Military Theory

Thank you for actual constructive discussion, furthermore, how would the occupying forces have stopped locals from blowing up markets and killing 40-100 people at a time?

Not had the CIA fund ISIS and give them vehicles, weapons and ammo.

We approached it like a conventional war, which worked when we were fighting the Iraqis.
We don’t have a doctrine for waging war against an enemy who doesn’t wear a uniform, who may be a civilian one day and a combatant the next. Same thing happened to us in Vietnam.

This. Look at Japan and Germany post WW2. We didn't completely destroy the local government and displace all the officials and soldiers to the streets. For all their ideology, if they play ball with the US, they feed their kids and at the end of the day that's what matters. Instead of doing the exact same thing he did last week except this time with some white dude in his office telling him not to execute prisoners, Achmed Al Mahmoud had his life taken away and his income shut off. Nothing better to do than get with the lads and start blowing up marketplaces.

don't stick our dicks into places where they don't belong,

>Muh CIA did 9/11 and killed the dinosaurs!!!

Post a source you stupid faggot. ISIS didn't need covert funding to acquire vehicles and weapons from the worthless Iraqi army.

is an idiot,
CIA funded the Mujaheddin and Al Qaeda when they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan way back when. Isis was funded by Saudi Arabia, I'm not sure if they still are but I wouldn't bet against it.

Germany, Japan, and Korea. You have to occupy it for a generation if you want it to not be a shithole.

>how could we have done better in Iraq?

1, double troop numbers and actually prepare for military occupation. Dont listen to iraqi refugees saying everyone in iraq secretly loves the usa and will just govern themselves without saddam.

2 dont try and assassinate saddam. The coalition had a decapitation strike planned to take out all of saddams competent subordinates with airstrikes but the day before it was planned to go ahead someone apparrentley smelled a fart that smelled like saddams farts so some random house in baghdad was bombed, giving away the element of surprise and allowing saddams officers to go into hiding. Also like a solid hundred random iraqi houses were bombed cuz someones dogwalker saw someone who looked like saddam near them.

3 just generally stop listening to all the intellegence sources on iraq, they fucked the whole thing by telling politicians what they wanted to hear. Specifically that there would be a massive uprising the moment amedican feet set foot on iraqi soil.

4 surround baghdad and wait for a formal surrendur instead of sending in the marines and having them kill all of saddams troops (saddams troops meaning everyone in baghdad including other us marines)

5 try and lure the iraqi army into the desert so they can all surrendur to the us army there and then be reformed into a loyal local force, rather than simly dropping their guns and walking home as they did during the defence of baghdad

6 close off all the borders post invasion to stop assad sending an army of terrorists

7 be led by politicans who arent a bunch of spinless ass licking bureacrats and generals with the balls to call out the politicians on thier bullshit

8 not invade a country randomly and for no reason

Better question
How could saddam have fought off the invasion?

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>How could saddam have fought off the invasion?
thread just got 100x better
are we talking a strictly conventional war? If we are, it seems quite impossible.

Cont.
Iraq most likely was never meant to be won. The enemy isn’t motivated by material or political gain. They’re motivated by ideology, an ideology that they’ve been fighting and killing each other over for thousands of years. Ultimately this ideology is one of martyrdom, of fighting outsiders until one of you is dead. We saw this in Japan during WWII and it took two atomic bombs to force them into submission. In this kind of conflict you have more or less two options to break the enemy- show them that you are willing to utterly destroy them, whatever the cost. Or excise the insurgency from the general population and destroy them directly- the British did this to great effect in the Malayan Emergency.
Tl;dr we entered a guerilla conflict and tried to fight it like an industrial war

CIA wouldnt be very good if it let solid proof leak.
How about bad ammo drops? Mistake.
Some of the leadership being evacuated instead of droned. Rumors.
New Tundra pickups & used american trucks somehow made it there. No follow up on money trail.
Saying sorry to Israel when accidentally attacking them. Funny.
Somehow well paid while living in a desert/hills with satellites over head. No real cover. Somehow could find refined fuel all over without attention. No one bats an eye.
US troops with choppers on the ground in Syria. Doesnt touch them either. Again no one bats an eye.
It all stinks to high hell.

If he gathered literally thousands of children in an arena and threatened to kill them all if the coalition forces didn't leave, what would the world have done?

I recall reading somewhere that saddam was hoping to turn at least the sunni areas of iraq into another vietnam, which ironically did happen just without saddam.

I guess the win scenario is that the coalition leaves and saddam is in charge of at least baghdad.

And yeah there was literally 0 chance of winning a conventional war

Ironically the only way he could have repelled an invasion (maybe) is what’s happening now. Roadside bombs, suicide attacks. Make the cost in enemy blood so high so as to make the war unsustainable on the political front.

The only way Sadam could have repelled the US would pretty much go vietnam mode. Go into hiding, and have his troops ditch their uniforms and blend into the public, and prepare for a long guerrilla war and win US public opinion once no wmds are found. Even then probably wouldnt work out since he doesn't have the backing of any foreign major power. His fate was sealed basically

>>how could we have done better in Iraq?

^^^This

not getting involved

Its a risky gambit, it might stop am invasion but it will basically make everyone your enemy and justifies attempts to remove him from power

In thepry yes but in the real world the americans stuck it out through even the darkest days of the insurgency amd civil war unil patreaus saved their asses by actually working out how to fight insurgencies. Saddam would have needed more cards than simply making the occupation politically costly. Something along the lines of threatening the whole middle easts oil infrastructure.

NATO would've bombed the arena and blamed it on Saddam I'd imagine.

I don't think there was any way to prevent these suicide bombings considering how urbanized Iraq is. We would have either had to somehow preserve Sadaams secret police apparatus and allowed them to repress the masses. I think we chose the ideological position, and tried to build up institutions from scratch using the parlimentarian model out of Shiites, which were then inevitably tinted by Iranian linked exiles and kleptocrats at all levels. Post-ISIS, the cities are probably about as safe as they are going to get.

Let's say we could do anything we wanted, what we be effective insurgent scare tactics? Let's say a suicide bomber, kill their entire family as retaliation? What would be effective, if not that?

Better yet, what if you just cut off the water supply if the pops didn't behave? Electricity?

>how could we have done better in Iraq?

threw all the baath officers into a pointless bitter war with Iran

Well said.

t. OIF 06-07

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>but that's not the point
Yes, it is the point.
>The point is what have we learned?
We should have learned that we should not have been there and, by extrapolation, that we should not engage in any other wars that violate Machiavelli's premise that all elective wars be reasonably expected to turn a profit.

>user say mil theory (mil science in reality)
>NUUUUUUUH
be quiet, $0ylet

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Studies have shown a lot of suicide bombers to be orphans or street children so revenge aattacks dont really work as dterrents. If your blowing yourself up you basically dont have anything to live for already. The problem with scare tactics against insurgents is they tend to backfire, look at the germans in yugoslavia, reprisal killings just create more recruits for the insurgents.

The better methos is to use the carrot rather than the stick, create well paid jobs as police or local militia to draw away the insurgents source of manpower and actually get them to work for you.

Don't dissolve the Iraqi Army.

Flood the country with troops after the initial invasion. Instruct these troops to act as a constabulary force, to protect the population and maintain order until a competent government can be established.

Do not arrest thousands of random Sunnis and put them in poorly guarded prison camps with hardened Sunni insurgents.

Do not have such inept people in charge of the detention system that Abu Ghraib can happen.

Fire Rumsfeld. Relieve Franks and Sanchez of command.

Do not allow the national government to be dominated by extremist Shiites.

Form political alliances with powerful Sunni Sheiks and use them to help keep the peace.

Pic related, the US military in Iraq 2003-2005

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This doesn't work if you can't protect the population from the insurgents.

As a rule, if the insurgents can kill you for cooperating with the government, you don't cooperate with the government.

What the British did in Malaya was

>surround village
>explain that there has been a terrorist attack in the region and the village will have reduced food rations and a curfew if those responsible are not caught
>put leaflets through the letterbox of every house in town, ask the townspeople to write the names of any members of the insurgency that are in the town
>force each family to hand back the leaflet, folded so that nobody can see if anything is written down
>somebody inevitably snitches, but nobody can tell who it was, because everybody got a leaflet and everyone handed one back
>take the people who are named on the list, and arrest them, then rescind the emergency restrictions on the village

This is distinguished from the Salvadorian military, who would drag the village's children across barbed wire until they died.

>New Tundra pickups & used american trucks somehow made it there. No follow up on money trail.
Some of your accusations are just silly. Like this one, we know exactly how this is happening. The new vehicles are bought via loan fraud and identity theft, it's a huge problem, but not for America. The secondhand vehicles are shipped overseas, sold on the international market and shipped to secondhand car dealers. Eventually, they're bought by ISIS, but again it has nothing to do with America.

Seeing as the enemy is basically farmer by day and soldier by when ever the fuck us troops are near by, the only real way would be to start killing civilians which ends up defeating the purpose of being in the country.

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One thing I learned overseas that was personally enlightening was that recordings of attacks on coalition forces were proof of bounty first and foremost.

Non-fanatics would attack us because AQ put a bounty on us, recordings were proof of contract, and used as propaganda afterward. where non-affiliated parties would attack us for economic gain.

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none of those places were shitholes before they got flattened by allied bombs.
the difference is clear political objectives. iraq was a money spinner for special interests and israel. a strategic victory was not the objective.

the brits did a really good job in malaya against the commies. it was the right balance of stick and carrot and the absolute will to not give an inch to insurgents.
compare it with africa where britain just absolutely folded.

Korea was most definitely a shithole. South Korea only overtook the North in like the late 70s/early 80s. There are heaps of adopted kids from Korea in the West in their 30s for that very reason.

So does your military theory's for dealing with the war take into account the CIA arm and trained all these whack jobs?

>Al Qaeda
>fighting the Soviets

like i said, it wasnt a shithole before the wars, which made it a shithole

Yes, it was a shithole before the wars.

ISIS is a US Neoconraeli production. You're not fooling anyone.

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I think there's value in having a large military presence in the middle east.
I think there's value is securing oil.

It's easy to say "there wasn't a plan" and "people just sat around". It's hard to execute the leader of a country and then run it well.

We drastically upset the balance of power in Iraq between Sunni and Shiite. There's no easy transition.

People on /k love to rave about what they'll do if the blue hats appear. How is this any different than what is going on Iraq? What peaceful plan would you have if trump/obama was hung from the neck until dead and rush limbaugh/al sharpton was put in charge?

Right now Iraq is continuing to say they won't allow the US to build permanent military bases. I assume it's all for show because we didn't do this shit to walk away with nothing. We are going to have permanent bases in Iraq.

The same with Afghanistan. We are going to build a major permanent base that extend our force projection immensely.

The success or failure of Iraq/Afghanistan is solely going to be decided on what type of permanent military installations we end up with.

Ideally. Ideally, the occupants could have created an interim council reflecting the population but forcing them to cooperate; with one power faction going gung ho to take power they would automatically lose it. The one force that was decidedly going out was the Saddam, his party and his regime. This power vacuum could have been spread evenly into the interim government. The council would not have ruled, that must be done by the occupants, but they could have advised. Within a few years new parties could have formed and new leaders be established, and in the meanwhile the occupants could work with and develop local government restoring electricity, water, roads and so on. But no. Instead all the power was handed to exiles without a platform or even up to date knowledge of their own damn country.

There was bound to be an insurgency of some kind. Of course. Fanatics can pop up anywhere. But in Iraq they came to a full table. The country was divided, every economic number was in decline and millions of people were either disenchanted or directly hostile both to occupants and the other people groups.