Originally posted by: TehMac
Originally posted by: soydios
what Iraq and Afghanistan have shown us is that the USA kicks arse at full-scale war. it's occupations that we're not so good at it. it's a simple question of manpower: each soldier is an incredible offensive weapon with all the tech we have, hence we win the full-scale war; but occupation requires a soldier on every corner, no matter how much tech they have.
Vietnam showed that without a counter insurgency strategy, you're just cutting down your own men. Iraq has showed that America is not wanting to fight WW2 all over again, but minimize the conflict and use a strategy.
you can have a lot of soldiers and a strategy and succeed. You can not have a strategy and some soldiers. Guess what, right now we are definitely at the 'some soldiers' level. There are nowhere near enough troops to get this thing done in a reasonable amount of time, if at all. The troop surge has been largely successful and has even forced the discovery of recent documents describing a growingly frustrated al Qaeda in Iraq with the increased security due to the troop surge being the cause of frustration. Throw more, and you'll find them even more frustrated. When they get frustrated, they screw up, they don't cover tracks, they try and use extreme force and in the process locations are discovered. Condense a bunch of them and they also run out of places to go. Honestly, we need to get NATO to support a general mass sweep of troops as they slowly move in a full 360 of the entire Middle East. It will require a hell of a lot of troops and a lot of recon sorties to maybe fill in areas of assumed least likely populated areas where the main elements won't go, or spread out so in small pockets they would be extremely vulnerable.. so mass numbers are important. Expensive. But extremely effective. Start from neighboring nations, at their furthest borders. Get the UN to help coerce the governments of those neighboring nations to cooperate. They continue to sweep in, and begin to form large elements as they move in. Eventually relieve a certain number to create alternating forward and rear elements. Get any possible threats confined in a small region. Do what you want from here. Maybe even send in units to evacuate certain interior locations prior (and briefly contain all and search and whatnot to determine if any are threats themselves), and possibly bomb an interior region once all threats have retreated into one common location? Safe houses are obviously going to be within these confines from the start, so all threats in the region will be forced into the interior, or killed on the spot.
Requires mass numbers, numbers the US alone can not afford to send in as one attacking wave as that would likely require all active and reserve servicemen. So UN support is necessary. But a highly effective, if possibly dangerous and considered a reckless move...
This occupation attempt is going to take forever to fully succeed, if that is indeed possible. More troops sent over will definitely help, and throwing a lot of units will be more effective at this stage, specially with a sound strategy. Follow the current strategy and use more troops and we're certain to make forward progress.
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