Stardate 20030325.1814

(Captain's log): Stage magic is the art of misdirection. Its purpose is to make you look where the magician wants you to look and to see what he wants you to see, so that you don't observe what the magician is really doing. Thus the grand flourishes, the pretty assistant, occasional use of pyrotechnics, with everyone in fancy costumes (which will be very revealing on the pretty assistant); all of it intended to capture your attention so that you don't notice what is really going on. And the true skill is in making it all look effortless; what this hides is all the hard work and preparation and practice, practice, practice.

There's been a lot of speculation about why the government decided to embed reporters in major military formations. Probably there were a lot of reasons why. First and foremost, when the reporters spend weeks with the same unit, the soldiers will cease to be remorseless baby killers and start being Joe and Ted and Fred. Embedded reporters would be expected to be less antagonistic.

But I do wonder if maybe there's also some misdirection going on. With reporters embedded in Marine units, and the 3rd Infantry Division, and with the British, there's a natural tendency for the news organizations to report on those formations, and a natural tendency on the part of nearly everyone to think that this is the entire war.

In fact, it's the tip of the iceberg. It's big, and showy, and damned important, and the men and women of those units have accomplished a lot so far and will accomplish a lot more before it's over; and some of them will pay a stiff price for it. It is proper that we should watch them, and be concerned for them, and mourn for them if they die.

That said, there seems to be a lot going on which we aren't seeing, and it's becoming revealed not by what's happened, but by what has not. Why were the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers not blown? Why are so many critical bridges being captured instead of being rebuilt? Why have so many oil fields and other critical economic facilities been taken with little or no damage?

In 1991, Iraq dumped huge quantities of crude oil into the Gulf, producing one of the larger oil slicks in recent history. This was a particular concern because several of the Gulf states produce most of their drinking water using desalinization plants on the Gulf; if the oil slick had reached such plants it would have forced them to shut down. Why was no such slick produced this time?

And why has there been no nerve-gas-armed missile attack on Israel? Why have many of the most feared Iraqi weapons not been used against our forces?

A lot of these kinds of things were "use it or lose it" for Saddam, and our hope was that we'd be able to remove his ability to use them before he made the decision to do so.

Apparently the reason for much of this is that small detachments of Aussies, Brits and Yanks are operating all over Iraq in small groups, to do things like secure oil fields and keep them from being destroyed, or to watch depots where chemical weapons or their delivery systems are thought to be held and to make sure they don't get used.

A hell of a lot of people are putting a hell of a lot of work into target identification. We read about missiles striking military targets, and precision guided munitions doing the same. Some of the targets have been obvious, such as Saddam's palaces. But not all of them have been, and it's noteworthy that not even the government of Iraq has tried to claim yet that we've accidentally bombed a purely civilian target. We seem to make it look easy, but it isn't.

Another question I've got is supply. The Third Division is nominally "Infantry", but it's "mechanized Infantry" which means it's most of the way to being an armored division. Technically, a Mech Infantry division is one which has enough vehicles to transport all its people without any of them having to foot-march; that means it's highly mobile.

It also means it burns truly vast amounts of fuel (measured in gallons per mile, not miles per gallon), and churns through huge amounts of spare parts. The men will go through a couple hundred tons of water per day, and maybe 50 tons of food and incidental supplies. This kind of heavy division uses mountains of supplies even when it isn't in combat (and vastly more when it's doing a lot of fighting), and usually that means it's connected to some port somewhere by a stretching rubber band of trucks. But in this war, they've been moving through large areas of Iraq and not trying very hard to pacify them. There are definitely still partisans in the rear of 3rd Infantry, and truck convoys would be a sweet target for them. I haven't seen much in the way of reports about such convoys, let alone attacks against them. How are the people in 3rd Infantry being supplied? Last year Sergeant Stryker said that it was actually possible to supply major formations like this entirely by air; I wonder if that's what's happening?

Some of this will come out in the weeks and months after the war. Some of what I'm curious about won't be revealed for years, if not decades. Such as just how it was that we learned about that meeting last week of top Iraqi government officials so as to interrupt it?

What are all those surreptitious special forces guys doing? We learned after the fact what a lot of them did in Afghanistan, what with making contact with local leaders and making deals with them to switch sides at the appropriate time, and doing a lot of valuable scouting, and designating targets for air strikes.