Our English Friends
I posted a few words on this to The Command Post earlier, but it deserves greater attention as an object lesson in media bias and/or stupidity. (No need to pick just one.) Read this snippet from The Times (UK) Online:
More than 30,000 American reinforcements were ordered to the Gulf last night as fierce battles raged through southern Iraq and the Republican Guard went on the offensive.
A thousand paratroops were also dropped into northern Iraq, where they seized a key airfield in the first sign that America was opening up a northern front.The deployments came as war planners were forced to change tactics and put the battle for Baghdad on hold; Pentagon chiefs conceded that they had underestimated the resistance they would face in other parts of the country.
The push towards the capital has been severely hampered by repeated attacks on armoured columns and supply convoys trying to bolster the American front line 50 miles south of Baghdad. These ambushes have fuelled criticism that the Pentagon went to war with too few troops.
This story doesn’t deserve a good, hard fisking, but it does warrant a little more attention than the typical newspaper reader is going to give it.
The claim that the Pentagon suddenly finds itself needing “30,000 more troops” is just plain silly. 4th Infantry Division was expected to be in the opening assault, moving in from Turkey. We know what happened — Ankara fiddled while our transport ships burned fuel going in circles. It will take another week to ten days to get 4ID in place in Kuwait or Umm Qasr, and that takes care of half the 30,000.
The other half the Pentagon didn’t know it needed until just now? Let’s see. Down at Ft. Hood, Texas, the men and women of the 1st Cavalry Division (basically an armored division with extra Apaches and transport choppers), got their “get ready to deploy” orders on March 2. Two days later, “Old Ironsides,” the 1st Armored Division, was told to get ready to move.
Those two divisions alone represent more than 30,000 troops. Add in 4ID, and you’re talking more than doubling our current land firepower. Odd, isn’t it, that the deployment orders went out to all three divisions, weeks before the “crisis.” With foreknowledge like that, it’s a wonder we didn’t take out Saddam on the first night.
I’m not saying the battle plan has gone without a hitch. Surely, the Times is right when it claims CENTCOM underestimated Iraqi resistance. Eisenhower’s observation that “no plan survives contact with the enemy” has become clich
Every dead American soldier is france’s responsibility.
The Prof has Ledeen’s column, but are any of us really surprised?
I still like my comment from yesterday: This war has been a failure in the same way that a round of golf has been a failure if Tiger had a hole in one at the first, birdied a Par 4 at the second, and is now about to tee off at the third.
If you start with the idea that the goal is a score of 18 or that you’re supposed to conquer a country with only one death (Saddam’s) at the most, then the real world is a failure every time.
There are potential outcomes which are truly horrifying. I do worry. I just haven’t seen anything yet to make me think we’re in a lost cause.
I hate to be rude, but Clausewitz is usually the one credited with saying, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Although, I bet Ramses I probably said it as well.
Even the Romans said that Hannibal’s victory at Cannae was the only time a battle plan did survive contact with the enemy.
I do love the way papers say that the plan has been changed when they have never seen the plan and wouldn’t understand it if they did. The people who planned it know what it takes to formulate a battle plan and exactly what can go wrong with it. If they didn’t take into account that many of the defenders would act like terrorists they would probably be too stupid to remember to breathe, much less plan wars. Afghanistan was beautiful in a difficult place and it took weeks. We are a week in and some are saying we messed up because the war isn’t over. It is over, the Iraqis just don’t know it yet.
The comment about no war plan surviving enemy contact was (I bleieve) made by Helmut von Moltke in 1906.