March 23, 2011

Latest Libyan War tactics and strategy

American war tactics seems to be evolving in the direction I suggested last night. The essential strategic issue for American, British, and French politicians is that their decision to launch the war was so offhand and irresponsible that they need to win (i.e., remove Kaddafi) or face embarrassing questions. If you get to declare victory, however, then those question diminish. As Gen. Patton liked to say, "Americans love a winner."

The NYT reports:
Having all but destroyed the Libyan air force and air defenses, the allies turned their firepower Wednesday on the military units loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that are besieging rebel-held cities.... Loyalist forces have surrounded two rebel-held cities in the west, Zintan and Misurata, and the strategic eastern city of Ajdabiya ...

In Ajdabiya, which has changed hands several times, residents said relentless shelling by loyalist troops had forced them to flee. One report called the city a “ghost town.” 

You'll notice the American sleight-of-hand here: Unlike some cities in the west that are rebel controlled and besieged by loyalists, whose relief could, theoretically be justified as humanitarian, Ajdabiya is loyalist-controlled and besieged by rebels. Gaddafi would be happy with a cease fire in Ajdabiya. But Ajdabiya is the key to taking the oil fields away from Gaddafi. Presumably, the colonialist powers' coalition's most favored outcome is a quick coup in Tripoli followed by a new regime that makes democratic-sounding noises and gets the oil flowing again. But, perhaps, Gaddafi won't be overthrown in Tripoli as long as he holds onto the oilfields.
“It’s an extremely complex and difficult environment,” Admiral Hueber acknowledged. “Our primary focus is to interdict those forces before the enter the city, cut of their lines of communication and cut off their command and control.” In military terms, “lines of communication” include supply lines.

As long as the regime’s forces are fighting in and around cities where the allies have ordered them to back off, he said, coalition attacks would continue. He said the allies are in communication with the Libyan units about what they need to do, where to go and how to arrange their forces to avoid attack, but that there was “no indication” that the regime’s ground forces were following the instructions.

I'm guessing that these instructions are that Gaddafi's forces can drive in a convoy toward Surt and maybe we won't kill you, but it would be useful to see them printed out. Further, how much would you trust the Americans if you were hunkered down inside a city that the Americans would be reluctant to flatten and you're hearing some kind of message that they want you to come out on the open road and drive through the desert. Uh, no thanks, we prefer staying alive. I wouldn't trust the American air force to not kill me on a Highway of Death unless Obama himself appeared on Al-Jazeera and promised in front of the Arab World that here's the deal: you drive at such and such an hour in such and such a direction and we won't kill you.

The LA Times has a story that is somewhat contradictory of the NY Times story:
Pentagon officials said Wednesday they were not attacking Libyan units inside cities because of the danger that such tactics would cause civilian casualties. They also said their orders were not to destroy the Libyan army or to provide air cover to opposition forces, limiting the types of strikes they can undertake.

Instead, they said, they were striking Kadafi's forces before they entered urban areas, as well as supply lines and headquarters facilities, in hopes of pressuring them to halt attacks against civilians. But the officers offered no timetable on U.S. pursuit of this strategy, with Kadafi's attacks in civilian areas apparently escalating

Overall, the high level of dissembling and blatant spinning by American politicians and generals during this war is likely to drag out the bloodshed. If Obama were to come out and say, "We're in it to win it. We will apply overwhelming firepower to make Gaddafi go away. The faster he goes, the fewer bombs will be dropped on his supporters. Gaddafi will lose, so the only question is whether he goes the easy way or the hard way," the clearer the message would be. Instead, Obama has constantly talked about "the U.S. stepping back" and other misdirection and feints for domestic and international consumption that confuse the message being sent to Libya.

Instead, the current mishmash of messages suggests to Gaddafi's mercenaries that they need to get out of the desert and hunker down in cities, which is the opposite of what the war was trumpeted as accomplishing.

24 comments:

  1. The whole action is so ill-conceived, so ad-hoc and so opportunistic.
    The trouble is that Gaddafi is such an arse that no one is prepared to speak up for him, despite the fact that it is pretty dammned obvious that the 'coalition's' motives are foul (honestly they couldn't give a sh*t about the Libyan people or Libyan democracy, Tony Blair was photographed kissing and cuddling Gadaffi a few months ago).
    Trying to fathom out coalition motives is a tricky business, basically I think it's just pure granstanding and posturing , put the tyrant's head on a platter just because you're able to do it.
    Methinks it's all down to British Foreign Secretary William Hague - a particularly odious, loathsome little creep on the make.What better way to show you are a big man than by emulating Maggie?
    Anyhow, as I've said before Libya in the scheme of hings is just a joke.The danger is a flare-up in Algeria which represses a democratic Islamist party.If it does blow up, then Sarkozy will look a prime dick.

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  2. Does Obama's Teleprompter have a plain speaking firewall?

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  3. OT.

    Could one argue that the American policy of sanctions on Iraq in the 90s was comparable in some ways to what Stalin did to Ukrainians with the Great Famine? Stalin sought to break the back of Ukrainians and starved them into submission. It didn't matter that 3.5 million people starved to death, many of them women and children.

    In the 90s, US sought to break the back of the Hussein regime. It went about doing this by starving the Iraqi population and depriving them of clean water and medicine. The result? Figures range from 300,000 to 500,000 Iraqi children dead. The real tragedy of all this is that it only made Hussein's regime more powerful, until it had to be finally toppled by force, unleashing more violence which killed at least another 100,000.

    So, it sounds hollow that we care so much about civilians in Libya.

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  4. Have you ever heard the press refer to a group that the US is fighting as "the allies?"

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  5. "The danger is a flare-up in Algeria which represses a democratic Islamist party"

    I think you'll find they've already had one of those.

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  6. Our best strategy is to hand-off to the French and then when the deal goes bad let them walk away from it instead of us. Won't look as bad.

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  7. So, what does this say about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize?

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  8. Is that such a thing as a Pyrrhic Defeat? If Gaddafi somehow survives, he might 'suffer' or gain one of those.

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  9. McCain couldn't have been worse than this guy and Hillary.

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  10. none of the above3/23/11, 5:06 PM

    I wonder if the reason we're involved is that we couldn't say no to the French/British plan, given that a bunch of their soldiers are in Afghanistan on our behalf.

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  11. Johnny Appleseed3/23/11, 5:23 PM

    Our best strategy is to hand-off to the French and then when the deal goes bad let them walk away from it instead of us. Won't look as bad.

    Kind of like a reverse Vietnam?

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  12. "none of the above said...

    I wonder if the reason we're involved is that we couldn't say no to the French/British plan, given that a bunch of their soldiers are in Afghanistan on our behalf."

    Good point. Perhaps an example of (A.J.P.) Taylor's law: In any alliance, the weaker party has the upper hand.

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  13. Yemen's now on fire, a hot bed for AQ--now what is the GREAT ONE going to do?

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  14. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWvQd4IlvA

    LION OF THE DESERT may have been Gaddafi's favorite film. I remember reading in the 80s that it ran in a Libyan movie theater for yrs on end. It was supposed to be for Libyans--or at least Gaddafi--what EXODUS was for Jews, BATTLE OF ALGIERS was for Algerians, and CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES was for apes.

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  15. To be sure, Gadfly is more like the badger of the sand.

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  16. Hey , whatever happened to that whole Libyan race-war thing that you were so looking over to, Steve; you know that manufactured mass-media chimera of the week that you got hooked with? Is that over?

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  17. "Could one argue that the American policy of sanctions on Iraq in the 90s was comparable in some ways to what Stalin did to Ukrainians with the Great Famine?"

    No. The UN trade embargo had an exemption to allow Iraq to sell oil for food and of course Saddam and his sons could have negotiated a soft landing-- take their loot and accept political asylum from Russia. Stalin stripped the Ukraine of crops, livestock and seeds. Like a real life version of that movie The Road, the next step was inevitable.

    Stalin's Cannibals
    What the new book Bloodlands tells us about the nature of evil.

    http://www.slate.com/id/2284198/

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  18. "Anonymous said...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWvQd4IlvA

    LION OF THE DESERT may have been Gaddafi's favorite film."

    I saw it when it came out - it was a pretty good movie.

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  19. A disaster of epic proportions. Obama will own either victory or defeat, but he's betting Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams will provide their own air cover and re-elect him, as they bow to him as "God that Walks."

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  20. I'm not really ancient, but like most people I get older. I used to credit our leaders with more substance. Now I see them as hopelessly out of their depth; overwhelmed by events; confused by their narcisistic intuitions of invulnerability; thrashing around and likely to screw up which ever way they move. Is this not a case in point?
    Gilbert Pinfold.

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  21. none of the above3/25/11, 6:14 AM

    Gilbert:

    Yeah, at 20 I assumed that a lot of what I saw was the result of competent, smart decisionmakers pursuing evil ends. In my 40s, I've seen a hell of a lot more of powerful people, decisionmakers who are called upon to decide what to do w.r.t. their organization's future plans, changing technology and society, etc. I'm far from the level of a president or a governor. And yet, even at the level of middle-management in private industry and government, people hit their limits. Obama is theoretically making decisions about intervention in Libya. Do you think he knows anything much about Libya? Do you think Hillary does?

    Nope. Hillary has subordinates, whose subordinates have some people working for them who are genuine experts on Libyan society and politics. Obama's information comes filtered through three increasingly uninformed subordinates, each adding their own spin, and their own noise from lack of understanding. Even when Obama gets a briefing from the guy three layers down who spent 20 years living in Libya and has dozens of contacts there now, the selection of who gives the briefing, and the pressure about what to include in the five minutes the guy gets with the president, come from above. More likely, that expert's boss' boss gets the five minutes of face time with the president, and gives him a heavily filtered version of reality calculated to please Obama and Hillary.

    Obama will get several such briefings, all with the same problem--people trying to spin him, people unintentionally introducing their own biases into the information, losing information as it moves up the chain of command.

    It's not that Obama or Hillary are especially bad choices for their jobs, though I imagine we could have done a lot better. It's that their jobs require deciding about so many things that nobody can be an expert on more than a negligible fraction, surrounded by people who are at least as concerned with manipulating them or kissing up to them as informing them.

    A really good book to understand these dynamics is Thomas Sowell's _Knowledge and Decisions_. It's not his most scintillating writing, but there are some valuable insights in there, and it repays re-reading and contemplation.

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  22. The Farakhan/Obama break over Libya is interesting. I think Obama is notable for winning every match-up against a rival black (for the support of the black community) on the national stage since he arrived as a national player in 2004. It's especially notable because I don't think he's the most charismatic, and doesn't have the most authentic origins narrative or natural connections (I think Chicago is behind the social networks of Atlanta, DC, and maybe New Orleans for black authenticity, and I think behind at least the meritocracy/media technocracy of black Los Angeles -New York and Boston may be more of a toss up). Consider Chicago's Jesse Jackson's failure to ever consolidate or subordinate the black elites of Atlanta or Los Angeles underneath him.

    Hopefully Anonymous
    http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

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  23. ...never believe anything the military(or anyone controlling the military), for anything...because know what??...this is just like what happened in the Iraqi Gulf War a few years back....they will make it sound like what they're doing is "justified" and "in support of "democracy"...military analysts know that this is just another pretense of the Western Powers(namely Italy and the US)..to make their presence in Libya be glorified as "liberations"...actually, they make themselves look like heroes, and when they win, anything contradicting that depiction will be "erased"...as the Romans say it, "the winner writes history"..and for the NATO Coalition, a perverse application of the quote by Sun Tzu: "business is war"....=)..talk to us on facebook, we'll be happy to share some thoughts...

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