Category Iraq

Future Conventional Warfare Scenarios

What are the U.S. Armed Forces’ potential conventional warfare missions?  Is conventional warfare gone, leaving the U.S. Army conducting special ops, training, coordinating air and drone strikes, providing counterinsurgency support, and generally just kicking down doors?

Well, there are still a few potential conventional warfare scenarios out there, even if they have a low probability of occurring:

  1. Korea: We still have the majority of the 2nd Infantry Division deployed in Korea as a reserve force for the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army. If a war blows up in Korea, then we are immediately right in the middle of a conventional war. It is 1950 all over again. Amid all the “fire and fury” type comments, I do consider this to be a low odds of occurring. Still, it is one conventional warfare mission that has existed since 1950 and does not appear to be going away.
  2. Taiwan: I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan (their third largest trading partner), but stranger things have happened. I believe we are informally committed to defend Taiwan if this happens. We have no ground troops there.
  3. Ukraine: We have no commitment to defend Ukraine. On the other hand, if Russia rolls across the border with tanks and is heading towards Kiev, then we may decide we need to intervene. Exactly with what forces we would use is a question, but this is potentially a mission in the future. I don’t think it is likely. If Russia was going to conduct a conventional invasion of  Ukraine, it would have done so in 2014.
  4. Baltic States: On the other hand, we do have a commitment to defend the three Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). They are members of NATO. Right now, with the forces currently in place, a Russian conventional invasion would sweep over these three countries in a matter of days. Then what? The U.S. would be challenged to be able to quickly move a single armored or mechanized division there, let alone the several divisions it would probably take to re-claim them. We currently are not defending them and do not have the ability to quickly re-take them. That said, the odds of Russia doing this is very, very close to zero, because they do end up in a war with 29 nations. This is probably not the best use of their time.
  5. Belarus: On the other hand, I don’t rule out tanks rolling into Belarus at some point in the future. Lukashenko, the Belarus dictator, is 63 years old, and these guys don’t live forever. Once he is gone, will Belorus undergo a calm transition of power to a new president (for life)….or does Russia take this opportunity to reclaim Belarus? Unlike Ukraine, there is not a strong nationalist group that is clearly ready to fight off any Russian invaders. If Russia did decide to take Belarus (probably making sure they were invited, like they were in Afghanistan in 1979), is there anything we could do about it? How concerned would we be about it?
  6. Georgia: Russian already had a five day war with Georgia in 2008. Russia probably could have overrun Georgia if they wanted to. They probably can now. It is a very small country and geographically isolated from NATO. I don’t rule out it becoming a battlefield in the future. Not sure what the United States could do about it.
  7. Iran: While I don’t think that the U.S. will ever invade Iran, I would have said the same thing about Iraq in 2000. Of course, Iran is a country with a population more more than twice that of Iraq. Invading Iraq in 2003 led to lots of long-term complications. Invading Iran might get even more difficult.
  8. The mission not yet named: The last 30 years are notable in that the United States has been dragged into three major wars rather suddenly. At the beginning of 1990, I don’t recall any defense analyst saying the United States was about to enter into a war with Iraq for the sake of saving Kuwait (who we had no alliance with). Yet, less than a year later, this is exactly what we did, and it was done with a large conventional force of nine deployed U.S. divisions. In 2000, I don’t recall too many defense analysts saying that we would soon be invading Afghanistan and Iraq. These missions came rather suddenly. So, one must always assume that there is a possible conventional mission at any time in any place. It has happened twice in the last 30 years. These are hard to plan for and to structure forces for, yet there is clearly a need for a mobile conventional force just in case.

Anyhow, that list appears to cover the possible conventional warfare missions for the United States right now. The one with the highest probability of occurring is “the mission not yet named.” There are many other flash points in the world, but most of them are not ones that would attract American conventional ground forces. Still, as shown by Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003, we can end up involved in a conventional conflict with very little notice. This is a far cry from the days of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were lined up along the border of Germany. The future ain’t what it used to be, to borrow a quote.

It ain’t over till it’s over

Article on ISIL: Fight against ISIL not over yet

Highlights:

  1. ISIL fighters are able to move through parts of Syria that they (the international coalition) is unable to target (meaning Syrian government controlled areas).
  2. There is an estimated 1,000 – 2,000 ISIL fighters are left fighting around the desert between the Iraqi and Syrian border.
  3. Maj. Gen. Gedney warned that as ISIL lost control of the territory it held in Syria and Iraq, it will try to “vanish” in the population, before transforming itself into a more traditional insurgency (just to state the obvious).

Isolating the Guerilla

The Vietnam was significant in that it was third bloodiest war in U.S. military history (58,000 U.S. killed) and the U.S. Army choose to learn no lessons from it !!! This last point is discussed in my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

In 1965 Trevor Dupuy’s HERO (Historical Evaluation Research Organization) conducted a three-volume study called “Isolating the Guerilla.” It was an interesting survey of 19 insurgencies that included on its research team 26 experts. This included General Geoffrey Lord Bourne (British Army, ret.), Andrew C. Janos, Peter Paret, among others.

These guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Bourne,_Baron_Bourne

http://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/26/archives/col-r-ernest-dupuy-88-dead-publicist-and-military-historian.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_N._Dupuy

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Janos

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2793254.William_A_Nighswonger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paret

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/northjersey/obituary.aspx?pid=163090077

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ropp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_E._Rothenberg

http://www.ur.umich.edu/9495/Oct03_94/29.htm

http://www.andersonfuneralhomeltd.com/home/index.cfm/obituaries/view/fh_id/12343/id/3994242

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/31/obituaries/frank-n-trager-78-an-expert-on-asia-dies.html

 

The first volume of the study, although developed from historical sources, was classified after it was completed. How does one classify a study that was developed from unclassified sources?

As such, the first volume of the study was in the classified safe at DMSI when I was there. I was aware of the study, but had never taken the time to look at it. DMSI went out of business in the early 1990s and all the classified material there was destroyed. The Dupuy Institute did not have a copy of this volume of the study.

In 2004 we did our casualty and duration estimate for Iraq. It was based upon a survey of 28 insurgencies. We then expanded that work to do an analysis based upon 89 insurgencies. This was done independently of our past work back in 1965, which I had never seen. This is detailed in my book America’s Modern Wars.

As this work was being completed I was contacted by a Lt. Colonel Michael F. Trevett in 2008. It turns out he had an unclassified copy of the study. He found it in the Ft. Huachuca library. It was declassified in 2004 and was also in DTIC. So, I finally got a copy of a study after we had almost completed our work on insurgencies. In retrospect, it would have been useful to have from the start. Again, another case of disappearing studies.

In 2011, Michael F. Trevett published the study as a book called Isolating the Guerrilla. The book is the study, with many of the appendices and supporting data removed at the request of the publisher. It was a self-publishing effort that was paid by Michael out of his personal/family funds. He has since left the Army. I did write the foreword to the book.

What can I say about this case? We did a study on insurgencies in 1965 that had some relevance to the wars we entered in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It remained classified and buried in a library in Ft. Huachuca, Arizona and at DTIC. It was de-classified in 2004 and came back to light in 2008. This was through the effort of a single motivated Lt. Colonel who was willing to take the time and his own personal money to make it happen.

So Why Are Iraqi Records Important?

Last preachy post on this subject:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

So, why does it matter? Well, Iraq has been involved in three wars in recent time that are significant.

We engaged them in the 1991 Gulf War. Even though this was a truly lopsided result, we do not have good two-sided data available for this war (it may exist, but it is classified/closed). As this was our largest conventional operation since the Korean War (1950-1953), then having good two-sided data for this war would be useful. As it is, the last major conventional fight that the U.S. participated in where there is good two-sided data is in Italy through June 1944. After that, German records significantly degrade and we do not have a good collection of opposing force data for Korea, Vietnam or Iraq….although we do have it for Grenada ;).

Then we invaded and conquered Iraq in 2003. This was effectively a three-division operation that went extremely well also. As this was the last major conventional operation we conducted, it would be useful to have good data for the opposing side (hopefully we do, but again, it is classified/closed).

But, probably most significant is the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988. This was the largest conventional war since the early 1970s (India-Pakistan in 1971 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973). This was also the first major war that used chemical weapons since World War I (1914-1918). Chemical weapons and nerve agents were used extensively by Iraq against the Iranians, and also brutally against Kurdish civilians. Iran did make limited used of chemical weapons in response. It is also the only extensive use of nerve agents in warfare. This is probably important to understand and analyze. We do not have records from the Iranian side, so it would be nice to have records from the Iraqi side. Hard to analyze their operations if we have records from neither side. We really have no actual operational data on the effects of chemical weapons in combat since 1918, and we have no operational data on the effects of nerve agents in combat. This could be a major shortfall.

Now, the documents destroyed, according to the article we originally cited, was only the material captured during the 1991 Gulf War, with records dating back to 1978.  Some of it (at least 60%) was preserved on digital tapes. And, perhaps we have preserved all the military records we captured in 2003. So, in fact there may be an extensive collection available (at least 725,000 pages), although it is classified or closed to researchers. Based upon our track record of record preservation from Vietnam and onward, I have reason to be concerned.

Anyhow, a related link on our chemical warfare studies (including links to articles on the Iran-Iraq War):

Survey of German WWI Records

 

P.S. There are over a dozen counties in the world that still have chemical warfare arsenals, including Syria, Iran and North Korea.

 

U.S. Records in the Gulf War (1991)

Of course, there were problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Gulf War (1991). There were serious problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Vietnam War (1965-1973), so not surprising, the problem had not been corrected, and the same problems existed 20 years later. In the Vietnam War, the 82nd Airborne Division pretty much threw away most of their records. According to Don Hakenson, Director, Center of Unit Records Research, Records Management and Declassification Agency; in the Gulf War, 86% or 87% of the battalion daily journals were not preserved (see War by Numbers, page 146).

This became a big issue when the “Gulf War Syndrome” became an issue. People became suspicious that U.S. soldiers had become exposed to hazardous materials or chemical weapons. Yet, when the Veterans Administration and others tried to figure out where the units were at the time, they found that the records no longer existed for many these units. In many cases, they could not determine where the unit or the people were during operations. Many of the records had simply been thrown out.

The Gulf War Syndrome was not a small issue. It has been estimated that 250,000 U.S. veterans were afflicted. It was a case where record keeping briefly became a major issue. Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome

Since the 1960s, there has been serious gaps in U.S. record keeping. There still was in 1998 when we conducted a survey of the subject for the U.S. Army. We have conducted no other surveys since then, but gather that corrective action has been undertaken.

U.S. Army Record Keeping

Gulf War Records

We, of course, have never examined the other sides records for the Gulf War (1990-91). We have included in our various combat databases over 20 division and battalion-level engagements from the Gulf War. These were all assembled for us by C. Curtis Johnson, former VP of HERO and author of something like eight books.

At the time he was working for a project that had collected the U.S. Gulf War records. So he had access to the U.S. records of the various engagements, as was able to assemble the U.S. side. He had to assemble the estimates of Iraqi strength and losses based upon the U.S. intelligence records and a little educated guesswork. There are real problems in using intelligence estimates to determine the other side’s strength and losses. I can point out a number of cases where loss estimates were off by an order of magnitude (I discuss this in depth in my Kursk book). Still, as we had overrun most of the units involved, taking their records at the time, then it appears that these were reasonable and the certainly the best estimates that could be made at the time. Because the records Curt was working with were classified, and our database is unclassified, he could not leave a record of how he developed these estimates. There were, of course, also problems with the U.S. records, but that is the subject of another post.

Now, our engagements could be improved upon by a careful examination of the captured Iraqi records, which is why this caught our attention:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

Needless to say, this means that for all practical purposes, the 20+ engagements in our database can never be cross-checked or improved upon. It is the best that can be done.

Disappearing Statistics

There was a time during the Iraq insurgency when statistics on the war were readily available. As a small independent contractor, we were getting the daily feed of incidents, casualties and other such material during the Iraq War. It was one of the daily intelligence reports for Iraq. We had simply emailed someone in the field and were put on their distribution list, even though we had no presence in Iraq and no official position. This was public information so it was not a problem….until the second half of 2005…when suddenly the war was not going very well…then someone decided to restrict distribution. We received daily intelligence reports from 4 September 2004. They ended on 25 August 2005. There is more to this story, but maybe later.

This article was brought to my attention today: https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2017/10/30/report-us-officials-classify-crucial-metrics-on-afghan-casualties-readiness/

A few highlights:

  1. From January 1 to May 8 Afghan forces sustained 2,531 killed in action and 4,238 wounded (a 1.67-to-1 wounded-to-killed ratio, which seems very low).

  2. The Afghan armed forces control 56.8% of the 407 districts, a one percentage point drop over the last six months.

  3. The Afghan government controls 63.7% percent of the population.

  4. Some of these statistics will now be classified.

 

One of our older posts on wounded-to-killed ratios. I have an entire chapter on the subject in War by Numbers.

Wounded-To-Killed Ratios

Survey of German WWI Records

At one point, we did a survey of German records from World War I. This was for an exploratory effort to look at measuring the impact of chemical weapons in an urban environment. As World War I was one of the few wars with extensive use of chemical weapons, then it was natural to look there for operational use of chemical weapons. Specifically we were looking at the use of chemical weapons in villages and such, as there was little urban combat in World War I.

As discussed in my last post on this subject, there is a two-sided collection of records in the U.S. Archives for those German units that fought the Americans in 1918. As our customer was British, they wanted to work with British units. They conducted the British research, but, they needed records from the German side. Ironically, the German World War I records were destroyed by the British bombing of Potsdam in April 1945. So where to find good opposing force data for units facing the British during World War I?

Germany did not form into a nation until 1871. During World War I, there were still several independent states, and duchies inside of the Germany and some of these maintained their own armies. The kingdoms of Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Saxony, along with the Grand Duchy of Baden fielded their own armies. They raised their own units and maintained their own records. So, if they maintained their records from World War I then we could developed a two-sided database of combat between the British and Germans in those cases where the British units opposed German units from those states.

So….for practical purposes, we ended up making a “research trip” to Freiburg (German archives), Stuttgart (Wurttemberg) and then Munich (Bavaria). Sure enough, Wurttemberg had an nice collection of records for its units (a total of seven divisions during the war) and Bavaria still had a complete collection of records for its many divisions. The Bavarian Army fielded over a dozen divisions during the war.

So we ended up in Munich for several days going through their records. Their archives were located near Munich’s Olympic Park, the place of the tragic 1972 Olympics. It was in the old Bavarian Army headquarters that had been converted to an archives. After World War II, it was occupied by the Americans, and on the doors of many of the offices was still the name tags of the American NCOs and officers who last occupied those offices. The records were in great shape. The German Army just before WWII had done a complete inventory of the Bavarian records and made sure that there were complete. It was clear that when we looked into that, that many of these files had not been opened since then. Many of the files had sixty years of dust on them. The exception was the Sixth Bavarian Reserve Division, which clearly had been accessed several times recently. Adolf Hitler had served in that division in WWI.

The staff was extremely helpful. I did bring them gifts of candy for their efforts. They were  neatly wrapped in the box with plastic mice attached to the packaging. Later, they sent me this:

So we were able to establish that good German data could be assembled for those Wurttemberg and Bavarian units that the face the British. The British company that hired us determine that the British records were good for their research efforts. So the exploratory research effort was a success, but main effort was never funded because of changing priorities among their sponsors. This research was occurring while the Iraq War (2003-2011) was going on, so sometimes budget priorities would change rather suddenly.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) also made extensive used of chemical weapons. This is discussed in depth in our newsletters. See: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm  (issues Vol 2, No. 3; Vol 2, No. 4, Vol. 3, No 1, and Vol 3, No 2). Specifically see: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/Issue11.pdf, page 21. To date, I am not aware of any significant work done on chemical warfare based upon their records of the war.

This post is the follow-up to these two posts:

Captured Records: World War I

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

Raqqa Has Fallen

It would appear that Raqqa has fallen: https://www.yahoo.com/news/islamic-state-raqqa-mounts-last-stand-around-city-083330251.html

  1. This announcement comes from U.S.-backed militias.
  2. It was only a four-month battle (in contrast to Mosul).
  3. “A formal declaration of victory in Raqqa will be made soon”

This does appear to end the current phase of the Islamic State, which exploded out of the desert to take Raqqa and Mosul in the first half of 2014. It lasted less than 4 years. It was an interesting experiment for a guerilla movement to suddenly try to seize power in several cities and establish a functioning state in the middle of a war. Sort of gave conventional forces something to attack. You wonder if this worked to the advantage of ISIL in the long run or not.

I gather now that the state-less Islamic state will go back to being a guerilla movement. Not sure what its long term prognosis is. This is still a far-from-resolved civil war going on in Syria.

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

The fundamental building blocks of history are primary sources, i.e artifacts, documents, diaries and memoirs, manuscripts, or other contemporaneous sources of information. It has been the availability and accessibility of primary source documentation that allowed Trevor Dupuy and The Dupuy Institute to build the large historical combat databases that much of their analyses have drawn upon. It took uncounted man-hours of time-consuming, pain-staking research to collect and assemble two-sided data sufficiently detailed to analyze the complex phenomena of combat.

Going back to the Civil War, the United States has done a commendable job collecting and organizing captured military documentation and making that material available for historians, scholars, and professional military educators. TDI has made extensive use of captured German documentation from World War I and World War II held by the U.S. National Archives in its research, for example.

Unfortunately, that dedication faltered when it came to preserving documentation recovered from the battlefield during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. As related by Douglas Cox, an attorney and Law Library Professor at the City University of New York School of Law, millions of pages of Iraqi military paper documents collected during Operation DESERT STORM were destroyed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2002 after they were contaminated by mold.

As described by the National Archives,

The documents date from 1978 up until Operation Desert Storm (1991). The collection includes Iraq operations plans and orders; maps and overlays; unit rosters (including photographs); manuals covering tactics, camouflage, equipment, and doctrine; equipment maintenance logs; ammunition inventories; unit punishment records; unit pay and leave records; handling of prisoners of war; detainee lists; lists of captured vehicles; and other military records. The collection also includes some manuals of foreign, non-Iraqi weapons systems. Some of Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Command Council records are in the captured material.

According to Cox, DIA began making digital copies of the documents shortly after the Gulf War ended. After the State Department requested copies, DIA subsequently determined that only 60% of the digital tapes the original scans had been stored on could be read. It was during an effort to rescan the lost 40% of the documents that it was discovered that the entire paper collection had been contaminated by mold.

DIA created a library of the scanned documents stored on 43 compact discs, which remain classified. It is not clear if DIA still has all of the CDs; none had been transferred to the National Archives as of 2012. A set of 725,000 declassifed pages was made available for a research effort at Harvard in 2000. That effort ended, however, and the declassified collection was sent to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The collection is closed to researchers, although Hoover has indicated it hopes to make it publicly available sometime in the future.

While the failure to preserve the original paper documents is bad enough, the possibility that any or all of the DIA’s digital collection might be permanently lost would constitute a grievous and baffling blunder. It also makes little sense for this collection to remain classified a quarter of a century after end of the Gulf War. Yet, it appears that failures to adequately collect and preserve U.S. military documents and records is becoming more common in the Information Age.