Blasting Ahead
Mohammed experiences a delay in his daily commute. And then, nostalia for another part of the Baghdad skyline.
Michael Yon talks about the intel benefits of New York-style “community policing” in Baghdad. It’s a quality of life thing.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:08 pm on Wednesday, March 21, 2007
One Response to “Blasting Ahead”
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March 22nd, 2007 at 12:44 am
This is why CI type strategy is so damn hard to win. Too much of it is an issue of adjusting to a situation as it changes and morphs, which our military has been doing well, but since so many of our msm and politicos are overtly enemy friendly, has been so badly misreported and turned into hostile propaganda.
If we had started putting more combat outposts into Baghdad earlier, it would have played into the enemy’s hands through the misrepresentation of our media, the arab media and our own politicos. It would have been construed as proof that the US and Coalition was oppressing the people directly.
We had to wait until the local citizenry and local politicos got it fully understood that the islamists were just as eager to kill the citizens as they were to kill the military and that they were no friends of the locals at all. This took time, and that time played into our enemy’s hands, through the machinations of our media and our own hostile politicos anyway.
Most of what has to be made, as adjustments, in CI warfare is different from locality to locality and on different time lines and this also plays into the hands of the enemy friendly manipulators or just plain idiots in the media and domestic politicos. It’s branded as chaos and confusion because it cant be easily explained in a 10 second sound bite and it’s not the same exact process at each and every location.
Most of the adjustments are serial, rather than parallel too. You cant, for example, shuffle all your troops out into small independent and unsupported combat outposts on day one, as many idiots in our media and domestic politics demanded, because then they become too easy a prey item for attacks from an enemy that is as of that time, unknown, unidentified and unquantified. It’s not until the locals have had time to begin the process of rebuilding (or in some cases, such as their military, building for the first real time) their infrastructure and our forces have had time to build knowledge and understanding of the enemy’s capabilities, as well as build some faith and trust in the locals willingness to supply info against the enemy that our forces could be expected to move from larger concentrations to more dispersed force allocations.