Iraq question

Hoosier did u look tv show "mash"? (i think that was the name,i sow that loong time a go).Fabula is in korean war when some doctors try to save lifes when war raging.Interesten this ,that is humoristic show,with doses of irony and sarcasm. I remember the scene when some guy got "purple heart" coz egg shell hit him in the eye when he droped egg on explosion r something :lol:

Try to say that all US soldier who got wounded get purple heart medal.But i think that is far from this topic.

 

Must just be Indiana. Wasn't Jessica Lynch National Guard?

 

That wouldn't amount to a couple of days of hard fought battle in WW2.
For a nation of 300 million with one of the largest militaries in the world (and over a period of nearly 4 years) that is far from being "bled white".

 

Agreed. I don't think anybody can say the US has had anything remotely resembling "heavy" losses. Consider the assault on Fallujah. Usually urban assaults like that make for high losses for the attacker (just look up some of the urban WW2 assaults, Berlin, Stalingrad). On the other side, how heavy have insurgency losses been?

 

Ive heard that its most likely around 5,000 - 10,000, but since the insurgents bury there dead as soon as possible so they dont seem to have many causalities it could be as much as 20k + Which is good

not being in a war, you are probably thinking that iI dont care for life, I personally dont care much of the dead of a person who doesnt even show his face when chops a innocents victims head off.

 

The current policy for the US is not to declare enemy casualties. The "reasoning" for this is because the government is afraid that large body counts will make us look like war mongers and few body counts will make us look like inept cowards. Me personally, I want the body counts.

 

Grieg:
PFC Jessica Lynch was with the 507th Maint. Co. (Regular U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps.)
Perhaps the distinction is for the Indiana National Guard only... but I can neither confirm nor deny.

sinissa:
I can't speak to how severely she was wounded, but she was a communications specialist (Signals) that took shrapnel when a mortar-round struck the building she was working-in.
I know there are female military personnel that have lost arms,legs and suffered severe, career-ending injuries as a result of service in the Iraq War. I don't think their Purple Heart was awarded for a paper-cut, or hang-nail.

Tim

 

Actualy u got body counts from UN,number of civilians who died directly r indirectly as result os bombing,US actions and embargo.

 

Not actual numbers but extrapolated "estimates" AFAIK.

 

True,exsact number we will newer know.

 

I think you misunderstand. I want to see how many enemy personnel we are hitting. In other words, I want to see the score.

The military on the ground knows about how many enemy forces they are killing in engagements as they get debriefs after the engagements.

 

Statistics about enemy KIA are not reliable.
You know old equasion:
11 enemy KIA
+ 30 civilian KIA
+ 10 chickens
+ 2 goats
+ 3 dogs
= 60 enemy KIA + 5 civilians killed by mistake (for which we are sorry, but it's their own foult becouse they should not be there in the first place)

 

Which is presumeably why no 'enemy' KIA figures are published. Because you simply can't be sure, and the last thing you want from a PR view is some journalist playing hell with your figures, because even if the journalist is wrong the public will believe them more than the military. :roll:

 

I accidently run on this site,when i searched some PIC's.
http://www.indybay.org/international/iraq/

 

Did Bush & co. finaly lost their last remaming marbles. It seems that they want to allienate their last remainig suporters in Iraq and provoke another war in the area.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6251167.stm

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2788262&page=1

Good informed comments:
http://www.juancole.com/2007/01/us-forces-storm-iranian-consulate-in.html

 

Has any one read ''The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century''
by USMC, Colonel Thomas X. Hammes?


In 1991, Israeli historian and military analyst Martin van Creveld shocked the defense community with his book, The Transformation of War. At least, he shocked that part more worried about post-Soviet threats than about buying weapons. Van Creveld preached that future danger to the West would come from groups other than state armies and that they would employ means that we would find repulsively violent and indiscriminate. In the intervening 13 years, all this has come to pass, but, as Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes eloquently argues in this important new book, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

What we are in fact seeing is "fourth generation warfare," (4GW) a term coined in a famous 1989 paper in the Marine Corps Gazette and now easily available on the Internet. Hammes argues that 4GW, far from being something academic or esoteric, represents the cumulative efforts of "practical people" trying to solve the problem of confronting superior military power. Their efforts are bearing fruit: "At the strategic level, the combination of our perceived technological superiority and our bureaucratic organization sets us up for a major failure against a more agile, intellectually prepared enemy." Amen.

The failure, in Hammes' view, will not be defeat in some Clausewitzian "decisive battle," but failure nonetheless as American politicians, tiring of the costs and despairing of victory, withdraw our forces short of achieving our objectives. He traces the evolution of 4GW through its successes--Mao, the Vietnamese, Sandinistas, Somalis, and Palestinians (in the first Intifada)--and its failures--the Al-Aqsa Intifada and perhaps al-Qa'ida, although the verdict, I fear, is still out on the latter.

It is the transnational element--we are not confronting state-based armies or even isolated insurgencies--that is driving the evolution of guerilla warfare into 4GW. So the 4GW danger in Iraq is not so much the insurgency but whether the conflict acts as a recruiting depot, training facility, and War Lab for violent transnational ideological groups, as was the case in Afghanistan.

Hammes concludes that when 4GW organizations remain true to their socially networked roots, and keep their focus on influencing their state opponents' desires to continue, they win. Such organizations only lose when they drop out of the 4GW paradigm--as when the Palestinians of the Al Aqsa Intifida shifted their focus away from influencing Israeli and Western opinion and directly towards destruction of the State of Israel, or perhaps when al-Qa'ida brought the war to the US homeland on 9/11.

In the last third of the book, Hammes raises issues that should trouble every US political and military leader. Perhaps most penetrating, given DoD's current focus, is the observation is that if information technology is the key to success in future combat, then we're probably going to lose. The reason is that dispersed, rapidly evolving networks can more quickly invent ways to exploit new information technologies than can large, bureaucratic, hierarchical structures such as the Pentagon. The parade of viruses, Trojans, and other worms that assault our (non-Mac) computers daily attest to the truth of this argument.

The solution, in Hammes' view, is to become more of a network ourselves. He is brutally realistic about the problems this entails--for starters we would need to eliminate about 50% of the field grade and general officers on active duty, which agrees with most studies of successful transformation--to "lean," for example-- which suggest reducing management ranks by 25-40%. Such thinking is a refreshing change from the gradualist school of "transformation" prevalent in DoD these days.

Many of his other recommendations will be familiar to those who have read US Army Major Don Vandergriff's The Path to Victory, which Hammes credits as the basis for his own personnel proposals: Solve the people problems and our troops will figure out ways to employ suitable technologies. Hammes' application of Vandergriff's ideas to fashioning a military capable of 4GW are among the most innovative parts of the book and potentially among the most decisive.

By the way, watch for Hammes' sly take on the phrase "coalition of the willing," which reveals a biting wit generally thought rare in Marine colonels.

If you are curious about where armed conflict is heading over the next 20-30 years, you must read The Sling and The Stone. You may not agree with all of Colonel Hammes' recommendations, but you'll find it hard to argue that he hasn't made a correct diagnosis of the problem. And just in time.

 

damnit ...why wont these people put on uniforms and ride arround in proper tanks and ships and airplanes ...this is all so unfair ... perhaps if we offered to give them all this stuff for free with free 90 days unlimeted tech support , would that work ? its got to be better than the way we are doing it now...

 

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there was an article on reuters stating that the U.S. Armed forces had failed to reach its recruitment drive for the second month running ,unnofficialy by about 15%,
this in a month full of school leavers , it go on to quote a negative attitude to enlisment amongst parents and other" influencers"

I'm more interested in the numbers for the national guards ,
some of the ones who got send to irak got savagely reamed . it should have some influence on the enlistments

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Some good points, but looks bleak overall.........

No choice: Stay the course in Iraq
U.S. leadership deserves support for one last effort to succeed, says a retired Army general.
By Barry R. McCaffrey, Retired Army Gen. BARRY R. MCCAFFREY commanded the 24th Infantry Division in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He teaches at West Point, serves as a military analyst for NBC News.



IRAQ IS BEING ripped apart by a low-grade civil war compounded by a dysfunctional, Shiite-dominated government. As many as 3,000 Iraqis are being killed or kidnapped a month, and American forces have suffered more than 27,000 killed and wounded. But we have little choice as Americans except to give our new military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and our new ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, the political and military support they need during the next 12 months. Failure in Iraq at this point could generate a regional war among Iraq's neighbors that would imperil U.S. interests for a decade or more.

I just returned from a week in Iraq and Kuwait, visiting combat units in the field as well as senior U.S., coalition and Iraqi officials. I was sent by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I'm an adjunct professor, to do a strategic and operational assessment of security operations there. I know that the problems we face are grim indeed, but Petraeus' strategy is sound, and the situation is not hopeless.

Our troops face thousands of attacks each month from Sunni and Shiite Arabs employing improvised explosive devices (more than 2,900 a month), snipers, rocket and mortar fire, mines and, recently, suicide truck bombings rigged to release noxious chlorine gas. The "burn rate" on the Iraq war is $9 billion a month. The Iraqis are in despair. Three million are refugees or have fled the country. The ill-equipped Iraqi police and army suffered 49,000 casualties in the last 14 months. There is no security in most of the country under the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

The threat we face is huge. More than 100,000 armed militia members and insurgents confront central authorities. A handful of foreign fighters (about 500) and a couple of thousand Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq extremists provoke sectarian violence through murderous attacks on the innocent civilian Shiite population and their mosques. This provokes a response of brutality and ethnic cleansing against the vulnerable Sunni civilian population.

U.S. forces have arrested more than 120,000 suspects and hold more than 27,000 as detainees. We have killed about 20,000 of these armed fighters. However, the armed struggle shows few signs of disruption.

Iraq's neighbors, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have intensified the civil war as an extension of their own larger Shiite-Sunni conflict for power — or as a reaction to the presence of a foreign presence in Iraq. This war is primarily an internal struggle, with the preponderance of the leadership, fighters, money and armaments generated inside Iraq.

However, there is no question that Iran has provided the Shiites with leadership from the elite Quds Force of its Revolutionary Guard and with highly lethal EFP (explosively formed projectile) bombs, which are a major cause of U.S. casualties. The Syrians have provided sanctuary to Saddam Hussein Baathists. The Syrians also have ignored or aided the passage of 40 to 70 jihadists a month into Iraq. (Most of them are suicide bombers who are dead within two weeks.) The Turks also have made threatening military and political moves to confront the prosperous Iraqi Kurdish regions at their border.

This is a dangerous neighborhood.

What is the basis for hope? U.S. troops continue to show determination, discipline and courage. We will have organized 370,000 members of the Iraqi police and army, in 120 battalions, by the end of the year. The Maliki government has finally gotten its nerve and allowed joint operations by its police and U.S. special operations forces to arrest Sadr militia members in Baghdad. Petraeus has placed more than 50 Iraqi/U.S. police and army strong points throughout the city. The murder rate has plummeted in response. The Sunni tribes in Anbar province have turned on the foreign fighters.

We will know by the end of the summer if Petraeus' strategy is going to prompt an adequate political response from the Iraqis. Only through the success of reconciliation talks can the bitter civil strife be moderated. We are running out of time.

The American people have walked away from support of this war. The Army is beginning to show signs of great strain. Many units are now on their third combat tour, and the tours are being routinely extended. Recruiting standards are being lowered. Our equipment is shot. By the beginning of the coming year, we will be forced to downsize our deployment to Iraq or the Army will begin to unravel.

The United States is now at a crossroads. We are in a position of strategic peril. We need to support the U.S. leadership team in Iraq for this one last effort to succeed.




Just hope it doesnt lead to an American cut and run like Vietnam, because the carnage in Iraq at the moment would escalate ten fold if they did.

We started this and now we're in it we have to stay the course even if it takes 10 years like Swartzkopf said it would take after the first invasion.

The U.S has the means but has it got the willpower, surely it has.

Will the Democrats pack up and leave if they win the next election, or make a slower phased troop reduction?

 

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So much to said , so little certainty but one can only try

I have no clue whatsoever as to the U. S . government political goals ,
The best I can guess is to last until the elections , then blame the democrats for having lost the middle east

The bloodshed in Irak as far as I can discern has quite a few layers

-1- Irakis nationalist shooting at the invaders , pretty straightforward
-2- Arab nationalist shooting at the jews's dogs , same
-3- good muslims fighting the crusaders , as is their deepest duty
-4- baathist ( founded by an arab christian ) fighting for arab socialism
-5- sunnis shooting at the shias , thinks of 18th century scots protestants shooting at irish catholics ,
-5- salafist and wahabist ,followers of the hard line against all corruptions and all compromises amongst the believers , the unbelievers are hardly a problem , the return to the purity of the first generations of islam would swept them away as a matter of course ,
their last incarnation was the Ikhwan whom Ibn Saud rode to power , and the Taliban created and supported even now by Musharaf the double faced " ally "


The U.S. government obviously is holding a busted flush ,everybody in the middle east know that the allied troops will leave soon , one's would have to be a mug to bet on them , as opposed to getting something practical such as weapons or firepower against your enemis
There is no indication of large scale intervention by Iran and Syria , except closing their eyes to some marginal smuggling .
The U.S. went out of its way to threaten them repeatedly even when they were cooperating back in 2003 , 2004 .
The recomendation by the baker group to engage Iran and Syria CONSTRUCTIVELY has been ignored , the present talks are at the behest of the Iraki government , the U.S. delegation engaging the Iranian's with hostility
The threats are empty and only confirm those governments to let events follow their courses , even to nudge them along
Should Iran and Syria be put in a position to oppose the military adventure , the level of pain for the allied forces would rise to unbearable level , even without one Iranian soldier setting foot in Irak , a massive force would be required to hold the line

Ask yourself how many palestinians refugees would rejoice at being armed and lauched on the U.S. forces

how do you vanquish a man ready to kill himself to get you ,

This is hammes 4generational war , wich to me looks like old fashioned guerillas

Ask yourself of the political advisability of enforcing the draft for irak

I shudder at the very thought

A solution do not exist , only outcomes of varying unpleasantness .

a doubling of the present force , ?? !!

a grinding away as advocated by General Petraeus , but can the U.S. Army afford it , indeed can the U.S. ?

a closing of the wagons , reply in the countryside and the border areas avoiding populated areas , to be left to the Irakis to manage

A straightforward cut and run over six months , it's simple an a acceptable military move
a lot of great generals have done it ,
The political waves would ease up eventually and it has the merit of being the cheapest in men an monies

unless a clear political direction is given , the whole thing is doomed , slogan and throw away lines are no substitute for a plan .


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