DR Congo M23 rebels advance on Goma in North Kivu

[loomer]

Ryacko, you don't know anything, not even enough to realize you know nothing.

That terrain means us Westerners can't deploy any of our best stuff, even helicopter gunships are going to be of dubious usefullness. We'd be operating almost exclusively as light infantry.

Of course, you don't actually have to end a war by killing thousands, you could...negotiate.

Rather ironically, if there weren't a host of other issues, it'd be the third world nations who'd have better light infantry training. A lot of American stuff, even for the Marines, is focused on combined arms operations, so for something like this you'd actually want a less mechanized army from a similar climate.

[Sea Skimmer]

Another fine day in the Congo, the head of Army has been suspended not over being an incompetent buffoon, but because he may have sold weapons to various rebel grounds.

22 November 2012 Last updated at 19:14 ET
DR Congo army chief Gabriel Amisi suspended
The head of the army in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been suspended pending an investigation into claims that he sold weapons to rebel groups.
A UN report accused Gen Gabriel Amisi of running a network supplying arms to poachers and rebel groups including the notorious Mai Mai Raia Mutomboki.
A government spokesman said other officers were also being investigated.
The suspension follows the seizure of the city of Goma by rebels of the M23 group on Tuesday.
Rebels also seized another town, Sake, although government spokesman Lambert Mende says it is now back in government hands.
The rebels, who are widely believed to be backed by Rwanda and Uganda, have threatened to advance towards the capital Kinshasa unless President Joseph Kabila opens direct peace talks.
The report, written for the UN by a group of independent experts, said Gen Amisi had overseen a network providing arms to criminal groups and rebels operating in DR Congo's troubled east.
"Gen Gabriel Amisi oversees a network distributing hunting ammunition for poachers and armed groups, including Raia Mutomboki," the report says.
The M23 was not among the armed groups named in the report although Mai Mai Raia Mutomboki is thought in some instances to have allied itself with the M23.
The UN report said Gen Amisi ordered 300 AK-47 assault rifles be given to another armed group operating in eastern DR Congo, known as Nyatura.
It says ammunition is being bought in neighbouring Republic of Congo and smuggled through Kinshasa to the east by a network of Gen Amisi's associates, including members of his family.
A separate UN investigation earlier this month said that Mai Mai Raia Mutomboki and Nyatura, along with Rwandan FDLR rebel group, had been responsible for the deaths of more than 260 civilians in a wave of tit-for-tat ethnic massacres in remote parts of North Kivu province.
Meanwhile, M23 rebels have rejected a call by regional leaders to withdraw from the main eastern city of Goma.
About 500,000 people have been displaced by the rebellion since April.
A UN report has accused Rwanda and Uganda of backing the M23, saying the chain of command culminates with Rwandan Defence Minister James Kabarebe.
Both countries strongly deny the accusations.
The M23's gains have raised fears of renewed war in DR Congo, where some five million people died in a conflict from 1997-2003.
The UN Security Council has adopted a resolution condemning the rebel seizure of Goma and calling for sanctions against M23 leaders.
The group was formed in April after a mutiny in the army. The rebels said they were not given army posts promised in a 2009 peace deal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20456500

[Alkaloid]

Pretty sure the US army shoots whoever is holding a gun, whether or not they are standing out side their house trying to protect it.

Couple of points.
1. Not really. Doing that in places where everyone and his dog is more or less armed and expected to defend his own home leads more or less ethnic cleansing. Since no one has announce the US army as a whole seems to be following a policy of ethnic cleansing and they are deployed to all sorts of places where there are a lot of people with guns, we can assume they don't.
2. This is why the terrorists hate Americans. Well, some terrorists. Others are just arseholes.
3. Do you actually think this would be an actual war, and wouldn't turn about two seconds after the first US made boot hit the ground into another counterinsurgency operation. Are you that stupid?

[Aaron MkII]

Ryacko, you don't know anything, not even enough to realize you know nothing.

That terrain means us Westerners can't deploy any of our best stuff, even helicopter gunships are going to be of dubious usefullness. We'd be operating almost exclusively as light infantry.

Of course, you don't actually have to end a war by killing thousands, you could...negotiate.

Rather ironically, if there weren't a host of other issues, it'd be the third world nations who'd have better light infantry training. A lot of American stuff, even for the Marines, is focused on combined arms operations, so for something like this you'd actually want a less mechanized army from a similar climate.

I'd suggest troops from South America, they have to operate in similar terrain and have some AFV's that do better in such. Well, if I wasn't totally opposed to a UN operation and playing world cop.

[Aaron MkII]

Pretty sure the US army shoots whoever is holding a gun, whether or not they are standing out side their house trying to protect it.

Couple of points.
1. Not really. Doing that in places where everyone and his dog is more or less armed and expected to defend his own home leads more or less ethnic cleansing. Since no one has announce the US army as a whole seems to be following a policy of ethnic cleansing and they are deployed to all sorts of places where there are a lot of people with guns, we can assume they don't.
2. This is why the terrorists hate Americans. Well, some terrorists. Others are just arseholes.
3. Do you actually think this would be an actual war, and wouldn't turn about two seconds after the first US made boot hit the ground into another counterinsurgency operation. Are you that stupid?

He obviously doesn't know what ROE means.

[loomer]

Ryacko, you don't know anything, not even enough to realize you know nothing.

That terrain means us Westerners can't deploy any of our best stuff, even helicopter gunships are going to be of dubious usefullness. We'd be operating almost exclusively as light infantry.

Of course, you don't actually have to end a war by killing thousands, you could...negotiate.

Rather ironically, if there weren't a host of other issues, it'd be the third world nations who'd have better light infantry training. A lot of American stuff, even for the Marines, is focused on combined arms operations, so for something like this you'd actually want a less mechanized army from a similar climate.

I'd suggest troops from South America, they have to operate in similar terrain and have some AFV's that do better in such. Well, if I wasn't totally opposed to a UN operation and playing world cop.

I'd suggest Aussies, but of late our military hasn't been so good, and we really don't have the jungle warfare experience anymore. If this was happening back in the 50s or the 60s, we'd be decent fits for the job thanks to all the experience in tropical rainforests in South East Asia, but to my knowledge our training no longer emphasizes that and we haven't fought a jungle war since Vietnam (peacekeeping exercises, yes, but those aren't the same.)

I'm not familiar with the South American militaries other than Colombia's. How are they, generally speaking, in terms of training and armament?

[Aaron MkII]

Halfway between the West and the average African military IMO. Personal weapons are really not that different between militaries, though helicopters are likely to be relatively few. I know a few have light tanks that would be useful in securing airports and such.

[Spoonist]

Shouldn't someone point the wee one to the great success the murrican marines had in Vietnam?
Better trained, better supplied, better fed, better equipped and we'd better get out of there.

Or when the US did deploy marines rangers to aid the UN in Operation Restore Hope uhm Operation Gothic Serpent nah maybe black hawk down no no no, I mean the capturing warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid of Somalia, that's a great success as well.

Well both are true successes for hollywood at least.


Or the number of rounds fired to the number of "insurgents" hits in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ratio is mindboggling. (Or ratio in nam).

[Aaron MkII]

I don't think anyone but ryacko thinks sending troops in is a good idea, regardless of what nations send them.

[LaCroix]

Especially since his solution is "Secure the mayor mining locations", and let the others slug it out until someone is the winner...
(To whom he obviously won't give the locations back because all their base belongs to him, now.)

Capturing resource locations and then wait for the enemy to run out of forces while trying to capture them back - old, solid tactic - worked in C&C, Warcraft, you name it...

I guess he expects a massive zerg rush will win this fight, too.

[loomer]

Especially since his solution is "Secure the mayor mining locations", and let the others slug it out until someone is the winner...
(To whom he obviously won't give the locations back because all their base belongs to him, now.)

Capturing resource locations and then wait for the enemy to run out of forces while trying to capture them back - old, solid tactic - worked in C&C, Warcraft, you name it...

I guess he expects a massive zerg rush will win this fight, too.

As memory serves, that was pretty much what the government of Sierra Leone (and the diamond companies...) hired Executive Outcomes to do back in the day. They also pushed the RUF hard enough to force a cease-fire, though, and they were all pretty much ex-Special Forces or former guerrillas, all with years of insurgency and counter-insurgency experience.

[Block]

To the average citizen of a western country, modern media make a war in the Congo nearly as 'real' to Americans as, say, one in Mexico.

This makes it harder for stupid people to grasp why we (the US) don't interfere in wars in the Congo as avidly as we'd step in to deal with a war in Mexico.

Meh, we're ignoring the one that's going on in Mexico too.

[Simon_Jester]

Mexico has a very serious organized crime problem, not a civil war. We know this because there are no rebel infantry divisions advancing on major cities and displacing UN peacekeepers.

[Block]

Mexico has a very serious organized crime problem, not a civil war. We know this because there are no rebel infantry divisions advancing on major cities and displacing UN peacekeepers.

Oh it's a full on war, they just fight it a little differently. They're fighting for control of areas, but not with the objective of overthrowing the government, it's more profitable not to run things directly.

[Esquire]

Wouldn't that make it not a war, by definition? Nobody questions that even the cartel-controlled areas are in fact part of Mexico and at least nominally under governmental authority, as far as I know. War has a set of connotations and implications that tend to be ignored in favor of rhetorical punch far too often.

[Sea Skimmer]

The drug gangs in Mexico spend far more time, effort, money and dead bodies fighting each other then the government. They have no political platform, no goals other then money making, its not a civil war, its just some bad gangs. Even then, the Mexican murder rate per capita while very high compared to the US, is actually less then that of a number of other Latin American countries, dramatically so compared to say Venezuela which is outright twice as high. Its just, a damn lot of those murders and other crime is concentrated in a few cities near the US boarder. Now, the number of people dead per capita isn't everything in if something is a civil war or not, some places in civil wars have lower rates, but its just not the case in the Mexican cartel areas.

If you wanted to point to a civil war in Mexico, it'd make more sense to point at the Indian groups own in Chiapas, some of which are very explicitly opposed to government politics. However while armed, they tend to limit themselves to tactics of intimidation rather then open warfare.

[Block]

The drug gangs in Mexico spend far more time, effort, money and dead bodies fighting each other then the government. They have no political platform, no goals other then money making, its not a civil war, its just some bad gangs. Even then, the Mexican murder rate per capita while very high compared to the US, is actually less then that of a number of other Latin American countries, dramatically so compared to say Venezuela which is outright twice as high. Its just, a damn lot of those murders and other crime is concentrated in a few cities near the US boarder. Now, the number of people dead per capita isn't everything in if something is a civil war or not, some places in civil wars have lower rates, but its just not the case in the Mexican cartel areas.

If you wanted to point to a civil war in Mexico, it'd make more sense to point at the Indian groups own in Chiapas, some of which are very explicitly opposed to government politics. However while armed, they tend to limit themselves to tactics of intimidation rather then open warfare.

Who called it a civil war? I certainly didn't. It's just a war on our border that we as a country are ignoring.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah you did, a war within a nation completely between its citizens is a civil war by default, but that just isn't what's going on in Mexico. Indeed attempts by the Mexican government to take the easy approach treat it like a civil war and rely on sending in the army and navy to 'go fight them' have failed completely because of this reality.

[Irbis]

Shouldn't someone point the wee one to the great success the murrican marines had in Vietnam?
Better trained, better supplied, better fed, better equipped and we'd better get out of there.

Vietnam also happens to be 10x better than Kongo - since that country is actually strip of land on the coast, meaning carriers can offer good air support if nothing else is available, ports and supply depots are close to battlefield, and there is a lot of good infrastructure in the region.

Compared to this, Kongo has jungles on the equator, far denser and hotter than SA or Vietnam ones, infrastructure mostly remembers Belgian times and is crumbling, we're taking about deep interior 2000 km from nearest port with no easy resupply or air support, with no good roads, mists making NVD gear and bulletproof vests useless, and natives having far superior survival and outdoors skills than any MURRINE.

Hey kids, is killing people how you make the world a better place?

To be fair, intelligent 'killing people' in Libya produced a lot better results and less deaths than Kongo or Syria did. Though, yes, people there need to want change themselves, glorified invading without popular support leads nowhere.

[Questor]

Seriously, does anyone other than Whacko think sending additional troops is a good idea?

The peacekeepers were (and are) a horrible idea, but the UN must Do Something About This.

What do people think would be actual, constructive, things to do, though?

[LaCroix]

In a situation that has evolved to the current state?

I doubt there is something left to do. The best thing would be to try getting the parties onto a table and negotiate, but since the rebels are winning fairly well, I doubt they'd agree. Also, the (still) rulers wouldn't accept to this, either.

Supporting the government with troops is only going to prolong the war, but won't solve it, as you literally can't win this war, anymore, without going all Vietnam+1 on the country. You might decapitate the rebel movement, but this would only lead to various factions who would also start fighting amongst each others, and we know from several examples what such a civil war in a Africa will look like.

Supporting the rebels, well, this hasn't the best track record, either.

Arranging a nice battleground far away from a city, where everybody meets and slug it out until there's only one side left would actually be the most useful solution.

So basically, all you can do is try to keep civilians as safe as possible, and wait...

[ryacko]

Especially since his solution is "Secure the mayor mining locations", and let the others slug it out until someone is the winner...
(To whom he obviously won't give the locations back because all their base belongs to him, now.)

Capturing resource locations and then wait for the enemy to run out of forces while trying to capture them back - old, solid tactic - worked in C&C, Warcraft, you name it...

I guess he expects a massive zerg rush will win this fight, too.

As memory serves, that was pretty much what the government of Sierra Leone (and the diamond companies...) hired Executive Outcomes to do back in the day. They also pushed the RUF hard enough to force a cease-fire, though, and they were all pretty much ex-Special Forces or former guerrillas, all with years of insurgency and counter-insurgency experience.

Just thought I should just quote the above before more people warp my argument points as if what I'm saying is baseless.

---

I'm not entirely sure what the rebels want. The BBC isn't very clear on it, nor are many other online sources.
Proposing a negotiating table seems to be a bit senseless if we don't even know if the rebel demands are feasible, or why supposedly Rwanda and Uganda supposedly are supporting the rebels.

Supporting the government with troops is only going to prolong the war, but won't solve it,

Despite what you may think, rebellions don't typically succeed.

[loomer]

Are your hypothetical troops the former elite employees of a brutal regime that waged a decades long war against African guerrillas, Ryacko? Just because Executive Outcomes could do it doesn't mean the USMC can.

[Stark]

Despite what you may think, rebellions don't typically succeed.

Do you understand why most revolutions do not succeed, and at which point this is generally obvious?