Way back in February of 2003, I published my modest proposal for a victory in Iraq. Basically, I noticed that Saddam Hussein didn’t care what we did in Iraq as long as he thought he was still in power. So we take that to an extreme:
My proposal is that we follow a strategy of encroachment. We just slowly keep creeping into Iraq, building air bases and fuel dumps, military hospitals, roads, bridges, rail links, civilian aid stations, and whatever else we can think of until we control 90% of Iraq without firing a shot.
I’m hardly an expert on military matters, so I was just making stuff up for the fun of it, and a couple months later it didn’t matter because our forces captured Baghdad in only three weeks of fighting.
The way things have gone in Iraq since then, however, I’m beginning to think my plan wasn’t so silly after all.
As our forces crept into Iraq, they would presumably have run into all the problems we’re seeing now, except on a much smaller scale because initially they would have occupied only a small fraction of the country. They’d have had a much better American-soldier-to-insurgent ratio, so they would have a pretty good chance of defeating the insurgency, especially since it’s a lot easier to adapt operations to a small theater than a large one.
Once the insurgency was crushed, our forces could have gone about the process of setting up a working civilization of sorts, with schools and hospitals and trained police and a new Iraqi army to prevent future insurgencies. Only when all this was accomplished would our forces have invaded a little further and repeated the process.
I think the military calls this concentrated piece-at-a-time approach defeat in detail. In my little software engineering world, we call it iterative development. There are three principle advantages of an iterative approach that seem to apply here.
First, with an iterative approach you discover problems early and you can quickly adapt your solution to overcome them.
Second, an iterative approach gives you the option of changing the scope of the problem you’re trying to solve. One of our goals in Iraq was to establish a western-style democracy as a demonstration of a better way for other countries in the region to follow. If we had used in iterative approach, we would quickly have discovered that this was a lot harder in some parts of Iraq than in others. We could have withdrawn from the difficult regions and focused our efforts where they’d do the most good. In other words, we’d have built a democracy from the green zones and left the red zones to Saddam.
(This is similar to modern armor doctrine in which enemy strongpoints are bypassed in favor of achieving other battlefield goals. The strongpoints are then isolated and reduced by follow-on forces.)
Third, an iterative approach keeps your initial commitment small so that if you decide the problem is unsolvable, the cost of giving up is not too high. If you’re going to give up anyway, it’s best to do it as soon as possible to limit your casualties. (The ideal, of course, is to quit before you start.)
Since I know so little about warfare, this is all just mental games. It’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek hindsight on a terrible situation. Someone with real military skills could probably trash my ideas easily, unless they found them too incoherent to analyze (i.e. so bad they’re not even wrong).
I knew that when I started this post. Now that I’ve written it, however, I’m starting to believe that maybe there’s some core bit of a good idea here.
In any case, I’m planning to write a few more modest proposals for winning in Iraq, so stay tuned.
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