Fallujah

In the late spring of 1942, the First Marine Division left Hawaii, turning defense of the islands over to a couple of National Guard units.

"We're retreating! We should be kicking Japanese ass!" cried a bunch of conservative bloggers. "This is a major defeat to the Nixon Administration" said Markos "Daily" Kos, not aware that Richard Nixon would not be elected president for another 26 years.

"The war is already over, and we've lost" cried amateur pundits from coast to coast.

A few weeks later, the Marines went ashore on Guadalcanal.

The situation in Fallujah is vexing to Americans, used to watching our military roll with seeming (and illusory) impunity over enemies, in campaigns both large and well-prepared - the march up to Baghdad - and small and extemporized (Afghanistan).

The mysterious but seemingly knowledgeable military blogger Belmont Club, has been all over this story from the beginning:

One of the risks to taking the town was always that the defenders would use the opportunity to stage their own Viking funeral pyre by torching the town and roasting as many civilians as they could with it. The answer, it seemed back in April 3 was:

However, if the Marines exert only gradual pressure, and use neighbors or Iraqi police from outside Fallujah to guide other neighbors into processing areas, the defenders will never be presented with a clear opportunity to precipitate a crisis. Once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself.

It is in this context that the perplexing cycle of ceasefires punctuated by nocturnal assaults can be understood. The Corps, besides incorporating the Chinese word Gung Ho into it's vocabulary, may have finally proved to the Arabs that they can out-hudna anyone who ever stood on a patch of sand. By alternately throttling and releasing the enemy, or in cruder terms, by a process of talking and shooting, the USMC seems to have squeegeed the foe into the 'Golan' without ever precipitating the feared crisis. ("Like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet doomed to die" -- Winston Churchill)

Is "Wretchard" from the Belmont Club right or wrong? We don't know.

But it's interesting, watching the current situation and hearing a lot of the same questions (phrased just a little differently in most cases) popping up on both the left and the right.

I'm going to take a semi-educated stab at some of them - and hope some of my military readers "got my six":

• Why aren't we kicking their asses? Everyone knows the Arab world favors the "strong horse"!" Yabbut, everyone favors the strong horse. How many of you gave a rat's ass about the Twins when they were going 70-92? Every culture respects fears the cultures that can pulverize the hometown team and build a pyramid of the locals' skulls. Is that the best way to end the situation? In the long term, I tend to doubt. As Wretchard implicitly notes, we'd gain nothing, and lose much, by "kicking ass" and creating half a city full of martyrs - and that has nothing to do with coddling the "Arab Street" and everything to do with showing the Iraqi street that we are omnipotent enough to win without napalming the Golan neighborhood even further into the stone age.
• "But we're losing face by handing part of the front over to the Iraqi police!" Huh? First of all, it's not "the front". It's a district that the Marines took weeks ago. It's rear-area security - just like the National Guard units holding Hawaii after the Marines shipped out.

  Second - it's not the Iraqi police, whose performace has been so spotty (albeit sometimes quite good). It's a separate unit, created and trained by the Marines themselves. Not much is known about this unit (and rumors that it's "commanded" by a former Republican Guard general are apparenty not only exaggerated but irrelevant - the unit, according to the Belmont Club, is fully integrated into the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, not subordinate to the CPA.

  Do you think the US Marines would hand over a chunk of their front - or even fob off security duties in their rear area - to Iraqis they didn't trust? If so, let me know why. I'll need convincing.

  And for all of you who call the Marine handover a "retreat" - only in the world of Baghdad Bob, I'm afraid. The battalion of Marines is, most likely, moving out of the front line to rest up for any final push that might be needed to end the stalemate.

• "Whaddya mean, "rest up?" They're the Marines! They're supposed to be good at this! If they have to rest up after only a month in action, what good are they?" That's the danger of getting your information about warfare from Hollywood or the evening news, I guess. There is an immutable clock facing all battlefield commanders, and it starts ticking when the first shot is fired at their men, and the clock measures a nearly-unavoidable cycle; tradtionally, a fighting man starts out fairly green in his first actions, while he's getting used to combat. It's here that soldiers suffer their worst casualties - for the 30-60 days it takes for a new soldier to learn the ropes of living under fire. (It's been one of the US military's great achievements that it has managed to repeal this first part of the cycle to some extent - training like "Red Flag" and "Top Gun" and "OPFOR" seek, with some success, to teach the lessons of those first 30 days under fire before the shooting starts).

  For the next 30 to 90 days, the soldier operates at peak efficiency; even troops that went into action without much training are generally top-flight soldiers if they survive this long. Then, at around 90 to 120 days under fire (depending on the individual), the fatigue and stress of all that time under fire starts to take its toll; the soldier becomes fatalistic, and increasingly prone to complete breakdown, what used to be called "battle fatigue".

  This cycle, and the timing involved, are almost completely immune to training, and doesn't even depend so much on the troops' equipment, quality, or even time spent out of action. Whether a soldier is a draftee, a Green Beret, a militiaman, a Marine gunnery sergeant or a fighter pilot - after four or five months under constant fire, their ability to be effective in action, and their value to their units and missions, erodes drastically.

  It's this reason that our units revolve out of Iraq periodically (as opposed to the practice in Vietnam, where individual troops shuttled in and out after a one-year tour was over). And it's one of the reasons that our military, grossly eroded in size under the Clinton Administration, has to be careful exactly how much combat it exposes our troops to; those 120-odd days under fire per man can't be bought back, and it takes a lot more than 120-odd days to replace the men that have to be cycled out of fighting roles at that time.

  The stress and fatigue of endless action also affects command decisions. So - if the commander of the 1MEF thinks the battalion of Marines needs a rest, especially if they're getting ready for a potential big push, I'm inclined to believe them, absent evidence to the contrary.

• So why don't we just attack the place now? We can! One of the key lessons the US military learned - or re-learned - in the wake of Vietnam is to always fight the battle in such a way as to maximize your own strengths. It's called "Shaping the battlefield", and it involves using all the tools of the military trade to ensure that every possible factor - terrain, technology, positioning, pacing and tempo, relative fatigue and endurance, firepower, and even time - favor you.

  In Fallujah right now, everything favors the Marines. They control most of the city, and all the worthwhile parts. The guerrillas are herded into a flimsy slum, "Golan", a place of flimsy construction but cluttered sightlines, a place where a guerrilla can launch a dandy surprise attack - once. The Marines control when the battle will begin. They control how it'll end. They can rest - the enemy can't. The Marines can move about pretty much at will - the guerrillas move in fear of Marine snipers and infantry ambushes and AC130s in the dark and tanks plinking at them 24/7. The Marines are the cat, the guerrillas are a mouse being batted back and forth between the cat's paws before the kill.

  Under these circumstances, with the hearts and minds of an awful lot of Sunni Iraq at stake, there is no legitimate reason for the Marines to allow themselves to be bullied into acting stupidly or rashly.

  Except for politics. And if the Bush Administration is willing to put the Marines' operational realities above transient, temporal politics (or, as I personally suspect, they know that the situation will be resolved by summer, and forgotten by election-time), it's testimony to its integrity, not a slam on its strategery.

In "Tunnels of Cu Chi", a Vietnamese general noted in retrospect that Americans' historical attention spans last about six months, while that of the average Asian is around 25 years.

We're dealing with a culture that, on a superficial level, respects the "strong horse". But that same culture still fumes at the loss of Andalusia in 1492, and is still in a snit over the partition of Jerusalem. This is as opposed to our culture, much of which can't name all of our World War II allies.

All I'm saying is this; while they will certainly favor the "strong horse", that determination doesn't happen in a week, or four weeks, or even a year. The "strong horse" isn't a bouncy quarterhorse in the Arab world; it's the Clydesdale.

The bet has been placed among the Northern Alliance - if this situation isn't resolved by June 1, I'll owe Captain Ed, JB Doubtless and Rocketman a beer.

I'm confident I'll be collecting.

Posted by Mitch at May 3, 2004 05:00 AM