Phillip Carter explains the challenges facing the US Army’s new post-surge offensive:
All this partly explains the size of the offensive. It’s an attempt to impose security on these warring insurgent cells and sectarian militias by brute force in a very hard-to-secure part of the country. By way of comparison, in April 2004, a task force of three Marine battalions assaulted the city of Fallujah after the brutal killing of four U.S. contractors there. In November 2004, the Marines launched their second assault on Fallujah with six battalions of combat troops and an arsenal of airpower and artillery. Now, in the Diyala breadbasket, U.S. forces are sending seven battalions plus various special forces units and a comparable amount of firepower. This for an area of Iraq previously occupied by only one battalion of about 500 troops –or sometimes fewer– during the last three years.
One truism about the surge has been that where we deploy sufficient numbers of U.S. troops, we prevail. There is no doubt that this quantity of U.S. troops will clear this small area of insurgents and al-Qaida fighters. The only question for the near term is whether our troops will kill, capture, or merely push those fighters out of the breadbasket. This has been the pattern for U.S. military operations since 2003, and yet the insurgency continues. The more important question is whether the U.S. military –and its partners in the Iraqi army and police– can secure the area for the long term, and do so with fewer and fewer U.S. troops as the surge ends.
What was that country in South-East Asia again, in which the Americans were involved for over a decade winning every battle, or so they said, but in which they lost the war?