Sir George over at The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has responded to a post that KOS thinks is brillant. I loved this response so much I have to call your attention to it:
Kos thinks this is a brilliant analysis of the Iraq quaaaagmire. I’ve excerpted a few choice bits.
Now, the warbloggers, who are fuzzy on the details of the actual war, like to believe that we’re winning in Iraq. They’re about the only ones who do.
That’s right, we’re looooooosing. I’ll bet he, like so many moonbats, thinks the situation grows exponentially worse, as it has since ever since we invaded. I mean, we suffered 36 fatalities in March 2005, surely somehow exponentially larger than the 37 in May 2003. It’s just one of those really weird exponential increases where you multiply through by zero and subtract one.
Let’s take a look at the map of major convoy routes in Iraq.
Here he inserts a map of Iraq obviously based on images taken from NASA’s Galileo probe as it passed the asteroid belt. I’m not kidding. Go click the link.
Most days, large stretches of these highways are vunerable to attack. And notice something else: all roads lead to Baghdad. So if you wage a road denial campaign against the US military, every attack in Baghdad has a multiplier. Because it slows down the whole network.
He follows this staggering revelation with other maps taken from the same space probe, along with some charts made by Mr. Magoo. As Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now would say, “? and then it hit me. It hit me like a diamond bullet; a diamond bullet right through the forehead. Roads are really long and impossible to protect from attack, even in Ohio and Washington DC. The North Vietnamese can never win the war because the Ho Chi Min trail is actually an unprotectable supply road!”
This isn’t news because Iraq is so dangerous that reporters cannot get out to cover the news, unless escorted by US troops.
Well he’s got that one half right. Reporters (other than the one’s who go out to cover the news) don’t go out to cover the news, because most of them write it at their desks without even bothering to check the facts on the ground. Our military asks them to come out, but they simply refuse. Just ask CNN and the BBC. I mean, the place is so dangerous that UN election monitors couldn’t even go in, even though 8 million people happily voted almost without incident.
And there is every reason to believe units just don’t report attacks which miss or don’t cause damage.
Yes, he actually thinks it’s standard military policy for units not to report unsuccessful attacks, I suppose to make sure that their commanders stay in the dark about the enemy’s current location and intent. In fact, I’ll bet he thinks we train our squads to keep mum about incoming fire until flying body parts threaten to damage the radio, probably because Halliburton got awarded a Duracell supply contract.
But what this shows is that the pace of combat is intense. One can conclude that US troops are under heavy combat daily and as a result, this pace of combat is wearing out men and equipment at a fairly high rate.
On the other hand, if the pace of combat wasn’t intense, like those idle times in WW-I when neither side was even scouting, we’d be losing a couple hundred dead a day. So simple math says things are a hundred-fold quieter than when all was quiet on the Western front. Then again, maybe we’re not dug in a couple hundred yards from millions of Westerners who know how to aim.
What people don’t want to do is put it together. You have declining enlistments, recruiters going AWOL, up to 5000 desertions, massive complaints about equipment and supply.
Year 2000 – Army 3,949 Marines 2,019
Year 2004 ? Army 2,376 Marines 1,297
Enlistments are down a bit, but what we have are small numbers of DNC members dissappearing altogether, with a half-dozen moonbats running to Canada and the rest desperately trying to find out how to get a draft card so they can burn it. The constant complaints about equipment and supply have been part of an army ever since people moaned about the sandal’s that were getting worn out while pointlessly marching around the walls of Jerico. It’s not that people don’t want to put it together, it’s that normal people just don’t shit in a jar and call it art.
So let’s draw some conclusions:
Okay let’s.
*Leaving open the ammo dumps set the bed for the resistance. The Iraqi resistance is the most lavishly equipped in history. Every unit well armed with modern weapons.
Indeed, crap you can buy at a flea market for $150 is the best stuff in all of military history, and yes, 1950’s and 60’s equipment is the most modern ever made. Our army is facing a decided backwardness deficit, and the only way to foreclose it is to buy 1940’s equipment. We’ll contact our congressman forthwith.
*Poor planning left the US without their Third World auxillary armies to provide basic security. Without the large Pakistani and Nigerian units to patrol towns and provide basic area denial, US units have had to do two jobs, security and quick reaction.
As we all know, any military strategy that doesn’t include sufficient Pakistanis and Nigerians is doomed to failure. This is what passes for “wisdom” on the left.
*Disbanding the Army set the stage for the resistance to have trained people running it. These men didn’t learn war from textbooks. The senior folks learned in combat and passed those lessons down.
Looking at how fast their army collapsed I can see that they didn’t learn war from textbooks. Maybe a Monte Python episode or something, but certainly not a textbook. Well, maybe a French textbook, but that’s another matter.
US forces have adapted to tactics only to have those tactics shift.
My jaw drops at the absolute idiocy of this “lesson”. Does anyone on the far left have even the vaguest idea that an enemy’s tactics shift is when their current ones fail to work? Only a rider of the ‘tard bus could even pen such a sentence, much less call it a spectacular overview, but then Kos always did fit right in on the short bus.
There is much more where that came from, it’s a definate must read.
UPDATE 4/23/05 1630HRS
Dadmanly (A soldier in Iraq) has a supurb response to the original author:
read your “newsblog” story, Looking at Iraq.
I don’t know the source of your information depicting life in Iraq for we who are deployed here, but it strikes me that you use what little information you do have to paint a picture grossly different than what is actually the case. You compound this fancy by drawing conclusions that are not supported even by the data you do misrepresent.
I am stationed in the heart of Sunni controlled Iraq — for operational security I will not identify where — and I regularly travel by convoy to other forward operating bases (FOB) within this area. We routinely conduct convoys, but we also try to take advantage of air transportation wherever possible, as this is more efficient and relatively safer.
There are regular improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on the major supply routes (MSRs), that is a fact of life for us. With thousands and thousands of vehicles on the road daily, it is impossible to completely prevent attacks, with perhaps several thousand dedicated insurgents with perhaps a couple thousand foreign jihadists with left over and imported weapons and ordnance. Overwhelmingly, these IED attacks rely on old military munitions, artillery shells, mines, etc., and the vast majority are implemented to no effect. Likewise, complex attacks with secondary IED or RPG or small arms fire are similarly ineffective. Any massed attack on U.S. positions results in a lot of dead insurgents and little or no injuries or damage to U.S. forces. Iraqi forces suffer more, of course, as they are not as well equipped or trained, and of course they live among sometimes hostile or at least ambivalent populaces. (And yet, despite this, their recruting efforts continue to outpace available positions.)
Dozens of convoys will travel the same road day after day, and perhaps a couple of times a week an IED goes off, usually to no effect whatever. Based on any reasonable calculation of threat, this might work out to a .5% chance of being hit while in convoy here.
I can assure you by a continuing problem we’re facing, soldiers gaining weight, and the proliferation of consumer goods available through the PX, that we have no problem with supply or resupply. We do make decisions based on relative risk, so yes, we’ll avoid being on the roads if we can achieve the same purpose by other means.
You use the number and frequency of IED attacks — without regard to their continuing lack of effectiveness — to then conclude that “guerillas” control the road network.
“Vulnerable to attack” in no way translates into “they control the roads.” That’s both simplistic, and idiotic. By the same lack of proportion, you should conclude that drunk drivers control the roads in the U.S. Sure, its a problem, but the overwhelming majority of us will never be in an accident with one.
Likewise, that the anti-Iraqi forces can stage fly-by or isolated attacks (however spectacular) throughout the country in no way translates into widespread support or control of the countryside. Al Qaeda can attack anywhere in the U.S. or Europe that they decide they want to plan and execute an operation. Does that mean they effectively control the U.S. or Europe?
You also point out that, in Vietnam, soldiers could move about the cities, bars and restaurants, flophouses and the like. That’s no doubt true, but your argument is disingenuous. We don’t want to have that kind of presence here, Iraqis wouldn’t like it. The whole point of the exercise is to make Iraqis responsible for their own defense, their own government, their own society. Absolutely, we toppled the dictator Hussein. Certainly, our forces are a critical part of preserving this emergent democracy. But you make it sound like anything less than complete occupation and domination is somehow defeat. Aren’t you arguing against yourself here? If we were behaving that way, as occupiers in that sense, I’m quite sure you’d have much to criticize with that approach.
This “insurgency” is losing, few soldiers deploying and redeploying agree with your assessment. The forces against us are doing everything in their power to jump start a public relations and media spurred “Tet Offensive” strategy, but they have very little by way of success to point to and mostly can only fall back on killing civilians or lightly defended Iraqi security forces. You make a valiant effort to help them along, but I seriously doubt any but unrepentant anti-war types are buying.
You can wait a very long time for your “truth to come out,” my guess is you’ll still be waiting when the majority of the U.S. forces come home and the Iraqis celebrate their 3rd or 4th succession of democratically elected governments.
Respectfully, but credulously,
Dadmanly
OIF III
He also has an email exchange with the original author up on his blog, check it out.
Bill over at The Fourth Rail also has an excellent response.
See author page