via Military Times...
This is a must read because its bullshit. Weaponry, equipment and training can only carry you so far. You have to have the will to fight and to win! The Iraqi forces had the right equipment, weaponry and training. They simply lacked will.
Experts say ISIS totals no more than 10,000 fighters throughout Iraq and Syria, while the force that specifically seized the city of Mosul this week probably totaled about 800 fighters. That force overpowered two Iraqi Army divisions totaling about 30,000 troops.Let me be clear.
“Clearly, the Iraqi forces in the north lack cohesion and a will to fight,” said Jeff White, a former intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a defense expert with the Washington Institute think tank.
In terms of weaponry, ISIS has small arms and civilian-style pickup trucks with mounted crew-served weapons, mainly heavy machine guns such as Russian-made Dushkas, and also a limited supply of 23mm anti-aircraft weapons that they are using for direct fire, White said.
On the other side, the Iraqi army is awash in about $15 billion in U.S. gear transferred since 2005, including IA-407 helicopters, M-1 Abrams tanks, C-130 fixed-wing aircraft and 300 hellfire missiles, Pentagon officials say.
This is a must read because its bullshit. Weaponry, equipment and training can only carry you so far. You have to have the will to fight and to win! The Iraqi forces had the right equipment, weaponry and training. They simply lacked will.
Violence of Actions and the will to put those actions into effect will carry the day.
ReplyDeletesomething I've been teaching alot of these days
YOU JUST MADE MY DAY!!! i feared that it wasn't taught in the Marine Corps anymore. Thank God!
DeleteOnly unit of Iraq army that actually did any fighting was a convoy of SF that got ambushed by ISIS but managed to keep them at bay till Hinds came in and decimated the ISIS column that fleed.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dii6bwvJ-2Q
ReplyDeleteThe ISF were created in our image. I fear that our increasingly political correct social experiment called our military will perform much as the ISF did in Mosul next time around. Will remains the most important factor in war, and the fact this is lost sight of shows how inept and/or corrupt our leaders are.
ReplyDeleteIn their desperation, the Shiite Iraqi government will invite their brothers over the border to intervene, meaning Iran. This is a sectarian Shiite versus Sunni civil war, stretching from Syria to Iraq to parts of Lebanon.
ReplyDeleteyeah but we're all missing the true big league player in all this. Saudi Arabia! you know they're sitting by and watching and getting more alarmed by the minute. we might see the Saudi Arabian Air Force in action before this is all over.
ReplyDeleteWhat does the US military have to offer foreign militaries?
ReplyDeleteWe are a Second Generation Warfare oriented military that places almost the entirety of our focus upon putting steel on targets. To us, it's a game of attrition, if we drop enough bombs, shoot enough rounds, we can kill our way to victory.
http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=1702
We go into 3rd world shit holes and go up against 4th Generation opponents who re-generate faster than we can drop JDAMs on their 'leadership', then we train our 'allies' to fight the way we do and then act surprised when they lose. The only thing that saves our bacon is the massive firepower we bring to bear to stave off our units being overrun, but apart from that we can't defeat the enemies (Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab, Hezbollah, AQIM, ISIS) because we are unable to move beyond a strategy that involves more than dropping ordnance.
you're one of those 4th gen acolytes huh? well check this out. the Iraqi Army faced what amounted to a motorized attack. they didn't fight like we do, they crumbled like a old dollar bill and they ran.
Deletethat has nothing to do with their training, enemy strategy etc...it has everything to do with the Iraqi soldiers being unwilling to stand and fight.
no fancy theory of warfare can nullify the cold reality of the situation. as a matter of fact warfare cannot be rationalized by a theory of warfare. its quite simple. you kill the enemy before he can kill you. you keep doing that till the war is won.
want me to explain why the "modern way of warfare" never wins? its because we try and do a barbaric act in a humane way. the very idea is lunacy.
Killing is incidental to warfare, it is not the purpose of it. We use force or the threat of it to compel the enemy to do our bidding.
DeleteAnd, no, the IA didn't fight as we do, because it cannot master our way of war. Only the US possesses the technology and ISR elements to fight the way we do. A few drones and Abrams tanks won't make the IA into an Arab version of the US military
More importantly there is a moral element to war....people need to have a reason for which they are prepared to kill or be killed. For what, who or why are the IA units fighting? The Iraqi gov't? The nation of Iraq? Esprit de corps? Al-Maliki? Their tribe? Shia Islam? Iraq exists in name only so there is nothing for the IA to fight for at the moment. It's as empty as their freshly thrown-away uniforms.
Once they start defending Shia cities and neighborhoods, the tide will turn back ISIS since it will be them who are being hunted and being blown up by Shia IEDs.