Isegoria

In It’s Not Nam, But It’ll Do, War Nerd compares the US invasion of Iraq to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon:

But the thing is, Vietnam isn’t the only way you can lose a war. Look at what happened to the Israelis in Lebanon. Iraq is a hell of a lot more like Lebanon than Nam.

22 years ago the man in charge of Israel was Menachem Begin, a real weirdo. He and Ariel Sharon were sick of taking mortar rounds from PLO in south Lebanaon. They decided they’d invade Lebanon, push the PLO into the sea.

It went fine, as long as the Israelis were heading north, attacking via combined arms. Their airforce destroyed the opposition. The Syrians lost 82 planes; Israel lost…zero. The IDF zoomed all the way to Beirut in record time, bombarded the PLO district and pushed Arafat into exile in Africa. They lost only about 400 men, but killed thousands of PLO. They kicked ass.

Then came phase two, the occupation. And that was the biggest military disaster Israel ever had. Sound familiar?

When I first started reading At the Pentagon, Quirky PowerPoint Carries Big Punch, I thought, who is this guy?:

In 1998, Thomas Barnett, an obscure Defense Department analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was changing national security.

One scenario they studied was a meltdown caused by the Y2K computer bug followed by terrorist attacks designed to exploit the chaos. Mr. Barnett posited that Wall Street would shut down for a week. Gun violence, racially motivated attacks and sales of antidepressants would surge. The U.S. military would find itself embroiled in brushfire conflicts across the developing world.

His theories were met with skepticism. “People began referring to me as the Nostradamus of Y2K,” Mr. Barnett says.

Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

An obscure Defense Department analyst teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was changing national security? How does that happen? Then I found out he’s a Harvard-educated professor of military strategy at the Naval War College (according to this Esquire profile and his own biography).

His proposed military comprises two very different forces:

Mr. Barnett’s military is a far cry from the shape of today’s armed forces. Instead of a single force to wage wars and rebuild nations, Mr. Barnett envisions two. The first, which he dubs “Leviathan,” would be hard-hitting, ready to take on conventional foes such as Saddam Hussein on a moment’s notice. The second, more unconventional force of “System Administrators” would focus on bringing dysfunctional states into the mainstream through the type of nation-building operations seen in Iraq, the Balkans and Eastern Africa. It wouldn’t only mop up after wars but would travel the world during peacetime building local security forces and infrastructure.

When I read this passage, I realized I’d read Barnett’s earlier Esquire article, The Pentagon’s New Map, and blogged on it:

In Mr. Barnett’s world, countries are divided into two categories. His “core” countries are part of a global community linked by trade, migration and capital flows. Europe, the U.S., India and China fall into this group. Then there are “gap” countries that either refuse to join the global mainstream (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran), or are unable to because they have no central government or are struggling with debilitating crises (such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa).

“The “gap” is a petri dish of grief, repression, terrorism and disease,” says Adm. Cebrowski. “And 9/11 shows we can’t wall ourselves off from it.”

I loved this mock personal ad from the Pentagon in the late 1990s:

ENEMY WANTED: Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms racing, Third World conflicts and general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to convince Congress of military financial requirements…Send note with pictures of fleet and air squadrons to CHAIRMAN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF/PENTAGON.

When I came across a blogger going by the nom de plume of War Nerd, I knew I’d have to read what he wrote. In Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG, War Nerd explains that he rarely writes about military hardware:

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It’s about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money — just about everything except pure hardware.

The venerable AK-47 assault rifle and RPG-7 anti-tank rocket are the weapons of guerrilla warfare:

In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they’ve switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

Interesting stat:

There’s another stat that’s even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half — half! — of US casualties in Iraq.

The American alternative to the RPG, the LAW (Light Antitank Weapon), “conveniently” weds a rocket with a disposable launcher:

We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn’t nearly as easy to carry, because it didn’t have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

In Somalia, RPG gunners took out US Blackhawk helicopters with a technique first used by Afghans against Soviet helicopters:

One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA [Surface-to-Air] missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile’s gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

The Chechens realized that the RPG is the perfect urban weapon:

The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn’t be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs — classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn’t do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Iraq stockpiled RPGs, and now the country’s flooded with these “perfect” urban weapons:

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It’s got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It’s light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It’s simple enough for any amateur to use — the original non-camera example of “point and shoot.”
[...]
Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you’re fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn’t look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn’t disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you’ve got the occupying troops in a position like that — I mean literally blind and deaf — you’re in a guerrilla strategist’s idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

(Again, hat tip to iSteve.)

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, wrote The Dark Art of Interrogation back in October. It seems apropos:

We hear a lot these days about America’s over powering military technology; about the professionalism of its warriors; about the sophistication of its weaponry, eavesdropping, and telemetry; but right now the most vital weapon in its arsenal may well be the art of interrogation. To counter an enemy who relies on stealth and surprise, the most valuable tool is information, and often the only source of that information is the enemy himself. Men like Sheikh Mohammed who have been taken alive in this war are classic candidates for the most cunning practices of this dark art. Intellectual, sophisticated, deeply religious, and well trained, they present a perfect challenge for the interrogator. Getting at the information they possess could allow us to thwart major attacks, unravel their organization, and save thousands of lives. They and their situation pose one of the strongest arguments in modern times for the use of torture.

We’re all familiar with the concept of torture — but torture lite?

Then there are methods that, some people argue, fall short of torture. Called “torture lite,” these include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.

How much information are we getting out of captured terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

“I doubt we’re getting very much out of them, despite what you read in the press,” says a former CIA agent with experience in South America. “Everybody in the world knows that if you are arrested by the United States, nothing bad will happen to you.”

Is it dangerously naive not to torture captured terrorists?

(Hat tip to iSteve.)