CEASE-​​FIRE: GOOD SIGN OR BAD?

“American troops with­held their fire­power on Sunday out­side three Iraqi cities where insur­gents have seized con­trol, allow­ing Iraqi inter­me­di­aries time to seek nego­ti­ated solu­tions to the most seri­ous chal­lenge yet to the year-​​old occu­pa­tion,” the Times reports.
U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cials said they decided to pause for the Shi’ite fes­ti­val of Arbaeen. And, accord­ing to the Times, they warned that the resis­tance in Falluja, Najaf, and Karbala “would be crushed if the insur­gents maneu­vered for long.“
But The Agonist notes that “you do not nego­ti­ate a cease-​​fire from a posi­tion of strength if you are the occu­py­ing power.“
Steve Gilliard agrees, not­ing that the Marines’ tac­tics in Falluja don’t bode well for their oper­a­tions there.

One exm­ple, the use of the AC-​​130. That plane is never used in offen­sive oper­a­tions. It can kill a foot­ball field’s worth of sol­diers. No one can move for­ward when Spectre is above, unless they want to die. It is usu­ally used when US forces are pinned down. Then, it can wipe an attack­ing enemy out. The fact that it was used in Fallujah indi­cates that their attack stalled out. Then, they had to call in more AF fight­ers, which means they were in seri­ous trou­ble. Marines hate call­ing in the Air Force because they have a habit of killing Marines.
Then, of course, they bought up a third bat­tal­ion. A full reg­i­ment of troops still stuck in that one mile area of Fallujah.
In no war game you could play, in no Lessons Learned, do you bring up another unit if your attack is going well. You do that when your other units are get­ting hammered. 

Not so, says Defense Tech reader RB. Although 18 Marines have died in a week’s worth of fight­ing in Falluja, “cit­ing Marine casu­al­ties as a flat num­ber is mis­lead­ing in the extreme.”

The real issue is a) ratio of Marine to enemy casu­al­ties, b) casu­al­ties as a per­cent of engaged Marines and c) effec­tive con­trol of the city vs. dam­age to infra­struc­ture & civil­ian casu­al­ties.
From what reports are avail­able, the Marines are doing an unprece­dented job in all 3 of these cat­e­gories… Apart from the mis­siles that took down the wall around a mosque early on, this oper­a­tion seems to be highly effec­tive with­out the use of major force options. The house to house fight­ing is in fact a sign of our strength we can do this with a min­i­mum of col­lat­eral damage.

THERE’S MORE: Defense Tech reader MS thinks Steve Gilliard’s all wrong about the AC-​​130 gunship’s sym­bol­ism.
“This is far, far, far from your daddy’s orbit­ing bul­let hose of yes­ter­year,” MS writes. “Steve’s state­ment may have had some accu­racy back in the day of the original(s) going to the DC3 with 7.62 mini­guns, up through the short­lived –119 ver­sion, and even the orig­i­nal –130 vari­ant.
“Current mod­els, how­ever, while use­ful in a perime­ter defense, are also very, very use­ful in plink­ing indi­vid­ual tar­gets with lim­ited col­lat­eral (damage).”

April 12th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.