Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-09-2016, 02:21 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF.

I can't speak for all Boomers, just for this one, but when Bush 43's "surge" occurred as the 2008 election cycle was gearing up, there was a shift in tactics that came with it.  The early battle against the insurgency focused on killing bad guys.  As in Vietnam, the Army kept score with a body count.  It was presumed that if we killed more people than we lost, we must be winning.

With the surge, came a shift in tactics from killing Iraqis to protecting Iraqis.  They built a lot of walls and tried to protect the people within the walls.  There was no small amount of racial cleansing.  If the different tribal and religious factions lived in separate neighborhoods separated by walls with various forces covering the perimeter, the civilian deaths at least became less.  The phrase 'hearts and minds' was thrown around.  The new thought was that if you killed people, they'd get mad and try to kill you back.  If you protected people, they might start treating you as a friend.  This approach was called counterinsurgency.  It didn't pacify Iraq, but it did significantly better than the initial 'increase the bodycount' approach.

Protecting people, trying to end the fighting, might be less gratifying to the young boots on the ground than killing people.  It might be more fun, if a hostile sniper starts shooting at US troops from a village, to call in an air strike on the village.  Entertaining the troops isn't the general's job, though.  If you want to entertain the troops, you call in the USO.  If you want to end an insurgency, you use counterinsurgency tactics.

But even with the new tactics, if you are fighting an insurgency, you really want a certain ratio of occupying troops to boots on the ground.  LBJ was told that the troop level he was intending to use in Vietnam would not be sufficient if the opposition went to insurgent warfare.  LBJ went in anyway, the enemy went insurgent, and the US didn't have the will to escalate.  The exact same thing happened in Iraq.  If you don't have the will and the funds for a lot of boots on the ground, the tactics don't matter a lot, you are going to get a quagmire.  After years of trying to make it work with inadequate force, and knowing full well that they were fielding an inadequate force, even Bush 43 recognized that it was time to start bringing the troops home.

Anyway, this Boomer at least favors counterinsurgency tactics when fighting insurgencies because expending ammunition with the goal of maximizing the bodycount just helps the insurgents recruit.

Trump has talked about knowing the Middle East better than the generals and hinted that he would use more aggressive tactics.  What he has said on the campaign trail and what he is saying now don't match though.  I can easily believe that some folk think brute force will solve the problem.  It hasn't solved this sort of problem in the past, though.  I do want to see what Trump will try to do before predicting failure.  His aggressive spiels were effective enough at winning votes.  He was telling his people what they wanted to hear, suggesting he could fight a short victorious war.  

There is a large possibility of quagmire, though, if he doesn't commit a lot of force.  They committed nigh on the entire US ground force during Bush 43's years.  The were sending the reserve units back into Iraq as quick as they could refurbish and retrain.

Well, anyway, I'm dubious.