Harper S

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Summary

1. Habbaniyah
2. intelligence negotiation and divide and conquer
3. You can't manufacture and army from the top down
4. MOOTWAH
5. Logistics
6. 4th generation warfare
7. Lessons from the Phillipines
8. Placement and Visibility
9. CLOC
10. Technology and insurgency
11. Pateince

Habbaniyah

1. from Camp Taqaddum to Camp Habbaniyah in 90 seconds
2. old RAF base
3. place used to train Iraqi defense force

intelligence negotiation and divide and conquer

• define the current U.S strategy against insurgency

1. hypothesis: Us strategy is a combination of intelligence-gathering; secret negotiation with some insurgents to enable the same divide et impera tactics the Romans used during their imperial rule, whereby insurgents were turned against one another and skillfully neutralized; and the careful, judicious use of military force.

You can't manufacture and army from the top down

1. what happens when the US leave?
2. we have to leave an army capable of defeating an insurgency
3. the north vietnamese army though funded from the outside created itself
4. you can't manufacture an army

MOOTWAH

1. Operation Iraqi Freedom II
2. in General Wissler's words, marked the "shifting from a kinetic fight into stability and support operations against an insurgent element."
3. Stability and support operations are not, within the pandect of modem conflict, considered war at all but "military operations other than war," or MOOTW (pronounced mootwah).
4. logistics bases are placed deep within hostile territory, and insurgents often target logistics convoys and even the bases themselves. In the current MOOTW there is no rear echelon.

logistics

1. The French lost at Dien Bien Phu in large part because they were not able to resupply.
2. Osama bin Laden cut his fangs working in logistics during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and his success in creating a viable logistics network was one of the reasons the anti-Soviet insurgency was so effective.
3. Insurgents know well that what logistics units move has incalculable benefit to the occupiers' morale and fighting efficiency
4. as the mujahedeen discovered in Afghanistan, when they so frightened Soviet troops that they rarely traveled outside of their bases for fear of ambush.
5. As one Afghan guerrilla later explained, "These tactics had the effect of creating a deep sense of insecurity in the minds of the Soviets …. They reacted by deploying more and more troops in static guard duties, thus reducing their ability to mount offensive operations."
6. ameteur's talk tactics, professionals talk logistics
7. third country nationals

4th generation warfare

1. US failure to recognize…
2. US failure to adapt to…
3. it is the only war the US has ever lost
4. it has lost 3 lebanon, Vietname and Somalia
5. so have the french in algeria and the USSR in Afghanistan
6. Clauswitz: the first, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish… the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature
7. pentagon: The discussion about what type of conflict this is… is almost beside the point."

philipinnes

1. If you can't understand local culture change it: Gen. Mckinley states that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the best we could by them.., and then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly.
2. Recognition of dependence on occupying force: Should our power by any fatality be withdrawn, the commission believe that the government of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchy. … Only through American occupation, therefore, is the idea of a free, self-governing, and united Philippines Commonwealth at all conceivable."
3. consistency: Some of this territory we have occupied; the rest we have returned to the insurgents in a more or less mutilated condition, depending on whether the policy of the hour was to carry on a bitter war against a barbarous enemy, or to bring enlightenment to an ignorant people, deceived as to our motives."
4. local involvement: it is politically most important that Filipinos should suppress Filipino disturbances and arrest Filipino outlaws.
5. ruthless show of force: "An eight p.m. curfew went into effect. Any Filipino found on the streets after that hour would be shot on sight. Whenever an American soldier was killed, a native prisoner would be chosen by lot and executed."
6. softer hand: in time, Taft's softer hand: trials rather than executions, infrastructure-building rather than crop-razinggenerally won the day.
7. patience: the insurgency lasted for another decade and a half, by 1902 the most organized and deadly of the insurgent groups had been defeated. More than 4,000 American soldiers had been killed in combat, thousands more perished of disease, and close to 200,000 Filipino civilians were left dead.
8. was it worth it: You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives. … You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit …. Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people … into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries cannot eradicate."

Strategy: Placement and Visibility

1. is unit placement and visibility, which is to say disrupting known insurgent paths and showing the flag to the Iraqi people insurgents intimidate and cajole into cooperating with them, although he allows as how the latter strategy relies on many untestable assumptions.

IED's attached with Dynamite is not meant to pierce amour but flip vehicles and crush those in side

CLOC

1. operations headquarters
2. Combat Logistics Operations Center
3. no intelligence can be gathered because no one speaks arabic
4. intelligence is static and not useful therefore offensie operations are crippled

insurgents hide in civilian areas where the Marines are forbiddon to give chase

1. insurgencies are not defeated by killing large numbers of insurgents
2. "If someone runs into a house, we're going to light it up. If civilians get killed in there, that's a tragedy, but we're going to keep doing it and people are going to get the message that they should do whatever they can to keep these people out of their neighborhoods."
3. a Fallujah-style siege (during which U.S. missile attacks killed a large number of civilians, including women and children, which was promptly reported by Arab media and led the Pentagon to stop the assault in medias res) be avoided at all costs.

technology (CLOC)

1. note-passing insurgents and IEDs stuffed with shredded-wire shrapnel can in some ways override what the Marines are able to accomplish.
2. No technology can erase certain on-the-ground advantages the insurgents possess,
3. although the insurgents' weapons are in many cases low-tech, they are no less deadly for it.
4. The insurgents likely have an operations center very similar to the CLOC. Really? I ask. Moore mentions the tunnels that have been found, the computer-laden bunkers. "I would not doubt it if they had some room like this," he tells me. I wonder if that is not a bit fantastical. No, he says. "It's realistic."

"warheads on foreheads."

"I like being shot at, sir," Lance Corporal Wetzel says.
"Really? Why?"
"Because you get a combat action ribbon, sir. You don't get shit for being blown up with an IED."

"I don't need a cock. I have personality."

1. MAM"s military aged men
2. CIMIC: He holds his M-16 downward, its butt untucked and thrust up onto his shoulder, to indicate his lack of a hostile posture.
3. "clear-and-hold" whereby the Marines captured towns, killed or arrested local Viet Cong insurgents, and then stayed put to live among the Vietnamese—was far more successful than U.S. Army General William Westmoreland's "search-and-destroy" tactics.
4. Insurgency remains a specialization within the military, the idée fixe of a few edge-wandering theoreticians such as Colonel Hammes. The current Department of Defense fixation, in Hammes's words, is that of "high-technology, short-duration war where technology is vital and essentially machines fight machines."
5. on the idea that if we service enough targets, we will win the battles. If we win the battles, the enemy will quit. As soon as he does, the war is over." Virtually no insurgency has ever been defeated this way.
6. "You cannot win militarily" when fighting an insurgency. "You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all."

patience

1. has been the insurgents' single greatest advantage.
2. Sandinistas have fought for 20years, Palestinians - 40, Chechens- 10)

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