Hey Jeff, I got here through a link to an article about US use of Napalm where you left a comment that I thought was really well written and so I plan on coming here more often.

Your thoughts on Al-Qaeda being part of the Iraqi's returning is intriguing I've been trying to figure that one out since it was first reported.

Do you have any info on whether or not the military has been able to adapt to these types of tactics since Mogadishu?

I don't think the same thing will be the case in Baghdad. If we play our cards right.

Thanks for the kind words.

Our military has many distinguishing features which make it successful. Of the many conflicts we have been involved in, and the many missions we've given our troops, I can only think of two which were failures: Viet Nam and Mogadishu, and these were both political (rather than military) failures. One of the reasons for this is that we learn from our failures, and from our successes. We do after action reviews of each mission in each service, looking for what went wrong and how to prevent it.

Sometimes, this learning leads to new munitions, such as the JDAM and increased stocks of laser-guided bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Sometimes, this leads to new operational doctrine, such as AirLand Battle. Sometimes this leads to changes in training, or TO&E or even just reminding people to follow the procedures that were already in place (for example, the incident in Afghanistan where the Canadians were bombed by US aircraft operating outside their rules of engagement).

In any case, we tend to adapt. The lesson of Mogadishu was partly military, but mostly political. Our troops did not take their night vision gear, and many did not put the ceramic plates in their body armor. They got cocky, and some of them died for it who would not have otherwise. The reason that the mission went South is because we lost two helicopters, shot down by RPGs. Had we had the AC130 gunships in place (they were requested, but denied by Les Aspin), there would not have been a disaster because we wouldn't have had to shift into rescue mode in the middle of capturing Aidid's men (the AC130s flew too high to be threatened by the RPGs). Note, though, that the mission was a military success, and the mission was accomplished. The political failures were not assigning the necessary equipment (the AC130s especially, but also APCs), and not sending out the troops the next day, or at least within a few days, as if the battle hadn't happened. In fact, it was the withdrawal from Mogadishu that convinced OBL that we could be beaten if pressure was applied correctly.

The problem is that political failures are harder to correct, because there is no requirement for political leaders to know political history, or for Presidents to know military or diplomatic history. As a result, any given administration can be competent or incompetent in their decisions of how and when to equip, deploy and withdraw the military.

We have learned from the tactics employed in Mogadishu and Afghanistan, and we will learn from Iraq as well. I don't believe that any urban battles we fight in Basra or Baghdad will be like the urban battles of WWII, Viet Nam or even Somalia.

Actually, I can think of a military failure: the mission to rescue the hostages in Tehran. The cause of this was largely interservice rivalry: everyone wanted a piece of the mission. As a result, troops which had never trained together and equipment which wasn't made to work together got thrown together for a complex and difficult mission, and the result was an unmitigated disaster. The fix for this was the Nichols-Goldwater Act (I might have the names backwards), which established the supreme advisory authority of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the supreme military authority of the joint commanders (like General Franks) reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense.