Top American military commanders wish for conventional war

[thejester]

Simon:

I'm not arguing that it's not useful at some level, just that it forms such a tiny fraction of one part of a complicated process that Shep's claim that it can be decisive is laughable, as is his whole conception of counterinsurgency as something that can be solved through military force. Take for instance this:

It doesn't, not directly. It can be made pointless if you screw up the face-to-face aspect. But done right, it can help: your patrols move more freely and are more visible, making people more secure. You harass random turnip farmers less frequently, making people feel more secure with you than with the guerillas. Guerilla leaders are quickly identified and forced into hiding, making people feel less secure with the guerillas than with you, and so on.

Which is great, but again, let's look at Iraq: what was more important, the incremental improvements in anti-IED technology or the decision to saturate neighbourhoods with US outposts during the surge? The latter, obviously, and it itself was not nearly as large a factor as the Sunni awakening.

And just quietly, as you yourself acknowledge most of these increments are about force protection for the third party Western force - which isn't a bad thing in itself but isn't doing much to solve the insurgent problem long term. Australian commanders who went to Iraq are pretty open about the fact they used civic aid to tribal leaders as a way of minimalising risk to their men -I'll build you a school if you make sure no-one shoots at us from your area of control. Which is great, cause it meant no body bags, but it didn't do anything to solve Iraq's problems going forward.

[thejester]

But then Shep's post clearly demonstrates that the military-industrial complex isn't coming under intense scrutiny, gets piles of expensive contracts, and even gets paid to recommend solutions to problems, solutions which - effective or not - come out of weapon production lines! And best of all, these toys are useless or next to useless to fighting a conventional war, so the US government has to continue their usual orders and procure entirely new toys, to fight a war which, even if it's lost utterly, doesn't harm the factories used to make all that stuff.

Read my second paragraph- the point is that such weapons are built under the aura of conferred invincibility and superiority. A guerrilla war, where their inherent defects become apparent, thus damages the social effects of the military-industrial complex, since it justifies itself on the grounds that it is essential for the security of the public. If it fails to provide security, then it is no longer justifiable and that is why when the US has faced its most grueling wars (Philippine-American War, WWI, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan) public anger against the military-industrial complex has become prominent- and this is all because the products of the complex cannot win guerrilla wars (or trench warfare like in WWI) and therefore cannot live up to their implied promises of invincibility.

As I said I don't agree with it but there's an internal logic to it - there's plenty of anger at the size of the military's budget and you have prominent commentators like Rachel Maddow writing books on America being 'addicted to war', which in turns feeds into broader movements like OWS.

[PeZook]

Simon:

I'm not arguing that it's not useful at some level, just that it forms such a tiny fraction of one part of a complicated process that Shep's claim that it can be decisive is laughable, as is his whole conception of counterinsurgency as something that can be solved through military force. Take for instance this:

Let me ask you this: is the amount of trucks the decisive factor in an armored assault?

It is, but it's not the trucks that are doing the fighting! ; But if you don't have enough trucks, your entire assault gets fucked anyways, however awesome your tanks are.

So you won't win a guerilla war with military force alone, but you definitely need a military force deployed because otherwise the guerillas kinda win by default. And since political constaints make it unacceptable to deploy half a million men and accept taking 50 000 casualties in the process of subduing Iraq, that means without all that force protection/surveillance technology you also lose by default, because the public demands everyone go back home.

So technology is decisive for COIN in the same way trucks are decisive for heavy armor: it allows you to win because without it you can't actually fight the war you want to fight.

This is, of course, completely separate from the reasoning behind even having the war in the first place.

[thejester]

What?

Even taking you 'model', doesn't the example of Iraq prove the exact opposite? The US didn't and wouldn't deploy enough troops to Iraq, which resulted in a rapid descent into insurgency which in turn eventually forced a massive increase in the number of troops deployed to try and quell it! The gap technology was supposed to fill was not filled - the 'do more with less through technology' approach failed. And that still avoids the point I made at the start: the decisive event in the Iraqi insurgency was the Sunni Awakening, which had fuck all to do with technology.

[Zinegata]

What?

Even taking you 'model', doesn't the example of Iraq prove the exact opposite? The US didn't and wouldn't deploy enough troops to Iraq, which resulted in a rapid descent into insurgency which in turn eventually forced a massive increase in the number of troops deployed to try and quell it! The gap technology was supposed to fill was not filled - the 'do more with less through technology' approach failed. And that still avoids the point I made at the start: the decisive event in the Iraqi insurgency was the Sunni Awakening, which had fuck all to do with technology.

What you're failing to realize is that the public doesn't know or doesn't care about that.

What the public cares about is simply two things: How the war is progressing (winning or losing) and the body count (and generally only if it hits close to home).

They don't care about the little details like the cost of body armor, or the effect of the Sunni Awakening. You haven't exactly seen an article like "Humvee Offers Insufficient Protection Against IEDs" in the NYT, do you?

And when things go wrong ("We aren't winning the war!"), the reaction tends to be focused on the government, sometimes on the military, but virtually never on the "industrial" side of the complex.

Which is why companies who supply the military can still continue to offer new products and earn record profits. "Losing" a war can actually drive desperate Generals to green light projects they shouldn't have. And even if the scandal breaks, the hammer usually only falls on government officials or the generals, not the corporations who produced the weapons.

[Sea Skimmer]

What?

Even taking you 'model', doesn't the example of Iraq prove the exact opposite? The US didn't and wouldn't deploy enough troops to Iraq, which resulted in a rapid descent into insurgency which in turn eventually forced a massive increase in the number of troops deployed to try and quell it! The gap technology was supposed to fill was not filled - the 'do more with less through technology' approach failed. And that still avoids the point I made at the start: the decisive event in the Iraqi insurgency was the Sunni Awakening, which had fuck all to do with technology.

Most of the relevant technology Shep was talking about didn't exist until the last years of US involvement when violence plummeted so its kind of hard to draw conclusions on it in Iraq. Though.. its not in question that the US became very highly effective at protecting its main supply routes fairly earl i nthe war. Patrols off the main routes suffered damn lot, but that helicopter camera system plus route clearing detachments escorted by M1 tanks could negate the IED threat almost completely. This is why you didn't see video of dozens of exploding fuel trucks every single day out of Iraq, but you do see endless hummves blown up, even though thousands of such supply trucks were on the move at any given time and none of them were armored on the cargo area (though actually, South Africa made vehicles like that in the 80s, its just too inefficient for mass use)

[MKSheppard]

I'd also like to point out the fact that overpriced construction/development/catering contracts are something that Halliburton does very well on, too, and they're definitely a way to win at COIN outside weapons and surveillance tech.

Said contracts also get massively inflated, because you have to pay people a premium to work in *gasp* a warzone. I once tried applying for one such job as an electrician back in the day, and part of the application sheet was a blank space authorizing the US military to incinerate my corpse and dump it in a hazwaste repository if the area I was in was attacked by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

[thejester]

What?

Even taking you 'model', doesn't the example of Iraq prove the exact opposite? The US didn't and wouldn't deploy enough troops to Iraq, which resulted in a rapid descent into insurgency which in turn eventually forced a massive increase in the number of troops deployed to try and quell it! The gap technology was supposed to fill was not filled - the 'do more with less through technology' approach failed. And that still avoids the point I made at the start: the decisive event in the Iraqi insurgency was the Sunni Awakening, which had fuck all to do with technology.

What you're failing to realize is that the public doesn't know or doesn't care about that.

What the public cares about is simply two things: How the war is progressing (winning or losing) and the body count (and generally only if it hits close to home).

They don't care about the little details like the cost of body armor, or the effect of the Sunni Awakening. You haven't exactly seen an article like "Humvee Offers Insufficient Protection Against IEDs" in the NYT, do you?

Yeah so you're totally wrong. You do see public reaction to, and extensive media coverage of comparatively minor issues like the provision of body armour - check out the 'you go to war with what you have' controversy circa 2004, families of British dead taking action against the British government for lack of mobile phone jammers etc - precisely because, as you said, the 'public' (the American public, obviously, not the Iraqi one, which in turn is an insight into how we frame these issues) cares vastly more about casualties than it does about winning. But again, the casualties that are saved by 'technology' (and technology is a two way street) are surely dwarfed by the casualties created by fighting the insurgency in the first place. And ultimately stopping the insurgency is about removing the political causes of it, not marginally increasing your ability to kill Random IED Man #456.

And when things go wrong ("We aren't winning the war!"), the reaction tends to be focused on the government, sometimes on the military, but virtually never on the "industrial" side of the complex.

Which is why companies who supply the military can still continue to offer new products and earn record profits. "Losing" a war can actually drive desperate Generals to green light projects they shouldn't have. And even if the scandal breaks, the hammer usually only falls on government officials or the generals, not the corporations who produced the weapons.

Which is a rebuttal of Bakustra's argument and has nothing to do with me.

Most of the relevant technology Shep was talking about didn't exist until the last years of US involvement when violence plummeted so its kind of hard to draw conclusions on it in Iraq. Though.. its not in question that the US became very highly effective at protecting its main supply routes fairly earl i nthe war. Patrols off the main routes suffered damn lot, but that helicopter camera system plus route clearing detachments escorted by M1 tanks could negate the IED threat almost completely. This is why you didn't see video of dozens of exploding fuel trucks every single day out of Iraq, but you do see endless hummves blown up, even though thousands of such supply trucks were on the move at any given time and none of them were armored on the cargo area (though actually, South Africa made vehicles like that in the 80s, its just too inefficient for mass use)

Did anyone question it? My point to Pezook was more aimed at the general Rumsfeld cult of more with less than the specific technologies Shep was talking about.

[Zinegata]

Yeah so you're totally wrong. You do see public reaction to, and extensive media coverage of comparatively minor issues like the provision of body armour - check out the 'you go to war with what you have' controversy circa 2004

Show me a headline from a major newspaper - not a tabloid - that says "Body Armor For British Soldiers ineffective".

Heck, you even specifically say that the only people who cared the most are the families of the slain British soldiers, when I said...

What the public cares about is simply two things: How the war is progressing (winning or losing) and the body count (and generally only if it hits close to home).

Again, the public is generally grossly ill-informed about military matters. But since you need more convincing.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1378/political-news-iq-quiz

More people answered a question on Glenn Beck (40%) correctly than a detail about the Afghanistan War (28%). And this is just about troop numbers; nothing about specific strategies yet.

Which is a rebuttal of Bakustra's argument and has nothing to do with me.

Then don't quote it.

[Grumman]

Show me a headline from a major newspaper - not a tabloid - that says "Body Armor For British Soldiers ineffective".

Would something like "Body armor isn't made to fit female troops" count?

(And would Shep mind confirming that this is a valid concern and not just a boondoggle? I've always assumed it was accurate, but I figure people who keep up with things like the LCS would have a better idea.)

[Zinegata]

Show me a headline from a major newspaper - not a tabloid - that says "Body Armor For British Soldiers ineffective".

Would something like "Body armor isn't made to fit female troops" count?

(And would Shep mind confirming that this is a valid concern and not just a boondoggle? I've always assumed it was accurate, but I figure people who keep up with things like the LCS would have a better idea.)

Wow, that actually made a frontpage headline? Must've been a slow news day

[MKSheppard]

(And would Shep mind confirming that this is a valid concern and not just a boondoggle?

Just look at the 98th percentile dummies for car crash testing for males and females. Significant differences.

[thejester]

Zinegata, it's pretty funny how you've made an essentially meaningless contribution and then tried to turn it into a points scoring exercise. Even funnier is how you've conflated two different incidents and then demanded that I prove this fictional incident happen. 'You go to war with the army you have' is what Donald Rumsfeld said to troops bound for Iraq in 2004 when they confronted him with complaints of antiquated equipment that they were being forced to deploy with. It received widespread media coverage:

NYT: Iraq-Bound Troops Confront Rumsfeld Over Lack of Armor;
WP: Rumsfeld Gets Earful From Troops
CNN: Troops put Rumsfeld in the hot seat;

It became a flashpoint for dissatisfaction with Rumsfeld's performance - The Daily Show - and became a lasting point of reference for Rumsfeld's perceived incompetence and callousness - see this article in the Washington Post in 2006.

The British side:

The Guardian covers the ongoing legal battle over whether or not the MoD can be sued over deaths in combat in Iraq; The Telegraph reports on how the MP expenses scandal was linked to anger at lack of proper equipment for British troops; BBC on the specific case of six British soldiers killed, where equipment shortages were found to have contributed to their deaths.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, course the media kind of ignored the fact that the brigade deploying was basically the first US brigade to ever deploy with every vehicle armored, even if a fair bit of the armor was improvised, and may have been the first fully motorized unit of that scale to deploy like that ever in history. Rumsfeld had some big problems, also made some underrated decisions that proved very effective, but that was just a dumb one to focus on. Planted question too.

[MKSheppard]

*snipp*

*snip*

what was more important in reducing violence in Iraq, the technofetish shit you just listed or the Sunni awakening?

Riddle me this. Could the Sunni awakening have happened if it was ridiculously easy to kill American troops, whether in convoys transporting supplies to various FOBs around the country; or when they went into the cities to kill insurgents?

[Zinegata]

Zinegata, it's pretty funny how you've made an essentially meaningless contribution

Again, if you're argument isn't Bakustra's, then don't quote it.

Secondly, I'm not entirely sure if those are frontpage headlines, but point stands based on the survey I showed: The Public doesn't know great details about military matters. They know more about Glenn Beck. Hence why the public anger isn't gonna be directed at General Dynamics.

[thejester]

*snipp*

*snip*

what was more important in reducing violence in Iraq, the technofetish shit you just listed or the Sunni awakening?

Riddle me this. Could the Sunni awakening have happened if it was ridiculously easy to kill American troops, whether in convoys transporting supplies to various FOBs around the country; or when they went into the cities to kill insurgents?

That's an outstanding false dichotomy you've got going there...but pretty clearly, the Sunni Awakening was as much the result of the failure of security operations as it was their success.