Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq on National Review Online
Anatomy of the Three-Week War
It was more that we were good rather than they were bad.
n the aftermath of the incredible three-and-a-half week victory we should not post facto make the mistake of assuming that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessarily an easy task.
The Soviets learned that trying to take an Islamic city is not an easy thing and can lead to thousands of dead and hundreds of lost tanks, planes, and armored vehicles. More Americans were killed in Lebanon in a single day than all those lost in the present campaign. In 1991 six weeks were necessary to soften up Iraqi troops � along with nearly a million allied soldiers. The British learned that attempting an invasion of the Dardanelles against a supposedly "weak" Turkey led to a bloodbath.
A fair historical assessment will soon emerge that attributes our victory not to Iraqi weaknesses per se. Rather it was the American ability on the ground and air in a matter of hours to decapitate the command-and-control apparatus of the Baathist regime that alone allowed bridges, oil wells, power plants, and harbors to be saved, and chemical weapons not to be used.
There were a number of inherent � indeed deadly � risks in the operation. Much is made of having few troops on the ground. But a greater worry was the need to deploy from the rather narrow staging area in Kuwait, once access was denied in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Assembling 300,000-400,000 ground-combat troops in such a small area over such a long period of time in essence would have left half the available aggregate land forces of the United States vulnerable in a few thousand square acres to missile or chemical attacks. And such a Gulf War I-type mobilization � given the deep cuts of the 1990s � would have left the U.S. army scarcely able to have met a sudden attack from North Korea.
Another problem was the geography of Iraq itself. Ostensibly it is a wide country with few obstructions. In fact, the actual inhabited areas resemble Egypt more than France, in that almost all the population centers and roads to Baghdad are concentrated in the narrow Tigris-Euphrates corridor, land that is marshier than desert, where dozens of bridges span tributaries and wetlands. In short, it was not an easy task to drive 400-500 miles northward to Kurdistan from a single base in a long, narrow thrust that could be stalled by a few carefully blown bridges and mined highways.
>>
But the lethality of the military is not just organizational or a dividend of high-technology. Moral and group cohesion explain more still. The general critique of the 1990s was that we had raised a generation with peroxide hair and tongue rings, general illiterates who lounged at malls, occasionally muttering "like" and "you know" in Sean Penn or Valley Girl cadences. But somehow the military has married the familiarity and dynamism of crass popular culture to 19th-century notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and audacity.
The result is that the energy of our soldiers arises from the ranks rather than is imposed from above. What, after all, is the world to make of Marines shooting their way into Baathist houses with Ray-Bans, or shaggy special forces who look like they are strolling in Greenwich Village with M-16s, or tankers with music blaring and logos like "Bad Moon Rising?" The troops look sometimes like cynical American teenagers but they fight and die like Leathernecks on Okinawa. The Arab street may put on shows of goose-stepping suicide bombers, noisy pajama-clad killers, and shrill, masked assassins, but in real battle against gum-chewing American adolescents with sunglasses these street toughs prove to be little more than toy soldiers.
By the same token, officers talk and act like a mixture of college professors and professional boxers. Ram-road straight they brave fire alongside their troops � seconds later to give brief interviews about the intricacies of tactics and the psychology of civilian onlookers. Somehow the military inculcated among its officer corps the truth that education and learning were not antithetical to risking one's life at the front; a strange sight was an interview with a young officer offering greetings to his fellow alumni � of Harvard Business School. So besides a new organization and new technologies, there is a new soldier of sorts as well.
>>
Helicopters are, of course, vital for fast-moving airborne operations, but when they go down with critical special-forces operatives or a half-dozen soldiers the losses are more than material, but are grievous in a psychological sense as well. The public can accept soldiers who fall in battle, but are traumatized when they die in groups of three, four, six, or seven from mechanical failure rather than enemy fire. We need clearly to invest in a new generation of transport, stressing good old-fashioned backup systems and reliability over enhanced speed and high technology. Tankers, transport, and other logistical craft � what Cicero would probably now call the sinews of war � deserve more investment and concern.
>>
The United States military is now evolving geometrically as it gains experience from near-constant fighting and grafts new technology daily. Indeed, it seems to be doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling its lethality every few years. And the result is that we are outdistancing not merely the capabilities of our enemies but our allies as well � many of whom who have not fought in decades � at such a dizzying pace that our sheer destructive power makes it hard to work with others in joint operations. In that context, we might reassess the need to take technology to its theoretical -nth degree: How many new sophisticated stealthy $1.5 billion bombers do we need, when the equivalent expenditure would pay for a more mundane but vital mechanized Division for an entire year?
Anatomy of the Three-Week War
It was more that we were good rather than they were bad.
n the aftermath of the incredible three-and-a-half week victory we should not post facto make the mistake of assuming that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessarily an easy task.
The Soviets learned that trying to take an Islamic city is not an easy thing and can lead to thousands of dead and hundreds of lost tanks, planes, and armored vehicles. More Americans were killed in Lebanon in a single day than all those lost in the present campaign. In 1991 six weeks were necessary to soften up Iraqi troops � along with nearly a million allied soldiers. The British learned that attempting an invasion of the Dardanelles against a supposedly "weak" Turkey led to a bloodbath.
A fair historical assessment will soon emerge that attributes our victory not to Iraqi weaknesses per se. Rather it was the American ability on the ground and air in a matter of hours to decapitate the command-and-control apparatus of the Baathist regime that alone allowed bridges, oil wells, power plants, and harbors to be saved, and chemical weapons not to be used.
There were a number of inherent � indeed deadly � risks in the operation. Much is made of having few troops on the ground. But a greater worry was the need to deploy from the rather narrow staging area in Kuwait, once access was denied in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Assembling 300,000-400,000 ground-combat troops in such a small area over such a long period of time in essence would have left half the available aggregate land forces of the United States vulnerable in a few thousand square acres to missile or chemical attacks. And such a Gulf War I-type mobilization � given the deep cuts of the 1990s � would have left the U.S. army scarcely able to have met a sudden attack from North Korea.
Another problem was the geography of Iraq itself. Ostensibly it is a wide country with few obstructions. In fact, the actual inhabited areas resemble Egypt more than France, in that almost all the population centers and roads to Baghdad are concentrated in the narrow Tigris-Euphrates corridor, land that is marshier than desert, where dozens of bridges span tributaries and wetlands. In short, it was not an easy task to drive 400-500 miles northward to Kurdistan from a single base in a long, narrow thrust that could be stalled by a few carefully blown bridges and mined highways.
>>
But the lethality of the military is not just organizational or a dividend of high-technology. Moral and group cohesion explain more still. The general critique of the 1990s was that we had raised a generation with peroxide hair and tongue rings, general illiterates who lounged at malls, occasionally muttering "like" and "you know" in Sean Penn or Valley Girl cadences. But somehow the military has married the familiarity and dynamism of crass popular culture to 19th-century notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and audacity.
The result is that the energy of our soldiers arises from the ranks rather than is imposed from above. What, after all, is the world to make of Marines shooting their way into Baathist houses with Ray-Bans, or shaggy special forces who look like they are strolling in Greenwich Village with M-16s, or tankers with music blaring and logos like "Bad Moon Rising?" The troops look sometimes like cynical American teenagers but they fight and die like Leathernecks on Okinawa. The Arab street may put on shows of goose-stepping suicide bombers, noisy pajama-clad killers, and shrill, masked assassins, but in real battle against gum-chewing American adolescents with sunglasses these street toughs prove to be little more than toy soldiers.
By the same token, officers talk and act like a mixture of college professors and professional boxers. Ram-road straight they brave fire alongside their troops � seconds later to give brief interviews about the intricacies of tactics and the psychology of civilian onlookers. Somehow the military inculcated among its officer corps the truth that education and learning were not antithetical to risking one's life at the front; a strange sight was an interview with a young officer offering greetings to his fellow alumni � of Harvard Business School. So besides a new organization and new technologies, there is a new soldier of sorts as well.
>>
Helicopters are, of course, vital for fast-moving airborne operations, but when they go down with critical special-forces operatives or a half-dozen soldiers the losses are more than material, but are grievous in a psychological sense as well. The public can accept soldiers who fall in battle, but are traumatized when they die in groups of three, four, six, or seven from mechanical failure rather than enemy fire. We need clearly to invest in a new generation of transport, stressing good old-fashioned backup systems and reliability over enhanced speed and high technology. Tankers, transport, and other logistical craft � what Cicero would probably now call the sinews of war � deserve more investment and concern.
>>
The United States military is now evolving geometrically as it gains experience from near-constant fighting and grafts new technology daily. Indeed, it seems to be doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling its lethality every few years. And the result is that we are outdistancing not merely the capabilities of our enemies but our allies as well � many of whom who have not fought in decades � at such a dizzying pace that our sheer destructive power makes it hard to work with others in joint operations. In that context, we might reassess the need to take technology to its theoretical -nth degree: How many new sophisticated stealthy $1.5 billion bombers do we need, when the equivalent expenditure would pay for a more mundane but vital mechanized Division for an entire year?
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