Stardate 20031219.1154

(On Screen): I recently wrote about the five fundamental elements of warfare: objectives, strategy, tactics, logistics and morale.

Objectives are set politically, and strategy/tactics/logistics serve the mission of achieving the objectives. Several people wrote to ask me why I had not included intelligence as another element. Intelligence is critical, but it's also a supporting function for strategy and tactics. (That's a judgment call, to be sure.) When setting strategy, military planners will evaluate alternatives based on the degree to which they support achievement of the objectives and their likelihood of being successful based on the operational realities of the campaign. The process of planning tactics likewise evaluates alternatives based on how well they support the strategy and how likely they are to succeed based on operational realities.

Logistics is one of the operational realities, as is morale. Intelligence deals with most of the others, including enemy capabilities, enemy intentions, terrain, weather, enemy vulnerabilities, third parties, and a amazingly broad range of other things.

One of the critical elements of intelligence is evaluation of enemy command psychology and enemy morale. It is possible, for instance, to construct strategy and tactics around a primary goal of foxing a particular commander. You can also choose strategy or tactics which would lead to victory by damaging enemy morale. That was the point of the Tet Offensive, for instance.

Last April, when the Republican Guard divisions around Baghdad had been eliminated and 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were poised to assault Baghdad itself, the original plan had been to conduct a siege. That was what the British had done in Basra. But the commander of the 3rd Division looked at the intelligence available to him which suggested that the defenders of Baghdad were not well organized or disciplined, and had not made the kinds of preparations which would have been made to prepare for a militarily-competent defense of the city. He suggested a radical change in the plan, audacious and unprecedented, and it was approved.

3rd Div and 1st MEF sent armored columns into the city and attempted to draw out the defenders to engage them in pitched battles. After about three days of hard fighting, in which enemy losses were very heavy, enemy morale broke and we watched the enemy rout.

Since then there's been low level resistance of various kinds, an ongoing trickle of attacks and a low but steady rate of casualties inflicted on American forces. Insurgency and resistance are not totally unified; there have been different groups involved. Some resistance was spontaneous and disconnected. Some of the resistance came from Islamic extremist groups associated with Iran, whose political goal was to establish a Shiite theocracy in Iraq similar to the one in Iran. Some of the attacks were made by foreign Jihadi, whose goals were as varied as their backgrounds and the organizations they represented.

But the largest part of the insurgency and the majority of the attacks came from a fairly large organization of Baathist loyalists, primarily Sunni, and primarily operating in the so-called "Sunni Triangle".

There will be some level of terrorist attacks in Iraq for the next fifty years, if not longer. It isn't really possible to prevent that, but we hope to reduce it to a level where it doesn't imperil progress. The core Baathist insurgency is the real problem; it's what we need to shatter. at least in the near term.

It appears that this insurgency was actually planned by Saddam's government before the war, as a fallback position in case of military catastrophe during the invasion.

And it appears that they were primarily targeting enemy (American) morale. Their entire strategy appears to have been based on study of the last 30 years of American military action, post Viet Nam. What they observed was that nearly every case in which America was militarily triumphant, action was brief and American losses were low and progress to victory was rapid and unambiguous. There were no cases where America had been defeated militarily as such, but there were many cases where American opponents who were outclassed militarily had still achieved victory because the Americans gave up and pulled out, and in every such case it seemed to be because the Americans had sustained significant casualties without immediate prospect of victory.

The lesson seemed to be that it was possible to triumph over America if you could create a situation where American soldiers were dying at a steady rate, and where the people of America did not see any clear prospect of an immediate end to those casualties. (Which is to say, if you could create a "quagmire".) In such cases, Americans would give up and leave. The evaluation concluded that America was rich and the US military was huge and extraordinarily dangerous, and that America was willing to expend mammoth amounts of treasure in war, but America wasn't willing to pay a steady price in blood over a long campaign. Facing that prospect, American morale would break and America would give up.

Indeed, it seemed that it would not take very much time at all for that to happen. What Americans seem