-insurgents in areas where we don't have an "official" presence. If we are going to do this kind of thing again, we need a special kind of unit. It would be a special MP unit in my imagination. It is difficult to describe this kind of unit as there is nothing in existance to compare it to but if we are going to go on a "nationbuilding" spree, we had better have them. They would have quite a bit of police training and infantry and some special ops skills. Think of MP crosstrained as infantry with Ranger school and you are getting close.
Combat forces would initially clear out combatant formations and these guys would come in behind them as a policing function to maintain order. The combat troops could be based nearby out of sight and used for quick reaction should someone get their ass in a sling. We are currently attempting to do this function with our regular combat forces and I just don't believe they are the best tool for the job. In fact, I don't believe we have the tool in our box that we need in order to do this job. It might not be cost effective to build one either because we haven't faced this kind of task since WWII. In post-WWII Europe, we had a much more developed Civil Affairs branch operating in occupied areas. Even so it took over 5 years to quell violence across Germany. Political assasinations were common in places like Berlin long after the war was over.
The main point is that we are not seeing any popular support of these "insurgents". They are simply being disruptive and that is very easy to do and doesn't take a lot of support or infrastructure. A dozen people can raise holy hell and be very difficult to find.
The Iraqis have had about two weeks to start to get a grip on the situation. I am prepared to give them some time.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 19:59
I believe BMOC is a bot. It appears to be sprinkling identical one-liner posts to many websites, a different one-liner each day. It appears that it might be a script and could be simple filling in the "website" field with the address of your blog. I noticed the same exact BMOC posts at several other sites.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 19:41
For what I consider to be probably the best data available to the average individual, see This PDF document from The Brookings Institution. In particular, page 31
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 14:35
Nationbuilding. You cannot do it, without securing the infrastructure first.
Right, and I say that is not the task of a combat force. The purpose of a combat force is combat. If you want to have a nationbuilding force, then we need a separate branch of the military to do it. People don't have a switch you can flip like some kind of robot. You can't send them into battle to destroy an enemy and then flip a switch and turn them into a humanitarian police force.
Electricity and oil production in Iraq remain below pre-war levels.
Untrue. It varies. Oil production is back to about the same with the re-opening of the northern pipeline.
Electricity production has been higher than pre-war levels and is current about at pre-war levels. The problem is that consumption is has grown more than production. People that never had air conditioners, TVs, and refrigerators have them now. Electricity demand has gone through the roof.
What you are now finding is that private entrepreneurs are buying large generators and selling electricity to the neighborhood when the official grid is off.
Just before the war, official production was at 4400 MW (down from a maximum of around 9000 MW in 1991 ... in other words, production had already been steadily dropping sice 1991 to 2003) August 2004's peak production was 4707 MW in August, about 300 MW more than at the start of the war.
People often look at Baghdad and extrapolate from that for the entire country. Not a good thing to do. Many towns that never had electricity under Saddam now have it 24x7. Electricity supplies are stable in the Northern sections of Iraq. Supply is much more available in the Southern parts too. Baghdad's demand for electricity has skyrocketed. It is estimated that Baghdad will need three times the pre-war level of electricity simply to service current demand 24x7. Doing that with oil for fuel is probably not the best approach. Oil is too valuable for other products to be burned in bulk as power plant fuel.
One thing that is being done is to attempt to capture and use the natural gas that Iraq has traditionally flared off as a waste product. They have little infrastructure for handling gas and it is slowly being built.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 14:26
we’re getting off-topic, but all our technology have severe limitations against the insurgent in an urban area.
To be sure. And what we are doing now in Iraq, if we are going to be doing any more of it in the future almost requires the development of a different kind of military force. More like a paramilitary police force designed to fight an insurgency and train the host police. We have done pretty well at training the Iraqi army but haven't done such a good job with the police. Our combat forces are not configured or trained to be good police, they are trained to be a good combat force.
We almost need a few "peacekeeping" brigades that are really paramilitary police. They would provide mainly a police function but a bit more heavily armed than average police, trained in combat tactics, able to call in air support/military surveillance assets, etc. Their main function would be checkpoints, house searches, neighborhood patrols. We are currently asking our regular combat forces to do these things and that really isn't what we pay them to do. We pay them to kill opposing military forces.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 00:18
Vietnam isn't a parallel so it would be pointless to go into it except to say that if we had done the same thing in Vietnam that we did in Iraq, things would be MUCH different. Instead of proping up an unpopular and corrupt government, had we taken it down and allowed the people to form a new one of their own making, it would have stood a better chance. If we had allowed additional political parties to form, allowed people outside the corrupt cabal of cronies that were running the place to have a voice and dissolved the then ruling political party, the people would have had more of a personal investment in their government.
Iraq will succeed because all of the groups in the country have a voice. They are all represented. The government in Iraq is their government that they elected. A government built that way can get the emotional buy-in that is required to get people to really defend it. The government of South Vietnam was a sham run by people who would kill you for dissent. It wasn't popular and there was no real way for alternative political parties to form and have a voice.
To even look at Vietnam as other than an example of what NOT to do when getting involved in a country is a waste of time. In Vietnam the insurgency had the support of the people. In Iraq, it doesn't. We should never place our troops in the position of defending an unpopular, corrupt, and cruel government. If we are going to send troops in, it should be at the request of a government that has a chance of survival or to tear it down and build one that does. As we did in Iraq.
We could have taken Saddam out and put the Baath party right back in power if we had wanted to and there wouldn't be so much strife now. But in the long run, by dissolving the Baath party and giving the government back to the people, we have a chance to build something that will last.
The Baathists will simmer down once Saddam is swinging from the end of a rope and all hope is lost of returning him to power.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 21.06.2006 @ 00:10
These days we have the capacity of one shot, one kill on a tank except by another tank or a soldier with an anti-tank weapon.
Should be :
Those days we didn't have the capacity of one shot, on kill on a tank ...
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 20.06.2006 @ 22:30
I must admit that at this point I have no clue as to what you are talking about. Mention was made of needing a much MORE massive military than the one we have. I countered with the fact that we are only using 10% of what we have now.
I was in the Army during the cold war. Our Army was much larger then than it is now. But we also didn't have terminally guided artillery shells and bombs that could be dropped from planes 20 miles away and hit a pinpoint target. There were no systems for the ground commander such as JSTARS. There were no "fire and forget" munitions that could find and engage tanks on their own without human intervention. Cruise missiles were new and GPS wasn't invented yet. These days we have the capacity of one shot, one kill on a tank except by another tank or a soldier with an anti-tank weapon.
Anyone putting massed armor against a modern US brigade combat team with air support is going to be in a world of hurt. They are going to find their tanks gone, their resupply convoys gone, their supply depots gone, and any deployed troops pinned down before they even SEE one of our units to engage.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 20.06.2006 @ 22:29
We don't need a "massive Army" anymore. With weapons systems that are now available, we are probably 10x more lethal with the same number of troops that we were in the first gulf war.
Armor is practically obsolete against US forces. You can't defend against our our as it is invisible to your radar. We will spot any vehicle you move and will kill it. If you move we will kill you, if you communicate we will kill you, and if you fire at us we will kill you.
What do we need a "massive" Army for? We aren't even using anywhere near our entire force in Iraq. The Army has about 500,000 active and 700,000 reserve for a total size of 1.2 million ... and that is just the Army. We have about 130,000 deployed in Iraq or about 10% of our force.
Just exactly what do we need a "massive" force for right now?
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 20.06.2006 @ 21:40
There is a big difference. The Democrats have a need to see Iraq as a defeat. A win in Iraq will be seen by the Democrats as a defeat for the Democrats and so that must be avoided at all costs. A defeat in Iraq would be seen as a vindication of the Democrats so in this sense, the interests of the Democrats and the interests of al Qaeda are in common.
Sure, both sides would like it to be over as quickly as possible, but one side with victory and the other with defeat.
Comment Posted By crosspatch On 20.06.2006 @ 21:33
