Stardate 20030301.1806

(Captain's log): While the Turkish Parliament will maybe reconsider its decision in a session on Tuesday, there comes a point where we will have to give up on them and make other plans. One thing to look for will be news reports that the ships carrying the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) have passed through the Suez canal. If so, it means our leaders have written Turkey off.

Mike writes:

for Northern Iraq- we got 2 brand new IBCT's sitting around here at Fort Lewis, air deployable. [A calculation shows] that it would take 72 c-5's and 89 c-17's (I think one sortie each ) to deploy the IBCT w/in 96 hours.

If we can't use them like this, then what the hell are they for?

Well, there's nothing in the rules that says that any given military formation will actually be useful in all situations. An airborne Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) is indeed designed for operations like this, but the problem is that right now everyone needs lots of air transport, and all our military transports have been working overtime for months. I'm not sure that it will be easy to allocate such a large percentage of our transports for this kind of operation. If it was really done as a single sortie, it would involve the majority of our cargo transports. According to the Air Force's official web site we have 64 C-17's and they don't admit how many C5's. A different site claims we have 120 C-17's and 81 C-5's. Regardless, it's clear that pretty much no one else could rely on either kind of transport for a couple of days if they were used to deploy one of these IBCT's, assuming Mike's calculation is correct about the number of sorties required, because when you're going into combat with a unit like this, you can't trickle in. You've got to get a lot in all at once. So those jets would all have to move to appropriate loading locations and all be ready simultaneously, and then phase takeoffs so they all arrived over Iraq nearly simultaneously. That's tough to manage even in the best of times.

They couldn't be directly deployed from the US to Iraq in any case. Not only would that also require us to allocate lots of air tankers along the way, but it would mean you were taking men who had just spent 20+ hours in the air and were timeshifted 9 timezones and drop them directly into a combat situation. That would be insanity. If they were going to be used, they'd have to be moved forward to some large friendly airbase nearby and given time to acclimate and recover from the trip, after which they'd make a relatively short trip to the theater of operations.

What kind of risks are we actually willing to take regarding the north? It depends almost entirely on just how important the assets in the north and the political situation there is viewed by our political strategists. I don't at all understand their thinking on that, so I can't really quantify it.

There seem to be three things in particular they're worried about. First is the oil field. Subpart 1: to keep it from being destroyed. Subpart 2: to keep it from being captured by the Kurds to be used as a bargaining chip. Subpart 3: to keep it from being captured by the Turks, also to use as a bargaining chip.

Second is the Kurds. Subpart 1: to defend them against any northern push by Iraqi forces. Subpart 2: to prevent them from declaring independence. Subpart 3: to keep the Turks from invading and occupying them, leading to mass slaughter of both the invading Turkish forces and the Kurds themselves when the Kurds inevitably resist.

And I think there's also concern about the low but nonzero possibility of interference by either Syria or Iran.

If we get there first, with a sufficient force (e.g. a couple of divisions), we have a good chance of preventing all that. Whether a much smaller force could do the job is more questionable (and depends on what "the job" actually is). But I don't know how likely any of those eventualities are viewed as being, nor do I know how serious any of them are viewed politically. Without that I can't make any kind of guess about just how much our strategists would be willing to gamble in order to prevent them.

Dumping a big airborne force into a dangerous situation with help from the ground being at least days away is a really big risk. We don't want it to end up being Dien Bien Phu all over again. Whether it will happen depends on how serious the issues are viewed as being.