Are we in another Vietnam?

You know, I think that is an incredibly arrogant statement. There is no way to know the outcome if Lee had taken that direction. As you pointed out there is little to no chance that it was an acceptable choice at all. IF some how it could have been sold to the Confederate government AND public, it may or may not have actually been effective. Conjecture and opinion are simply not facts even if they are well reasoned.

 

Says it all about our quadmire in Iraq.

 

Another good one...

 

DaveHayden: Arrogant? I've taken enough history (and, more to the point, enough Civil War history) to know whereof I speak. The tactical offensive, at the time of the Civil War, wasted men at the rate of three to one compared to the tactical defensive. Statistically, Lee did not have enough men to pursue the tactical offensive. And strategically, since the South was not trying to conquer the North, he did not need to go on the strategic offensive. However, considering that the people of the South likely would not have supported Lee simply letting Grant et al chase him all over the South, the best compromise might have been Longstreet's strategic offensive/tactical defensive.

 

Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Abner

 

Ted

There is a huge difference between knowing the advantage of a certain kind of attack and knowing exactly what the outcome of the war would have been. There are way too many variables to KNOW the outcome no matter how logical your reasoning. It is similiar to saying you KNOW the outcome of an election before it has been counted.

 

Did I ever say that I knew for sure what the outcome of the war would have been if any given alternative strategy had been adopted? The first of my posts that you excoriate started, "Lee could have won." Not, mind you, "Lee would have won," but "Lee could have won." That indicates not certainty, but mere possibility. What does seem almost certain is that an individual who is usually outnumbered 2:1 likely is not going to succeed in an attack when offensive tactics generally require 3:1 superiority (at least at that time in history). Of course, humans and their free will have their way of upsetting statistical prognostication. Lee apparently did not realize that he should simply let McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, and Grant chase him all over the countryside till they got tired of it. The military genius of Grant was in realizing what he called "the horrible arithmetic": viz., that, since the North had far greater manpower reserves than the South, he could far better afford a war of attrition than Lee ... and hopefully he could put an end to it before the Northern people got tired of it.

 

Robert McNamara said that historians don't like counterfactuals. But he knew a few things about Vietnam and so deconstructed a bit that war.

Not that he ever won any wars or anything.

 

Ted

My apologies if I misread your statements. I was under the distinct impression that you felt you knew the only possible outcome not just the most likely outcome.

 

Needing a 3:1 superiority for the tactical offensive makes defeat almost certain when you're outnumbered 2:1, if you keep going on the attack. On the other hand, if your attacker needs 3:1 superiority, too, it's reasonably certain that you can hold off an attack if you're only outnumbered 2:1. Which suggests the tactical defensive. The open question is, of course, one of morale, both military and civilian. How long would the South put up with Lee letting himself be chased all over the Eastern US (even if he and his men take out a few bluebellies here and there as they run)? How long would the North put up with Grant's war of attrition (even if the "horrible arithmetic" was on his side)?

 

Lee could have "won"? Won. Well, I don't know. In 1865, after Petersburg, his army was melting away and that part that wasn't melting was starving. Grant captured the last trainload of provisions, IIRC. Logistics, again.

Perhaps the best one could say was that Lee could have continued the war as a gorilla effort with a much smaller group of irregular fighters. He certainly couldn't have fielded the huge masses of men that, up to that point, he'd commanded.

Logistically impossible, you see.

I am inclined to think that, whereas that approach or something like it worked in Viet Nam, because the U.S. lost the stomach for the fight (and let it not be forgot that the North Vietnamese Army received extensive logistical support from the Russians, something Lee would've had to do without), it wouldn't have succeeded in the American South.

Why?

Because the Northern population had by that time conceived such a deepseated hatred of the rebellion that it would have supported ANY measures Grant thought necessary to subdue it. EXTREME measures were politically possible and would have been carried out with positive pleasure. Don't think so? Look at Sherman's marches. Sherman killed a LOT of civilians and allowed many more to starve to death. At that point, he didn't care. And just IMAGINE what the effect of Lincoln's asassination would have had under those circumstances.

Cold fury would augment hardened hearts.

To the North, the war had become a Godly crusade. No, Lee would still have failed and it would have been much, much worse for the South. The Northern armies would happily have killed each and every white southerner they met.

And, of course, the Northern economy and industrial base had actually EXPANDED during the war. Unlike the South, the North was actually creating more wealth than it was expending on the war effort! Note, please, the relative value of the greenback and the gold dollar, if you don't believe me.

Logistics forever!

 

Sometimes Degreeinfo threads seem like exercises in free association.

What has the American civil war got to do with the current situation in Iraq?

And when people say that we are in "another Vietnam", what are they saying? Obviously the word "Vietnam" is being used metaphorically. What politico-military assertions is the word "Vietnam" supposed to symbolize?

 

Again, nosborne, by 1865 Lee had wasted far too many men on the tactical offensive. Possibly, he might have made a guerilla war out of it by that time but he didn't have the gazongas to make such a decision because of his foolhardy precepts of Southern honor so-called got in the way. But from the get-go, retreat to victory while taking out the bluebellies by means of guerilla tactics was the way to go. And, yes, morale on both sides was the big question. Who would give out first?

 

TH should really answer that given his admittedly superior expertise, but I have long thought that the Civil War is worth studying in detail because it was the first major MODERN war, because all of the original sources are in English, because it is well documented on both sides, and because it is the clearest possible example of warefare between very similar peoples.

Now, as to Iraq: We are told that there sovereignty has passed to a legitimate Iraqi government and that we are assisting that government to defend itself against an "insurgency".

On its face, this is horseshit. A genuine government wouldn't require ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY THOUSAND foreign troops and uncounted thousands of foreign civilian workers to impose its will on the countryside. Such a "government" does not fit the definition of a government at the most basic level. It is, in fact, no government at all, but a sham.

So what do we REALLY have in Iraq? A civil war between a strong dissenting group and a very weak central administration. Both the "government" and the "insurgency" enjoy extensive material and manpower support from outside the country and it is the presence of this support that guarantees a long, bloody, nightmare of violence and death.

Yet even here the Civil War could be instructive if we would learn from it...

Logistics, logistics, logistics.

We need to STOP the flow of men and material into the insurgents' hands. We need something like an "Anaconda Plan" for Iraq if we are to even begin extracting ourselves.

Note, please, that the Anaconda Plan pre existed Ft. Sumpter. It was ignored. Eventually, in somewhat modified form, it was implemented and became the blueprint for Union victory.

 

Bill Dayson: He who is ignorant of the past is doomed to repeat it. In the original question (is the Iraq war another Vietnam?), yes Vietnam is being used as either a metaphor or a simile (maybe an English teacher can tell us which) for a situation in which a major foreign power is being tied down by a group of rebels using guerilla tactics. What has the Civil War to do with this? Again, that was a situation in which a major power was faced with a group of rebels. The UK did lose the Revolutionary War because they did not adapt to the US' use of guerilla tactics. The USA - Northern Rump did win because the CSA failed to use guerilla tactics in the Civil War. The US did lose the Vietnam War because they did not adapt to the Viet Cong's use of guerilla tactics. The US seems to be losing Iraq War II because they are not adapting to the use of guerilla tactics by the local rebels. The question then becomes: Can the US figure out how to adapt to the situation now that they are faced with the use of guerilla tactics again? Or will we once again get tired of taking it on the chin and go home? Will the morale of the Iraqi insurgents hold up just long enough to convince the Americans to go home? Or will Americans tolerate ever higher casualties until the insurgents are defeated?

 

I think that's accurate.

How many police does it take to defend against a few subway bombers? I think that asymetrical-warfare can be very manpower-intensive if the goal is to maintain peaceful civilian life.

It needs to be able to exert more force in its own behalf. So an immediate priority has to be reconstituting reliable military, police and security agencies in Iraq.

Look a a map of Iraq. The US can't even control its own borders, there's absolutely no way that determined infiltrators can be prevented from crossing Iraq's.

The most porous frontier, the one that doesn't involve crossing long stretches of open desert, is the border with Iran. So it might be possible to choke of the Sunni insurgency to some extent. Of course, if the Shiites decide to rise, it would be a different story.

But given the fact that only a few thousand insurgents are required to keep this going and the fact that there's huge amounts of munitions floating around Iraq, I don't think that patrolling the border will help very much.

I think that we need to accept that terrorist violence is going to continue in Iraq for the forseeable future. It's impossible to stop it totally, so the goal will have to be to keep it suppressed to acceptable levels.

The US shouldn't have its own soldiers out patrolling Iraqi villages in humvees. They just make themselves into targets. All the insurgents are doing is killing a few Americans every day and hoping that the American media and political opposition force the country into declaring defeat and running away.

This isn't really a military struggle at all. It's a political struggle, a PR struggle. As Mao so accurately said, politics out of the barrel of a gun.

So we need Iraqis out there. People who speak the language and know the customs. People with local contacts. I'd like to see the US forces spend more time in reasonably secure areas, making periodic sortees to back up the Iraqis. But that requires a capable Iraqi force with insurgent infiltration kept to a minimum.

The Iraqis should also devote themselves to some high-profile development projects, providing good things that their people can use. (Their petroleum exports can pay for it.)

Then sit back and wait.

Hopefully the Iraqi civilians will like the idea of individual freedoms. They will like their new opportuities. They will want to normalize their lives, raise their kids and get on with the business of becoming more prosperous. If they don't like their leaders, hopefully they would rather go to the ballot box than use bullets to pull everything down in some apocalyptic orgy.

And if they identify the government with the people who bring them their schools and hospitals, identify them as the people who represent safety and normalcy, then popular patience with the insurgents who threaten all of those things will grow thin. The Iraqi police will receive more information and the insurgents will become isolated and their attacks increasingly sporadic.

At least that's the idea.

 

Sure, it takes LOTS of policemen. As you say. But a genuine government doesn't have to rely on FOREIGN police to hold itself in power. Emphasis on FOREIGN, if you please.

Your map argument is exactly my point. We couldn't control the inflow in Viet Nam, either, given the limits on the force we were willing to exert. Remember the Ho Chi Min Trail?

QED: Iraq is an unwinable quagmire.

 

My study of history has so far not included much if anything on counterinsurgency tactics. What's a superpower to do if the natives refuse to meet you in battle eyeball to eyeball? How does the great power successfully counter guerilla warfare?

 

Germany, Japan and Italy were our wards until certain threats, internal and external, diminished with the tortured establishment of stable governments.

 

decimon,

Yes. This is true. But ALL of these countries, even Japan, had a substantial experience with liberal democracy, to a much greater extent than Iraq.

Furthermore, there was essentially NO insurgency in ANY of these countries following the end of WWII.

Still, I hope and pray that you will be proven right and I will be proven wrong.

But I can't help but put myself in the place of an Iraqi citizen considering his "government". The words "collaborationist" and "Quisling" come irresistably to mind.