New US General Will Copy British 'Softly-Softly' Style

[Purveyor]

The new US ground commander picked by President Bush to direct the military “surge” into Iraq believes that the war can be won with a radical change of tactics: those used by the British in Malaya and Ulster.

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General Petraeus, who has spent 2½ of the past 4 years in Iraq, has been one of the few officers advocating a troop surge into Baghdad. He believes that a new approach, based on soldiers living and patrolling amid the population and co-opting local leaders, can halt the slide into chaos.

Having co-authored the US military’s counter-insurgency manual, General Petraeus believes that only by combining military strength and sensitive interaction with locals can an insurgency be defeated. He has been influenced by a study of the British in Malaya during the 1950s by John Nagl, a Pentagon official.

Colonel Nagl compared Malaya to America’s failure in Vietnam, where the US Army approached the conflict as a conventional war. The British defeated the insurgency in Malaya, he writes, because of a “civil-military strategy based on intelligence derived from a supportive local population”.

A key lesson General Petraeus draws from Vietnam, compared to Malaya, is that the US Army is historically unprepared to fight insurgencies. The American military has overwhelming force for conventional combat but, without the British experience of empire, is intellectually unequipped to deal with the subtleties of guerrilla war.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2541457,00.html

[Seldona]

1. A kinder, gentler, occupation?

:wtf:

[IndianaGreen]

2. British tactics in Malaya? Concentration camps and lots of dead civilians.

Special Forces studied British tactics to put down Marxist rebellion in Malaya and used them in Vietnam when it still was a "professional soldier's war." It didn't work in Vietnam because the nationalism of the Vietnamese had cast Americans as a foreign military power. It won't work in Iraq for the same reason.

[rodeodance]

3. a little Honey goes a long way. Who know what willl happen

[hedgehog]

4. It sounds like a good way to repeat Blackhawk Down.

Scattering small groups of soldiers into the neighborhoods 24/7. Sounds like a perfect way to set up a massacre.

[JoFerret]

5. "Intellectually unequipped"

...well , certainly applies to the alleged C in C.
This all sounds like a self congratulatory puff piece.
Question: How are those tactics currently working in Basra?

[hedgehog]

6. Yeah, I loved that phrase myself.

It stands to reason the Brits would love this guy. We really need to build an American Empire. Maybe then we'll be intellectually equipped to fight guerrilla wars.

[mikeytherat]

7. "Having co-authored the US military’s counter-insurgency manual,

General Petraeus believes that only by combining military strength and sensitive interaction with locals can an insurgency be defeated."

Well, if General Schmuck co-authored this manual, does he still stand by the Army's ratio of "20 close-combat troops per 1000 civilians" to control and contain a counter-insurgency? Because, just for Baghdad's population of 6,000,000, that would require 120,000 close-combat troops, and we only have 70,000 of these troops in-country. Even if every single soldier we sent in the "surge" is a close-combat soldier, and we moved all of the close-combat troops throughout Iraq to Baghdad, we would still be 30,000 troops short to meet the Army's own minimum standards.

I guess most Americans just don't realize what it takes to run a war (our President sure doesn't). Not every single soldier is a close-combat soldier - there are thousands and thousands of support personnel who do not go out on patrol and face front-line danger. 20,000 "troops" does NOT mean 20,000 "close-combat soldiers." Just what the fuck does President Chucklenuts hope to accomplish?

mikey_the_rat

[Kagemusha]

8. Petraeus needs to read al-Hakim's 'iron fist' comments

This is out of control and it hasn't even started yet.