The civil war is already happening. Our leaving will make it worse. A regional war means Iran, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Turkey becoming directly involved. Managing the chaos and minimizing the power vacuums is essentially what is left when there are no good options.

Again, only if you feel so inclined, if you were POTUS, what would you do with our troops moving forward?

Any leader, civilian or military, should hold back from committing to any movements until they have some pretty good information. Unfortunately, none of us stateside civilians has good information about troop deployments, capabilities and the dangers they face now or in certain dynamic potential situations.

So, most of our comments have to do with political views.

I wondered aloud when 9/11 happened if Al Qaeda and/or Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. But, with some passage of time we all heard more information and it became increasingly clear Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with it (the Niger documents helped seal that) and we shouldn’t be there at all. We had no legal leg to stand on. So, I’d personally argue we should just leave — and I’d let the military decide how to move the troops & equipment because that’s what they’re paid to do.

That said, nobody is going to do it that way. I suspect the Iraq Study Group will suggest doing it in late 2007 and it will be stalled so as to occur in spring 2008 and troops will parade across the Republican National Convention stage waving flags. It will all be political.

However, considering only what is ideal for America’s foreign policy, the answer is probably a bit different. Howard Dean said long ago we should help the Iraqis stand up so we could stand down. Bush echos that, but doesn’t allow it to happen. This indicates the plan is set and the only way to get a more ideal plan in place is to replace Bush & Cheney. I don’t see that happening unless they screw things up so badly with their interfering that our troops might be killed in extremely large numbers for no good reason.

So, my conclusion is we’re stuck with Bush & Cheney and whatever plan they want to execute and nobody or nothing is going to ruin Junior’s parade (the one he never got for never serving in Vietnam).

Given another leader, such as a Kerry or Dean, you could look at truly arming the Iraqi government and testing the hypothesis that they can get the job done. Sadly, it’s not gonna happen.

The situation is this:

- The Army is now refusing to send Med-Evac helicopters into live fire zones. This is a major change in policy. Now, given the effects of this kind of change of policy on morale and soldier survivability, we can assume that the Generals aren’t doing it to amuse themselves. The fire zones of insurgent activity have become too dangerous to send Helicopters.

- Indeed, if you go looking, you’ll find quite a bit of information on helicopter losses, including indications that the Iraqi’s are bringing online new techniques and new surface to air missiles.

- From the start of the year, losses are listed for Iraq and Afghanistan as: 27 Apache attack helicopters; 21 Blackhawk utility helicopters; 23 Kiowa Warrior assault helicopters; and 14 big Chinook cargo helicopters. There’s also substantial wear and tear on your aircraft, five times that of normal peacetime use.

- There’s also the disturbing loss of a fighter jet recently, a fast mover, but moving relatively low and slow in providing close air combat support.

- All of which goes to suggest that American Air power is not quite as unchallenged as we might be lead to believe. Since its the only real advantage you guys have, any widespread suggestion that its value is eroding, vulnerability increasing or its days are numbered would be devastating. So the odds are that the military high command would go out of their way to lie about it, like they lie about everything else. But reading between the lines, there are indications that America’s wide edge against air power is eroding.

- Is it for real? Is America’s advantage in air power really eroding? Could the Iraqi’s with the advantage of better and better missiles, Iranian funding and supplies, or other access actually offset that advantage. Don’t know. And damnably, we can’t know, thanks in part to an unreliably truthful pentagon. Things may be perky-fine, or the ice may be growing very thin under your feet. Unalloyed optimism, under the circumstances, seems reckless.

- Setting aside whether Close Air Support and Combat Support Aircraft are becoming unacceptably vulnerable, the real question becomes a practical one. I know that practicalities aren’t big with the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, but bear with me.

- Numbers of air support combat vehicles are not unlimited. Indeed, there is a finite upper limit in terms of the resources available. This will deteriorate.

- There are several factors which confine the use of said vehicles in the field. One is the practical issue of the fuel in the tanks and the ammunition in the weapons racks. An aerial combat vehicle can only stay in the field for a limited period of time… then it has to withdraw for refueling and re-arming.

- This means that there are logistics vulnerabilities, particularly fuel. And we’re talking major consumption of fuel issues here.

- Unfortunately, the Iraqi’s are getting better and better at cutting fuel and resupply lines. American forces are dependent upon very long, very restricted and very vulnerable supply lines, which must supply all the forces (and not just Warthog fuel and ammo) needs.

- So there’s a real risk that a major disruption of supply depots or supply lines might well cripple or restrict in theatre air operations. This would be a VERY BAD THING INDEED.

- But not necessarily fatal. Air operations can still be fueled and maintained from out of the country, where supply lines and stockpiles are secure. But then there’s a trade off. Your Warthogs cannot teleport. They have to travel to and from the refueling depots to the theatres, journeys of hundreds of miles, which may take hours. This limits the time that you can actually spend with your Warthog in the theatre providing air support. It means that your Warthog is more vulnerable to attack along a longer and more predictable flight path.

- The reduction of the Warthog’s available time for close air support means several things.

- First, you completely lose flexibility and potential for fast response if you’ve got to send your mission in from three hundred miles away. If you don’t already have an asset in the air in the region, then your besieged marines are screwed.

- Second, you need a major logistics, scheduling, and organizational effort to ensure a continual flow of air support vehicles to, in, and out of the moving theatre. This means that you’ve got a fluid situation, people continually coming into strange territory, lots of scheduling problems, and frequency of gaps.

- Third, to get away with this, you need a lot of air support vehicles. Shitloads of them. Huge quantities of them. And you need a major effort in terms of servicing, pilots, mechanics, refueling, spare parts, ammo racks. So the 64,000 dollar question is, does the American forces have this kind of surplus capacity?

- Because right now, the impression I’m getting is that all of the American forces in Iraq are stretched to the limits. So there’s a serious question as to whether the existing assets are up to the job you propose, or whether there’s any or enough additional assets to bring on line sufficient to do the job.

And there you go. You’ve got a smart mouth, which is irritating but not fatal. You’ve also got this notion that American air superiority is the ultimate magic bullet which will solve the problem completely.

Now, its possible that you are right. But you’re ignoring a lot of things that perhaps, if you weren’t so cocky, you might be needing to pay attention to. It’s also quite possible that you are wrong. In which case the situation is rather more serious than you realize. Disaster is a potential outcome, as it almost always is in military issues.

50% of all the parties who fight wars lose. The ones who win do so by being smart, by accurately and carefully assessing strengths and weaknesses, and planning on that basis. The ones who die, often wind up being the cocky smartasses.

And trust me, its always harder to finish a fight than it is to start it. Four years ago the United States had months to build up its stockpiles, put resources in place, prepare its battle plans and subvert Iraqi generals with huge piles of cash.

Well, today the piles of cash are gone into Halliburton’s pockets, the people opposed to you will not be bribed, you don’t have the advantage of months of stockpiling, you are using what you’ve got as you get it. Your army is overstretched, exhausted and faced with an enemy that grows more sophisticated and aggressive each day.

Way way back, six months after the conquest, when the insurgency was starting up you were looking at 15 attacks a day, and guessing a rump of maybe 3000 bitter enders. Now you’re up to 180 attacks a day, in insurgency whose numbers may go from 30,000 to 60,000, and who are showing up with increasingly better weapons and booby traps.

Lots of guys started fights easily, that the other guy had to finish for them.

Now, go off and be condescending to someone else about something you know about.

ROTFL

ROTFL! Cross-Condescend much, Tater?

I’ve already replied to your empty headed post. Sufficient to say:

1) Little Big Horn?

2) Air superiority is not a magic wand.

3) It’s always easier to start the fight than it is to finish it.

…And perhaps you can describe the state of air power during the battle of Little Bighorn, and how it made a whit of difference either way?

Your logic is even more muddled than Gilliard’s.

I expressly concede that air superiority is no magic wand, and go on to the real point of the matter; lack of a magic wand is no defense against the very real air superiority of US forces. A point that seems to have completley escaped you both.

It may be easier to start a fight, but it is NOT axiomatic that is thus harder to finish it.

Half an argument does not a point make, nor debase.

I’ve already replied to your empty headed post. Sufficient to say:

1) Little Big Horn?

2) Air superiority is not a magic wand.

3) It’s always easier to start the fight than it is to finish it.

This is where your analogy completely falls apart and where you again prove to be much more a shouter with strong ctrl-c/ctrl-v skills, and a thinker, not so much.

In the Korea conflict US forces fought a much larger, professioanl, well equipped, well trained, well supplied, enemy. Iraq is asymetric warfare, where the enemy can not muster, nor sustain the kind and scale of attacks that you suggest. We are facing a crafty and determined enemy who has inflicted casualty on US forces by exploiting targets of opportunity with small arms, IED, and RPG’s. These are not the tactics, nor weapons, and certainly not the troop levels required to inflict the kind of casualty you seem to beleive possible.

You go on to state:

“An American army can be decimated in a retreat, even by an enemy without airpower.”

Well again, I think this is absurdly faulty logic. You seem to completly discount the effectivness of US air power in defending a US withdrawl. Yes the case can be made that a determined enemy can be effective without air-power, but that does not mean by any stretch that it can be effective while having to face the unrestricted and overwhelming airpower US forces will have.

To be sure this administration, and it’s leaders on the ground in Iraq have been woefully negligent in the post-invasion conflict, however let’s not forget the brilliant and swift success of the invasion itself, one drawn out over the same hundreds of miles of route you now contend they are inadequate to defend going the other direction.

Steve, spend a little, ok a LOT more time thinking, and a little less time writing.

The USA has put a lot of work into ensuring that it will be as black as the devil’s arsehole.

And the cherry on this hellhole sundae, is the man in the white house, immature, bad under pressure, frightened, and more than anything else, concerned about how he looks…. the nukes may fly.

God help us all.

Den,

Your scenarios and situations are truly dreadful to read; but I cannot disagree that all those results are perfectly possible. The one thing all military ‘experts’ seem to espouse in complete agreement is that there are no good military options. The one item you’ve listed that shows any promise, includes an organized political retreat; and that means admitting some level of defeat. I don’t know that this boy king can even fathom that, regardless of whether intelligent people the world over see that it has, plainly, already occurred.

I’d like to thank you for your perspective.

I’d like thank Steve Gilliard for putting this together with the well researched historical perspective. Increased perspective is not always a boon; it does show the circumstance to be very far progressed past any hope of a reasonable resolution. There will be butcher’s bill to pay, somewhere, of that I have no doubt. And the greatest irony is that not one penny of that bill will fall to the boy king, Dick Cheney, or his neo-con masters in the Paul Dundes Wolfowitz cabal.

My experience with 11 years on active duty and 9 in the Reserves (1978 – 1998) leads me to the conclusion that fighting while surrounded is far far different both mentally and physically than when not surrounded. By definition the fighting retreat such as those depicted is fighting while surrounded. Remember, the U.S. Army only has two units that consistently train to fight surrounded — the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Airborne Division. During such operations fire discipline does tend to break down in a manner that causes increased ammunition usage, increased need for equipment repairs and increased logistical demands further straining the system and it is logistics that make successful operations possible. It is outstanding warfighters that make successful operations happen.

The reliance on air superiority is misleading. Aircraft, even the vaunted A-10, only have a limited loiter time and can’t be overhead all the time. Unfortunately! Without Field Artillery, or other indirect fire support, units in contact will suffer greater losses. While I cannot speak to the current force structure in country and its make up of artillery units, I do recall reading that significant numbers of artillery battalions had been removed from artillery duties and were performing infantry or “infantry-like” duties. If the force structure has been tinkered with in order to emphasize infantry units or the artillery units have been deployed without their howitzers, then this sort of operation is going to get real ugly. That sort of organization for combat is not without precedent. When units initially deployed to Afghanistan for OEF, Gen Tommy Dumb*** Franks ordered that the infantry brigades not be deployed with their accompanying artillery battalions and were to rely solely on air support for the indirect fire support. The stupidity of that order was shown to the world during Operation Anaconda in the Shahikot Valley.

I’ve read through the story and all of the comments and have not found one thing that would lead me to believe that the fighting retreat would be anything other than a bloody battle for both sides. To be able to lead in the vacuum that would follow any such US withdrawal, each faction/militia would need to be seen as having successfully fought the US. Each would need to show that they too had “counted coup”, much as the American Indians had done against the US cavalry. How many 100’s of miles would our forces have to traverse during which every man or boy with access to a rock, AK-47 or RPG (let alone heavier weapons) would need to “count coup”?

Thank to Jane for hosting this discussion and to Steve and others for their insightful work expressing and explaining the situation.