Re: [MV] OT - Bradley's fighting in Fallujah

From: Steve Grammont (islander@midmaine.com)
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 23:29:19 PST


Hi Ryan,

This is getting way off topic now... so I'll post this and if you wish to
continue off list, be my guest.

>I'll ask Fred after thanksgiving to see if his
>Son thinks they were out on a limb or not.

The war is bigger than Fallujah, bigger than the Marines. I don't doubt
that when they were pulled out things were more or less under the control
of the Marines at that time.

>Will
>the indirect word of a Marine that was there sway
>your opinion?

Facts would be better :-) What you described is basically what I
described, except I think your account doesn't look at the big picture
enough. The Marines were pulled out (I didn't say they were redeployed
elsewhere) because primarily it was seen as counter productive to not do
so. The assault was causing a lot of collateral damage and death, which
was making things (in some ways) worse instead of better. But there were
other factors as well, though I have no idea how much they came into play
since the decisions made aren't public yet as far as I can see.

Remember that Najaf/Sadr was going on at the same time and we were having
a lot of problems with that situation. If things went from bad to worse
in Fallujah, there was no pool of troops sitting around twiddling their
thumbs to make things better if the Marines needed backup. Likewise, the
Marines might have been better used elsewhere if things went to Hell in
Baghdad (Sadr City) and/or Najaf. Getting the locals to take over
Fallujah was supposed to keep the lid on Fallujah's problems and thus
remove it from the equation. This didn't work, and in fact probably made
things worse. I think the pullout will go down as one of the worst
military decisions made during the Occupation up until this point.

Keep in mind that forces were drawn out of Fallujah early as the second
assault wound down in order to deal with the overruning of parts of
Mosul, in part because forces were drawn from there to go into Fallujah.
 Now a big op is going on south of Baghdad were we pulled out troops to,
in part, go into Fallujah. All these redeployments, in rapid succession,
are a classic symptom of not having enough troops. The warnings of
commanders in Fallujah that things could flare up again if troop levels
are decreased there is a much more direct issue.

>Some of it's the bravado of the Muj. However,
>there's one report via www.thedonovan.com
>(indirectly) that the rank and file fallujan
>civilians left notes and blankets for our guys to
>use their homes while they were away. Literally
>"thanks for liberating the town" kinds of notes.

I am sure this is true. But if you have 10% of a city like that pissed
off, armed, and not all playing with a full deck... then you have some
trouble if that 10% is roughly twice the size of the occupying force.
And that is the BIG problem with the insurgency... a fairly small % of
the population is causing all the problems. You have to sit on them hard
or they bubble up. And sitting on them means troops in place without
interruption.

>Or Vietnam? How about Grozny? It wasn't a Grozny,
>either battle.

I'm not sure what your point is. I said we had to retake the city at
great cost, and unnecessary cost, and you're bringing in irrelevant
examples from other wars that have nothing at all in common with this
one. And to make what point? Roughly 1 in 5 were wounded in some way
even and 1 in 50 were killed. We lost a couple tens of millions of
dollars of equipment (several Abrams, Bradleys, and copters) to a couple
hundred bucks worth of enemy weapons. Uncountable amounts of non-
combatant property was destroyed and still unknown civilian casualties
were caused. I don't know what your definition of "cost" is, but I'd
call this "great" in the context of the current conflict in which we were
our troops were supposedly going to be home by now and the Iraqis all
happily going about their peaceful, democratic lives in order to pay us
back for the initial liberation.

>Our guys weren't just equipped
>with armor and lots of firepower. They were
>trained too.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to anything I said. The US forces in
place are second to none in my eyes. Civilian leadership isn't. It is
the latter that caused the conditions for the pull out, plain and simple.
 You and I might disagree on the minutia of this, but I don't think we
disagree with the real issue.

Steve



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 07 2005 - 20:37:43 PDT