perfidy

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate about the logistical issues that coulda-- but did'na-- derailed the US military's Iraq invasion you may have heard something about last year. Kaplan details problems with spare parts, medical supplies, soldiers going hungry for want of MREs, motor pools scavenging oil and gas from Iraqi military vehicles, and more. His information is drawn from a 500-page report commissioned by the Pentagon and subsequently buried for fertilizer. (Not really... it's just that it's hard to find, not available for print or filesave, and rather discursive).

A Kaplan highlight:

"Literally every" commander in the 3rd Infantry Division—the Army unit that swept up the desert to Baghdad—told the study group that, without more spare parts, "he could not have continued offensive operations for another two weeks."

And another from the report itself, in the section discussing the 507 Maintenence Company (remember Jessica Lynch?)

None of this is a problem if the 507th is a singular example of a poorly equipped, poorly trained and poorly led unit. Nor is it a problem if the Army expects to operate with clear demarcation between "front" and "rear." If, however, the 507th is indicative of an Armywide problem in training, equipping, and manning CS and CSS units, and if the Army expects to operate in a nonlinear, noncontiguous operational environment, Army leaders may need to examine everything from culture to equipment in CS and CSS units. Equally important, the Army should examine any concept that envisions operations in nonlinear and noncontiguous battlespace to determine how forces should be manned and equipped to operate in the so-called white spaces and on LOCs. Assuming that technical means of surveillance will protect those units may not be justified. The culture and expectation in the Army should be, to borrow a phrase from the Marines, that every soldier is a rifleman first, and every unit fights.

The part that really frosts my biscuits is this quote, pulled by Kaplan:

The A10s were absolutely fantastic. It's my favorite airplane. … You can move, and when that A10 starts his strafing run, you can do anything you want to do … because the bad guy's head is not coming off the hard deck."

That's an infantry commander talking about the A10 warthog, the only plane in the US arsenal intended for ground support. But what about the Army's fancy AH-64 Apache attack copter? Well...the report sez

The day closed with the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment's unsuccessful deep attack against the Medina Division near Karbala. There, the regiment lost two aircraft (one to hostile fire), had two aviators captured, and saw literally every AH-64 Apache helicopter come back riddled with holes. Worse, the targeted Medina units remained relatively unscathed from the attack. The Army's vaunted deep-strike attack helicopters appeared to have been neutralized by the Iraqi air defense tactics.

Of course, the A10 is still the redheaded stepchild of our Air Defense, because the Air Force doesn't care to get down where handheld fire can hit their planes. Kaplan notes about the Apache and Warthog,

These two points are remarkable, in two ways. First, here we have a team of Army officers criticizing the attack helicopter—the Army's own weapon of air support—while gushing over the Air Force's weapon. Second, the A-10 scarcely exists anymore. The Air Force, which never wanted to build it in the first place, stopped production in the mid-1980s and would have melted them down to scrap metal had they not performed so well in the 1991 Gulf War.

For all the vaunted technology and great toys our military has, many institutional problems remain that keep us from being, erm, all we can be.

[wik] Goodwyfe Johno saw a report last week on the Patriot Missile system, which apparently sucks all ass. SOP for Patriot operators was to run to mash the "abort" button every time a Patriot wound up to launch automatically, because almost every time the Patriot was either targeting an F-16 or nothing at all. In the end, they became worse than useless because the fully automated system doesn't really allow time for manual vetting of targets. A CBS news report argues that in Gulf I, only 2 out of 44 Patriots actually hit an incoming missile. Most of the others just exploded in the sky, missing their targets (when they actually were targeting a real object). According to Ed Bradley, in Gulf II, "The Patriot had 12 engagements in this war, three of them with our own planes." Yeesh.