Gulf II Critique

I realize this is cliché, but never-the-less it is true. The military always starts by fighting the last war. This has never been more true than the beginning of Gulf II. I am not going to talk about what we should have known, but rather about the complete surprises this campaign brought. Nobody I Know (including me) expected the Iraqi army to melt on first contact, but it did. In far too many causes the soldiers just dropped their weapons and walked home. We were apparently prepared for hundreds of thousands of enemy war prisoners which just did not materialize. Many of these walk homes no doubt became part of the terrorist insurgency. If we had an opportunity to imprison them we might have prevented some of that.

The U.S. military is trained to pursue and we did that in spades. On several accounts this particular pursuit was a mistake. First we outran our logistics and in the end did not have the CORRECT manpower to protect that logistics tail. Our ignorant and terribly ill-informed (not to say biased) press thought they were seeing a quagmire, the opposite was true, the military was successful beyond their wildest dreams. Any intelligent observer could see after the first several days the army and marines needed to wait for the logistics to catch up. I do not think that the military went in without enough manpower, I just think it is the wrong manpower. We had too many heavies and not enough military police in the first place. In addition one of the lessons of this war is that some of our MPs need to be more heavily armed and of course, armored. Secondly, we should have slowed down to pick up and detain unarmed and fleeing troops. Usually, you bypass these men as they are no longer a military threat in the short run. You bypass them to retain your contact with the remaining combatants to keep them off balance. However the military knew and planned for an insurgency and did not see these people as future insurgents. This was a serious mistake. Thirdly, the US military continues to do a relatively poor job in protecting the logistical tail (remember the number of our trucks captured in Gulf I if you need further proof). Again this calls for more MPs.

Although the insurgency was expected, I am not sure the multifaceted one was foreseen. We should in the beginning have played the Baathist remnants against Islamofacists. We were not clearly ready for the in Iraq propaganda needs. I not sure we thought that we would need to explain to people why we are the “good guys”.

Finally, we should have expected not to find WMDs. With today’s information we are sure that Iraq knew we were absolutely going to attack at least a month in advance of the start of conflict (perhaps thanks to Senator Jay Rockefeller). It seems clear that the WMDs were then destoyed or moved to Syria (and then some on to Dafur?).

So IMAO, I believe that the future military needs to be in general lighter (fewer heavy units and more logistics protection and counter-insurgency units) and more willing to throw off old tactical precepts. Sometimes air contact is enough to keep in contact with a defeated unit, the ground units should spend more time retaining coherence on the ground and contact with logistics.

And as a little aside, armored units that are doing house to house dismounted should get infantry badges, period.