It’s Fun to Be Right III
The Professor already linked Tom Holsinger’s fascinating new essay, but one passage stuck in my head:
It is now possible for the United States to strike effectively on the ground throughout Iraq’s strategic depth at the onset of hostilities.
The United States does not have the heliborne forces to hit everywhere at once, but can hit almost anywhere with about an airmobile division equivalent on the first day (the “inside-out” plan with a real punch). That, with the usual overwhelming airpower and a second, air-transportable, division flown into captured airfields on the second day, is more than enough to shatter potential Iraqi resistance immediately, even without a reinforced corps advancing up the Euphrates from Kuwait. We might not use this plan, but certainly have the capability now.
Some readers of this post of mine complained that the US doesn’t have enough helicopter airlift to make it work. (Excuse the fact that at a late hour, I’d switched the 82nd and the 101st — I’d gotten it right in a previous discussion of the “rolling” or “two-stage” invasion option. One problem with blogging, as Norah Vincent mentioned, is that there’s no editor to catch those little errors.) Are the doubters about American mobility a little less doubtful now? As amateur as I am, Holsinger is professional.
Anyway, we have the airlift. Many of our assets are in place; more are moving into theater. The rhetoric — even from Colin Powell — is ratcheting up. Brace yourselves.
Let’s not go at this by fighting the last war all over again. There are several things to consider here that are usually overlooked.
1. We own the airspace over 80% of iraq, we overfly take pictures and monitor ground activity daily of the areas under both no-fly zones. We’ve been able to take in intelligence of ground activities in this area for the last 10 years.
2. If it is an all out invasion, we are sorely understaffed along the border with iraq/Saudi ( in my opinion, but based on facts and figures regularly published about GW I). if its a decapitation move, like Panama, we’ve got just about the right size force and about the same players in place as we did on that one.
Decapitation works like this, suddenly all communications stops, power stops and the airborne forces drop, not on the suburbs but right into downtown bagdhad. backed by complete mastery of the skies, you can make you airbridge at Bagdhad international airport.
Worst case: Market-Garden II
Best Case: A month of saddam holed up in an embassy, while our guys play Van Halens “PANAMA” 24 hours a day, till he gives up and goes on trial in florida.
3. Assuming that decapitation is in order, what we are talking about is a slow process of closing off or controlling information flow into and out of both the areas under the no fly zones. we’ve been bombing on an almost daily schedule in both of these areas, just how many SAM’s do we think they have? is it more likely they are blowing up communications pathways? Could it be that we are blinding them before we move into an area?
If Saddam cant get a clear picture of whats in going on there, its ours.
4. Assume that the 82nd drops from the sky one moonless night in january in Tikrit? What kind of response can we reasonably expect? How do we paralyze iraqi counter action until we control the whole situation.
Do the Iraqis believe that scenario is likely to haqppen? what tools do they have to respond? How fast would word get back to Iraqi command and control in bagdhad?
5. I dont think its helicopters that are the limiting factor in this operation, its the parameters of the mission in the first place. if its full scale invasion, I think we are grossly under-armed in manpower and stores, which is why I just dont think thats what we are looking at here.
It just doesnt feel right to me.
Good point, especially #5 regarding manpower and stores. Manpower is easy enough to fix, or at least much easier than it was in the fall of 1990.
Stores also worry me. No matter how much you bring, you always need more. And we fought the ’91 war largely off our Cold War stocks, and spent much of the ’90s failing to replace them.
I suspect that’s a big reason why we’ve gone to the UN, allowed inspections to go ahead, etc. It’s gonna take a lot of bombs and missiles — a lot of bombs and missiles we didn’t have on the shelf already like we did ten years ago.
My concern with the scenario sketched above (heliborne assault straight to Baghdad) is the extreme susceptibility of helicopters to air defenses. Jets can fly high enough that they’re invlunerable to most surface fire, and with proper tactics and supporting suppressive fire, can prevent any of the SAMs that could actually hit them from being fired.
Helicopters can’t. A regular old .50 cal machine gun can do a pretty good job shooting up a helo, not to mention any real AAA guns, SAMs, RPGs, and even smaller caliber weapons.
Trying to fly a significant number of helos (which are very loud, giving plenty of warning even in a black night) through a heavily defended airspace seems like it could as easily turn into another charge of the light brigade suicide mission as it could be a success.
Yeah, Iraq’s troops have low morale, yadda yadda. But it doesn’t take much morale or motivation to take potshots at a group of helos that fly by, since they’re not firing back.
We don’t have a division of helicopter lift in the area yet. We might not deploy that much in the next month. We could if we wanted to.
Mr. Turnbull overlooks the implications of treason.
The principal item of stores is fuel, notably aviation fuel. PGM’s reduce the need for aviation fuel as well as the tonnage of necessary munitions.
Nothing says that the 82nd has to be heliborne. While parachute assault is believed to be a dead tactic, nothing says that the Army can’t use it.
I think we’ll see us ramp up slowly, then a big, all at once that ends with the actual assault. The question, as pointed out here, is hwo to we have enough men to hold the ground we capture? Market Garden was a “near run thing”. A few more resources, a bit of luck, and it would be hailed today as a stroke of tactical genius.
The problem with all of this stuff is that the core of all military strategy is a basis of deception. We dont really know what assets are ‘in theatre’ , we are just guessing( and more importantly, so are “they”). What we hear on the news is what we’ve been allowed to hear. We can only make our guesses on the information weve been given, and we have to take it as understood that what we have been given is not anything of any real value.
In point of fact, we dont even really know what units are still in Afghanistan. Its not outside the realm of possibility to think that Iraq is not even our actual target, that “somewhere else” is where we are really going, and this has been a newer upgraded version of of WWII’s OPERATION FORTITUDE.
Calais seemed an obvious target to most everyone, up until the first troops landed at Normandy. The deception was so well done that the german high command believed that the Normandy landings were a ruse for up to 4 days after the landings.
Could we be experiencing the same thing here? To some degree, Im absolutely certain that we are.
But to quote Han Solo ” I prefer a straight on fight to all this sneakin around….”
Stephen, Tom points out that we don’t have enough helos in theater yet but I still think you are taking a comment of Tom’s out of context to support your idea of using the 101st deep in Iraq. Recall that my concern about using helo-borne troops deep in Iraq unsupported by mechanized forces was their logistical tail. This is why airmobile forces can quickly move tactical distances without problem but not operational distances or strategic distances unsupported.