March 31, 2003 [LINK]

Wargames vs. reality

A front-page story in last Friday's Washington Post included an unusually candid quote from Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the Army's senior ground commander in Iraq:

"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against...

We knew we'd have to pause at some point to build our logistics power. ... This is about where we'd expected."

What was unexpected, however, was the zeal of Iraqi paramilitary fighters.

"We're dealing with a country in which everybody has a weapon, and when they fire them all in the air at the same time, it's tough," Wallace said

The "Sgt. Stryker" Web log followed up on this story by getting some inside information from one of the staff officers who participated in the actual wargames:

The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to [Paul Van Riper] the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game's Opposing Force.

If so, it defeats the whole purpose of wargaming in the armed services. If staff officers don't feel free to speak their minds, it is easy to abuse wargames so as to "validate" a preconceived notion. The social norm of obedience to authority in military organizations always carries a latent risk of suppessing dissenting viewpoints, which can be dangerous. (That reminds me of the saying inscribed on the side of the Centro de Altos Estudios Militares [CAEM] building in Lima, Peru: "Ideas are to be expounded, not imposed.") Victory in war tends to breed an overconfidence among commanders who thus pay less attention to the novel kinds of threats to national security that continually emerge. Looks like "Desert Storm Syndrome."

Hersh vs. Rumsfeld

Once again, Seymour Hersh has written an article in the New Yorker magazine that portrays Bush administration officials in a very unflattering light. He claims that, during the last few months, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turned down repeated requests for more troops for the Iraq invasion force from General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command. What's more, he writes, Rumsfeld has allegedly micromanaged conduct of the war, angering many officers in the Pentagon. Retired General Barry McCaffrey corroborates the second charge. If Hersh's article turns out to be substantially accurate, then Rumsfeld should be held accountable just like then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who resigned under intense pressure a few months after the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in Mogadishu. At the time I was infuriated by the fact that Aspin had declined requests for armored reinforcements by the commanders of the light infantry units who were patrolling in Somalia. Lack of adequate armaments was one of the main reasons why so many U.S. soldiers died in that awful tragedy. (Aspin died of a heart attack several months after that.) I like Rumsfeld's blunt, candid style (much as I liked former Secretary of the Treasurey Paul O'Neill), but Rumsfeld has made ill-considered remarks that offended potential U.S. allies more than one occasion, and he often shows signs of hubris.

Unlike many pundits who have criticized the U.S. failure to deploy sufficent ground forces prior to the war, General McCaffrey was NOT "second guessing". Here is what he said way back in the January 6 issue of the Washington Post:

If we get three heavy divisions plus the 101st and a Marine division, they will manhandle the Iraqi military in 21 days.

The forces we've apparently got targeted on Iraq are more than enough to do the job, but the opening moves shouldn't be modulated force to see if we can do it on the cheap. The biggest mistake you can make in boxing and combat is to lead tentatively into battle, instead of dominating it from the start.

In fact, there was only ONE U.S. heavy division available for the invasion on March 19, not three, though there would have been one more if Turkey had not refused passage to the 4th Infantry Division. Just as McCaffrey warned, the "undisputed heavyweight champion of the world" got a bloody nose in the first round of this fight. To be fair, the "premature" U.S. ground attack probably did yield a big benefit: It seems to have caught Saddam Hussein off guard, so his criminal henchmen didn't have enough time to torch very many oil wells.

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Austin Bay makes some (revised) estimates on how long the war will last, while James Dunnigan offers some timely thoughts on the ugly specter of urban guerrilla warfare in "Saddam Succeeds with the Secret of Stalingrad," both on the Strategy Page Web site.

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Whither the 101st Airborne Division? Well, its Apache attack helicopters are busy hunting for Iraqi tanks near Baghdad, but its highly-trained airmobile infantry units are deployed in rear areas, guarding supply lines along with units of the 82nd Airborne. What a waste. If the unique capabilities of U.S. airborne units are not exploited in a more aggressive fashion soon, this war might indeed drag on for several more weeks.