War Plan Orange
In retrospect Saddam's plan to defend Iraq may bear a resemblance to War
Plan Orange's retreat into Bataan. Since reinforcements could not come to
the aid of US divisions in the Philippine Islands in time to repel an
anticipated Japanese invasion, the plan called for the abandonment of the
capital and a concentration of forces and supplies into the Bataan peninsula,
where MacArthur's forces could hope to hold out until relief eventually arrived.
MacArthur attempted to change the plan at the last moment, attempting to fight
near the beaches and was belatedly forced readopt the strategy of withdrawing
into Bataan, a mistake which cost him thousands of tons in supplies. Still, by
skillful rearguard actions at the Agno and Pampanga Rivers, MacArthur slipped
80,000 men into his defensive redoubt and held out for four months. Three years
later, Tomoyuki Yamashita, facing the same strategic problem against superior
forces, moved his 272,000 troops into the mountainous spine of Luzon where he
held out for a little over eight months.
Faced with an invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam carried out his own sideslip
maneuver into a redoubt. The Duelfer
report notes that Saddam may have begun moving his WMD materials into Syria
as the US vainly attempted to get UN authorization to topple his regime.
Duelfer agreed that a large amount of material had been transferred by Iraq
to Syria before the March 2003 war. "A lot of materials left Iraq and
went to Syria," Duelfer said. "There was certainly a lot of traffic
across the border points. We've got a lot of data to support that, including
people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related
materials, I cannot say."
At least some of that was the key munition of modern terrorist warfare -- money.
Syria has acknowledged that its banks have held funds for Saddam Hussein's
regime in Iraq, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news
service. But the regime of President Bashar Assad disputes U.S. officials who
say Syria was harboring about $3 billion in Saddam funds. Instead, Syria
maintains that its Iraqi assets have not exceeded $300 million.
If MacArthur's delaying actions at the Agno and Pampanga Rivers enabled him
to get his forces into Bataan intact, the successful campaign to prevent the US
from pushing the 4ID down from Turkey gave Saddam the time and space to move
assets into Syria and disperse munitions and men into the Sunni Triangle. About 600,000
tons of munitions were dispersed throughout the country of which 100,000
tons -- five Hiroshima bombs worth of explosive -- were taken to Anbar province
in the Sunni Triangle alone.
The ammunition is strewn all over Iraq, and provides insurgents with easily
accessible free material to make bombs ... "Approximately 100,000 of the
estimated 600,000 tons of explosives in the country are located in the Al
Anbar Province, I MEF�s area of responsibility," said Army Capt. Elmer
Bruner Jr., the officer in charge of the operation for the battalion.
Nor was there any shortage of men to use these weapons. Former CPA
Administrator Paul
Bremer noted that 100,000 convicted criminals were released just before US
forces overran the cities, ready to be officered, along with many Sunnis, by
either the cadre of the former Ba'athist dominated armies or international
terrorists flooding in from Iran and Syria. Conceptually, the defense plan was
similar to Lieutenant- General Ushijima's scheme to hold Okinawa. He offered no
resistance either on the beaches or in the northern part of the island,
preferring to withdraw his men behind the Shuri Line, honeycombed with secret
tunnels and caves. All the while American forces battered against prepared
positions, the Kamikaze suicide corps would take its grim toll of the supply
lines and support units offshore until the US population grew weary of war. It
was a campaign where nearly 1,000 men could die in an afternoon as actually occurred
when Kamikazes hit the Essex class carrier Franklin with heavy loss.
The Americans lost 7,373 men killed and 32,056 wounded on land. At sea, the
Americans lost 5,000 killed and 4,600 wounded. The Japanese lost 107,000
killed and 7,400 men taken prisoner. It is possible that the Japanese lost
another 20,000 dead as a result of American tactics whereby Japanese troops
were incinerated where they fought. The Americans also lost 36 ships. 368
ships were also damaged. 763 aircraft were destroyed. The Japanese lost 16
ships sunk and over 4,000 aircraft were lost.
These casualties -- compressed into four months -- would be unbelievable by
today's standards. They were barely supportable, even to the hard men of the
Greatest Generation and were a major factor in the subsequent decisions to
incinerate the Japanese cities and use the atomic bomb. But no one knew at the
time that Okinawa was the latest major land engagement of the Pacific War.
The major modern innovation of the Arab Way of War has been its radical new
conception of defense in depth. The concept made its debut in Algeria; it was
subsequently refined in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Checnya and the West Bank. Unlike
Ushijima's Shuri Line with its tunnels in rock, the Arab redoubt was founded on
establishing an underground of terror in the civilian populace. From the
anonymity of crowds, they could emerge to attack the enemy from the rear as the
Imperial Japanese Army once had done from tunnels. Faced with superior United
States forces, this 21st century War Plan Orange was the natural choice of the
Arab strategists. By denying the United States proof of its WMDs and grinding
them down through occupation warfare -- the one mode of combat at which they
excelled, they had a reasonable hope of holding America until a politician
willing to treat with them was elected into office. There was no need for
despair because, as James
Lileks put it, "hope is on the way" -- a reference to the eventual
actions of the antiwar Left. In Iraq the ultimate blitzkrieg force met the
ultimate protracted war army and the protracted war army awaited events
confidently.
Shortly after declaring major combat operations over, the US must have
realized, like Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner in Okinawa, that it had come up to the
approaches of the Arab Shuri Line. Fortunately, not everything had gone
according to the enemy's plan. Like MacArthur in Luzon, they had underestimated the speed of their opponent's advance. They enemy had probably
not counted on OIF reaching Baghdad in 3 weeks. Their withdrawal into the
redoubt, although substantial was still incomplete. But most importantly, they
had not reckoned on the American ability to generate local forces against them,
something the Israelis had never achieved. This took the shape of an interim
Iraqi government in which Kurds and Shi'ites were major participants. They must
have watched with mounting alarm as Iraqi security forces were raised against
them. They had forgotten, too, that just as they had developed their tactics in
Lebanon, the Americans were able to leverage Israeli tactics that were invented
to counter them.
The battle began to go against them from the start. In essence, Ba'athist-terrorist
coalition was unable to inflict the losses necessary to disrupt the
organizational learning curve of the American forces. Unlike the conscript
Soviet Army, the American Armed Forces were a professional force that retained
its core of officers, NCOs and to a large degree, even their enlisted men.
Forces were rotated out of Iraq largely intact, where they incorporated lessons
learned into the training cycle in CONUS; and relieving forces were improved
accordingly. In 1980s, the Al Qaeda and not the Soviet Army had turned
Afghanistan into a training ground but in 2003-2004, it was the US Armed Forces
and not the terrorists that were coming away with organizational memory. Simply
not enough of the enemy survived to pass on their experience and simply too many
American lieutenants left Iraq to return as captains. The terrible enemy losses
on the battlefield could not be wholly overcome by media plaudits which they
received. At least 15,000 enemy cadres have been killed in the 17 months since
OIF. Recently, the remains of a French jihadi were identified in Fallujah
and his fate is probably a common one. While Afghanistan was once where the
young fundamentalist fighter went to get experience, Iraq was now where the
fundamentalist fighter went to die.
One indication of the unfavorable trend faced by enemy forces face was the
rapid transformation in US operations. It is interesting to compare Marine
preparations to assault Fallujah in April 2004 with those apparently under way
today, just months later. The Marine methods of April would have been instantly
familiar to any military historian: hammer and anvil, seizure of key terrain;
feint and attack. Today, many of the military objectives in the developing siege
of the terrorist stronghold are abstract. They consist of developing a network
of informers in the city; of setting up a functioning wireless network; of
getting close enough for smaller US units to deploy their line-of-sight
controlled UAV and UGV units to create a seamless operational and tactical
environment to wage "swarm" warfare; of getting artillery and mortar
units close enough to play hopscotch over everything the network decides to
engage. To the traditional methods of warfare the Americans were adding a whole
new plane which only they could inhabit.
Faced with a force increasingly familiar with Arabia, with deep combat
experience, nearly unlimited technical resources and growing lethality, the
enemy, like Yamashita in the Cordilleras and Ushijima in Okinawa, can only hope
to be saved by the bell. Objectively, there is little chance of that. But as Lileks
said: "hope is on the way".
