Gallia on COIN

North Arkana wrote:
Republican Guard was a paper tiger. A political stability unit tends to find itself faring poorly in open warfare.


That's why they beat the enemy that defeated the US Army multiple times lmao. USA has no room to talk about paper tigers when it's defeated by dirt farmers with fertilizer and street thugs paid $20 to shoot a gun at a US convoy. That's just sad, considering the allegedly poor Republican Guard could not only suppress those same groups, but destroy them utterly after suffering the greatest defeat it'd ever been handed in its existence.

The Republican Guard was a hybrid warfare force designed for 21st century combat, so it's not surprising that it lost to a 20th century army. Meanwhile the US Army tooted its own horn about being hyper prepared for "COIN" and lost for the most simple of reasons: not understanding what the fuck it wanted to do. Something that the USA has never quite grasped is how to connect the dots between using force to achieving its political aims, which is actually simple to see if you don't have its dumb morals, but the USA is blinded by its own beliefs.

Ba'athists be like http://i.imgur.com/MPDNKnf.png

Said political stability unit beat dirt farmers every time. Meanwhile the US Army loses every time because it forgot how it dealt with the Indians. If dirt farmers are the future of warfare, I'd much rather the US Army model itself on the Republican Guard than the US Army. It would be more successful and more reliable at doing its job, and less of an embarrassment.

The real paper tigers think there is some sort of weird dichotomy between "counter-insurgency" and "open warfare". Those are the countries that tend to not be aggressive enough because they are socially/morally weak (I guess?) and blame their failures on some mystical supernatural foe, like "hybrid warfare" or "insurgents" or something of the like. They handily ignore any and all evidence to the contrary that they can win a counter guerrilla war without being aggressive, even when that evidence is from themselves (albeit, the Indian Wars and Philippine Insurrection are pretty far removed from modern USA, and the latter was never fully resolved anyway since the rot had already set into America at that time) or similar groups to themselves. They outright dismiss the successful counter guerrilla operations of their opponents as being "brutal" or "inhumane" and then wonder why they are losing the war where their enemies consistently won their wars.

This, of course, is entirely because the United States has learned to imitate the greatest buffoons at warfare ever: Nazis.

So America's (and NATO's) counter-insurgency strategies are derived from the unsuccessful counter-insurgency strategies of the Nazi Empire. Everyone else copied the Soviet Empire and was much better at it for obvious reasons: they killed the enemy. The Nazis were only successful, probably, because they also killed their enemies. The Wehrdoerfer had little effect on the outcome either way, which is why relying on it tends to exaggerate weaknesses and especially that most signature American weakness: timidity.

The Manticoran Empire wrote:
Most Iraqi commanders, and indeed most Arab military leaders in general, are grossly incompetent.


If you put Schwarzkopf in the same position he would have lost too.

Shocking.

It's almost as if the prerequisites to winning a ground campaign are path determined, possibly by the following levels of superiority in successive order of importance: electromagnetic, air, sea. Each of these allows the next level of superiority to be achieved. Electromagnetic superiority is an important prerequisite to achieving air superiority, which is an important prerequisite to achieving naval superiority, which is an important prerequisite to achieving ground superiority.

Without electromagnetic superiority, you cannot be forewarned of enemy air attacks on your own air force. If your air force is destroyed, you cannot attack naval forces that are attacking you, which is quite unfortunate because these ships generally bring ground troops.

Thus, by the time you are fighting ground troops from a naval power, it is quite difficult to defeat them, because you have systematically beaten down until you are incapable of resisting. So Iraq literally could not have won against America no matter how powerful its military, because it could not contest America's naval or air forces meaningfully. The ground troops were a sideshow. The only difference between Iraq and an actual threat to America is that America would take several years to beat down to a similar level, while Iraq took a couple of months.

Even if the Iraqis had nothing but Schwarzkopfs, Zhukovs, and Guderians leading an army of Audie Murphies and John Basilones, they still would have lost. Maybe not as hard. Maybe the Americans might lose a couple thousand guys or something if the Iraqis had 'actually fought', whatever that means, but it was impossible for Iraq to win in any real sense. The fact that George Bush Sr. knew more, individually, about the Middle East than every administration including and since his son's administration, collectively, is the only thing that saved Hussein from being toppled: because his collapsing would be more of a threat to stability in the region than anything else.

Cue Assad collapsing, a weak Iraq being taken over by Iran (and unable to resist spillover from Syria), and the advancement of the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the dirt farmers and bedouins. Had Saddam been around, it's likely that Assad's collapse would have simply been contained in Syria altogether. Possibly because the IRG built a big, beautiful wall on the Iraqi-Syrian border and shot anyone attempting to climb it. The Shiites would still be kept down and the Sunnis would still be on top, for all the "good" that brings.