Lessons to Learn

Our enemies are quickly learning that facing our combat units is not a winning proposition. However, that is not going to make them suddenly stop being our enemies, in most cases. So the question becomes, how will they fight us. Since we've removed any possibility of combat success against our front-line units, the enemy will be forced to take up guerilla warfare, the one part of Saddam's defense that had any success at all against us.

The most vulnerable targets we have during an invasion are our supply convoys. (This has been the case for every army since at least WWII, by the way.) Because our way of fighting, as well as the necessity for most of our enemies to rely upon guerilla warfare, tends to blur or erase the concept of a front line, these convoys will become more exposed.

We will almost certainly have to devote more resources to convoy duty. This has to be a judgement call, because resource you use to guard the columns cannot be used in actions elsewhere. On the other hand, if the columns don't get through, your lead elements don't fight. The fact that some Marines were down to one chow a day for three days (during or right after the sandstorms) is pretty inconsequential militarily. The fact that units in contact in Baghdad were low on ammunition was far more worrying.

During one of the more intense operations of the war, the initial push into Baghdad along Hwy 8, then back out towards the airport, some of the heaviest fighting was by a supply convoy, trying to reach the front-line units, who were running low on ammo and fuel after 10 hours of continuous combat. The convoy was repeatedly ambushed. Here is some footage of one of these ambushes. Note the soldier hopping into the fuel truck to drive it away from the adjacent burning ammo truck.

I think that one meaningful lesson that we will draw from this war is that we need to better train and equip our rear-area troops for combat. They will never and should never be the specialists that the combat arms are, but it is a given that supply convoys and maintenance yards will be targets in the future, because the enemy has identified them as weaker than the combat units. As a result, even without convoys making wrong turns (the event that led to the capture of 6 POWs and the deaths of many more of our soldiers from the 507th), we can expect to see more fighting by rear area forces. We need to be prepared for this.

There is one other lesson, as well. A lot of our losses came from vehicles hit by RPGs. In close-quarters combat, the RPG is a fearsome weapon against buildings, helicopters, and unarmored or lightly-armored vehicles. Given that there are millions of them throughout the Third World, we can expect to see a great deal of action against them. As a result, we need to be very careful with our deployment of medium forces. The Stryker combat vehicles are certainly lighter and easier to deploy than our heavy forces, and require less load in combat. For most of the combat that occurred in the countryside, there would have been no problem using them. For the urban combat we faced, such a unit would have been torn up pretty badly, unless significantly more infantry was available to us than was the case here.

There are cases where the time savings in the deployment of troops make the risk of additional casualties worthwhile. Initial deployments into a combat zone, such as Desert Shield, could benefit from rapidly-deployed light armor, as could operations such as that conducted by the 173d AB Bgde in northern Iraq. However, when heavy forces can get in, they should get priority in shipping and should be put ashore as soon as possible. Without this, our casualty rates will rise sharply, which I don't think any reasonable American wants to see. My fear in this area is that political forces would get us to deploy medium forces in situations where they aren't a good fit, because they won't be seen as being as threatening as a heavy unit, or because they are cheaper than heavy units. We must maintain a heavy unit infrastructure, even if we shift more of the heavy units into the Reserves and Guard as we bring medium units on line in the regular force structure.

Posted by Jeff at April 14, 2003 10:58 AM | Link Cosmos