The US’ way of waging war is to build outposts in semi-safe locations, then venture forth to battle using its tremendous mobility advantage.
That strategy evolved during the Vietnam war, and it was a consequence of the problem of force protection. At its root, it’s a logistical problem; it’s the “quagmire” that US forces were flailing around in, but nobody saw it early in the war.
The previous two wars for the US were WWII and Korea, which were mobile wars of attrition characterized by large engagements, large maneuvers, and large battle-lines with clear(ish) “front” areas. You knew where the enemy was – they’re right over there – and you knew where your safe areas for logistics generally were. In that context, the “Battle of the Bulge” was notable to the allies because it was one of many times in which the Germans called the safety of rear areas into question. The Korean war had a lot of similar experiences – US troops got caught on their back foot (i.e.: they were over-extended) when the Chinese army crossed the Yalu, and suddenly they discovered that “behind the lines” was not safe space. That sort of mobility warfare was hardly a thing in WWI, which was characterized by static lines of trenches defining a clear front, and safe logistical zones behind the front lines. The US army’s experience in Korea taught that it’s necessary to assume you might get suddenly attacked, so your “behind the lines” areas need force protection all the time.
March 1965, the beginning of the fucked up beach party
That’s where the quagmire comes in: when your forces are deployed as a cloud of small defensible strong-points, you need one extra soldier to protect the logistics for the combat soldiers. If you have a fire base with 500 troops, you need 100 doing logistics and 100 doing force protection, to keep enemy special forces or sappers from sneaking back and shooting up the logistics. A lot of americans don’t realize that the marines did their celebrated sea landing near Da Nang in order to provide force protection for the air base that was evolving there. They weren’t troops that were going to go out and do things, they were just there to keep the Vietcong from blowing up a bunch of extremely expensive aircraft and ammo dumps. And maybe some pilots and REMF, too.
Fort Zinderneuf, Djibouti – CIA black site
The Vietnam-style war without front zones became a matter of building “firebases” and air bases that were like Fort Zinderneuf (exactly the same strategy, done by the French in Algeria) from Beau Geste. The base needed to be defensible, which means a lot of manpower and money spent building defenses, clearing fields of fire, etc. Inevitably it becomes more efficient to have fewer, larger bases, which means keeping them further back from where they are likely to be attacked. Eventually, you reach the final evolution: large bases in another country entirely where they are “safe” from attack, and you just fly your drones over the border, or hop in and out with helicopter-loads of special forces.
Khe Sanh: “what do you mean ‘our runways are in range of their artillery’?”
It turns out that the firebase architecture has problems against a resolute and numerous opponent. The US got out of Vietnam when two things happened, more or less simultaneously: the Tet Offensive and the attack on Khe Sanh. The Tet Offensive was an assault against Saigon, which the US had been treating as a “safe zone” for R&R and military bureaucracy – the NVA infiltrated about 5,000 soldiers into the city and they attacked, simultaneously, during a holiday. Khe Sanh was a huge base that served artillery and air support (and logistics) which was brought under attack and suddenly the marines defending the place realized that they were going to have to defend it a lot harder because the war had just come to them. The Tet Offensive had an even greater impact as it sank in to the US military’s reptile brain that it was not possible to turn a city the size of Saigon into a fortress.
Fort Zinderneuf
The quagmire gets worse when you get a sock in the nose like at Khe Sahn, and you fall back on your walls and ask for more troops to defend the outpost. Suddenly, it costs more to have the outpost than it’s worth: if you need 5000 troops to defend your REMFs, it looks cost effective to send them home. But that triggers a hunkering down and an undeployment, because eventually you don’t have enough troops to man the walls of the fort. When that happens, the spectre of Dien Bien Phu begins rattling its bones and wailing in the distance – if you don’t have enough troops in the fort, you get cut off and wiped out and the survivors are paraded past the cameras as your imperial hubris is revealed to the whole world.
That’s what I think is driving a lot of the panic in the US military command structure. What happened in Iraq was that ‘protesters’ were allowed into the “green zone” – i.e., behind the walls and into the safe area, where the embassy is/was. Realizing that could happen profoundly shook the US’ what-pass-for-strategists, who saw that they couldn’t trust the green zone and were going to have to build a fort within a fort (and a little fort within that fort) (and…) The US realized that it was staring down the barrel of major Iraq quagmire and they were either going to have to re-commit large force protection units and re-militarize a new perimeter, or they were going to have to leave. So, they assassinated the guy who was on the other side of the chessboard. That’s not going to work, either (the US tried to assassinate NVA general Van Giap, too) but it’s the kind of move that immediately comes to the mind of a bad strategist.
Iranian light attack ships “ghosting” the US nuclear aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln [link]
The immediate reaction by the US military has been to retrench and put its force protection on a high alert. Obviously, they won’t be able to do that for long. The NVA waited for Tet (Vietnamese new year holiday) because everyone would be at a low alert, and used to seeing masses of people moving around. The US has brilliantly ceded the initiative to Iran and has not only done that, it’s hunkering down in well-mapped locations. Fucking idiot Trump has hung them out to dry. I hope the threat of US retaliation will keep the Iranians from severe escalation, but the least-worst thing we can expect is some very expensive cyberwar. A missile flattening the US embassy is more likely; they won’t use a truck bomb or anything primitive. They probably won’t go after an aircraft carrier or a navy ship because US navy ships unpredictably carry nuclear weapons and damaging an aegis boat carrying H-bombs would be too big an escalation.
As the US military hunkers down and tries to figure out what the dipshit in the golf cart just did, its ability to do anything else has dropped to zero. What’s left of ISIS has a season pass to move about safely and freely; the Americans are going to be too busy covering their own butts for a while. In one move, Washington has politically neutralized its own forces, as well as exposing their piecemeal deployment to attack at any point.
If the Iranians want to avoid escalation, they could simply point that out: “the first things you Americans do when you’re threatened is to dig a hole and cower in it, while raining high explosive on weddings from a safe distance; you’re contemptible. And you’re vulnerable. Go Home.”
I wrote this yesterday morning. As of now, the Iranians have used medium-range ballistic missiles from inside Iran to strike one of the airbases in Iraq that the US has troops stationed in. No word of casualties, yet. Basically, the Iranians chose the Khe Sahn option, but have not followed up with more strikes. It’s a fairly proportional response and it sounds like everyone got lucky and no US troops were killed, which allows everyone to de-escalate without loss of face.
I wonder if the Iranians included some cratering charges in the mix; those are specially designed submunitions that blow big holes in runways. It’s possible that the US troops in the air bases are effectively stranded. Being a small(ish) force in an entire country; that’s the Fort Zinderneuf scenario.
I see oil prices just jumped 4%. Way to go, team Trump!
“It’s a fairly proportional response and it sounds like everyone got lucky and no US troops were killed, which allows everyone to de-escalate without loss of face.”
Except the orange moron doesn’t understand that. He thinks exactly like the idiotic Tic Tok soldiers “They better stop talking shit or we bomb them”. The (mainstream) media is already rolling out all the Bush era death worshippers, the range of acceptable opinion is somewhere between “they are clearly monsters, lets debate if we should start the war right away or wait two more weeks, maybe” and “blood for the blood god skulls for the skull throne”.
Excellent article. Haven’t seen the term REMF used since my army days. I was armour and signals, not a REMF :)
@Marcus
I wonder what you think of this:
It reminded me of things you’ve said about low-cost attacks that aren’t aimed at defeating the opponent directly, just cause him a lot of grief. Seems to me that sending out a few text messages is a very cost-effective way of creating confusion and fear.
Even if most people realize that it’s bullshit, it’ll still cause some degree of worry and to the degree that some military person has to look into this and draft a response statement, they’re not doing anything useful.
What if Iran just did a lot of that kind of thing? I have no sense of how well they’re set up for that, but it’s a thought.
LykeX@#3:
It reminded me of things you’ve said about low-cost attacks that aren’t aimed at defeating the opponent directly, just cause him a lot of grief. Seems to me that sending out a few text messages is a very cost-effective way of creating confusion and fear.
It could work – and for what it would cost, well, you or I could afford it. The US has huge robocall infrastructure and even has specialist companies that deliver messages without attribution. I suspect that most of those organizations would not take the money if they knew it was a trans-national information operation, but we’re talking lowlife douchebags and it’s just a matter of finding one that’s willing to go lower than the rest.
Purchasing facebook data to find out who’s related to soldiers deployed to the area, then sending them official-looking text spam – that could be really scary for people.
Of course, the Trumpalos in my workplace are stalking around triumphantly babbling about Dear Leader’s strategerical genius.
Not sure if you saw the Tom Tomorrow cartoon, but we are already there.
https://www.dailykos.com/blog/Tom%20Tomorrow/
Where is your flag pin, Marcus?
bmiller@#5:
Where is your flag pin, Marcus?
This is the left side of my “tactical” jacket:
And this is the right:
“It’s a fairly proportional response and it sounds like everyone got lucky and no US troops were killed, which allows everyone to de-escalate without loss of face.”
That was my reaction as well but I doubt that’s how the idiot commander in chief or his underlings will see it. But maybe they’re still waiting on the poll results to decide if that was enough “action” to get re-elected. Or maybe I’m a terrible cynic.
I was also struck – once again – at how calm, reasonable and, let’s say it, fucking professional the Iranian officials (or their tweets) sound. Well, on average I mostly see Trump tweets quoted in news articles, so my baseline is pretty low. One side explains they’ve carried out what they consider proportionate and justifiable counter-attack, while the other has been howling how they’ll do the exact opposite and start blasting cultural monuments (an awful euphemism for “civilian targets”*) while they’re at it. No offense, but those Mad Merricans are scary…
*apparently Trump doesn’t even get how euphemisms are supposed to work.
The side with “precision weapons” indiscriminately and without warning killed people surrounding the person they wanted to assassinate. The Iranians, without “precision weapons” performed a surgical strike on (as Iran defined it) a terrorist camp – and they warned the Iraqis beforehand.
This is not just proportionate response, it makes the US military look inept in multiple ways. They’ll want to strike back, but have no justification.
I’m reminded of an argument I got in a couple years back, when orange asshole was spouting off about leaving NATO (I’m still convinced he got The UN confused with NATO…), and some asshole was just like: “fuck, yeah! – let’s go it alone! maga” or some such shit. I tried to point out that the U.S. military is dependent on hundreds (?) of bases scattered all over the globe for staging areas and resupply points and such, and without those bases, and the cooperation of our once-allies, we would have a hell of a time projecting military force in the Middle East.
I think I would have hat better luck explaining plate tectonics to one of the pigeons that hangs out in the underground BART stations…
People who dodged the draft shouldn’t get to start wars and send other people off to die…
lochaber@#9:
I tried to point out that the U.S. military is dependent on hundreds (?) of bases scattered all over the globe for staging areas and resupply points and such, and without those bases, and the cooperation of our once-allies, we would have a hell of a time projecting military force in the Middle East.
We’d have to have a navy that wasn’t a $200 billion clusterfuck, if we didn’t have NATO client states willing to support bases.
Purchasing facebook data to find out who’s related to soldiers deployed to the area, then sending them official-looking text spam – that could be really scary for people.
I tend to have a sick mind . What is to stop the “opposition” sending little billet-doux pointing out that your “deployed person overseas” has been specially targeted.
It can get worse.
Sorry “billets-doux”
@ 7 komarov
I was also struck – once again – at how calm, reasonable and, let’s say it, fucking professional the Iranian officials (or their tweets) sound.
Have a look at who they are. They are generally highly educated and with long experience in government and diplomacy . Often with considerable experience in the West.
The Supreme Leader is very highly educated in Islamic theology ( at least the equivalent of a Ph.D?) and has a great deal of government experience including having been President of Iran. There is a completely unsubstantiated rumour that he studied in the USSR and may speak Russian.
The Iranian president was, among other things, Chief Nuclear Negotiator for Iran and has a Ph.D from a Scottish university.
The Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is a long term, highly experienced diplomat including having been Ambassador to the UN . He got his PH.D from a US university ; his dissertation was titled Self-Defense in International Law and Policy.
These men and their associates have been defending Iran (literally in the trenches in some cases) for years. They know their enemy; they have been studying it for years and in Javad Zarif’s case have even lived there for years.
They know that the USA is their implacable enemy. They also know, based on the US record over the last many years, that US intervention means not just regime change but devastation for their country.
They are very likely to be professional and temperate in their words and actions.
jkrideau: All I can think of when I read your brief c.v. is how pathetic and amateur the Trump team is. :)