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 Analysis:.S. Losses Expose Risks |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Analysis
U.S. Losses Expose Risks, Raise Doubts About Strategy
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 24, 2003; Page A01
Iraqi troops and militias used ruses, ambushes and other guerrilla tactics yesterday that exploited the risks inherent in the fast-moving Pentagon war strategy, inflicting more than a score of American casualties and raising questions about how effective the U.S. approach has been in convincing Iraqi troops and civilians that President Saddam Hussein's removal is inevitable.
After three days of routing Iraqi forces and even labeling their advance toward the Iraqi capital "the Baghdad 500," U.S. soldiers had a series of sobering engagements. One unit of Iraqi regular troops ambushed a U.S. convoy. Others trapped U.S. troops in what was described as a phony surrender, and some reportedly disguised themselves in civilian clothes. In the south, remnants of an army division moved heavy weapons into a residential area of Basra that U.S. and British forces were reluctant to fire upon.
Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy U.S. commander in the war, characterized the spots of Iraqi resistance as hazardous for individual U.S. troops but militarily insignificant. "We are on track, [and] will arrive in the vicinity of Baghdad soon," he said at a briefing at U.S. Central Command headquarters in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.
Nevertheless, the images beamed around the world of U.S. soldiers in stunned captivity, or dead in a makeshift morgue in southern Iraq, cast some doubt on the assumptions underpinning the U.S. approach. Pentagon officials had expected U.S. troops to be greeted almost universally as liberators, at least in the Shiite south. That view influenced a war strategy based in part on the goal of achieving victory by persuading the Iraqi population and military that Hussein's government is doomed.
Instead, the appearance yesterday was of members of the Iraqi government standing their ground. "We have drawn them into a swamp, and they will never get out of it," Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf declared in Baghdad.
The continued Iraqi resistance specifically calls into question the efficacy of the biggest psychological operations campaign waged by the U.S. military. Over the last six months, U.S. aircraft dropped more than 25 million leaflets on Iraqi military units and civilians, urging them not to fight the U.S. invasion. That was supplemented by propaganda radio broadcasts and telephone calls to unit commanders inviting them to negotiate their capitulations.
The lack of large-scale surrenders suggests that Iraqi commanders instead may have been manipulating the expectations of their U.S. contacts. U.S. military commanders speculate that Iraqi soldiers simply are deserting and going home. But it is also possible that some units are biding their time.
U.S. commanders knew going into Iraq that they were executing a plan that contained a good deal of risk. It flings the U.S. invasion force deep into Iraq at the end of a long, largely unprotected supply line. It calls for the U.S. vanguard units to move until they encounter enemy troops who fire upon them. And it requires them to take unusual steps to avoid killing civilians.
Indeed, columns of M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles ferrying thousands of troops continued their relentless drive toward the capital yesterday, pulling to within 100 miles of the city.
But that armored force is tethered to Kuwait by a largely unsecured supply line, which set up the conditions for the ambush near Nasiriyah yesterday in which 12 soldiers from an Army support unit were either killed or taken prisoner.
That attack "hopefully will be a wake-up call for everyone to realize that bypassed [Iraqi] units can live to fight another day," one Army officer commented yesterday. He said he continues to worry that the overall U.S. invasion force -- a third the size of that which ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 -- is too small.
At the forefront of the invasion, U.S. forces are conducting what their officers call "movement to contact" operations, charging northward toward Baghdad until they hit an enemy unit that fights. Unlike the campaign to oust the Iraqi military from Kuwait in 1991, however, Iraqi forces in this war have not been subjected to weeks of B-52 bombing raids in advance of the ground invasion. The reason is that the entire U.S. strategy is built around the premise that the senior Iraqi leadership, not the military, is the enemy.
Another pillar of the U.S. approach is to minimize civilian casualties. In practical terms, that has meant the imposition of unusually restrictive rules of engagement on U.S. and British troops, who say they have been told not to shoot unless shot at. Iraqi units that are holding out in the south appeared to take advantage of those constraints.
U.S. casualties that were suffered in the process are bound to provoke criticism of the gamble that U.S. commanders are taking, predicted Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert in national security. "Certainly, you will have no trouble finding quotes from retired Army officers saying that the war plan has been too risky," he said. But, he added, in his own opinion "the really important thing about the plan is that it has put mission accomplishment ahead of force protection."
Military experts predicted that the resistance in the south was so disorganized and relatively small-scale that it would die out quickly. "Nothing surprising," said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has played the role of the Iraqi commander in several U.S. military war games of an invasion. In those games, played to probe U.S. war plans for weaknesses, he said, "We came up with much worse." He noted that the Iraqi attacks were sporadic and small in nature, temporarily stopping small U.S. units but hardly affecting the broad advance toward Baghdad. Getting to the capital quickly is a key U.S. objective.
Anderson said he was focusing on the looming encounter with the Republican Guard divisions south of Baghdad, which is expected to come within the next day or two. "I'm waiting to see what happens when they hit the Medina division," he said, referring to one Republican Guard unit. "That's when we really will know how we are doing."
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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