October 24, 2004
NONE SO SUPPLE:
Innovative Tactics Scoring Against Insurgents North of Baghdad - for Now (DENIS D. GRAY, 10/23/04, Associated Press)
When U.S. civilian authorities were rooting out Saddam Hussein loyalists, Col. Dana J.H. Pittard recruited 41 of them as advisers and encouraged them to stay in contact with the very insurgents who were fighting his men.Discovering that a respected Muslim cleric had been in prison for 10 months, Pittard and a small contingent helicoptered 300 miles to the lockup in full battle gear, and confronted military police guards, demanding that they free him. "We made it very clear we wouldn't leave without him," Pittard said. Otherwise, he added jokingly: "I think we would have kidnapped him."
Pittard, commander of an American infantry brigade in the once insurgency-rife province of Diyala, is outspoken and his tactics don't always follow the textbook. But he believes they have produced a "recipe for success" at Baghdad's vital northern gateway.
It includes everything from driving wedges between rebel factions to forbidding his troops to be rude to Arabs.
A Harvard-educated military aide to former President Clinton, the colonel from El Paso, Texas, also believes that contrary to what some military analysts think, a conventional U.S. Army unit with the right training, tactics and mind-set can defeat the rebellion.
While Pittard and others acknowledge the insurgency remains active and could again worsen, he points to evidence of a sharp decrease in attacks in the largely agricultural region of some 1.7 million people.
No other military has ever had a more consistent record of recovering from flawed tactics by innovating quickly. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2004 9:56 AM
The only occasions I can think of when your military faced anything approximately similar were in the Philippines in 1899-1904 and in Vietnam.
In neither case, as I recall, did our military successfully innovate and succeed.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 24, 2004 2:15 PMThe US Army's experience in the Philippines led directly to John Moses Browning's M1911 .45, the standard issue American military sidearm for 80 years thereafter.
That's certainly innovation.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 24, 2004 4:35 PMWe won in Vietnam by innovating too:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/829
Posted by: oj at October 24, 2004 5:47 PMOJ, ah.. Darn it let's not try to duplicate our Vietnam Victory exactly. I was hoping for something a little more obvious like say a peaceful, free Iraq, instead of a lagging, mean little commie country.
Posted by: h-man at October 24, 2004 7:49 PMh:
There is no North to attack them and the Democrats won't get to cut and run this time.
Posted by: oj at October 24, 2004 7:55 PMNo, there's a West; in Syria, and East in Iran, and a South in Saudi. The same tactics were tried
by a local man; Major Mirabile ; with the 124th
Florida NG company; with not much success.
Michael, designing as better pistol is not exactly the kind of innovation we are talking about, I think.
Besides, that came well after the Filipinos settled down.
For those who don't know (practially everybody, I guess), the 'innovation' we used in the Philippines was to lay waste to the place, then kidnap the one charismatic leader of the opponents.
We did half that in Iraq with no obvious impact.
We could level the joint, I suppose.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 25, 2004 12:36 AMFirst of all, Harry, about 90% of Iraq is pacified. There are a few pockets of resistance in the Sunni Triangle, mostly due to taking State Department advice to let the Sunnis run it themselves. Al Sadr, the only troublesome Shia of note, is working with us for the most part. The Kurdish North is safer than Staten Island.
Second, there is no great power dumping money and equipment into the region. The Muslim World just doesn't have very much money. Outside the oil states, if you pass the burnoose around for contributions, all you are left with is an empty burnoose.
Third, in case you haven't noticed, we don't have a draft, and especially not one which was as easy to legally evade as jury duty is. The soldiers there know why they're there, that they chose to be in the military and that even if they don't 'believe in the war,' nobody forced them to quit civilian life to go. Thus, there is no groundswell of activist opposition, outside of the professional America-haters of San Francisco and the Upper West Side, to this war.
Fourth, don't ridicule the pistol design. The Filipinos we were fighting were crazed like beserkers. Even after they would be killed, they would fall so as to hit their killer. The .45 pushed their bodies backwards ending that threat.
Fifth, the Philipines and Vietnam are jungles, Iraq is a desert. You can't see things in the jungle, you can see everything in a desert.
Other than that, I guess your parallels with the Philipines and Vietnam make perfect sense.
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 9:20 AMBart, you need to go back to school.
If a 45 slug had the power to knock back the person it hit, it would also knock over the person who pulled the trigger.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, remember?
The myth of the Colt 1911 is just that, a myth.
Orrin extols the virtues of ignorance, and I don't. The 1911 is just a minor example of why firmly held wrong ideas can lead to wrong decisions.
(The kick of a 1911 Colt .45 automatic can be, and was, reproduced with a special .22 caliber training model. My father trained with one at the Naval Academy. Whether the Moros were truly berserkers or not, nobody goes around saying they knocked 'em back with their mighty .22s.)
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 25, 2004 2:26 PMSorry, Harry. I don't know a whole lot about pistol design but I do know that the shooter does not feel the recoil on the pistol in the way the intended victim does. The recoil is disbursed over a much larger area, hence the reason for the relatively large size and weight of more powerful weaponry. The expression 'hand cannon' comes to mind.
After I saw the movie 'Snatch', I bought a Desert Eagle .50 which can shoot through walls(and of course Kevlar). It hasn't knocked me down or injured my hand or wrist yet, and I'm far more Ned Beatty than Arnold Schwarznegger.
Going through and knocking over are two different things..
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 25, 2004 7:46 PM