Posted on 04/03/2003 4:37:12 PM PST by JudgeAmint
"America's Stunning Victory"
by J. R. Nyquist
It is now apparent that Iraq is on the verge of defeat. The threat to U.S. lines of communications has been countered. Any delays to America’s forward advance were therefore insignificant. At the same time, Iraqi forces were unable to launch an effective counterattack. As these words are written, Iraq’s best divisions are being shredded, the Iraqi people are turning against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the prospect of a sudden Iraqi collapse is before us.
If Saddam’s army collapses or surrenders in the next two or three weeks the war will be nothing short of a blitzkrieg operation. The word “blitzkrieg” is German for lightning war. Instead of fighting for many months or years to defeat a country, lightning warfare collapses a country in a matter of weeks. This method of warfare is chiefly attributed to two British military theorists, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart. In describing the application of the blitzkrieg technique against Poland in World War II, Fuller explained: “German armoured tactics were based on speed more so than on firepower, for their object was to accelerate confusion.” This passage helps us to understand why British and American troops were ordered to advance rapidly into the very heart of Iraq. The object was, as Fuller stated, “to accelerate confusion.” Fuller also noted that “points of resistance, fortified areas, anti-tank positions, woods and villages were normally avoided, and the lines of least resistance leading to the enemy’s rear were sought out.” This is exactly what U.S. and British forces have done in Iraq. And just as this technique worked in the Second World War, it works today.
The speed of the coalition advance, the massive bombing campaign and the direct strike at the dictator himself,
accelerated Iraqi confusion as allied forces bypassed fortifications and heavily defended urban areas. In 1939 the German forces collapsed Poland in 27 days. The coalition timetable in Iraq appears to be of similar length. What is astonishing is the small size of the invading forces in the Iraq operation. We are now seeing the effectiveness of real-time battle management. In the divisional engagements now taking place we see that Iraqi forces cannot react or coordinate their moves in a timely fashion. This is not only due to bombing, but is also due to rapid U.S. troop movements. Consequently, the Third Infantry and First Marine divisions are picking apart the Republican Guard divisions in front of Baghdad.
The American operational method differs from the German blitzkrieg in the incredible precision of America’s firepower. United States forces now combine firepower superiority with high maneuverability. Add to this the real-time management of friendly forces that gives U.S. troops a rare invulnerability. We are seeing this demonstrated before our eyes. The only way to cope with this kind of advantage is to use weapons of mass destruction, including electromagnetic (EMP) warheads, to disrupt America’s decisive command-and-control advantage and to counter America’s firepower advantage. It is safe to say that the Iraqi position has deteriorated to such an extent that a coalition victory can only be disrupted if Iraq uses biological, chemical or atomic weapons. Even in that event, it is probable that such attacks would be self-defeating for the Iraqi regime, both morally and militarily.
It was recently acknowledged that the Pentagon planned a 30 day operation against Saddam Hussein. Despite the disruption of this plan by Turkey’s refusal to allow the Fourth Infantry Division to pass through Turkish territory and attack from the north, the operation will probably be accomplished within the allotted 30 days. Those in the media who erroneously allege that U.S. officials promised victory in hours or days have been lying, and their ulterior motives deserve closer scrutiny. Such reports reveal a sour impulse to portray victories as defeats and rapid advances as “setbacks.” Politically distorted persons, some of them military professionals, have mischaracterized this campaign in a way that is unfair to the Bush administration and the Pentagon. Retired U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark recently suggested that a quick coalition victory is “not going to happen.” Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter told a Lisbon radio interviewer on Tuesday, “The U.S. is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we cannot win.”
Those who oppose the war out of ideological hatred, who are eager to gloat over an American defeat, have dug a pit for themselves. When this war is over, who will want to be associated with the wrongheaded claims of those who secretly looked forward to America’s defeat? Evidence of Iraqi duplicity and the horror of Saddam’s terror regime will be proved. For those too lazy to read the documentary evidence before the war, there will be pictures and eyewitness testimonials broadcast on television in the aftermath. Of course, persons animated by anti-American ideology will cling to their bitter rhetoric; but these will be separated from sane opinion by a clear and ever-widening divide.
Through all of this, America’s real enemies have learned an important lesson: namely, that U.S. military power can only be effectively opposed by employing mass destruction weapons at the outset of a conflict. If U.S. power is to be overthrown in the world, that overthrow must rely upon nuclear, biological and chemical munitions. Only an attack that destroys U.S. conventional military advantages is workable, and this attack must be overwhelming. In order to work effectively a mass destruction attack must decapitate the U.S. leadership. It must cripple the U.S. economy and paralyze the American military. Anything short of this merely invites destruction in turn. The same lesson can be drawn from the terror attacks of Sept. 11. As destructive as the attacks were, the United States is a huge country with nearly 290 million people. Killing 3,000 persons and destroying two large buildings only served to stir the sleeping giant into action.
Ironically, those in Iraq and Afghanistan who celebrated Sept. 11 as a victory are now stewing in defeat. This is the fruit of Sept. 11. Instead of stimulating an Islamic holy war against the West, the United States will have effectively eliminated two hostile regimes. We may shortly learn that both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are dead. The lesson of these actions will not be missed in Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang or Beijing. Dictatorships suffer from intrinsic weaknesses. They are economically brittle, technologically backward and administratively challenged. It cannot be repeated too often that the weapons of choice for such regimes must therefore be nuclear, chemical and biological. Only by leveling the playing field with such weapons do the inferior states of the totalitarian periphery stand a chance against American technological and administrative vitality.
The Soviet theorists of the 1960s were correct when they wrote: “Strategic missile troops will be the basic troops of modern massive armed forces. They are the decisive force at the disposal of supreme commands.” If you cannot win with conventional forces, if you are thoroughly outclassed on the battlefield, you must turn to the great equalizer. What the United States must do now, in the wake of its victory in Iraq, is anticipate the anti-American coalition’s intensification of WMD proliferation. This will be their response to America’s victory. Since this is a potentially effective strategy, the United States must solidify its defenses against such weapons.
© 2003 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
April 2, 2003
Unfortunately, Secretary Rumsfeld's brain trust and the current Army leadership seem to think the M-1 is obsolete, a relic of the past. I wonder if the Iraq campaign will change any minds?
This would seem to parallel statements made by several folks on FR concerning initial use of WMD against the US.
If I were Sec Def, and had limited resources, I wouldn't build additional tanks, but instead would build additional air/sealift to deliver the tanks we have to ANY battlefield, Turkey or no.
Rumsfeld wants to develop the next generation of vehicles to replace traditional tanks with gun turrets. Rumsfeld want to pay for the new generation by doing away with the program to convert original M1 tanks to M1A2's. Supposedly they will use missles rather than guns, and have a longer range. The weight savings by eliminating the turret will allow them to be tranported with fewer aircraft and ships. Also the new armored vehicles will be able to fire their weapons even more quickly than the current M1A1; this is due to elimination of the time it takes the turret to rotate.
Amen, brother! That's a much better idea than trying to build cracker box armored cars to fit on C-130's. Any ideas how long a Stryker armored car, which a .50 cal can pierce, would last on a battlefield infested with RPG's and Kornet's???
The best force is a balanced force. But those LAVs with the Marines sure don't seem to have much trouble, and you have to admit that right now, the threat from Iraqi tanks is virtually nonexistent.
"It cannot be repeated too often that the weapons of choice for such regimes must therefore be nuclear, chemical and biological. Only by leveling the playing field with such weapons do the inferior states of the totalitarian periphery stand a chance against American technological and administrative vitality."
"What the United States must do now, in the wake of its victory in Iraq, is anticipate the anti-American coalition’s intensification of WMD proliferation. This will be their response to America’s victory. Since this is a potentially effective strategy, the United States must solidify its defenses against such weapons."
Strange how this author seems to dwell on what it would take to stop the U.S. It's almost as if he his trying to drive a point home to our enemies, a useful point.
The future combat vehicle's planned capabilities are impressive, but assuming the technology can be developed, it's at least ten if not 20 years away.
The weapons you describe don't address the problem of increasingly sophisticated ATGM's. Fortunately, Saddam acquired few Kornets due to the embargo and relied on old RPG's. That's not the case with other potential adversaries. Sending Strykers or Bradleys with no tank cover into that environment would be suicide. It makes no sense to shift to less survivable vehicles in a more lethal environment. We can't assume we'll always go up against an enemy starved of technology by a 12 year embargo, but may go up against an A-Team armed with the latest Russian-developed technology. So, there's no alternative to maintaining a tank force until FCV is available.
I think we both agree we need more transport of all kinds.
In its human controlled version it's fast becoming obsolete but make it much smaller, remove the seats and install an autonomous computer and you have a fearsome machine that comes with no political cost to put in harms way. The sky is now full of robot airplanes. Next we need robot soldiers. The hard part will be the artifical intelligence to not kill civilians. A fire only when fired upon behavior may be a solution.
Completely agree.
PRNK is going to school off this.
I'm not really thrilled with the article for this thread, but the pictures are nice.
Anyway, what better place than this thread to mention the obvious:
The U.S. has the world's mightiest military due to an amazing combination of technology, training, and integration.
It is the integration that is the least understood. Our soldiers on the ground are digitally linked through HQ to every unit in the skies and in the rear, and thus coordinated into highly effective local tactics that fit in with the overall strategy.
What does all of this mean? It means that simply copying American technology *won't* give pipsqueak nations a competitive force to challenge us. It means that simply adapting our training won't allow another nation to match us.
But what the Iraq war illustrates is something even more amazing: that even with ex-Soviet military advisors, the latest in French and German military equipment, the breaking of all military rules of acceptable behavior, and willing suicide volunteers, that a 600,000 man army is little more than modern roadkill for any sizeable U.S. military force (in this case, 1/6th the size of the defenders).
Or put another way: the rest of the world is failing to match the U.S. in *any* significant category (e.g. technology, training, integration, et al).
And the so-called "great equalizers" are being threatened by our new dominance in ABM interception technology, special forces operations in strategic areas, as well as our electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
Thus, the rest of the world is not only wasting every penny that it spends to try to compete with our own military, but it is also playing into our strong suit by insisting upon military solutions to conflicts with us (a *clever* Iraq would have played a South Africa-style hand, completely disarmed in an open, visible fashion, and simply held on until GWB was no longer in office, for instance).
So North Korea wants a nuclear war with us and old Europe wants an economic trade war with us, the strongest economy in the history of this entire planet?!
B.r.i.n.g. I.t. O.n.
Yes. And IMO, he has it right.
Not really, the like the B-52, the M-1 will be a mainstay for decades to come. No replacement is in the pipeline. It probably isn't needed. There are a lot of other goodies comming that will augment it.
Even if all of that were achieved, that would still leave our boomers available for global retaliation on a scale never before witnessed.
No, the *only* answer to American military power is to channel any conflict with the U.S. away from our storng suits (e.g. economic or military wars) into areas in which we've traditionally been more vulnerable, such as diplomacy, negotiations, and trade relations.
...But it won't hurt my feelings if the rest of the world never figures that fact out.
No, I mean the Kornets that took out the first M-1's lost due to enemy fire. You understand, of course, that the Russians are seeking to upgrade their technology too. Look, their economy may be behind ours and their army may be run by unimaginative neaderthals, but the Russians are still pretty good engineers. And what they produce seems to get leaked all over the world.
The posted article was about the next war, when our enemy will be prepared to use WMD from the get go.
Tanks would then be, shall I say, passe'?
Or is that just my take?
During the mid 1950's our preacher at a small Southern Baptist church in the Florida Panhandle had a PHD from Yale. Dr. Lett was semi-retired and served trying to help a struggling country church. One day the preacher and his wife showed up at church driving a brand new Chrysler. My Mother told me later that their Son who was an engineer at Chrysler, had designed the car and given one to them.
I basically forgot about it until one day I was watching the History Channel program on the development of the Abrams tank. They interviewed the head of the Chrysler design team several times and he was identified as Dr. Phillip Lett. I noticed he had a strong resemblance to the old preacher and asked my Mother what the preacher's Son's name was.
She told me his name was Phillip. I guess it is possible there is another Dr. Phillip Lett who looks like our old preacher but I am reasonably sure that is him.
The problem is that technology is going to continue to advance. Proliferation is going to continue. In fact, I predict that without external influence, rogue states will develop the capability to turn out WMD as easily as we turn out desktop computers today.
Thus while it may be possible for the US to stay ahead of the curve. We will have to be ever vigilant. And possibly excercise an ever increasing amount of control over such states.
I hate hate hate to quote Jimmy Carter. But there is some truth to his statement "We need to be building the kind of world we want to live in when we are not the biggest"
OK, Carter's a jerk for assuming that we will not be the biggest. But my concern is that biggest want matter. WMD will become so plentiful and easy to produce that size isn't going to matter much. Any country will be able to demolish any other county in a matter of a few seconds.
I'm all for missle defence systems, but I see them as possibly only a temporary stopgap.
We need to eliminate governments that would resort to the kind of savagery we've seen out of Saddam and NKorea's premier chia head.
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