The Opinionated Bastard

The differences between Reserves and NG go back to a change that was made [in the Clinton years, I suspect]. The Reserves were reorganized to be primarily support units, and their combat functions were shifted to the NG, or, most often, eliminated.

Hello,

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis of the data. By any chance, could you post an Excel spreadsheet or PDF with the numbers, for those of us who’d like to play with the data ourselves? Thanks,

This all comes from the Brookings report, which you can get here, except for the first graph, which I do manually in a table via Excel.

Combat Service support units are units that arm, refuel, fix, or move the combat forces. Combat Support Units or personnel oriented…things like the chaplains, legal, finacial etc…

Yes, I Cro, you are mainly correct. I tend to describe in this way, CSS provides material things - food, water, repair parts, fuel, etc … While CS provides services - Military Police, Communications, Engineering, etc …

The organization of the Reserves and National Guard was done shortly after the Vietnam War. The intent was to structure the Active and Reserve components so that the Active Force could not sustain a long term commitment without the activation of the Army Reserve at a minimum.

The rational for the reorg was to ensure that if the Active Forces were committed, then reserve units across American would be mobilized, thus forcing the politicians to involve the American Public in the decision to commit troops to combat.

Regards.

Regards

There is something that you are missing in your assertion that IEDs are “bad strategic thinking”. They do not necessarily deny territory to all sides. Many of the IEDs are bombs that are set off by pushing a button, not mines that go off by themselves.

For that matter, “both sides” is also not the right phrase, because the civil war in Iraq has many sides, not just two. Also the phrase “strategic thinking”, while not quite wrong, is a bit misleading. Many of the factions in Iraq are so small that they hardly ever rise to the level of strategic thinking.

Actually the real impression that I get from this post is that you are trying way too hard to decide between a good face and a bad face on the Brookings assessment. The plain truth is that the war is a great deal of same old, same old.

IEDs still require the cooperation of the enemy in driving by. I’m just saying that IEDs are like mines in that they only deny a piece of territory about 20 feet in diameter.

The mini-factions that aren’t thinking strategically make them just blind expressions of rage IMBO.

As for good face/bad face: I got slightly better mostly from ground truth reports, less from the report as I said.

But yeah, all “news” is pretty much “same shit as yesterday”.

I’m currious what the deffinition of “attacks” is. If they count all engagements as attacks, then there is no wonder the number has risen in October given the intensity of OSC. If, however, an attack is an engagement initiated by the insurgents, then the increased attacks coupled with the lower casualties may indicate a loss of effectiveness.

Good job trying to bring perspective to such poorly defined data.

I predict that if present trends continue eventually US casualties will fall sufficiently that the pressure to withdraw will fade and by the end of Bush’s term a bipartisan consensus will emerge to stay in Iraq for the forseeable future unless and until Iraq demands that we leave.

It would be a major strategic blunder to NOT stay in Iraq.

OB: But what you said in the older post that you linked is that IEDs deny territory to both sides. That is not true.

Your new argument doesn’t add up for me either. If insurgents plant 40 IEDs on a 10-mile stretch of road, they haven’t just denied their adversaries 20 feet for each IED, which would be 800 feet. Rather, at the point they control the entire 10 miles. Unless, of course, the Army races through at 100 miles an hour in up-armored vehicles. Then they sort-of share the road with the enemy.

noah: There has been no particular pattern of falling US casualties. It has been the same old, same old for the entire year and more. I predict that Bush will hand his successor the unenviable task of losing a war that he had been “winning”. A bipartisan consensus will emerge to dish out blame.

They aren’t even fighting the strongest Islamic fundamentalist militias in Iraq, which are of course Shiite. Instead they are handing those people Iraqi Army uniforms and seats in the legislature too. They are giving the keys to the kingdom to followers of the Ayatollah Khomenei - remember him?

Well, they don’t control the territory either, and if you search for Route Irish on my blog, you’ll see that the IP have been able to completely clear out a formerly problem area. In fact, search for IED on my blog, I’ve talked about this issue a lot.

If the insurgents stand there with a button you could argue that they control it, but that’s dangerous, and they could just as well stand there with a grenade. So they don’t do that (because it gets them killed), instead they set them up more as booby traps, hence the mine analogy. In a post long ago I also pointed out that if they manually trigger it, they have only a fraction of a second to do any damage. So its harder to use an IED than you might think: Manually trigger it and a bunch of pissed off soldiers will jump out of their cars and try to kill you; automatically trigger it and you just deny an area to both sides.

Anyways, say they do control a strip 40 feed wide and 20 miles long. So what? Take a different road. Use helicopters and go over it. Or put a 20 foot pole on the front of your car (which they’ve actually done in Iraq) and spend 20 minutes driving down the road setting off all the IEDs.

Perhaps the insurgents could leverage off their IED success for some strategic initiative, but I haven’t seen them do that, so I don’t think they are.

Non-IED kias show different trends then the totals, that’s where noah and I are coming from. If we can truly turn over all of Iraq to the Iraqis, IED kias could plummet in a month. That would be very surprising for the MSM, but not for my readership…

I also think its ok to have some religious people in the government and militias. As long as its not totally one way. Is it bad to have black policemen patrolling Compton? Should we ban Jesse Jackson from public office? We’ll have to see how it works out, but the constitution is pretty much designed to ensure a consensus government, which means no domination by the fundamentalists.

Will their government be as liberal as the US? No. Will it be as conservative as Saudia Arabia? No. That’s about all we can ask for.

They don’t stand “there” of course, they stand some distance away and use binoculars. As we saw today, one grenade is something completely different from an IED strung together from large Russian-made munitions.

As for what the government of Iraq will be like, the question is not how deeply “conservative” it will be. The question is how much political Islam it will have. Iran is not as conservative as Saudi Arabia either, but its current government is deeply hostile to both the United States and Israel.

In Iraq, one of the main parties is called “The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq”. Doesn’t that spell it out rather clearly? And those guys are the moderates compared to Muktada al-Sadr. Remember him? He was the one whose militia attacked the United States Army in Najaf. The Shiite coalition in the Iraqi parlaiment has granted him his own bloc of seats for the new elections.

“Not as liberal as the US” doesn’t even begin to describe the problem. Namely, that while fight one set of Islamic extremists, we hand another set of them uniforms, weapons, and offices.

Yeah, but having guys with binoculars watch you is kind of a tip off, and gets those guys killed.

And in the US we have the Communist Revolutionary party that advocates the violent overthrow of the government. Turkey has some Islamist parties as well.

Thing is long term, moderates can do ok in Iraq, because even in Iran, after that hardliner ranted about Israel, the Iranians told him to shut up, because they wanted to hear about what he was going to do for them. One man, one vote, multiple times can lead to a much more reasonable, moderate Iraq. If you have to actually deliver, you start to tone down the rhetoric.

Come to think of it Greg, you’re a math guy. Do the math. If you have a 20 ft blast radius, and a Humvee is traveling at 45 mph, how long do you have to trigger the IED? How close to you have to be with 8x binoculars to detonate correctly, yet not visible to the convoy, either before or after the attack?

You’re missing the point that the insurgents manage to pull off these IED attacks regularly. The bad guys even videotaped one of them.

Also the point that Iraq is nothing like Turkey. Also that the analogy with the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA is in a completely different position than the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI has a big bloc of seats in parliament. The Interior Ministry is controlled by SCIRI. If the American RCP ever bothered to field candidates, they probably couldn’t get their own mothers to vote for them.

I don’t understand how people can continue with these wild analogies.

Sure they pull them off. But that was never the argument, the argument was whether denying the troops the use of a road was the same as holding territory.

Actually, Iraq IS a lot like Turkey, they were both part of the Ottoman empire at one point for that matter; they were both the same country at the beginning of the 20th centure.

Its not a wild analogy; having some members of parliament is not the same thing as having control of parliament. The whole principle of democracy is to give the various factions in the country a voice in their government. Are you really arguing that we should deny Iraqis who have political beliefs you don’t agree with seats?

But ultimately, government comes down to governing. For all we know, a Shia controlled Iraq could lead to toppling the mullahs in Iran, because if the Iraqis could vote out the idiot mullahs and vote in the compentent ones, but Iranians couldn’t that might make them think.

People can vote with their feet…and if parts of the country are control by one faction, and parts by another, but they’re under a federal democracy, might Iraq just end up with red states and blue states?

You’re right that having a few seats in the Iraqi National Assembly is not the same thing as actually controlling the legislature. In fact, SCIRI is a major componenet of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite coalition that has a majority of seats in the Assembly. That is why the Interior Minister is from SCIRI.

It is all well and good to give factions a voice in government. But what Iraq has is something else: Political factions that not only have radical names and platforms, but are also coupled to armed militias. SCIRI is coupled to the Badr Brigade. Moktada al-Sadr, who actually led an uprising against the US occupation, controls the Mehdi Army. Sadr’s militia has been his ticket to political power. It isn’t because he has a fantastic civil service resume.

Look at armed militias in history that have been coupled to political factions: The Klan (during Reconstruction), the IRA (with Sinn Fein), the Nazis (in the Weimar Republic). It almost never bodes well. Even if the final outcome in Iraq is better than an outright disaster, there is no evidence that the country will be pro-American. Pro-Iranian is more like it.

Assembly turns over in 13 days though.

The Klan wasn’t particularly powerful during Reconstruction, Sinn Fein never really accomplished anything politically, and the Nazis wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Hindenberg.

I think the country will be pro-Iraqi, in the same way that the post-war Japanese legislature was pro-Japan.

I think a pro-Iraqi government in Iraq might be a nice change.

Hmmm.

1. I’ve read this about Iraq’s Shia’a becoming very pro-Iranian and quite frankly it’s nonsense. Saddam didn’t want the Shia’a in Iraq. He did everything he could to drive them out to Iran, but they stayed. Why? Because Iran sucks. Some Shia’a left for Iran, but life there wasn’t any better than in Iraq.

So now, after Saddam is gone and the economy is booming and there’s freedom all over the place, the Shia’a are going to do what? Install a Iranian style theocracy? With the terrible example that Iran is giving with it’s almost non-existent economy?

Loud babble is still babble.

1. Look at armed militias in history that have been coupled to political factions:

You must be joking. The Klan? Here’s another example: The original 13 colonies of the United States of America.

1. It’s very possible that the Iranian government could be toppled by a prosperous and safe Iraq. One element that many people seem to miss is that the primary shrine for Shia’a is in Iraq. This is why I supported the invasion and liberation. Because all Shia’a, including those in Iran, are required to visit the Tomb of Ali, and other shrines, at least once in their lives. Even though Iran and Saddam hated and feared one another, this annual pilgrimmage continued for decades and was stopped during the Iran-Iraq War.

Imagine coming from a nation with no rights, no freedoms, no jobs and no economy worth discussing and going on a pilgrimmage to the Tomb of Ali. You enter into a country where there are rights, freedoms, jobs and a booming economy.

The biggest single obstacle to democracy in the Middle East is that very few people living there have any experience at all with how it actually works vs the cinema crap they see in movies.

1. IEDs and land mines are area denial weapons and they deny a specific segment of land to everyone.

Why?

Because there are very few people who are interested in standing on and defending the location of a land mine or IED. So what if the land mine or IED is command detonated.

Who on earth is going to be happy about fighting in the blast zone of a bomb? And who would do that knowing that there was a bomb?

Why?

Because Murphy exists and crap happens.

Greetings - nice work, just one nitpick.

I’m a “Combat Service Support” troop and I’m in Baghdad atm. The terms are technical ones rather than region-specific ones; In the Army each Branch is either a Combat Arms, Combat Support, or Combat Service Support Branch - you can see which fit where [url=http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/branch.htm]here[/url]. I’m in AG, and that’s a Combat Service Support Branch, though you’ll find AG soldiers in every Battalion (in the S-1 shop if nowhere else), even front-line (yes, yes, there are no “front lines” anymore) Infantry Battalions.

Quartermaster and, of course, Transportation are everywhere - the trucks being a big target for the enemy, natch, they get the brunt of a lot of attacks, so 88M (Truck Driver) is one of the more dangerous MOSs one can have; but they’re “Combat Service Support”.

Just a nitpick of your otherwise excelent post, and explaination to share info.

Nice job, thanks. A sign of intelligence is being able to monitor the changes that are happening, and respond to them. OB is doing his best to keep up, and we salute him.

A sign of fossilization is lumping everything together in “same old, same old”, failing to comprehend that the entire world is changing around you.

Dear Math Guy,

When insurgencies are winning, they are overrunning F.O.B.s and operating in large scale units to ambush whole columns, not have two guys plant and IED and have another call in a cell phone number. Have they even done that ONCE in Iraq to a US position?

Notice Mosul is largely pacified.

The USA will only “lose” Iraq if it decides it wants to. Death rates are very low compared to Vietnam.

You worry way too much about Shias taking over. They are a majority and were oppressed. What do you want? Are you freaked out that the ANC took over South Africa? You know, the ANC with the ARMED WING!

I don’t know what the difference between “Combat Support” and “Combat Service Support” is exactly . .

In any event, this is a superb post, and the data and analysis are much appreciated. Nicely done.

People seem to be talking about some imaginary Iraq that is completely different from the real one. It is about as likely for Iraq to foment a revolution in Iran as it is for Mexico to foment a revolution in the United States. This thinking is just backwards. Iran’s GDP per capita is three times that of Iraq. Its unemployment rate is a lot lower too. Then there is the fact that many of Iraq’s political factions are beholden to Iran for military training and safe harbor. Iran has deep influence over Iraq, not the other way around.

The wild fantasies about the Iraq of the far future remind me of the Taliban’s promises about Afghanistan. The Taliban were going to build Kabul up to be better than Paris, they said. Yeah, right.

The fact that the Shiites are taking over Iraq may or may not be good for Iraqis. It depends. The point is that there is no reason for the United States to be in the thick of their internal business. It comes at a cost of $60 billion per year and the Shiites only resent it. It’s clear that eventually we will get tired of it and leave.

Or for the United States to forment a revolution in France? Oh, wait, that actually happened. :-)

Really, no one knows. You’re pretty pessimistic, but I suspect you’re getting more information from the news media then from people actually there. (I don’t necessarily count the reporters in Iraq as “there” if they’re hiding in their hotel.)

Read some of the ground truth postings. Things aren’t as bad as you maintain. Comparing the promises of the Taliban to Iraq is just silly, because you’re comparing the promises of a totalitarian regime to the potential of a democratic society.

Iraq isn’t the first nation in recent history to become democratic, and if you look at those in almost all cases it led to dramatic improvements in standard of living.

Could Iraq be one of the exceptions? Sure. They do have some deep divisions. But I think the Kurds have shown that fundamentally, the Iraqi people just need a chance.

What constitutes “holding territory?” Given the role that Islam plays in this war, I would argue that any territory that Coalition troops do not physically occupy is territory held by the enemy. Arab tribalism and Islam are fundamental beliefs and ways of life to the people, collectively and individually, of these countries in a way that communism was not in places like Vietnam, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, etc. Essentially every part of Arab Iraq is hostile territory to us. The Shi’ites realize that they can strengthen their position in the country by allowing Coalition troops to die fighting their enemies, hence the reason they haven’t called for American troop withdrawals. Iraqi representatives, however, did say that that Iraqis have a right to resistance (kill Coalition troops). That’s not good news.

“I would argue that any territory that Coalition troops do not physically occupy is territory held by the enemy. … Essentially every part of Arab Iraq is hostile territory to us.”

Thank you for helping me to understand something I’ve never been able to. I have often wondered how some people can be so excrutiatingly hang-dog pessimistic of Iraq and this, in two sentances, succinctly illustrates the fundamental difference in thought that makes it so hard for me to understand so many of the detractors. Whereas I see a country of 25 million people who just want to live and raise their children in freedom and peace that, unfortunately, have a sizable often hidden nihlistic amalgom of savages plaguing their efforts you seem to see a morrass of hatred, danger, hoplessness and defeat. If I shared your vision I, too, would perceive no hope for victory and no future in Iraq. From this perspective there really is little logical alternative than complete withdrawal as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this view offers the long term choice of only capitulation or complete and utter anhilation of one culture of the other, a decission I sincerely hope we never come to.

This is not a sarcastic comment at all, it truly has been an epiphany.