Some military observations from a Marine just back from Iraq

au1929 wrote:

We have heard that complaint time and time again and also the rebuttal by the administration that the commanders on the ground say they have sufficient troops. Who do you think is telling the truth?

In all of the recorded history of warfare, there has never been a commander who thought he had enough troops for the job at hand.

If you go through the wars and battles of old, the commanders have always pleaded with their superiors for troops, troops, troops.

This is a non starter issue.

Just remember as one of my officers told me that he had learned at West Point:
If the Allies had waited until they had every man, piece of equipment and intelligence information that they wanted before invading Normandy, D-Day would have occurred sometime in 1962.

You fight with what you have, not with what you want.

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Fedral
But you don't start a war particularly an elective war unprepared without a plan. That is unless you are Bush and Rumsfeld.
The US is in the present quagmire because those two idiots were too stupid to understand what was needed.
If they had enough boots on the ground the insurgency would never have had a chance to take hold and grow as it has.

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Fedral:

Quote:

In all of the recorded history of warfare, there has never been a commander who thought he had enough troops for the job at hand.

If you go through the wars and battles of old, the commanders have always pleaded with their superiors for troops, troops, troops.

This is a non starter issue.

...and it probably would stay "non-started" if Rumsfeld didn't answer, everytime he's asked about it, "The generals make those decisions, and I follow their lead."

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Fedral wrote:

In all of the recorded history of warfare, there has never been a commander who thought he had enough troops for the job at hand.

Horse poop . . . that statement won't fly. Petr Alexeevitch of Russia, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Duke of Marlborough, Frederick II of Prussia, Maurice de Saxe, George Washington, Nathaniel Greene, Napoleon and any number of his Marshalls, Winfield Scott, Joseph Johnston, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert Lee, Ulysses Grant, George Thomas . . . i can go on and on with a list of military commanders who willing reduced their forces so as to reinforce other commanders for their operations, stating that they had retained sufficient force to accomplish their own missions. You might be able to argue a point that it is common for commanders to complain of insufficient troops, but your statement as written is pure, unadulterated and reeking to high heaven horseshit.

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au1929 wrote:

Fedral
But you don't start a war particularly an elective war unprepared without a plan. That is unless you are Bush and Rumsfeld.
The US is in the present quagmire because those two idiots were too stupid to understand what was needed.
If they had enough boots on the ground the insurgency would never have had a chance to take hold and grow as it has.

That is false and you fail to identify the actual problem with the tactics used by GW and friends.

The initial phase went very well, minimal foot traffic, extensive air tactics. They stopped too soon.

However, the initial error occurred when we gave the Iraqi Army a choice, leave the military and live, or die fighting. They left and many became todays terrorists.

Next tactical error was "trying to win the hearts and minds of the locals".

The US has again proven that this is next to impossible to do since by trying to "win the hearts and minds", we are losing US soldiers daily and not killing "the bad guys".

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woiyo

Wrong again. The fact is and that has been established we had a sufficient force to win the fight against Saddam's army But we did not have sufficient forces to hold what we had won. Unless you can hold what you win, in the long run you haven't won.

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au1929 wrote:

woiyo

Wrong again. The fact is and that has been established we had a sufficient force to win the fight against Saddam's army But we did not have sufficient forces to hold what we had won. Unless you can hold what you win, in the long run you haven't won.

We can debate tactics. It just seems that if we bombed longer and better, did not provide advance information to the enemy, we might be in a better situation today.

I can agree we HAVE insufficient ground forces today but that is as a result of incorrect tactics prior.

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woiyo wrote:

Next tactical error was "trying to win the hearts and minds of the locals".

The US has again proven that this is next to impossible to do since by trying to "win the hearts and minds", we are losing US soldiers daily and not killing "the bad guys".

No, that's the right thing to do. It's what the British were doing down in the south of Iraq. If you don't win their hearts and minds, you're going to have them hate you, thus providing more recuirtment possibilities to the terrorists.

The real problem is the relative slowness of getting the Iraqi Army back on to its feet and a lack of troops, which wouldn't have been a problem if the US had gone through official UN means.

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Some military observations from a Marine just back from Iraq

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