The Secret War - Special Forces, psyop, the air war—and the utterly inept Iraqi Army

Newsweek ^ | April 21, 2003 Issue | By Evan Thomas and Martha Brant

[Oldeconomybuyer]

April 21 issue — Know thine enemy is a cardinal rule of war. Ignorance was costly for American soldiers fighting guerrillas in Vietnam. Before plunging into Iraq, U.S. psychological-warfare operators studied certain cultural stereotypes.

ONE WAS THAT young Arab toughs cannot tolerate insults to their manhood. So, as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent. The Fedayeen, the fierce but undisciplined and untrained Iraqi irregulars, could not bear to be taunted. Whether they took the bait or saw an opportunity to attack, many Iraqis stormed out of their concealed or dug-in positions, pushing aside their human shields in some cases—to be—slaughtered by American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. “What you say is many times more important than what you do in this part of the world,” says a senior U.S. psy-warrior.

American armed forces have long tried to overwhelm the enemy. Outsmarting them is a relatively new idea. “We’re going to mess with their heads,” a senior Pentagon official told NEWSWEEK before the war began. But even the most gung-ho Bush administration officials were surprised by the suddenness of Saddam’s fall. So were the commanders on the ground. Inside a drab, dun-colored tent within a drab, dun-colored warehouse at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, resides the “brain” of the American war machine, the Joint Operations Center, the “JOC.” The tent (surrounded by barbed wire) is stuffed full of high-tech equipment, computers and giant plasma screens that show the battlefield in real time. The commanders in the JOC kept waiting for the battle that never came.

[snip]

[Oldeconomybuyer]

   

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[Mister Magoo]

My favorite excerpt: "But the oddest discovery came in the abandoned mansion of Tariq Aziz, Sad-dam’s deputy prime minister and his longtime emissary to the West. Aziz must have liked his trips abroad. His house was full of old copies of Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan, bottles of Dakkar Noir and Obsession cologne, more than 50 American movies on DVD (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “The Godfather”). Then there was a Princeton Review test-preparation book, titled “Cracking the GMAT,” marked with notes in the margins."

[grobdriver]

“What you say is many times more important than what you do in this part of the world,” says a senior U.S. psy-warrior.

And now we know that all Liberals should really go to live in Arabia to be happy.
Nothing will be expected of them but words - which is all they offer America.

[eeman]

This is actually a pretty interesting article, especially considering it comes from Newsweak. A short excerpt is below:

For the first time, the Air Force dropped “tank buster” bombs dispensing heat-seeking bomblets that float down by parachute, sniffing for tanks and then hammering them with munitions designed to penetrate their vulnerable topsides. The military is not yet sure how many Iraqi armored vehicles it destroyed, but the number is likely to reach well into the hundreds, possibly thousands.

[TomB]

That was probably the AGM-154A Joint Standoff Weapon [JSOW]

	AGM-154A (Baseline JSOW) The warhead of the AGM-154A consists of 145 BLU-97/B submunitions. Each bomblet is designed for multi-target in one payload. The bomblets have a shaped charge for armor defeat capability, a fragmenting case for material destruction, and a zirconium ring for incendiary effects.
	AGM-154B (Anti-Armor) The warhead for the AGM-154B is the BLU-108/B from the Air Force's Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW) program. The JSOW will carry six BLU-108/B submunitions. Each submunition releases four projectiles (total of 24 per weapons) that use infrared sensors to detect targets. Upon detection, the projectile detonates, creating an explosively formed, shaped charge capable of penetrating reinforced armor targets.
	AGM-154C (Unitary Variant) The AGM-154C will use a combination of an Imaging Infrared (IIR) terminal seeker and a two-way data link to achieve point target accuracy through aimpoint refinement and man-in-the-loop guidance. The AGM-154C will carry the BLU-111/B variant of the MK-82, 500- pound general purpose bomb, equipped with the FMU-152 Joint Programmable Fuze (JPF) and is designed to attack point targets.

[KeyWest]

Newsweek and Time have a lot of catching up to do, they were so wrong in last weeks issues.

[LS]

Ping to me.

[LouD]

Then there was a Princeton Review test-preparation book, titled “Cracking the GMAT,” marked with notes in the margins

An MBA is an excellent way to make a career transition. Tariq was planning ahead. ;-)

[DeweyCA]

CENTCOM supplied its troops with decks of cards identifying Saddam and 54 of his top lieutenants (Saddam, naturally, was the Ace of Spades).

And Baghdad Bob must have been one of the "jokers" in this deck.

[eeman]

Thanks for the information and the link. Just think, in a few years, someone will write a book about what really happened over (omitting some classified stuff, of course). Meanwhile, our military hopefully will continue to develop smarter, more lethal stand-off weapons and force multiplier weapons. That way, we never have to name another navy ship, etc after a horrible battle like Peleliu.