Friday, October 31, 2003
Rumsfeld was right to believe that 90,000 troops were more than enough to tactically defeat an outdated, demoralized, and corrupt Iraqi army. However, defeating an army and occupying a hostile power are totally different things. In the case of the former it is sufficient to beat them on the battle field. In the latter case, though, you can not just leave hundreds of thousands of "dead-enders" rooming about the country with, ahem, their leader. These people need to be dealt with and it is infinitely easier in today's day and age and especially for a country like the US to deal with the baddies on the battle field than afterwards when they running the country. In other words, a major failing for the Iraq war plan, and this can be said of Afghanistan too, was that killing or capturing great swaths of baddies was not made a key military objective.
A larger point is that the awful fact of the matter is that one can not occupy a country on the cheap and that includes avoiding political costs associated with high civilian and enemy combatant casualties. Indeed, a recent study supports the notion that the level of resistance tends to be proportional to the level of damage done. The more damage the less resistance there was.
More than anything else, the unwillingness of the US to inflict heavy causalities is the Achilles heel of the US military machine. It is not, as Saddam once thought, an unwillingness to accept causalities. The Christmas bombings (Linebacker 2) of 1972 bring this into focus. From October 1968 until April 1972 (Linebacker 1), the US held off bombing the North for a whole host of reasons. Some feared that doing so might bring China into the war and the US might have another Korea on its hands. Still others worried about the Soviets and the potential that if Soviet SAM operators were killed that this would anger the Soviet Bear. However, the main reason was that by 1968 the political optics of targeting the North where all wrong. North Vietnamese civilians would die and while, the killing of citizens in bombing raids on Laos and Cambodia more or less escaped media attention, the North would be all to happy to bring out civilian corpses for the Western media to see. It was thus with a certain reluctance that Kissinger and company decided to go ahead and bomb the North. Kissinger believed that if the North was forced back to the peace table that America could escape with “Peace with Honor”. That said, there were strict measures taken to insure the civilian deaths were kept at a minimum. Most notably, during the bombing runs pilots were not permitted to take evasive action before having dropped their payload. The fear was that if they did so they might drop their bomb load on civilian areas.
The restrictions proved disastrous. The strict flight path that the B-52s had to take made them inviting targets for SAM operators. The pilots staged a revolt and the Air Force eventually allowed the pilots to take evasive action. Whether planned or not, the concession did not amount to much. By the time the concession was made the North had basically ran out of SAMs and thus there was no longer any need for the pilots to take evasive action. Their sacrifice was for not. Much to the delight of the North, an uninformed world press, wrongly, accused Washington of carpet bombing Hanoi and inflicting massive civilian causalities. In reality casualties were remarkably light. According to North Vietnamese sources, only 1308 were killed in nearly two weeks of heavy bombing and it is not clear just how many of those were killed by the hail of AA fire coming back to earth. Eventually, many News organizations retracted their intial reports. However, by then much of the damage was already done and myth of the North's cities were carpet bombed still persists in many quarters.
As for the Administration, some have argued that Christmas bombings (the only sustained bombing of Northern cities in the entire war) allowed the administration to achieve something resembling Peace with Honor. This is disputable. What is certain is that, judging from the severe damage done to the North’s industrial capacity in just two weeks, the US had the power to cripple the North’s industrial capacity and failed to do so. As mentioned above, no raids were carried out from October 1968 until April 1972. As for the pre 1969 bombing campaign (Rolling Thunder), the restrictions placed on the bombings of cities (restricted areas of 30 and 10 nautical miles (nm) were established around Hanoi and Haiphong, respectively) meant that the important port Haiphong was strictly off limits. This promoted one Air Force officer to quip that, "instead of destroying the war-supporting pillow at the port, efforts were expended chasing the feathers all over Southeast Asia." President Johnson acknowledged that the effectiveness of Rolling Thunder was "zero . . . indeed . . . less than zero."
A larger point is that the awful fact of the matter is that one can not occupy a country on the cheap and that includes avoiding political costs associated with high civilian and enemy combatant casualties. Indeed, a recent study supports the notion that the level of resistance tends to be proportional to the level of damage done. The more damage the less resistance there was.
More than anything else, the unwillingness of the US to inflict heavy causalities is the Achilles heel of the US military machine. It is not, as Saddam once thought, an unwillingness to accept causalities. The Christmas bombings (Linebacker 2) of 1972 bring this into focus. From October 1968 until April 1972 (Linebacker 1), the US held off bombing the North for a whole host of reasons. Some feared that doing so might bring China into the war and the US might have another Korea on its hands. Still others worried about the Soviets and the potential that if Soviet SAM operators were killed that this would anger the Soviet Bear. However, the main reason was that by 1968 the political optics of targeting the North where all wrong. North Vietnamese civilians would die and while, the killing of citizens in bombing raids on Laos and Cambodia more or less escaped media attention, the North would be all to happy to bring out civilian corpses for the Western media to see. It was thus with a certain reluctance that Kissinger and company decided to go ahead and bomb the North. Kissinger believed that if the North was forced back to the peace table that America could escape with “Peace with Honor”. That said, there were strict measures taken to insure the civilian deaths were kept at a minimum. Most notably, during the bombing runs pilots were not permitted to take evasive action before having dropped their payload. The fear was that if they did so they might drop their bomb load on civilian areas.
The restrictions proved disastrous. The strict flight path that the B-52s had to take made them inviting targets for SAM operators. The pilots staged a revolt and the Air Force eventually allowed the pilots to take evasive action. Whether planned or not, the concession did not amount to much. By the time the concession was made the North had basically ran out of SAMs and thus there was no longer any need for the pilots to take evasive action. Their sacrifice was for not. Much to the delight of the North, an uninformed world press, wrongly, accused Washington of carpet bombing Hanoi and inflicting massive civilian causalities. In reality casualties were remarkably light. According to North Vietnamese sources, only 1308 were killed in nearly two weeks of heavy bombing and it is not clear just how many of those were killed by the hail of AA fire coming back to earth. Eventually, many News organizations retracted their intial reports. However, by then much of the damage was already done and myth of the North's cities were carpet bombed still persists in many quarters.
As for the Administration, some have argued that Christmas bombings (the only sustained bombing of Northern cities in the entire war) allowed the administration to achieve something resembling Peace with Honor. This is disputable. What is certain is that, judging from the severe damage done to the North’s industrial capacity in just two weeks, the US had the power to cripple the North’s industrial capacity and failed to do so. As mentioned above, no raids were carried out from October 1968 until April 1972. As for the pre 1969 bombing campaign (Rolling Thunder), the restrictions placed on the bombings of cities (restricted areas of 30 and 10 nautical miles (nm) were established around Hanoi and Haiphong, respectively) meant that the important port Haiphong was strictly off limits. This promoted one Air Force officer to quip that, "instead of destroying the war-supporting pillow at the port, efforts were expended chasing the feathers all over Southeast Asia." President Johnson acknowledged that the effectiveness of Rolling Thunder was "zero . . . indeed . . . less than zero."
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