The Gulf War

With all the US and Western military fuckups before in Vietnam, the 1980s, and after in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. how did it go half as well as it did?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_School_of_Advanced_Military_Studies#Operation_Just_Cause_and_beyond
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality
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It was an actual conventional force-on-force conflict between two "modern" armies, an arena that U.S. military has unquestioned dominance in.

Is that still the case?

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Conventional warfare over large open areas with are superiority, it was basically the situation US doctrine was written for. Seeing they couldn't fuck it up militarily they chose to fuck it up politically and destabilise the region for 28 years and counting.

*air superiority

I missed saddam
Fuck Hitler. Saddam was the most Zig Forums dictator ever.

The real question is why did the others go as bad as they did

Prolonged occupation, even if the general public once thanked you for overthrowing their government after a decade of you hanging around and stealing resources even moderates will start considering insurgency.

The US cannot into guerilla warfare and propaganda necessary to justify occupations

I would like to object. This insane motherfucker:
a) overthrew a government
b) purged the entire military
c) then got into a defensive war against a military superior enemy
d) while opposed by both NATO and PACT forces
e) resorted to the use of child soldiers and human wave attacks
f) managed to make progress into enemy territory

Armies designed for cheap open large scale combat aren't necessarily the best for operating in small numbers and in confined spaces.

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I don't understand why you guys can't do it. Even Greece perfected it using your own weapons. The one and absolute solution is napalm. Burn the fuckers in the mountains. Don't leave any survivors. After the entire mountain is nothing but burned debris, send mountain alpine infantry to check for any survivors.

Napalm at the entrances of caves will kill everyone inside so the enemy can't hide in there either. As for towns, do the same. Burn it to the fucking ground and send a few troops with flamethrowers to clean up the probably extinct survivors.

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80s Saddam used both NATO and Warsaw pay for his army. None of them could control saddam. That pretty smart.

It looks bad mmkay.

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Post the one with the avengers posing in the background

That is why you mix in a bursting change and a little frag, that way they can't run out of the fireball so the media never knows they were in there.

I haven't seen that one.

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Saddam was one of the few dictators both NATO and Pact supported, but let's be honest: a real strelok would never accept aid from a foreign power and go full Rhodesian home economy, like Kohmeini did.

I'll admit if someone wanted to give me ATGMs for something I was going to do anyway I would be taking them.

That's how you get v&.

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Well played Strelok.

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Proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

Democratic countries constantly get into wars with no exit strategies or pre-determined victory conditions. And you can't exactly win a war if you don't know what you are even doing or what you're even supposed to do.

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Technically that was also the case with Serbia with the difference being the Serbs knew when to hide and avoid battle with an overwhelming force when the Iraqis had delusions of grandeur. Still surprised why the fuck Serbs sacrificed half their MiG-29s for no apparent reason.

Yes. IMO i will take another 2 or 3 decades before there's a visibly crippling effect from the poz.

You are a true bbq connoisseur, patrioti.

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Seriously. She deserve to be a laughing stock.

If they did they wouldn't have chosen communism.

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Who are you talking about?

Off subject. But are Asians the only people that still like clowns at this point? Seems like only The Japanese think clowns are creepy.

Well, serves to illustrate the Greeks' point! You guys clearly didn't apply enough napalm. If you did, this piece of walking cancer would not have done the damage she did to your country.

the naked girl in the pic

Everyone should’ve glass vietnam. Vietnamese are viewed as the Somalians of Asia for a reason.

Well for starters our first goal was pretty easy: liberate Kuwait and kick the Iraqis out. Coalition forces barely made their way into Iraq. Our goal wasn't ever to totally wipe out the Iraqi army, and we went out of our way to not engage them after the ending of hostilities even as the Iraqis went on to attack Kurds and put down CIA backed uprisings less than a year after the war was over.

Is it an unspoken rule that you should cut the heads of commies after killing them?

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Burgers have a habit of missing and hitting their own forces with that.

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I appreciate the sentiment, but even Rhodesia got a bit of help from South Africa and Portugal. Fighting a war on your own against the world is admirable but you shouldn't refuse help when it's offered against such overwhelming odds.

Are we posting dead communist here?

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How else did they think it was going to work out?

I think 6 of them died. This was a very embarrassing display. Flips have to deal with commies, muslims, and catholic cults.

Only quality post

Hitler had his army use an inferior and outdated rifle for the majority of the war just because it was his raifu. If that doesn't scream Zig Forums, I don't know what does.

It didn't.
I fucking can't find it but the 1990's ex-chair of the US cavalry school explained it in a great paper that basically the US army missed all their objectives and completely fucked up the time table by days due to a variety of logistic/material issues and poor supplies route planing.
That's basically why most of Saddam's army managed to leave Koweit unhindered for a while (while the plan was always to quickly surround them and the war had been going on for nearly 2 weeks) until the air force was ordered to pick up the slack.
It worked but it was so much of a SNAFU that's what pretty much convinced a lot of Bush Sr. staff to not press their luck and not invade Iraq.

Was that source from sputnik news you russiaboo frog faggot

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I don't know about 'unspoken rule'. But can you think of a single reason not to?


You know what, go ahead. Tell us all why you think we were responsible for Americas actions in Vietnam.

Communist blood is tainted man. You don't want any of their bugs on you.

You get dirty commie blood on your clothes. Though some may consider that a positive.

And what's that?

Gulf War was a conventional war.

The west excels in conventional war.

I don't agree that the West sucks at counter guerilla warfare. Look at the JSOC task forces F3EA targeted killing / manhunting campaigns. These things work. They halved the age of the average Taleban combatant, smashed the Fedayeen IED networks, and were successful in capturing a lot of key HVTs that disrupted enemy leadership, logistics, weapons, and intelligence networks. If you pumped these up to super-levels with money and personnel, they'd decimate shit. In Vietnam, look at the Phoenix Program, which was a proto-F3EA style targeted killing campaign, and that the VC command admit was their worst period. This has also been the MO of the Israeli's for a number of years in terms of assassinating terrorists and key personnel (the nuclear scientists in Iran). This is really what needs to be done instead of traditional counterinsurgency and nation building. The problem isn't tactics and operations. It's politics and strategy. It's stuff like allowing safe area of operations in Pakistan with ops support from the Paki ISI while the Americans turn a blind eye to their alleged Pakistan allies. It's stuff like allowing American allies like the Gulf Oil countries to provide basically unlimited war finances and Islamic fighters that sustained enemy ops. It's turning a blind eye to domestic enemies, like the Islamic fighters in places like Britain (when their not busy raping the British), or the media (who simultaneously said the wars should happen, then when the wars happen take the side of our enemies). There is a successful counter-guerrilla program, it's just our Generals and politicians are cowards, morons, or traitors.

I think it's because americans literally cannot enforce the border of Afghan as well as South Vietnam.

You have vietcongs going in and out non-stop in Saigon, hard to win a war with that kind of open border.

As always, the way to win a guerilla warfare is not heart and mind, it's infrastructure, as long as you cut the guerilla from getting outside support & materiel, they are fucked, sorta like the french cucksistance in WW2.

I also agree with targeted assassination, though again the US doesn't seem to know which head is the head worth killing and just keep killing literally-who.

Right, and that's also why you need a higher level response if they have guerrilla safe zones in areas they aren't at war in. Grand strategy stuff like financial warfare (don't just go after localized terror network finances, go after the Gulf Oil princes or the covert funding infrastructure of their nations), diplomacy and info ops (to deal with possible fallout from cross border raids, e.g. the bin Laden raid in Paki territory), etc. Above all, better strategists and planners that set everything up for the lower level ops and tactics. To bring it back to the OP, one of the many things credited for the Gulf War success (at least at the command, strategy, and planning level) was Schwarzkopf's "Jedi knights" from the School of Advanced Military Studies: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_School_of_Advanced_Military_Studies#Operation_Just_Cause_and_beyond

The analysis of social networks in F3EA is pretty sophisticated now. It uses a lot of graph theory and network theory to workout key nodes in social networks, then hunts for them (rather than the old style "kingpin strategy" of killing leadership). It ends up being a different kind of "literally who's" (to the past) because the targeting strategy is different. It's all about "centrality" (especially betweenness centrality): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality The tl;dr without all the math is that, in the case of betweenness centrality, you take out nodes that exhibit a sort of key flowing effect, i.e. a lot of stuff flows and connects through the targeted node: money, personnel, weapons, information, etc. The literally who middlemen become important in disrupting a network's functioning. For example, if you were going to take down some organization, instead of going after the leadership, you go after the guys that pay people, the guys that recruit people, etc. Now you've stopped the flow of cash within an organization, and the flow of personnel into in an organization. Which ends up being similar to what you said about going after infrastructure (except more finely grained). Of course, the problem is that this is all happening at a lower tactical and operational level (still lots of cash and people being pumped in from other parts of a larger network). Which is why I think if they did this on a larger scale, it might work.

To kill snake, strike its head.

This has always been true, my strategy would be to kill from the top down. No matter what they say, there's always some slimy fucker at the fucker.

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Maybe I didn't make myself clear, but leaders are still seen as key nodes. They spread things (ideas, information) like mission intent (in the case of commanders), ideology (in the case of religious leaders), etc. The difference to the old style assassination programs is that it doesn't focus solely on the kingpin strategy. It instead re-interprets the targeted killing of leadership within the framework of social networks and central nodes.

Yeah, looking at my post, I'm not very clear at all. But they do still focus on leadership, it's just not the only thing if there are indicators that there are more important nodes (if the centrality of a financing middleman is larger than the leadership, they'll add the financier higher to the find and fix lists).

The answer method of killing the head and blaming it on one of their successors so the organization has a power struggle and kill itself off has always been the best way to destroy an organization.

The middle man is just delaying it.

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It depends what you mean by "best". They want the fastest and most efficient way to wreck networks while keeping a close eye on them. McChrystal outlines this in his book. Setting up such a deception operation involving "killing with a borrowed knife" would take a long time and there are bad trade offs under the framework. F3EA is all about speed and fighting for intelligence. You find the enemy, you fix them to some location, you capture or kill them. Then you exploit personnel (tactical questioning/interrogation), documents, technology (mobile phones, laptops). Then you do quick analysis that feeds information into your targeting, and plan the next raid. It's all about latching onto a node in the network and spreading across it. Raid after raid. Night after night. This is why these JSOC guys were doing several raids per night. The borrowed knife method might sound good, but you lose information and intelligence on an enemy that wants you dead, and you could have had both a dead enemy and intelligence with the F3EA framework. Plus, the whole idea is that the ultimate structure of the enemy you want to destroy is a network. A single organization has connections and alliances all over the place. They aren't an island in warzone (and my example above of such an organization was an example of the graph theoretic methods they use on networks, not about organizations in general). Doing the borrowed knife on one organization means you lose the larger picture across multiple networks. Plus, you can't do the same thing over and over again. The enemy learns from your operations. If you go in a warzone, and start doing borrowed knife ops, either the enemy you are targeting will learn from it, or others elsewhere will see your tricks. F3EA is not really the same when it comes to this weakness, since it is fundamentally an intelligence gathering framework and not a stratagem.

Is that the irategamer?

I hope you realize that "they" will be us during the race war

Assuming you mean Gulf War 1

So to put it in a non-social context, it's sort of akin to those posts I sometimes see about unassuming, mundane-looking pieces of infrastructure (roads and bridges, etc) that the US government is actually highly dependent on to get from one side of the country to another? It's not a fancy military base or other prominent target, but it would cause a gigantic pain in the ass if anything were to happen to it.

Good ole' Merica , if we go down the rest of the world is coming with us .

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It's been expunge from the net but you can still find a lot of reports from the era that make references to it.

Sauce: LIBERATION, OCCUPATION, AND RESCUE: WAR TERMINATION AND DESERT STORM
John T. Fishel, Strategic Studies Institute U.S. Army War College, 1993
Pic related is from "Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report" of 1992.

Also that's in George Bush own fucking memoirs, not that you know how to read or anything…

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North Vietnam was smuggling material through Cambodia though and when Nixon bombed it he both caused public outcry and the Khmer Rouge to rise.

Even though they were commie gooks, any group that kills 1/3 of the country's population is interesting. I'm fascinated by what it was like then. Any Cambodians got any stories? I also learned that the KR still held parts of Cambodia after 1975 till 1999, but I can't find jack about what life and conditions were like in those places after '75. Did the KR chill out with their communism or what?
sage for off-topic sorry

The fact that a bunch of filipino muzzies managed to turn almost overnight a whole city into a living hell for months, while the commiefags can't even lay a proper ambush makes it more sad.
Even cartels lay better, more coordinated operations from time to time, the Clashes at New Laredo on past march is a good proof of it.

What about the line below that saying >50% of the regular army was rendered completely ineffective? Seems like RG only comprised 10% of the Iraqi Army at the time, and most were pulled back north of the Kuwaiti border, making withdraw much easier.

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Because the strength of the Iraqi army was grossly overestimated on that map they list nearly every formation as entire divisions while they were at most a couple brigade strong.
Meanwhile the republican guard units were at full strength and was the professional core of the Iraqi army (the rest were conscript) and the pillar of the regime.

Destroying them was a critical goal, which wasn't accomplished and the same republican guard quickly quelled the anti-Saddam insurrection in Iraq that followed. And it wasn't accomplished because the encirclement of the Iraqi army failed due to do an overconfidence in the advance speed of the US mechanized forces that were supposed to be the big claw of a very classic pincer movement.

You do realize there is 27 soviet style infantry divisions on that map? So about 360 000 soldiers?
On 11 340 APCs, 4 050 IFVs, 38 853 trucks and 5 940 tanks?
And there is an 8 additional tank divisions (3000+ tanks and about as much IFVs)? And the combined divisions of the Iraqi republican guard?
It would have been a miracle if they were half that (various US source says half the Iraqi regulars deserted. None say were the fuck would they had gone in the middle of a fucking desert! The truth is those "division" were far from being at full strength).

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America had just went through the largest military update in its history. Recall that 3 years prior to the war, us troops were still riding in m113s.

Actually they have a habit of missing and killing Canadians so I see no problem here.

No. They cant get quality new recruits because an entire generation was raised seeing through their bullshit, one way or another.

He then immediately unimprisoned most of that same military with a simple statement and question.

1. Saddam is invading
2. Will you defend our people?

This is also why Iran also has 2 armies.

Fuck that, a real strelok takes all the free shit offered, steals everything he can and manufactures whatever he can manage.

In Vietnam, we basically ignored the Marine Corps and all of their suggestions, along with ignoring everyone who had plan that might have functioned.

Oh and the whole stupidity of fighting communists over there and letting them fester over here.

Not to mention how polite the Iraqis were in letting the Coalition build up those forces in the first place.

If the following were true

1. Those formations were at full strength and remained so
2. The Iraqi soldier and nco was worth a damn, at least good, not necessarily excellent
3. Their equipment Nd ammo was the good shit

Then Saddam could have gathered up and refueled and resupped his forces, and smashed into coalition forces long before they had those divisions deployed. Would have been a hell of a debacle, what with US forces now having to deploy in Israel and Egypt….and going hard on Turkey.

What kind of guns did the iraq mostly use?
Are FALs canon for 80s-90s period?

Most the Iraqi army was a pile of burnt up corpses in the highway of death. Are you going to link me the sputnik paper where it says the US took some 20 thousand cassulties initial invasion now?

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Let me guess, you got this from the same source that says Hitler had one ball, a peg leg, 2.5 eyes and a scat fetish, right?
Also there was nothing wrong with the K98k, every army of relevance at the time except for one was fielding bolt actions, and the Bongs went through the entire war without fielding their own semi auto.

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How long did it take them to figure this out again? I say, if you're an insurgency you've got a good half decade before the US remembers that killing the bosses works.

You mean other than the typical sandnigger inbreeding-induced low IQ?

Probably because Saddam did not go asymmetrical from day one as he should, and instead tried to face the world's largest, most technologically advanced and by far most expensive military heads on.

Sean Connery? :^)

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Learn to fucking read, I posted actual US army and airforce source saying the same shit while your posts are "lol what source?"
The only thing you're demonstrating is that you're a mouth breathing retard that can't even read a fucking map.

The guys that died on the highway were the greatly overestimated Iraqi army remnants trying to get out AFTER the Republican had retreated, those forces were seen as disposable conscripts in the first place and were there to be a literal meat curtain (Iraq had just been out of the Iran-Iraq war which was basically a WWI trench warfare slaughter, they couldn't care less about conscripts) and since the Iraqi republican guard retreated with most of it's gear (as per the US Airforce own admittance) and the final vehicles destroyed/captured count by coalition sources are nowhere near what you would need to deploy a force the size of the coalition estimate of the Iraqi regular forces (which were by all account pretty much either killed in airstrikes or captured without a fight… but somehow over half of them magically vanished in the desert with their tanks, APCs, IFVs and trucks… but they were totally there in the first place, we pinky swear).
You can fap all you want on the battle reports of the clashes west of the roads between Iraqi and US forces but the reality is the Iraqi high command SUCCEEDED in it's maneuver as it effectively bough enough time for most of the Iraqi republican guard to withdraw to Basrah area in good order and thus prevented the Iraqi main force to be trapped in a pocket by the US encirclement movement.
Because by the time of the cease fire the unit the deepest in Iraq (24th infantry) that should have been the flanking element between Basrah garrison and the main fight led by US heaviest divisions (1st cavalry, 1st and 3rd armor) was barely 40 miles of Basrah with the Iraqi main force already IN Basrah.
It's a classic tactical defeat/strategic victory for the Iraqis, which politically lead to a de facto 12 years ceasefire with near constant skirmishes due to the inability of the US ground forces to trap and destroy the Iraqi main force in a timely fashion, that would have secured either a general surrender or a collapse of Saddam's regime and an actual peace with Iraq.

All in all the US demonstrated that it's easy to bomb people that can defend themselves (something everyone already knew but which became the US main political focus, 0 risks good to rake boomers votes in) and that when it come to ground fighting US forces are perfectly adequate tactically but that even retarded half-monkeys like the Iraqis can outmaneuver US military planners.

And while it's easy to fix tactics, it's nigh impossible to fix the other one, take it from people that have suffered from high command retardation since pretty much Napoleon and still aren't out of it even after the WWII and Indochinese purges.