Category Iraq

Status of Books

War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat: For some reason, Amazon.com does not have a Kindle edition available at the moment (I recall that they did). I have talked to the publisher and they are looking into it. The paperback edition is for sale on Amazon.com and of course, University of Nebraska Press. I have heard that some people overseas have gotten copies, but other people are having a problem. I also have the publisher looking into that. There is one 5-star review of the book on Amazon.com. I don’t know the reviewer (meaning it is not a planted review).

Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka: The book has been selling at a consistent rate this year, and at that rate, it will be out of stock in the second half of 2018. If you are thinking about getting it, you probably don’t want to tarry too long. There are currently no plans for a re-print.

America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam: I do consider this the most significant of my three books, and of course, it is the one with the worse sales. I guess the study and analysis of insurgencies is passé, as we have done such a great job of winning these type of wars.

 

Deployed Troop Counts

Well, turns out we have a little more deployed troops in Afghanistan than is previously reported. Previously it has been reported to be 8,400. Turns out we have 11,000. This does not include the 3,900 that have been recently authorized to go there.

We also have officially 5,262 in Iraq and 503 in Syria. These figures are low with a couple of thousand more troops in both countries (not sure if that is supposed to a couple of thousand more in each of these two countries).

So potentially we are looking at around 15,000 troops in Afghanistan and may have around 8,000 troops in Iraq and Syria.

Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-military-idUSKCN1BA2IF

 

 

Battle of Mosul Ends

Looks the Battle for Mosul had ended as of Sunday. A timeline is here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/iraq-battle-mosul-135450223.html

This thing took forever. The offensive started on 17 October. They entered the city on 1 November. It then took 251 days to take the city (over 8 months). This is one of the interesting challenges of urban warfare, it takes 15 days to get to the city and 251 days to take it. As we noted in our three urban warfare studies (and in two chapters in War by Numbers), operations outside of the urban area go so much faster than in the urban areas. The end result is that most urban warfare eventually turns into a giant mop-up operation.

I notice there has been a renewed interest in urban warfare, especially with discussions of fighting in mega-cities. I am not sure that everyone involved in these efforts grasp that these fights are not occurring at the point of the spearhead, but are indeed often a mop-up operation, regardless of the size of the city.

Mosul is in ruins. It is certainly one of the largest cities that ever had an extended urban fight in it. It is larger than Stalingrad.

So…does anyone have some good casualty figures for this fight?

 

P.S.: https://www.yahoo.com/news/isis-driven-mosul-leaves-behind-city-ruins-society-shattered-distrust-113951651.html

 

 

Economics of Warfare 17-3

Finishing up the examination of the seventeenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at:

https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

The first two posts on this lecture addressed the impact of climate change on political violence and civil conflict. This third part “completely shifts gears” and looks at the war in Syria (starting slide 31).  He provides data for percent of men, woman and children killed by weapon type (i.e. Air attack, mortar, small arms) for Iraq (slide 33) and Syria (slide 34). There are a higher percent of woman and children casualties in Iraq than Syria. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that little factoid without further study.

The link to his lecture is here (with the part on Syria covered in slides 31-35): http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2017.pdf

Mosul Battle will be finished in days?

By the way, in between all the other rather dramatic news, there is still a battle raging in Mosul. Now, the Iraqi’s are claiming it will be over in days (before 26 May): http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39882257

The statement was made on the 10th, and it is now the 20th.

Just as a reminder, as it is been a while since we looked at the timeline, back around 18 October, they were claiming that it could take two months: https://dupuyinstitute.org/2016/10/18/duration-estimate-for-mosul/

  1. They started the offensive around 15 October https://dupuyinstitute.org/2016/10/16/its-started/
  2. Arrived to the outskirts of Mosul and started taking parts of Mosul in early November: https://dupuyinstitute.org/2016/11/10/taking-mosul/
  3. Took the Eastern half of Mosul around 22 January: https://dupuyinstitute.org/2017/01/23/east-mosul-taken/
  4. And then they started fighting for the western half of Mosul around 18 February: https://dupuyinstitute.org/2017/02/19/offensive-to-re-take-western-mosul-has-started/

Not the fastest offensive we have seen. For example, the Germans arrived on the outskirts of Stalingrad in August 1942, had taken most of the city by the end of November, and were still there, surrounded and starving, in February 1943.

One final note, remember this prediction in early February: https://dupuyinstitute.org/2017/02/09/timeline-for-mosul-and-raqqa/

It stated that U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. Army Lt. General Stephan Townsend, said “within the next six months I think we’ll see both (the Mosul and Raqqa campaigns) conclude.”

So, are we still on track to take Raqqa by the end of July?

Back to the Future

The opening sentence of an article by Dan Goure caught my attention: “Every decade of so since the 1960s, the U.S. Army creates a requirement for what can nominally be described as a light tank.” The article is here: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/its-back-the-future-mobile-protected-firepower-20539?page=show

It reminds me of a meeting we had in late 2000 with Walt Hollis, Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). He started the meeting by telling us that something like “Every now and then, someone seems to want to bring back the light tank.” He then went on to explain that these requirements are being pushed from the top (meaning by the Chief of Staff of the Army) and they should probably have a study done on the subject. He then asked us to do such an effort.

We did and it is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/mwa-2lightarmor.pdf

We decided to examine the effectiveness of lighter-weight armor based upon real-world experience in six possible scenarios:

  1. Conventional conflicts against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
  2. Emergency insertions against an armor support or armor heavy force.
  3. Conventional conflict against a primarily infantry force (as one might encounter in sub-Saharan Africa).
  4. Emergency insertion against a primarily infantry force.
  5. A small to medium insurgency (includes an insurgency that develops during a peacekeeping operation).
  6. A peacekeeping operation or similar Operation Other Than War (OOTW) that has some potential for violence.

Anyhow, I am not going to summarize the report here as that would take too long. I did draft up a chapter on it for inclusion in War by Numbers, but decided to leave it out as it did not fit into the “theory testing” theme of the book. Instead, I am holding it for one of my next books, Future American Wars.

The interesting aspect of the report is that we were at a meeting in 2001 at an Army OR outfit that was reviewing our report, and they told us that the main point of action they drew from the report was that we needed to make sure our armor vehicles were better protected against mines. As our report looked at the type of tank losses being suffered in the insurgencies and OOTWs, there were a lot of vehicles being lost to mines. Apparently they had not fully realized this (and Iraq did not occur until 2003).

Assessing The Battle For Eastern Mosul

Mosul, Iraq (Institute for the Study of War)

Alexander Mello and Michael Knights have published an assessment of the urban combat in eastern Mosul between Iraqi Security Forces, supported by U.S. and other allied forces, and Daesh fighters.

From the abstract:

The Islamic State’s defense of Mosul has provided unique insights into how the group has adapted its style of fighting to dense urban terrain. While the Islamic State failed to mount an effective defense in the rural outskirts and outer edges of Mosul, it did mount a confident defense of the denser inner-city terrain, including innovative pairing of car bombs and drones. The Islamic State continues to demonstrate a strong preference for mobile defensive tactics that allow the movement to seize the tactical initiative, mount counterattacks, and infiltrate the adversary’s rear areas. Yet, while the Islamic State has fought well in Mosul, it has also been out-fought. Islamic State tactics in the final uncleared northwestern quarter of Mosul are becoming more brutal, including far greater use of civilians as human shields.

The article is in the latest edition of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s CTC Sentinel.

The Iraqi Army Has Entered the Old City

The offensive is continuing and they have entered the old city: Iraq-forces-seize-ground-mosul-old-city

The estimate is that there are about 2,000 ISIL fighters left behind in Mosul (along with 700,000 civilians): in-mosul-a-heavy-but-not-crushing-blow-to-is-group

In Fallujah in 2004, they left behind about a 1,000 fighters. The November 2004 Fallujah operation did turn into a slow mop-up that cost the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines 65 KIA, 582 WIA, 1 NBD (non-battle death) and 54 NBI (non-battle injury).

Right now, I am editing Chapter 16 of my book War by Numbers. That chapter is called “Urban Legends” and covers the findings from the three reports we did on urban warfare in 2002-2004. So, if I have not been posting much lately on the blog, there is a good reason for it. Trying to keep the book on its scheduled August release date.