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How Tech Almost Lost the War
An anonymous reader writes "Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq? Wired says so. Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies. But the Pentagon got their network theory all wrong, with too few nodes and a closed architecture. Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq."
Our military doesn't have efficient networked killing machines? Go to liveleak.com and look for some AH64 Apache videos from Iraq or Afghanistan. They are killing people from 1-2 miles away with very accurate 30mm cannon fire all while communicating with the guys on the ground.
Funny, they're busy blaming the democrats for the war this week.
== Bad when you create 2x more insurgents because of all the civvies you just collaterally damaged.
We should've sent the guys who said we were going to be greeted with candy and flowers.
It upset our oil supply, thereby raising the price of oil. The oil cos, and subsequently the Bush family, liked that. Halliburton got paid way too much for a government contract that was handed to them on a silver platter. Every stock holder in Halliburton, including most of the Bush administration liked that.
I'm sure there were many reasons we went to war. They all point to money and power.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
He is calling Hizbollah opeartives (Israel opponent in the 2006 Lebanon War) "primitive foe". That is as far from the trough as it could be. In fact Hizbollah won this war because it was more technically and organizationally sophisticated than IDF in ground war.
According to prisoners each Hizbollah anti-tank missile operator launched more than dozen missiles during the training. The Israel Army representative told that IDF "could only dream" about such level of training. BTW cheapest ATGM cost around 5k $. But Hizbollah also used some 9M133 Kornet (60k $ a pop). And Hizbollah had a lot of ATGM operators, so many that ATGM were used often against Israel infantry. Hizbollah operatives were well coordinated, using mobile phones and radio, well supplied and had had a network of concealed concrete bunkers, with communication lines, optic and stores.
It's plain stupid to call combatant capable of successful launch of modern anti-ship missile "primitive foe".
Insurgents that just want us out of their country??? These people are terrorists! They terrorize the hell out of the LOCAL POPULATION, and do more damage to them, and their infrastructure than to us (I am a soldier in iraq as we speak). You sound like jane fonda during Vietnam, and need to move to god damn france with all the crap you are spouting, not even worth my time to tear apart the rest of your arguments.
The article is fully titled "How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social Not Electronic". The article itself is utter garbage, it is confusing the role that technology played in warefare with the ones that strategic and psychological thinking played. Technology didn't lose the war, if anything it won it. Just ask the dead Iraqi in their tanks, cut off from their communications and were smart-bombed... No, the problem with the Iraq war does NOT lie with technology, it lies with piss-poor strategic thinking. Read the Art of War, the first principle is that it is best to archieve victory without fighting. This is where the US army is utterly failing, they failed to gain any good-will with the Iraqi people, and for good reason too. If anything, the administration had a serious lack of interest in properly re-building Iraq, and more interest in selling out military and construction contract. While I definitely agree that the critical networks to work with in Iraq right now is social, the purpose of the technology mentioned--namely network-centric warefare, was designed to tackle a completely different problem. It takes a completely different tools--namely much better and focus foreign policy, to tackle the problem in Iraq. Finally, the U.S. needs to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, they really have no business there to begin with in the first place, they need to focus on re-build the infrastructure that they destroyed and let the Iraqis govern their own country.
The authoritative study of civilian casualties was done by a group from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Here is a link to an article bolstering the validity of the study; it has links to a review of the original study.
The "iraq body count" guys are just counting dead listed in press releases.
It boils down to conglomeration of a terribly incompetent, but trying-to-overachieve administration, a bunch of rightout lies and a big media clusterfuck in a lot of countries. IMO. This Wikipedia article might be an interesting read for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War
I agree with him. C is not easy. It is a language for programmers, not for people that are mainly into e.g. mechanical stress simulations. Granted, with appropriate libraries, and all that, you could make an environment suitable for mechanical stress simulations, using C as a base language. But unless you already have that environment, and are able to show it to him, there's no reason for him to start learning C.
I suggest you try to show him MATLAB instead, and see if he's more impressed this time. (And the matlab compiler makes this a "compiled" language too, if "compiled" is of importance to you (I assume it's totally unimportant to him)).
It's much worse than an over-reliance or mis-application of technology, or having the means justify the end, it's mistaking a means for an end.
Jeff Huber just put up an excellent essay on this which can be summed up by the two quotes by Clausewitz:
"Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa."
and
"If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits."
The most efficient "kill-chain" won't do squat unless there is a clear and achievable objective. The other problem is that the "kill-chain" that is being used is purpose built for set piece battles between great powers basically 2nd generation warfare (web 1.0) versus 4th generation asymmetric warfare.
You don't even need Clausewitz, Powell will suffice. To use a shortened version of the Powell doctrine:
- Do we have a clear attainable objective?
- Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
- Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
- Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
- Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
The entire Iraq mess can be laid at the feet of our 43 president.
He is commander in chief, that is his military to command. Sure, president Bush has advisers, both technical and military, but ultimately, at the end of the day, after all the intelligence has been analyzed, he is responsible for ordering the troops to war.
Everyone else can finger point and double-talk, but the orders come from the top. With great power comes great responsibility.
I don't care if everyone beneath him fucked up their jobs - it is his responsibility to weed out the incompetents and poor performers, not protect them because they are "loyal".
If you want someone to blame, look no further than our President.
-ted
It's not a complicated statement. It means exactly what it says: Never start a war if you're having diplomatic success.
... and war has considerably more risks and costs associated with it.
There's no need to read any more into it. The statement is silent on when you should start a war. And it's likewise silent on many other situations where you shouldn't.
If you want to understand the rationale:
1. The purpose of diplomacy is to get something you want.
2. The purpose of war is to get something you want.
3. If you're already getting what you want through diplomacy (ie, having success), then going to war isn't going to get you any marginal benefit.
4.
5. Hence: "Never start a war when you're having diplomatic success."
I don't see why this is so terribly difficult to understand.
I don't think most people realize what a reversal it was for the Bush administration to put Petraeus in charge in Iraq. He had demonstrated workable techniques years before in Mosul. (?) From what I heard, he was removed, told "We don't do nation-building," and his unit was replaced with "the Striker Brigade," which shows a certain bias or viewpoint from the higher-ups in the war management. To put him back in charge of Baghdad was something of a repudiation of the "Striker Brigade" mentality. Even if I liked what Petraeus did in Mosul, (?) I don't know if the same can be done this much later, with a social/political environment this poisoned, in a place as big as Baghdad, with the resources available.
One thing I don't think the Bush administration understands is that continued occupation time is poisoning the well in Iraq. IMHO we had 60-90 days of good will after the invasion, to begin making daily life for Iraqis better. We squandered it, in fact we did worse, in that we didn't even set the stage well for a hostile occupation. We did things like allow them to carry the weapons and explosives out of their own military bases, and some estimate that with what they took, they can run the current level of insurgency for decades. So it's not a simple case of try this, if it fails try that. Every thing we try that fails, makes the starting point for the next attempt worse. Every month that passes is another month of occupation, and that makes it worse.
Whatever you feel about whether we should or should not have invaded Iraq, just about every aspect afterward has been horribly incompetently managed.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The current tribal nature is from emulating the conquering Arabs, and the devastation left by the Mongols, who destroyed (or let die) much of the desert agriculture, and thus the supporting civilization. In fact, most of the so-called Iraqi Arabs are no more Arab than the French are Germanic Franks, or inhabitants of Turkey really Turkmen.