Tuesday, 16 October 2007

The Fatal Flaw of the U.S. Iraq Occupation Strategy

1. Though the U.S. forces had already encountered "roadside bombs" or IEDs ("improvised explosion device") in Afghanistan, and the U.S. had witnessed the aggravation that they caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s, little thought was given to them as a serious obstacle when the secret planning for the invasion of Iraq accelerated.

2. According to the often repeated claim the U.S. was not prepared for the resistance. This, of course, is not true, since its very actions from all the way from the First Iraq War and before the second show that the U.S. prepared to this by demolishing all the heavy weaponry Iraq possessed with various means (such as aerial raids, UN inspections, economic siege, etc.), strategically preparing for an occupation as a police operation with huge aerial terror component: it was supposed that the U.S. artillery, Air Force and NAVY would soon wipe out the hard core light weapon resistance combatants in suicidal mass wave attacks (of the Iranian style in the 1980-88 war).

3. Unfortunately for the U.S. Expeditionary Forces the wet dreams of the salesmen of the aerial terror equipment never materialized, but instead the Iraqi Resistance developed an artillery of their own (not unlike the "Molotov's coctails" used by Finns in the WWII), the so-called "roadside bombs" or IEDs. Basically the IED crews are the artillery units of the Iraqi Resistance/Liberation Army that utilize simple, economical "consumer electronics" explosives" with anything that can flip a switch as a detonator combined to stock of artillery rounds and/or other high explosives (of which there are plenty available in Iraq).

4. With no visible heavy equipment such as the gun, stock of rounds, a gun pit, the crew, etc. the IED artillery is beyond the U.S. aerial occupation's capabilities of tactical counter strikes, nullifying the huge military-technological advantage with the U.S. was supposed to control (i.e. occupy) Iraq.

5. Squarely, the U.S.-U.K. aerial terror strategy was breached by late summer 2005, when the explosively formed perpetrator (EFP), like the underbelly IED (placed into the road, right under the approaching), had become an appallingly lethal weapon for which there was no obvious countermeasure. The Iraqi Armed Forces (the real, not the puppet ones) have been exploring the flaw ever since with no end in sight before the total U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (including all its military installations and organizations).


Explosively Formed Perpetrator (EFP) EFP, otherwise much like IED, but when fired, the semi-molten copper disks of an EFP strike with such violence that casualties tend to be higher and more gruesome than in other IED attacks appeared soon. The so far most effective IED/EFP – though one can readily see some improvements – is

1. UNDETECTABLE: its radio frequency is outside the U.S. jammers (and should that change, so will the radio frequency).

2. INFALLIBLE: A mechanical infrared trigger ensures the hit.

3. MUJAHIDEEN FRIENDLY: Unlike with a suicide bomb, the mujahideen detonating the delivery is not martyrized and so able to do new strikes against the occupier.

4. CIVILIAN FRIENDLY: A manual switch (called "telemetry module") by which the Mujahideen arms the EFP with a radio signal as an enemy target approaches secures the the Iraqis he is protecting.

5. ABSOLUTE PENETRATION: The underbelly, or deep buried IED demolishes any combat vehicle in the U.S. arsenal.

6. SUPER HEAVY ARTILLERY: - A 155mm (18pd) round of high-powered explosive properly positioned can destroy any vehicle the U.S. Army owns. Any number of these can be combined so that 100pd is equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with unrivalled accuracy.

7. MORALE: IED/EFP is more devastating to morale than anything, since there "Ain't nothing you can do", making the U.S. troops wary, distrustful, revengeful, disorientated, paniced and so on.

On EFPs and IEDs
1. Already four years ago (September 2003) Lt. Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region, and predicted current situation (namely "the IED problem" has got "out of control") adding: "We’ve got to stop the bleeding."

2. In a TIME magazine EFP report just in Sgt. Jason Fagan, 28, a former Arkansas deputy sheriff who rode as truck commander riding shotgun leaks that "Every EFP that goes off kills something like two-point-five soldiers." When this is added to the WaPo reporting that "EFP attacks since spring 2007 had increased from about one per week to roughly one every other day (yielding some 450 U.S. dead/year + the wounded and the deaf from the some 180+ EFPs only), so that Jason's comment "That's the only thing I'm really afraid of out here" is well backed.

3. When the Pentagon admits hitherto some 81,000 IEDs (of which some 25,000 this year), there are officially some 100 "incoming" IEDs and/or EFPs against the occupation forces daily, having caused some two-thirds of the American combat deaths in Iraq (note also that according to WaPo "Some analysts believe that 20 percent or more of all IEDs have never reported", and that no Army in withdrawal has ever published true figures so that the actual IED figure is certainly 100,000+). By early summer 2007, the underbelly IED (i.e. not the EFP mentioned above) was killing more American troops than all other combined.

4. U.S. army admitted that "We're bleeding..." in early fall of 2003 when the IED attacks had reached 100 a month. The current figures of some 100 attacks a day, against invisible enemy, with no countermeasure available, four years straight and 30 times worse than "bleeding", i.e. wounded, i.e. useless in the battlefield. This is the truth about the U.S. Expeditionary Forces position and casualties in Iraq.

Strategic Effects
1. Any decent combat outfit does not care shit about anything else before the troops have been provided an effective tactic, shelter and treatment against the opponent. While these conditions are not satisfied by the U.S. high command, the rift between the troubled U.S. generals and the administration puppet ones is growing: while Petraeus may have some success in deceiving the U.S. public, he certainly won't success with his colleagues.

2. The ultimate cause why the French lost in Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the Israel in Lebanon 2006 was that the very spearheads of their efforts were cut off: the French no longer had paras to jump into the "toilet" and Israelis tank crews with guts to proceed with the assault. It is by no means impossible that the U.S. "soft" reserve for armored vehicle crews would exhausted in Iraq.

3. The Iraqi Resistance, like all its counterparts aims at the one sole purpose: to drive the enemy out of its soil (and air space), which in practice means killing as many occupiers as possible. The side product of this process is the breaking of the U.S. "political will" (i.e. the current administration, including the Democrats) directly which one may expect to result in impossibility of going forth with the war.

4. Analysis sheets indicate that the U.S. began the withdrawal of its troops "secretly" from Iraq some three-four months ago, now concentrating on its final resort, the partition of Iraq into three ethnically cleansed concentration camps, each with an internal civil war. In these civil wars the U.S. militias, Peshmerga, Mahdi Army and Anbar Salvation (read: slavation) Militia, puppeted from the local U.S. permanent bases wage war against the respective local populations supported by the U.S. aerial terror war. What comes to the outcome of such an attempt, the best suggestion we've heard so far is this:

May the best man win!

Editor: Louhi
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With no definite end in sight, Iraq has become a true quaqmire with no real solution to end the violence. With the deployment of MRAP, US casualties might noticeably drop, but insurgents has proven to be a resourceful adversary.

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