Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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 Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:10 am Post subject: Michael Yon: The Battle for Mosul IV-Soldiers Spies & Sh |
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http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/
| Quote: | Tuesday, October 04, 2005
The Battle For Mosul IV
Soldiers, Spies, and Sheep
(Excerpt)
They fled. It was all over the news. When the bullets flew, they fled. Leaving stations, abandoning posts, forgetting duties, hundreds of police fled. When the police response to gunfire was to simply run away, the city fell into lawlessness. Pundits rushed to the airwaves, proclaiming the city’s future hopeless. When the news of Hurricane Katrina first reached Mosul, the parallels were uncanny.
When Katrina battered the bayous of New Orleans, she submerged most of the Big Easy, leaving her defenseless. The levees broke and the looters and lowlifes who the Governor had euphemistically called “hoodlums” began ransacking the city. Their gunfire, combined with the prospect of patrolling streets awash in waist-high fetid water, repelled hundreds of police officers from their posts. Many police were unable or unwilling to slog into stations that were under water and out of electricity. Others simply deserted. While many police stood their ground, undoubtedly performing countless acts of heroism that will never be known, the cops who fled got the most attention. Watching the storm and its aftermath from Mosul, especially seeing the wash of relief on the faces of people as the US Army rolled in to restore order, I recalled a time when Mosul, like New Orleans, needed “a few good men.”
Disaster Relief 101
The military uses catchphrases like “kinetic fight.” Kinetic fights have nothing to do with “winning hearts and minds,” building clinics or showing people new ways of living. Kinetic fighting includes jets dropping bombs, helicopters launching missiles, tanks and artillery firing rounds, and lots of bullets: open warfare.
The initial invasion of Iraq was purely kinetic. A very powerful and heavily-armed Iraqi military fought back and was crushed. The standing government was toppled along with its statues. When American leaders said that major combat had ended, many Iraqis seemed ecstatic, but the much-predicted rose parade did not happen.
The combat that ended a corrupt and tyrannical government also removed law and order. With no Iraqi government, cities devolved into lawlessness. Museums were looted and government offices trashed and burned, while nascent animosities cowed by a tyrant, were revived, strengthened from the generations of dormancy. Iraq was a mess and getting messier fast. Infrastructure that worked under Saddam—corrupt and evil as he was—did not work under the Coalition. As we learned with Katrina, people cannot really see the big picture when the lights are out.
Like those days following Katrina, when it seemed the people in charge were doing little more than handwringing, fingerpointing or back-slapping, no one in Iraq seemed to have a good plan for what to do next. The constant back and forth of shifting priorities tilled the ground for an insurgency that in some areas grew to civil war proportions. When this new and deadlier guerrilla war emerged, the Coalition switched from a purely kinetic fight to what military leaders call a “full-spectrum fight.”
“Going full-spectrum” means that schools, medical clinics, community centers and other systems are built in addition to using combat power. Government workers, including security forces, are trained and given the resources and support they need to get up and running. The full-spectrum plan divided Iraq into three areas of responsibility: the United Kingdom administered efforts in the south, Poland administered a central area; while the United States oversaw the most dangerous central and north areas.
Mosul was in the US sector, and when the full-spectrum phase of the war began, Mosul was peaceful. Falluja was also in the US sector, but was extremely dangerous and growing ever more so by the day. Full-spectrum tactics can only take hold on ground that has a potential for stability. |
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