The War and the Clock
STRATFOR ^ | Mar 26, 2003 - 0025 GMT
Posted on 03/25/2003 4:46 PM PST by Axion
The War and the
Clock Summary
Mar 26, 2003 - 0025 GMT
The realization that the war in Iraq would not be over in a
day or two sent the markets reeling and the media into a frenzy of negativity
this week. When one considers that Desert Storm took six weeks and Kosovo took
two months, it strikes us as odd that the criteria for a successful war has been
set in days. In fact, both the Iraqi and U.S. war plans are playing out pretty
much as expected -- a chess game with fairly predictable first moves. Both sides
have done well, but ultimately, the Iraqis have been able to pose only localized
problems for coalition forces, and the coalition has been able to accomplish its
strategic missions. Things get harder now, of course, but the logic of the war
remains set. The United States will win, unless it takes unnecessary risks in
trying to win a prize for the world's shortest
war.
Analysis
The American people discovered last weekend
that the United States was at war. They discovered that in war, troops are
wounded, taken prisoner and go missing in action. They discovered that the enemy
can sometimes fight and sometimes win, and that they might well be brave and
skilled. This seemed to come as a shock to many, judging from the behavior of
the stock market on March 24 and the behavior of reporters at a March 25
briefing by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Gen. Richard Myers. The events of the weekend seemed to convince both
the markets and reporters that something might be seriously wrong with U.S.
strategy.
Some had expected that the Iraqi army might not fight at all
and would simply collapse at the first blow. This was always a possibility, but
as Stratfor stated in its War Plans series, it wasn't the most likely
scenario:
"It has been 12 years since the Gulf War. The general assumption on the
U.S. side is that the Iraqi army has deteriorated over that time and that the
defeat of 1991 in Kuwait can be replicated in 2003 in the whole of Iraq. This
may well be true, but the answer will not be known until the battle has begun.
This much we do know: The Iraqi government must believe that its forces have
improved. Its leaders know how badly the Iraqi army was defeated in 1991. They
know that a similar defeat in 2003 could mean their lives and certainly their
freedom and fortunes. They have alternatives, such as complying with weapons
inspections or accepting exile; they have not chosen these. Therefore, they
clearly must believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that their forces have improved
or were not fully tested in 1991." From War
Plan: Iraq - March 12, 2003.
Since their lives were on the
line, we tended to trust the Iraqis' judgment. They thought their army would
fight, and it did.
Which means there is resistance. That fact has stunned
some people, who have gone from the expectation that there would be no
resistance to the view that any resistance represents not only a stunning
setback, but in some way a betrayal -- a failure to deliver on a flawless war in
which the Iraqis would cooperate by capitulating at the first shot. The lack of
realism about war, both in the financial community and among portions of the
media, has been interesting to say the least.
Let's begin by benchmarking
wars. Desert Storm, which is as close to the perfect campaign as you can come,
lasted six weeks. It included a massive air campaign that culminated in a
lightning ground war. The lightning ground war was made possible by the fact
that Iraqi forces left in Kuwait were generally among the weakest formations in
the Iraqi army and had been brutalized by six weeks of incessant bombardment.
But the perfect campaign still took six weeks.
Kosovo, which was far from
a perfect campaign by any measure, took two months to complete. It did not end
in the military defeat of the Yugoslav armed forces but in a complex diplomatic
maneuver, in which the Russians convinced the Serb leadership that capitulation
on the Kosovo question was better than resistance. It nevertheless took the
United States and its coalition two months of intense bombardment to reach this
point.
It is true that Haiti was defeated in a matter of days. But Iraq
is not Haiti. Under the best of circumstances, you couldn't drive from Kuwait to
Turkey in 48 hours in peacetime. The idea that a large military force could
enter and occupy Iraq in a matter of days was preposterous on its face, even if
the Iraqi army had served as guides. The time measure for this war ought to be
Desert Storm and Kosovo, save that the territory being fought over is
substantially larger than either Kuwait or Kosovo, and the defenders appear
somewhat more motivated. This is a war of weeks or months, not of
days.
Thus far, the war has been fought as Stratfor expected, by both
sides. In our war plan for Iraq, we wrote:
"The Iraqi regime intends to try to impose a war of attrition on the
United States, under the working assumption that time and casualties are what
Washington can least afford." From War
Plan: Iraq, March 12, 2003.
Iraq's plans included devolving
command to the lowest possible levels, imposing delays and casualties on U.S.
forces advancing from Kuwait, establishing defensive lines in
populated/urbanized areas south of Baghdad, and digging in and waiting for U.S.
forces to come to them. So far, they have held to their plan.
The United
States is also operating generally according to plan:
"Two separate operations apparently are planned. One, involving the
slightly heavier forces, seems committed to advancing northward, into the oil
fields and against two Republican Guard Armored Divisions. The lighter,
western force seems to be preparing a combined ground/airmobile thrust into
the Western Desert, to the Euphrates bridges." From War
Plan: United States, March 14, 2003.
The coalition drove north, encountering the 51st Mechanized
Division and the 6th Armored Division -- both regular army units -- which
splintered when attacked. However, certain elements did resist stubbornly,
allied with special operations troops that linked with them and continued to
resist in Umm Qasr and Basra. These pockets needed to be eliminated, but many of
the units in this area were released and reassigned to the more strategic
western drive.
The 3rd Infantry Division mounted the drive to the west
and north to the Euphrates river bridges. There were limited airmobile
operations, although elements of the 101st Airborne Division did participate in
the drive. The drive was a textbook application of the principles of armored and
mechanized warfare. It drove at maximum possible speed through the line of least
resistance, on the relatively unpopulated and undefended western bank of the
Euphrates. The spearhead bypassed all pockets of resistance, continuing the
attack northward until it reached a major line of resistance south of Karbala,
where Republican Guard forces were dug in, waiting for their first encounter
with the U.S. forces.
The 11th Infantry Division, which was a regular
army unit charged with holding the Euphrates line from An Nasiriyah to An Najaf,
had an impossible mission: It could not possibly hold the entire line.
Nevertheless, elements of the 11th remained in An Nasiriyah and formed other
pockets of resistance that were attacked by U.S. forces following the spearhead.
The Iraqi forces held in several places, inflicting casualties. Even a direct
attack by U.S. Marines on the night of March 24-25, which led to the capture of
the bridge at An Nasiriyah, did not completely dislodge the Iraqis.
What
we have seen, therefore, is that the Iraqis were defeated on the strategic
level. The main objectives of both operations were met. However, the Iraqis did
not simply collapse. They held their positions and, on a tactical level, were
able to inflict casualties, take prisoners and pose non-critical problems for
U.S. forces. The bottom line is that some Iraqi troops -- but far from all --
held their positions. However, the speed of the U.S. advance was not affected.
The resistance was strategically ineffective, causing very light casualties for
an operation of this sort.
On the other side of the ledger, the United
States demonstrated that it could deploy a division-sized force for an
impressive thrust against light resistance. Since the night of March 20, the
United States executed the easier part of the campaign. It advanced to the major
line of Iraqi resistance and halted its advance as it should have done, which
opened the door for the next part of the campaign -- intensive air attacks on
the Republican Guards. Those attacks resulted in the downing of a single Apache
helicopter, and the capture of its crew. Apache attacks were apparently
abandoned in favor of attacks by tactical aircraft and, we suspect, ultimate
bombardment by B-52s, which will seek to break the Republican Guard before a
ground assault begins. In the meantime, U.S. forces, under the cover of a dust
storm, appear to have crossed at multiple points to the more populated eastern
bank of the Euphrates. This opens up a new axis of attack, with the potential of
either flanking the Republican Guard around Karbala or moving forward to
identify the major line of resistance between the Euphrates and Tigris and/or
assault on Al Kut.
The Iraqi forces have performed more effectively than
expected, and some of their soldiers have fought courageously. The United States
has carried out its first maneuvers of the war as expected, and coalition troops
also have fought courageously and effectively. On the Iraqi side, it must be
said that many of their forces did not resist. On the U.S. side, it has to be
said that forces have not yet confronted their greatest challenge. That is yet
to come, as the battle south of Baghdad unfolds and U.S. troops fight Republican
Guards -- who may be shattered by U.S. air attacks or may resist.
All of
that is as yet unknown. However, what is known is this: Two countries went to
war, and both sides fought. The Iraqis were unable to defeat the coalition
either in Basra or along the Euphrates, except in peripheral, tactical
situations. They did not mount successful counteroffensives. They could not
isolate U.S. forces. They could and did resist direct U.S. attack as well as air
and artillery bombardment. But the U.S. war plan has not been checked, at least
not yet.
The United States has an overwhelming advantage: Its forces are
more mobile than those of Iraq, and it has air power. This means that while the
Iraqi forces can hold fixed positions, they can neither engage in maneuver
warfare nor, if they hold positions, can they avoid overwhelming air attack. The
United States then can choose to attack directly or envelop the Iraqis. Once the
battle is joined, coalition forces have the options. Even in the possible battle
of Baghdad, the United States has the option of attack or siege. The Iraqis have
only one option -- to hold in the face of bombardment. The Iraqis can't
win.
They can't win unless they achieve their strategic goal: to create a
political crisis in the United States that compels the Bush administration to
accept a cease-fire. Their means to this end would be to inflict as many
casualties as possible and to make the war last as long as possible, in the
expectation that political support for the war will dissolve internationally and
in the United States and Britain. Saddam Hussein's assumption is and has always
been that the United States and Britain have no stomach for a long (defined as
months), costly (defined as hundreds of deaths) war. From what he has seen so
far, he has no reason to doubt his strategy.
To claim that either U.S. or
Iraqi war plans have failed to this point indicates a fundamental
misunderstanding of warfare. The measure of a plan is not whether it is adhered
to, but whether it leads to victory. In this particular case, it seems to us
that the plan thus far has actually been followed. But if one simply thinks of
the Normandy Invasion, we can see a case in which many things went wrong for the
Allies, except for one: that they succeeded in invading France.
There
are some real issues built into the war, of course. The decision not to isolate
Baghdad by shattering its electric and telecommunications system strikes us as
odd, although it has not interfered thus far in the war. There is a question in
our mind as to whether there are enough forces in theater to deal with the
Republican Guards should they fight effectively. But at this point, with the air
campaign against them just beginning, it isn't clear that additional forces will
be needed.
Stratfor has consistently warned that the assumption that
Iraq's army would not resist invasion of their homeland was probably flawed and
certainly unproven. We are, as an organization, skeptical and pessimistic.
However, the manic-depressive mood swings of the markets and some in the media
force us to into a different mode. The fact that the United States has taken
light casualties does not translate into thinking that the U.S. plan has failed.
It hasn't even been tested.
The greatest danger the United States faces
in this war is if its politicians and generals come to feel that they are
working against some deadline -- if they sense that they must not only win, but
win fast. That is where unnecessary risks are taken and where wars can be lost.
How many really remember how long Desert Storm or Kosovo took? What is
remembered is the outcome. There is no prize for doing it fast. However, the
core Iraqi assumption is that the United States will not be given enough time by
the American public to defeat Iraq. That is the essence of the Iraqi war plan.
Over the past few days, it did not seem a foolish assumption.
