|
[Previous entry: "Poste restante"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Collaborative blogging"] 12 July 2003: "Maneuver warfare and the misadventures of the 507th"
It's been said many times by now that, despite the fact that Operation "Iraqi Freedom" was possibly the most extensively covered war to date, this did not actually lead to a better understanding of what was going on at any given time. A fine example of this is how long it has taken—well over three months—for a coherent picture to emerge in the media of the chain of events on 23-Mar-2003 around Nasiriyah, when the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company wandered off-course and lost eleven KIA and seven captured, including PFC Jessica Lynch.
"The 507th Maintenance Company was placed in a terrible predicament by the wanton desire of its command structure to race to Baghdad," said the Rev. Tandy Sloan, father of Pvt. Brandon Sloan, 19, of Cleveland, Ohio.Private Sloan was one of the seven Americans killed in the engagement. While the Rev. Sloan has my commiserations on his loss, I'm less than impressed by his analysis of the situation. In an entry on 26-Mar-2003, I elaborated on the doctrine of "maneuver warfare," touching on Captain Basil H. Liddell Hart's "Expanding Torrent System of Attack" and the Maneuver Warfare Handbook by William Lind. The appendix to the Maneuver Warfare Handbook consists of teaching materials from the course "Fundamentals of Tactics" as taught by Colonel Michael D. Wyly, USMC, at the Marine Corps Amphibious Warfare School. Wyly kicks off by discussing the German concept of Flächen- und Lükentaktik, or "the tactics of surfaces and gaps." If we take Liddell Hart's analogy of a torrent of water seeking its way through an embankment, we see that the water cannot penetrate a surface—say a patch of well-packed earth—but instead seeks gaps, cracks which permit the passage of a small amount of water. This small amount of water erodes the sides of the crack, widening it and thus permitting the passage of more water, etc. The idea is to avoid pitting strength against strength, but to pit one's own strength against the enemy's weakness. To switch analogies, rather than trying to eat one's way through an unpalatable pie crust (the enemy line), one tries to find the thinnest point in the crust and punch through, straight to the filling. One may have to nibble at the crust to the sides of the gap to widen it, but ultimately one concentrates on removing the filling. Once this has happened, the crust, bereft of its support, will collapse. In this scenario, the own troops are the fork. The combat units form the tines, while combat service support units, like the 507th, form the stem. What appears to have happened at Nasiriyah is that the fork bent, with the tines going sideways while stem—the 507th—pushed straight ahead. There's a pop-up which accompanies that CNN article, "The 507th Maintenance's wrong turn," which gives an overview of the chain of events. Bear in mind that the prospect of a heavily defended piece of built-up terrain, like Nasiriyah might very likely have been, would rightly have been regarded as a "surface," which is why the lead combat elements avoided it. But what's particularly interesting, looking at the CNN diagram, is that the 507th—the stem of the fork—not only penetrated Nasiriyah and crossed the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal, but didn't actually encounter opposition until it turned around and tried to retrace its steps. The significance of this event can hardly be overstated; a rear-echelon outfit managed to roll straight through an enemy-held city and across two strategic obstacles, and not encounter any resistance until it turned around and tried to come back the same way. In any other war, one would expect that the column would have been brought to a halt and either destroyed in place or have to be relieved by combat troops. It seems likely to me that the rapidity of the American advance played a major role in the Iraqis' inability to mount an effort sufficient to trap and destroy the 507th. The question which consequently presents itself is whether the assessment of Nasiriyah—specifically Route 7/8—as a "surface" was incorrect, since the relatively easy passage of the 507th both ways might indicate that it was, in actual fact, a gap? The answer is "probably not." It seems likely that a task force of maybe battalion size might have punched its way through to the far side of the Tigris, but keeping it supplied would immediately have proved a challenge, since presumably every single Iraqi fighter, regular or irregular, in Nasiriyah would have flocked to the road in order to harass and interdict the supply lines of any such task force. Obviously, the plight of the 507th was the result of a cockup (or, more accurately, a sequence of cockups). But war is messy and unpredictable business, and there is simply no way to guarantee nothing will ever go wrong. Perhaps a slower advance on the Coalition's part would have helped to prevent the 507th's wrong turn, but who knows how much longer the campaign might have lasted, and how many other lives—on both sides—would have been lost in the process? As I speculated in March, I think the Coalition battle plan is based on the concept that Iraqi armed resistance is house of cards, and Saddam Hussein and his Inner Circle are the card which will bring the house crashing down. Rather than laboriously dismantling the house card by card, the Coalition is going for that card.I stand by that assessment, and I think characterising CentCom's strategy as a "wanton desire" is unfair. It is possible to argue with the benefit of hindsight that CentCom took unnecessary risks, considering the speed with which organised Iraqi resistance collapsed. But at the time nobody was expecting that events would unfold the way they did. |
Navigation: home archives backgrounder Blogs:
au currant Miscellanea:
Care to contribute |
