Uprising in Libya

[Sarevok]

That Libya intervention type wars are won politically rather than militarily seems lost on NATO leaders.

[Metahive]

That Libya intervention type wars are won politically rather than militarily seems lost on NATO leaders.

Doesn't seem to be so, actually:

From David Brunnstrom, Reuters: NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Tuesday he would not guess how long the alliance's military mission would last in Libya, but there could be no solely military solution. Speaking after an international coalition pledged to continue military action against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and agreed to set up a contact group to coordinate political efforts, Rasmussen urged all parties to seek a political solution as soon as possible."I am not going to guess," he told Reuters when asked how long the NATO mission could last and whether it could become a financial burden for alliance states on top of their long commitment in Afghanistan.

"But I do hope that we'll see a political solution to the problems in Libya as soon as possible. Clearly there's no military solution, solely, to the problems in Libya," he said.
NATO agreed on Sunday to take over all operations in Libya from a coalition led by the United States, France and Britain, putting the 28-nation alliance in charge of air strikes that have targeted Muammar Gaddafi's military infrastructure, as well as a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone and an arms embargo. NATO officials say alliance planning foresees a 90-day operation, but the timetable would depend on the United Nations."We are there to protect civilians against attack, but in order to find a long-term sustainable solution to the conflict in Libya, we need a political process and I would ask all parties involved to seek such political solutions sooner rather than later," Rasmussen said.

NATO forces will reach initial capacity to take over military operations in Libya on Wednesday and should be fully operational on Thursday, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said.

http://www.acus.org/natosource/nato-chi ... bya-crisis

[Shroom Man 777]

Rebels call for more close air support for days, NATO obliges and mistakes happen. Yeah I see can see they wont apologize for that. A damn good reason existed why NATO didn’t want to fly those kinds of missions now that US assets are out of the picture. Trying to deduce a tactical situation looking through 500mph a soda straw from 20,000ft isn’t easy. This is NATO telling the rebels that if you want to win that way, you’ll have to accept this is going to happen. If the US was still involved then some armed Predators would be far more effective then fast jets for figuring out who is who.

Whuh? Emphasis on the bolded. The US is no longer involved in bombing stuff in Libya? What happened?

(Christ I live in a cave.)

[RedImperator]

The US has scaled back its involvement to logistics and intelligence, if I understand the situation correctly. Obama wanted no part of a long-term combat commitment and said from the beginning he was going to hand the operation off to the Europeans as soon as the US's "unique capabilities" (read: wiping out Libya's air defenses with total impunity) were no longer needed.

[Guardsman Bass]

I suppose that if the rebels still manage to lose, the US will just maintain cut-off diplomatic relations and also slap Libya with an embargo. We'd be back to the situation before the easing of relations in the last ten years.

It's a pity Qaddafi isn't older. The fucker probably has at least another 10 years of life if he holds on to power.

[Phantasee]

I suppose that if the rebels still manage to lose, the US will just maintain cut-off diplomatic relations and also slap Libya with an embargo. We'd be back to the situation before the easing of relations in the last ten years.

It's a pity Qaddafi isn't older. The fucker probably has at least another 10 years of life if he holds on to power.

My understanding is that his son is a smart motherfucker, so if he gets into power after his father kicks the bucket we're looking at another lifetime of rule by a Qaddafi.

[Zaune]

My understanding is that his son is a smart motherfucker, so if he gets into power after his father kicks the bucket we're looking at another lifetime of rule by a Qaddafi.

The last few weeks should have hammered home the drawbacks to the "despotic tyranny" gig, however. If he's any smarter than his old man he's probably planning to cut some sort of deal with the rebels, even if just for safe passage out of Libya in return for capitulation.

[Edward Yee]

Meanwhile, Germany is continuing to make a fool out of itself. Now the Parliament is considering a "humanitarian mission" to Rebel territories. So...we are going to land Ground troops there who are supposed to "only defend themselves when fired upon" to help stave off a humanitarian catastrophe? While we also pray real hard that Ghaddafi does not attack the German mission? How is that supposed to work? Unless the objective is to drag Germany into the war via proxy, I cannot make sense out of this.

I also have this objection/question... what exactly would German troops be providing -- whether for war or for that other Western/First World military troops couldn't? (And alternately, "why should they get to touch down any more than other Western/First World troops do?")

It looks incredibly disconcerting considering how far the German government had already gone to avoid involvement in military operations in Libya, only to try wading back in with questionable contribution (humanitarian or not).

[Thanas]

My understanding is that his son is a smart motherfucker, so if he gets into power after his father kicks the bucket we're looking at another lifetime of rule by a Qaddafi.

The last few weeks should have hammered home the drawbacks to the "despotic tyranny" gig, however. If he's any smarter than his old man he's probably planning to cut some sort of deal with the rebels, even if just for safe passage out of Libya in return for capitulation.

Why should he? Until the French Foreign Legion rings his doorbell, there is no incentive for him to leave.

I also have this objection/question... what exactly would German troops be providing -- whether for war or for that other Western/First World military troops couldn't? (And alternately, "why should they get to touch down any more than other Western/First World troops do?")

Beats me. We do have an excellent field medicine system....as well as probably the best Artillery and Armor and decent combat engineers. Though the efficiency of the latter three is in question - there is no chance we will be deploying conscripts in Libya. And how would we get the forces there in the first place?

It looks incredibly disconcerting considering how far the German government had already gone to avoid involvement in military operations in Libya, only to try wading back in with questionable contribution (humanitarian or not).

Apparently, if the newest rumours are correct, Germany will be willing to cover refugee trecks as well as providing humanitarian relief. However, no UN representative has requested it so far, so who knows if it will ever come to pass.

[Lord Woodlouse]

http://www.economist.com/node/18530437 Not a bad overview of the situation by the Economist.

[Iroscato]

I've just seen a news report, saying about Gaddafi's daughter was holding a rally, saying the ousting of Gaddafi would outrage 'all Libyans. Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhh...
It makes me think; how many people really are supporting Gaddafi? How many just make it look like they do, out of fear for the evil bastard?

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, for all we know there could be some tribalism involved and they might think the other tribes (rebels) are dicks?

[Count Chocula]

The US has scaled back its involvement to logistics and intelligence, if I understand the situation correctly. Obama wanted no part of a long-term combat commitment and said from the beginning he was going to hand the operation off to the Europeans as soon as the US's "unique capabilities" (read: wiping out Libya's air defenses with total impunity) were no longer needed.

The situation appears more complicated, and our speedy pullout (hopefully) from involvement and any ground-pounding, by the following data:

Datum #1:

Libya News

Libya: al-Qaeda among Libya rebels, Nato chief fears
Libyan rebel forces may have been infiltrated by al-Qaeda fighters, a senior American military commander has warned. Admiral James Stavridis, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, said that American intelligence had picked up "flickers" of terrorist activity among the rebel groups. Senior British government figures described the comment as "very alarming".

The admission came as the American, Qatari and British Governments indicated that they were considering arming rebel groups, who yesterday suffered a series of setbacks in their advance along the Libyan coast towards Tripoli.

Datum 2:

Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya".

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".

Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.

So the US has a conundrum. Moammar El-Gadhafi is a certified bad guy and on our shit list. So's Al Quaeda, who we've been actively combating for, oh since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan ended. In Libya we have a case of "our enemy's enemy is our enemy too..." Oops. THAT's not in the handbook! It appears that "take out Libya's SAMs and let our allies take care of business" is the course we've chosen.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, for all we know there could be some tribalism involved and they might think the other tribes (rebels) are dicks?

Isn't it basically a tribal split? Libya never got rid of tribalism, it was a union of whatever-number of tribes, and some were pro-Gaddafi while others got the short end of the stick, and those formed the core of the uprising.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh man, so there really ARE AQ guys in the rebel side. Gaddafi you magnificent basterd.

[Iroscato]

Oh man, so there really ARE AQ guys in the rebel side. Gaddafi you magnificent basterd.

Different kinds of evil I guess. I don't think it's a case of 'Gaddafi is so evil even Al-Qaeda (DAMN that is fiddly to spell) hates him.' Probably more 'Gaddafi isn't working in our best interests, so we hate him'. Possibly.

[K. A. Pital]

Qaddafi is a secular dictator, and he did a fair share of work to make Libya more secularized than other African nations. No wonder Al Quaeda hates him.

[Thanas]

Also, it is very disingenious to take two dozen fighters and tar the entire rebellion with it by association.

[Raj Ahten]

Something to consider about the NATO air campaign is the small number of aircraft involved. The Washington Post puts the total number of strike aircraft at around 64 from NATO nations; and they are already pretty much out of precision munitions. You'd think that more aircraft could be scrounged up than this. With that number of aircraft, no wonder Gadaffi is able to continue besieging Misrata. Also I knew that most nations only stock enough munitions for a couple of weeks of actual war, but I'm a bit surprised that Britain and France are running low so quickly given their records of interventions and the UK's role in the "war on terror." Maybe the Libya campaign will be a bit of a wake up call to the Europeans that if they want to do anything with their militaries they are going to have to spend a bit more on them than almost nothing. Otherwise the US will continue to be the indispensible nation for good or ill.

Link to the Washington Post

NATO runs short on some munitions in Libya
By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, Friday, April 15, 8:46 PM
Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials.

The shortage of European munitions, along with the limited number of aircraft available, has raised doubts among some officials about whether the United States can continue to avoid returning to the air campaign if Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi hangs on to power for several more months.

U.S. strike aircraft that participated in the early stage of the operation, before the United States relinquished command to NATO and assumed what President Obama called a “supporting” role, have remained in the theater “on 12-hour standby” with crews “constantly briefed on the current situation,” a NATO official said.

So far, the NATO commander has not requested their deployment. Several U.S. military officials said they anticipated being called back into the fight, although a senior administration official said he expected other countries to announce “in the next few days” that they would contribute aircraft equipped with the laser-guided munitions.

Opposition spokesmen in the western Libyan city of Misurata, under steady bombardment by government shelling, said Friday that Gaddafi’s forces had used cluster bombs, and Human Rights Watch said its representatives on the ground had witnessed the explosion of cluster munitions in civilian areas there. The Libyan government denied the weapons had been used.

A spokesman for the Misurata City Council appealed for NATO to send ground troops to secure the port that is the besieged city’s only remaining humanitarian lifeline.

The opposition has also repeatedly called for an increase in NATO airstrikes. The six countries conducting the air attacks, led by Britain and France, were unsuccessful at a meeting this week in Berlin in persuading more alliance members to join them.

NATO officials said that their operational tempo has not decreased since the United States relinquished command of the Libya operation and withdrew its strike aircraft at the beginning of April. More planes, they said, would not necessarily result immediately in more strike missions.

But, they said, the current bombing rate by the participating nations is not sustainable. “The reason we need more capability isn’t because we aren’t hitting what we see — it’s so that we can sustain the ability to do so. One problem is flight time, the other is munitions,” said another official, one of several who were not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.

European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the NATO weapon of choice in the Libyan campaign, have been quickly depleted, officials said. Although the United States has significant stockpiles, its munitions do not fit on the British- and French-made planes that have flown the bulk of the missions.

Britain and France have each contributed about 20 strike aircraft to the campaign. Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Canada have each contributed six — all of them U.S.-manufactured and compatible with U.S. weaponry.

Since the end of March, more than 800 strike missions have been flown, with U.S. aircraft conducting only three, targeting static Libyan air defense installations. The United States still conducts about 25 percent of the overall sorties over Libya, largely intelligence, jamming and refueling missions.

Other NATO countries, along with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan, have contributed planes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Gaddafi’s use of airpower, but so far have declined to participate in the strike missions.

After the Berlin meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen said that 10 more aircraft were needed and that he was confident they would be supplied. A U.S. official said that Italy — which earlier in the week said it was not interested — may contribute planes to the ground attack mission, and that the Arab participants might also do so.

But with Gaddafi’s forces and the rebel army locked in a stalemate, Obama has resisted calls from opposition leaders, and some hardline lawmakers in this country, to move U.S. warplanes back into a leading role.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other have called on Obama to redeploy U.S. AC-130 gunships, which are considered more effective over populated areas.

Although the gunships flew several missions early in the operation, Gen. Carter Ham, who commanded the mission before it was turned over to NATO, said last week that they were frequently grounded because of weather and other concerns.

The slow-moving aircraft, which flew as low as 4,000 feet over Libya, are also considerably more vulnerable than jet fighters to surface-to-air missiles. While much of Libya’s stationary air defenses have been destroyed, Ham said Gaddafi was believed to have about 20,000 shoulder-held SAMS at the beginning of the conflict, and “most” of them are still unaccounted for.

Concerns that supplies of jet-launched precision bombs are growing short in Europe have reignited long-standing controversies over both burden-sharing and compatibility within NATO. While allied jets have largely followed the U.S. lead and converted to precision munitions over the last decade, they have struggled to keep pace, according to senior U.S. military officials.

Libya “has not been a very big war. If [the Europeans] would run out of these munitions this early in such a small operation, you have to wonder what kind of war they were planning on fighting,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Maybe they were just planning on using their air force for air shows.”

Despite U.S. badgering, European allies have been slow in some cases to modify their planes and other weapons systems so they can accommodate U.S. bombs. Retooling these fighter jets so that they are compatible with U.S. systems requires money, and all European militaries have faced significant cuts in recent years.

Typically, the British and French militaries buy munitions in batches and stockpile them. When arsenals start to run low, factories must be retooled and production lines restarted to replace the diminished stock, all of which can take time and additional money, said Elizabeth Quintana, an aerospace analyst at the Royal United Service Institute in London.

edit: to correct numbers I gave.

[Lonestar]

Well, there are several nations(Sweden, Qatar, the UAE) who are not NATO and are absolutely refusing to drop munitions with an eye at only making sure nothing takes off.

But yeah, not a really big surprise here. France and the UK don't have a lot of PGMs to begin with(well, not compared to the US) and a good chunk of that is probably in the "do not use" box for other contingencies. Their fancypants stuff like the Storm shadow is not a lot, although I question the WaPos claim that RAF Typhoons aren't wired for US-built munitions, as there was a video released of a Typhoon dropping a paveway on a tank in Libya.

[Lonestar]

although I question the WaPos claim that RAF Typhoons aren't wired for US-built munitions, as there was a video released of a Typhoon dropping a paveway on a tank in Libya.

Annnnnnd here is the video

[Raj Ahten]

The article is pretty damn vague about what particular munitions they are talking about running low on. Plinking tanks and such without destroying the neighborhood is a pretty specialized thing to do and for all we know what's running low are some of the munitions designed in the last few years specifically for counter insurgency ops that purposefully have as small a warhead as possible that still gets the job done.

[Lonestar]

The article is pretty damn vague about what particular munitions they are talking about running low on. Plinking tanks and such without destroying the neighborhood is a pretty specialized thing to do and for all we know what's running low are some of the munitions designed in the last few years specifically for counter insurgency ops that purposefully have as small a warhead as possible that still gets the job done.

Yeah except the article says that British planes are not wired for US Munitions when they clearly fucking are wired for some(Paveway family) US munitions.

[Sea Skimmer]

But yeah, not a really big surprise here. France and the UK don't have a lot of PGMs to begin with(well, not compared to the US) and a good chunk of that is probably in the "do not use" box for other contingencies. Their fancypants stuff like the Storm shadow is not a lot, although I question the WaPos claim that RAF Typhoons aren't wired for US-built munitions, as there was a video released of a Typhoon dropping a paveway on a tank in Libya.

The UK has several of its own Paveway production variants; they should be able to use some models of US laser guided bombs but not all of them. It wouldn't be a wiring issue as much as a software issue though. Some of the newest LGBs being used don't need wing wiring at all except for the physical arm switch which is a NATO standard thing; the bomb seeker is activated and given its initial cue by radio commands and then you merely need to drop it.

Anyway I highly doubt a lack of laser guided bombs in affecting anyone. What is affecting everything is that barely 60 jets are actually flying bombing missions, and only about 1 mission a day per aircraft, and they have crap in the way of reconnaissance to help them find targets and at least until very recently they would not bomb tanks in the streets at all unless they specifically spotted the tank firing. Dumb as fuck, but on the plus side Qatar just gave the rebels Milan anti tank missiles and new BM-21 rocket launchers so we might see some progress on the ground.

[Thanas]

I think that no matter what you think about the invasion, the very least Germany could do is to give the munitions to the partners. After all, we are not using it and I think we do have a decent-sized stockpile lying around, which should also be compatible at least with the British tornados.