Slashdot Mirror
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."
More like blame the generals who shot spreadsheet "simulations" back and forth instead of large scale wargames to shake-out the technology. The networked battlefield went out untested with an expectation that it would work as promised. Which is a really dumb assumption for military hardware.
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me. Fire a DU round from a tank down the road, all the IEDs go "boom" and the insurgents waiting on the side go "slwooop" as the massive air pressure changes suck them inside out.
Efficient killing machine == Good when there are bad guys trying to kill you.
One might argue that the insurgents are not terrorists and are thus not our enemy. A reasonable argument, save for one missing piece of logic. If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government. Instead, they decide to take on the most powerful military in the world. Even on our bad days, that's not such a good idea.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wait...
So tech is bad because it didn't work and so the troops weren't efficient killing machines...
But tech is bad because we don't want the troops to be efficient killing machines.
Is that about the gist of it?
A president and Secretary of Defense who were concerned with creating popular support for a war are responsible. They ignored reports from military and civilian groups assigned to study the problems with a post-invasion Iraq, that the administration had themselves created, that a larger force would be needed to prevent the destruction of critical infrastructure. Even then, better deployment of available troops could have prevented much of the immediate post-war chaos. However, the current situation is more a creation of a corrupt system of bidding on construction contracts. Many of these contracts are wildly over budget and half-completed. I seriously doubt that you can blame a highly networked military for that.
Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq
How about we blame Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other "Hawks" for single-mindedly pushing a US foreign policy doctrine of preemption, which led to a war based on falsified "evidence" of a laughable "threat" to the US?
Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies.
We did beat the "enemy"; only Saddam's core Republican Guard put up any sort of fight. The major fuck-up in the initial "war" was Rumsfeld repeatedly cutting supply lines and over-extending troops.
Then we failed to fill the power vacuum in a country with a history of sectarian violence even under a brutal dictator. Worse, we failed to keep the power, lights, and water going which left the door open for opportunists. Iraq fell head-first into a sectarian civil war, with both sides, most of the world, and half of the United States population agreeing on one thing: we need to get the fuck out of their country.
It's hard to "wipe out" your enemy when every day you create more just by your mere meddling presence. It's like standing in a bathtub holding a garden hose, wondering why the water's rising.
Please help metamoderate.
...that way you don't have to admit the galacticly stupid decision to invade in the first place.
everything gets screwed. Even when it's a high-tech efficient screwdriver.
Diplomacy FTW. Literally.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Oh dear, all that "it wasn't my fault" crap just to avoid saying "you were right, we screwed up. It was another Vietnam, after all".
We're being slowly bleed dry in Iraq right now because this administration can't see the difference between actual terrorists who have a grudge against America and insurgents who just want us out of their country. Blaming equipment or protocol would be laughable if it wasn't so shameful and arrogant. The blame for this on going catastrophe rests squarely on the shoulders of one very stubborn man who believes completely and sincerely that he is on the side of justice and that his every action is not only righteous, but indeed endorsed and guided by God himself.
You can't call these people we are fighting terrorists when WE are the foreign troops on their home soil occupying their country. The only justification Bush hasn't abandoned for this war (WMD was a criminal fraud, ousting Saddam already happened), the ludicrous idea that fighting the enemy "over there" makes us safer at home is so mind numbingly flawed at the most basic level that even a C student should be able to see there can be no victory the way the war is being prosecuted. The terrorists who would "follow us home" are doing so anyway, Iraq is diverting precious man power and resources away from stopping them. They are probably already here in fact. The 9/11 hijackers lived in the country for an extended amount of time before they carried out their attacks. Every dollar we spend on Bush's crusade is a dollar that could have went to pay more police officers, increase border security, inspect more cargo. The current plan we're on to get out of this hole is to keep digging until we get to the other side when the first thing you should do when you find yourself in a hole is STOP making it deeper! Violence, even when justified, against religious extremists only begets more violence. It's such an un-American concept to accept, there's no pride in it, no feeling of success but the only way to win is not to continue fighting. Every insurgent you kill insures his sons will be your next generation of enemies. There is a point, and we have long passed it, when someone strong has to stand up and say "Enough." accept the consequences to their reputation, and walk away.
This is a very trying time for the USA, and I fear that we will not long survive the ruinous path we are currently following. Our leader, and calling him that brings me an almost physical pain, will not change our path. He is too stubborn to admit defeat, even if that means dragging an entire country down with him. History will count him among the worst of our Presidents.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I would agree with you although it is really a symptom of bigger problems. Namely where you can have an incompetent leadership to start this sort of nonsense and an apathetic population that won't do anything about it.
From an Army Officer that just got back from Iraq I think the article is hilarious. Technology made my life there incredibly easy and difficult at the same time. Our ability to mass combat power in a short period of time was amazing. That same technology that allowed us to communicate also crippled us when it stopped working. Thank God for the enlisted Soldiers that knew how to use "doohickey Y" when everything went to shit. Blaming the problems of Iraq on technology is ridiculous.
The problem with Iraq is that we think that we can enforce democracy on a country that simply isn't interested in it. My apologies to any civilized Muslims that read this blog, but Southeast Asia Shiite and Sunni sects that dominate Iraq are not interested in allowing people to have an influence in the government. They desire and will ensure that they have full domination over the population. The truth is the population is just fine with that. They are very dedicated to their tribes and will do whatever their respective Sheik tells them to do. I personally think that if you want to solve the problem in Iraq you should allow whatever form of government that works best develop from the ground up. Stop trying to impose democracy. I don't know of any government that has successfully imposed democracy on another country. Democracy will either develop over time from the inside out or it will not develop at all.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Your definition is closer to the one used by most military intelligence types than most definitions, but that's just the problem. Normally, efficiency in military parlance is a measure of how well the unit accomplishes its missions. Goals such as minimizing collateral damage, preventing all friendly fire incidents, preserving existing international relationships, and avoiding loss of life or health among troops are ALL supposed to be incorporated at various decision points if civilian oversight doesn't specifically override them. Goals such as following the Geneva conventions are included, and these are not supposed to be countermanded even by the highest levels of civilian oversight.
Technically, killing the enemy isn't a goal - defeating him is. Of course this reduces to killing in many cases, but by no means even nearly all. In the Desert Storm era, and the early stages of this war there was a lot of quite satisfactory victory by mass surrender, and in general, the whole area of Psy-ops is about bloodless victories.
If the military internally has a problem, it's that third tier or lower goals such as reducing events with negative propaganda potential can end up pretty far down the checklist for some commanders and very high for others. (Whatever you think of the morality of torture, allowing the prison abuses was operationally stupid in that it was a result of rating propaganda potential way too low, while giving a blanket order never to stop and search any Mullah, for example, would be putting it too high.). First tier goals such as winning battles, and second tier such as conserving material and avoiding unnecessary damage to civilians, infrastructure, and culture, usually get dealt with pretty darned well.
There are a high percentage of civilian overseers who don't get the idea that efficiency is a measure of overall success by at least a dozen criteria and often more, and think it's reducible to a simple measure of bodycounts. I rate the percentages of congresscritters and DOD staffers who are totally clueless here much higher than the percentage of incompetent field commanders, based on face to face meetings with some substantial numbers of all sorts during both the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations, and judging by public remarks I have seen for Rumsfeld, Rice, and others since I got out, it's gotten worse.
Who is John Cabal?
The US/Allies imposed democracy on the Axis powers of Japan, Italy and Germany after WWII. While it can be argued that Italy and Germany had some democratic traditions (however the Weimar Republic was really broken), it was foreign to Japan.
That said, it is pretty hard to come up with many more successful examples...
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Actually the US armed forces are the most efficient bunch of people in history when it comes to killing other people quickly and en masse.
Their only shortcoming is that they aren't very discriminating about exactly whom they kill. Just as long as US casualties stay low - grotesquely low in terms of the history of armed conflict, although of course any casualties on your own side seem too many. That's a political necessity, when the commander in chief is also the elected president of a democratic state.
Traditionally, war has been "the continuation of diplomacy by other means" (as Carl von Clausewitz neatly observed). That meant exerting pressure on specific people whom you wanted to influence, and - if necessary - killing them and their supporters.
The USA has always been adept at the form of diplomacy that involves choosing partners iin foreign nations who are likely to further US interests, and supporting them by all manner of means. Unfortunately the subtlety of this approach breaks down when "continued" by the modern American way of war, which is basically to break into a territory and kill everyone in sight very quickly. That tends to be counterproductive, because it eventually pisses everyone off. As soon as "Shock and Awe" was mentioned, it was immediately obvious that it was essentially just 21st century Blitzkrieg. And despite all the rubbish about "precision targetting", it is about as selective as Blitzkrieg - in other words, not at all. Everyone within the blast radius dies. And the blast is not necessarily centred on the chosen target, and the chosen target is not necessarily what it is thought to be. Remember the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, or the 30-40 publicly announced bombings of "safe houses" where Saddam Hussein was allegedly hiding in 2003? All those bombs hit and destroyed their targets - although we later learned that Saddam was not in any of them. Want to guess who was?
Minimizing your own casualties, desirable as it is in terms of domestic politics, turns out to be disastrous in terms of foreign politics. War cannot be a continuation of diplomacy if it lacks subtlety and discrimination. Moreover, in the long run it will be disastrous domestically too - when even the US media can no longer suppress the truth about the real damage done to Iraq and its people.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
No.
This war was started and is fueled by American politics. Don't try to shift the blame to the geeks. I and many of my friends are geeks, and none of us are residents of the USA.
Place the blame where it's due: The administration of the USA.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Armies kill things. Technology has made our military, man for man, the most effective and efficient killing machine anywhere. The invasion of Iraq and the annihilation of its military took 3 weeks and a handful of casualties, hardly more than we'd have had in almost any live-fire exercise on the same scale.
After that, however, and despite the fact that the military is a conveniently well-organized and broadly capable group of trained men and women that can be ordered to do just about anything, we didn't need a massively efficient and effective killing machine. We haven't for years now. IF we insist on the paradigm that it is our responsibility to rebuild any country we knock over, we NEEDED a wise, foresightful, thoughtful, and empathetic administrative POST-confilct authority. We didn't have it. What we got - charitably speaking - was a collection of hastily thrown-together policies based on really nothing but optimism, a lack of any strategic direction cognizant of the political, religious, and tribal realities, as well as ex-pat Iraqi opportunists who saw their chance to nab some power and wealth.
Think of the Army as a supremely well-balanced and perfectly crafted chainsaw - perfect for treecutting. Once you've cut down the forest, and want to try to build a city, is it any wonder if the chainsaw - no matter how wonderful - turns out to be nearly useless for digging wells, building homes, paving streets?
What they have accomplished is more a testament to the versatility, dedication, and skill of the individuals in our armed services who are willing to try to accomplish whatever they are ordered to do.
-Styopa
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ok, as an Engineer using it now, let me throw a recommendation for GNU Octave. It's basically an open source equivalent to Matlab. (scripts are ~95% compatible between the two, well documented where they aren't) Gotta start getting away from closed source math, especially where science and technology needing peer review are concerned. Windows version is a Cygwin implementation, but they have a standalone installer that makes it transparent to the user. http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
I have used Matlab at work for years, recently switched to Octave, and haven't had any problems. That, and there's the free, open source thing. Save the taxpayers a few grand on another Matlab license.
I suspect the Russians were saying that for quite a few years when they were up to their necks in Afghanistan.
America won the war in Iraq, that was the easy part. Winning the peace is harder, and that's where they are failing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
[though the following may appear to be directed at you, it isn't specifically aimed at just you]
here's another crazy plan. i'm gonna come to your house with 7 crips. we're going to kill your wife and rape your daughter before shooting her too. then we'll burn down your house and drag you off to prison, where you will remain until we feel like releasing you, hell maybe we'll rape you too. afterwards we'll give you a laptop with msn so some idiot can tell you how wonderful the war is for you and how you should just stop being so angry and see that it was in your best interests. and here's the REALLY crazy part. we'll be fucking *astounded* when it doesn't work and will declare you a muslim fundamentalist for fighting an invading army waging an illegal war.
at the risk of invoking godwin's law (in my defense this is a statement of fact) the very idea of trying to re-educate your victims even as you slaughter them is literally the same attitude nazi germany demonstrated in russia. again, they were SHOCKED that the russians didn't either give up or join them. after all, they didn't have a chance against the mightiest army the world had ever seen, right?
i'm not new here, i've been reading slashdot since 1999 (the first story i read was about the columbine massacre). yet i'm still amazed at how braindead some of the comments are. god help us, some of these people probably work for the department of defence. you just don't get it. you *cannot* win in iraq. maybe you could have, in a five minute window, but not now. you can kill every last iraqi and you'll still lose. i know there are plenty of people who read that last sentence and are thinking 'killing them all isn't losing!' which just reinforces my point that slashdotters just don't get it. war is not a deathmatch. after your inevitable defeat iraqis will have lost lives but gained a national soul, forged by a great victory against terrible odds. your country on the other hand will have lost good men and the last vestige of what made it great. i hope it's worth it.
Flawed premise. We are opposed effectively because our wars are unjust and the local populations know it and will not surrender. We aren't up against "jihadists" or "terrorists" or "insurgents". We are up against people who want us out of their countries and will not submit to empire.
Afghanistan is a failure because, contrary to America's deeply held belief, it did not attack us on 9-11-01. The Taliban did not blow up the towers. Al Qaida did, and they booked from Afghanistan in the 30+ days it took for Bush to set up the annihilation of that country. We bombed brown people who kinda looked like Al Qaida and who were living in the same country that the outfit formerly camped in. We killed tens of thousands of people, occupied the place, and not coincidentally made our new puppet government sign the gas pipeline deal the Taliban government refused.
Iraq, well, well. A pack of lies to invade a helpless, non-hostile nation. We killed 100,000 outright and another 900,000 died from the effects of the occupation. Two million are homeless and at least a million of those have fled their own country. Girls are selling themselves in Syria to feed their families bak home. We are being opposed because we are bastards, not because we haven't "social networked" properly. We murdered their country. What would YOU do if someone wiped out three percent of all living Americans and then stole everything not nailed down, then dictated a constitution and installed a puppet government? Would social networking make you feel better after your wife and kids were incinerated?
> Extreme pro-freedom, both market and social, doesn't correlate well with the standard left/right divide.
I would dispute that libertarians are pro-freedom, but then you have to start mincing over definitions. To bring it back into the nerdy scope that this site specializes in, I would submit that it's analogous to the difference between the GPL and BSD-style licenses. Which is more free? You'll hear lots of heated arguments on both sides, and it boils down to one philosophical difference:
If your system allows an individual the freedom to subjugate the freedoms of another individual, is your system more free or less free?
Libertarianism/objectivism allows just that; an individual or group with enough political or economic power is free to use their power to impugn upon the freedom of others. For instance, WalMart is free to use their economic force to de-facto forbid their employees from bargaining collectively as a union. You, as a libertarian might find that WalMart's freedom to hire and fire as they see fit without limitation is what is required for a free society; others would argue that the right of the workers to freely associate and to bargain collectively is of greater value, i.e. leads to greater overall freedom.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
The Iraqis are hardly as monolithic as you imply. The majority of them are more interested in general quality of life issues than anything else, like whether they have a decent job, can go to the market safely, have clean water and electricity, and so on and so forth. It is true that the majority of them don't like Americans, even beyond the amount you might suspect given that we've killed a lot of them, but they don't hate us enough to stop being essentially utilitarian, which is what they are. That's what the Anbar Awakaning, the "Concerned Citizens" groups, and so on are all about. The Iraqis are just people. As much as they might not like a foreign occupying force, they aren't going to die to the last man (as you suggest) to get rid of it. Would you? Would the people you know? Not if life was the least bit livable under the regime, and not if the alternative was worse. For a while, your average just looking out for his family and friends Iraqi thought the Islamists were the better choice. The evidence (and polling) suggests that that is no longer the case. So while I agree that all in all the whole thing may not have been worth it, Iraqis will almost certainly become our "friends" over the long term. Their only alternative is essentially nutcase religious warlords, and they just don't hate us that much. And as a final point, the U.S. Military hardly behaves like the crips, and don't compare the two.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
You would be hard-pressed to maintain that the US peacefully occupied Iraq.
Well, Your missing some things. We are fighting clean wars because we want to seem superior in some respect. We are attempting to avoid civilian casualties and so on.
The issues aren't that simple when we go from taking cheese from the trap to getting backed into the corner. There is a lot of stuff we simply won't bring to the table. Some of this is Carpet bombing, chemical and biological agents, Nuclear agents and so on. when things start unraveling, and people start backing the rat into the corner, don't be surprised when it come straight for you biting and clawing all the way.
So while I see what your saying, and please forgive my Rat analogies, I think your missing the point that the western world hasn't really gotten fed up with it yet. When it becomes more then swatting at mosquitoes, then they will take heavier actions which should put the fear back into place.