“Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromise and ordered the ground forces in.”
Is that true?
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archiv...
The Iraqi invasion happened in August 1990, and America's response was in January/February 1991.
It sounds like Saddam changed his tune because he saw the buildup of American forces over that time period. If there was no threat then he probably wouldn't have agreed to any settlement.
With the ground war just days away, Mr. Gorbachev mounted a peacemaking effort. Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, arrived in Moscow on Feb. 21. Later that day, Mr. Gorbachev told Mr. Bush in a phone call that he sensed a “serious shift” in Iraq’s position, according to a transcript in the Bush Library.
as i recall, the air war was so devastating there wasn't much of a purpose for ground troops and when it came time to "order the ground forces in" most of the work was just walking across Kuwait. They even made a movie about how much of a let down the ground war was to the Marines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(film)
The marine advancement in to Kuwait that was part of a larger multi-national push that much of the Iraqi forces were running from. The push by 1st Inf Div, 2nd ACR, and others on the west was to cut off that retreat.
Combat theaters are large and it is never a good idea to take a narrow view of them and generalize it to the whole. The father of my childhood friend used to tell us how his deployment in Vietnam as an MP was some of the best time in his life. He spent his entire time on a post relatively far from the fighting largely killing his time trying to surf and eat BBQ.
I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here, but it does seem a tad bit vindictive.
Striking the retreating army is the 'easiest' way to 'neutralize' it, Clausewitz writes about it, and I am sure it's been practiced for thousand(s?) of years before that.
For a timely comparison: would it be 'vindictive' when Ukraine strikes the retreating Russian army in the Kyiv area before they regroup and attack the Donbas? I don't think so. Seems like a good idea, actually.
Why wouldn't you feel sympathy for people who were killed or maimed, and their families?
they could have always surrender and become POW.
The answer is "pretty much true".
Curious that nobody asked to sanction the US to destroy their economy and to isolate them for that war... or any of the other wars.
Or something else horrid and gross would have developed.
If you have a small number of high cost, high impact UAVs, you will target infra and supply columns.
If you happen to have a cargo plane full of cheap, mass produced head-popper slaughterbots which you can dump over a town, they will remove all the humans and leave you with intact buildings, vehicles, and infra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
Thanks for the link - someone at BBN had told me a similar story, but I didn't know the name of the program.
QJM == Quantified Judgment Model. Other than what the acronym stands for, I'm still not sure what it is or why it's better, as this article never explains. The best short explanation I've found is "The QJM consists of two submodels whose interactions represent several battlefield intangibles such as leadership, morale, and training." [1]
WEI/WUV (that's one thing, not two, and if you try to search for just WEI you'll get nowhere) == Weapon effectiveness index/weighted unit value. [2]
It seems to me that this 2017 post from the same blog [3] is all but required prereading, with the problem that many of its linked sources (such as the one that might explain WEI/WUV) are dead and point to .mil domains that do not currently exist.
[1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/23101
Christopher Lawrence took over after Dupuy. He explains the current state of their project in War by Numbers (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32824088-war-by-numbers). He brings this methodology to bear on some recent conflicts in America's Modern Wars (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22224145-america-s-moder...). Reviews have been very skeptical.[1,2]
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0968344517747141k
Why were we in Vietnam?
Why did we stay in Afghanistan for so long?
The military industrial complex does indeed find war funny. It's called laughing all the way to the bank.
This is why many want cooler heads to prevail in the Russia-Ukraine war now!
Those who have lived through war know how horrific and uncontrollable it is and how sociopathic you need to become to wage it successfully.
Intelligence is the first problem. Then the model to fit it to. Then the conclusions to take from it. Each layer is HIGHLY prone to error.
Just an example: precision munitions largely eliminate the odds of NOT killing to zero but then it's the intelligence and interpretation that becomes the weak link: are you really hitting the right target for the larger purpose, or are you doing everything wrong hitting the wrong target because you are measuring success wrongly (e.g. body count - as we did in Vietnam and then returned to in Iraq and Afghanistan - simply because it was the only thing we could measure; classic "streetlight fallacy")
I would argue Russia is in a very similar position today, and if we don't act decisively now, we're just enabling Putin to do far more damage in the long run. The risk of WWIII and a nuclear exchange does exist, but the risk of on inaction is just as high.
