A story about planning for Desert Storm | Hacker News Reader

A story about planning for Desert Storm

dupuyinstitute.org

76 pointsbibliographer53 comments

Wow, I have never heard this before:

“Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromise and ordered the ground forces in.”

Is that true?

> ordered the ground forces in

as i recall, the air war was so devastating there wasn't much of a purpose for ground troops and when it came time to "order the ground forces in" most of the work was just walking across Kuwait. They even made a movie about how much of a let down the ground war was to the Marines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(film)

I think you mean Hollywood filmed a book written by one of those marines.

Well, he DID say "they made a movie" so yes, obviously that is exactly what he meant.

I think he said what he meant. But, I think you meant "I know you linked a wiki that explains the film is based on a memoir in the first line, but you've already exposed yourself to the 'It was a book first!' attack, and I don't want to have to turn in my 'Ackchyually Guy,' membership card." Since we're speculating.

A more charitable reading would be that you simply meant, "Yes, that movie is based on a book by one of those marines." Maybe with some added opinion on whether you enjoyed it or found it equally as enlightening.

Generation Kill is a great movie in a similar vein about the second invasion.

It's a mini series, and yes, it's brilliant

I wouldn't go so far as to say there wasn't much purpose for the ground troops in the context of the goal of eliminating Iraqi military capabilities. It involved some of the largest tank battles in US history such as the Battle of Norfolk and the Battle of the 73 Easting. While we look back at some of these as a steam roll in hindsight, the truth is the engagements were larger than most of the armor battles in WW2 involving the US.

The marine advancement in to Kuwait that was part of a larger multi-national push that much of the Iraqi forces were running from. The push by 1st Inf Div, 2nd ACR, and others on the west was to cut off that retreat.

Combat theaters are large and it is never a good idea to take a narrow view of them and generalize it to the whole. The father of my childhood friend used to tell us how his deployment in Vietnam as an MP was some of the best time in his life. He spent his entire time on a post relatively far from the fighting largely killing his time trying to surf and eat BBQ.

Have you heard of the 'Highway of Death'? Iraqi forces were retreating on that highway, on their way back to Iraq. Coalition forces did not want to permit that, and slaughtered them. Thousands of vehicles destroyed, hundreds+ soldiers killed, thousands more captured.

I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here, but it does seem a tad bit vindictive.

"I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here"

Why wouldn't you feel sympathy for people who were killed or maimed, and their families?

It's funny how I got some comments insinuating that I have too much sympathy, and yours which seems to say I have too little. I'll address both in this single comment.

What little sympathy I have, is because people died. I don't have more sympathy because 1) those Iraqis invaded another country. 2) They didn't surrender. I am well aware that retreating but not surrendering soldiers get shot in wars, and I'm not particularly upset about it when those soldiers are on the belligerent side. I have some shred of sympathy for them, only because they are still human.

Human tragedy aside (and it absolutely is, no doubt about it, on all sides), it really depends on the context.

Striking the retreating army is the 'easiest' way to 'neutralize' it, Clausewitz writes about it, and I am sure it's been practiced for thousand(s?) of years before that.

For a timely comparison: would it be 'vindictive' when Ukraine strikes the retreating Russian army in the Kyiv area before they regroup and attack the Donbas? I don't think so. Seems like a good idea, actually.

It's how battles have been won for thousands of years. The two army's approach each other and take minor casualties until one sides moral collapses, they break, and route. 90% of the deaths happened after the route.

It is obviously a matter of context. Russian army in Kyiv is indeed able to regroup and attack again. Iraqi army was by all means a defeated force that was running for its life into Iraq where civil war just started. The risk of it attacking Kuwait again was zero.

A defeated force can still regroup in, say, Baghdad and make the city much harder to take.

Reminds me of the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War. The story at the time was that the Belgrano, an Argentinian warship, was leaving the Falklands to return to Argentina, when a British submarine sunk her; there were many in the UK who considered this an outrage, on the grounds that she was no longer contributing the occupation of the Falklands, so should have been left alone.

That analysis never made much sense to me, and apparently it later came out that the Belgrano wasn't leaving the Falklands anyway, and much later on the captain of the Belgrano said he thought that the British were quite right to sink it [1]!

[1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-was-right-to-sink-th...

Well, it probably saved Kurdish lives to some degree. Remember that Iraq is a British Empire construction of three opposing ethnic groups (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) and Saddam was a Sunni oppressing the other two.

Wiping out his best soldiers may have reduced his ability to suppress the other two ethnic groups.

Or it made Shia and Kurds more active and sowed MORE conflict. Who can predict such things.

But from realist international puppet string wannabes, it neutered Saddam's military and ability to threaten Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The US was just a mercenary army for the Kuwait and Saudi royal families in this "war".

They were retreating, not surrendering. They were bringing with them all their arms and armor (literally, bringing their tanks back). We stopped them because they very well could have regrouped to when they were back in Iraq. They were not 'hors de combat'.

Do you think the Ukrainians were in the wrong when they killed Russians during their withdrawal? Or are rules different for the underdog?

>I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here, but it does seem a tad bit vindictive.

they could have always surrender and become POW.

I have mo idea what your background is. How do you imagine a cog in an authoritarian country to surrender during a war. Mutiny, summary executions, retaliation against family, shamed as a coward.

Many did when command and control broke down

Just google "gorbachev saddam 1991"

The answer is "pretty much true".

I took now half an hour to check sources on that and it seems to be pretty much the color.

Curious that nobody asked to sanction the US to destroy their economy and to isolate them for that war... or any of the other wars.

the coalition built for gulf war 1 was extensive to say the least. I think that was one of Bush Sr's requirements, if anyone was going to liberate Kuwait it had to be everyone. You would have to sanction the entire coalition which was basically the entire western world.

Bush Sr. convinced everyone to stop at Iraq's border and wouldn't push further to knock out Hussain's regime. Wisely, IMO for all the reasons that are clear today. However, lots of people think this is what cost him a second term and left many people at the pentagon feeling like there was unfinished business in Iraq. This "unfinished business" is what eventually led to Bush Jr's invasion.

What cost him the second term was the economy.

Actually in the end the US went soft on Iraq. Thatcher wanted to roll into Baghdad and clean it out properly (or, she argued we’d find ourselves there again in a decade or 2). Bush disagreed.

I wasn't aware of that history either -- this article gives more color:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archiv...

The Iraqi invasion happened in August 1990, and America's response was in January/February 1991.

It sounds like Saddam changed his tune because he saw the buildup of American forces over that time period. If there was no threat then he probably wouldn't have agreed to any settlement.

With the ground war just days away, Mr. Gorbachev mounted a peacemaking effort. Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, arrived in Moscow on Feb. 21. Later that day, Mr. Gorbachev told Mr. Bush in a phone call that he sensed a “serious shift” in Iraq’s position, according to a transcript in the Bush Library.

Imagine if it were true. Then maybe no Forever Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

Or something else horrid and gross would have developed.

This reads like an ad for the QJM model. The DePuy Institute had a proprietary model for figuring out who wins a battle. This was invented by General William DePuy, one of the leading planners of the US loss in Vietnam. He came up with a Quantitative Judgement Model for evaluating military strength. It's mostly adding up weapons values (sword = 1.0), although there are other features of the model. There are tables, now used mostly by war gamers. DePuy looked at a large number of historical battles, and came up with weights which seemed to work. The result was supposedly that the side with a 2:1 advantage almost always won. Within the 2:1 range, it was a tossup.

Two different people with differently spelled last names: General William DePuy (who was MACV C-o-S, BigRedOne-Six and then ran TRADOC after the war, and is considered the architect of the rebuilding of the Army after Vietnam) is unrelated to Col. Trevor Dupuy. Both of them fought in the US Army in WW2, and have confusingly similar names, but Dupuy is the one who founded the Dupuy Institute to do his numerical analysis of combat with all of his models and fudge factors.

Oh! Thanks.

Quite interesting. I though this would be about DART (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...), but I take it that this is more about front line stuff.

"Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined"

Thanks for the link - someone at BBN had told me a similar story, but I didn't know the name of the program.

Amateurs talk about killbots. Professionals train their AIs on logistics.

I think it depends, right?

If you have a small number of high cost, high impact UAVs, you will target infra and supply columns.

If you happen to have a cargo plane full of cheap, mass produced head-popper slaughterbots which you can dump over a town, they will remove all the humans and leave you with intact buildings, vehicles, and infra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

Parent comment was jokingly paraphrasing General Bradley words: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics."

I didn't know about DART. Developed and deployed in eight weeks [edit: less optimistic sources say 23 months]! Is there a good retrospective somehwere with some technical detail?

Seconding. I'd be interested in reading more into it.

This seems to have flown entirely over my head:

QJM == Quantified Judgment Model. Other than what the acronym stands for, I'm still not sure what it is or why it's better, as this article never explains. The best short explanation I've found is "The QJM consists of two submodels whose interactions represent several battlefield intangibles such as leadership, morale, and training." [1]

WEI/WUV (that's one thing, not two, and if you try to search for just WEI you'll get nowhere) == Weapon effectiveness index/weighted unit value. [2]

It seems to me that this 2017 post from the same blog [3] is all but required prereading, with the problem that many of its linked sources (such as the one that might explain WEI/WUV) are dead and point to .mil domains that do not currently exist.

[1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/23101

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26553096

[3] http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/tag/wei-wuv/

PDF for [2] at https://info-gap.net.technion.ac.il/files/2018/05/mil-eff006...

Christopher Lawrence took over after Dupuy. He explains the current state of their project in War by Numbers (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32824088-war-by-numbers). He brings this methodology to bear on some recent conflicts in America's Modern Wars (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22224145-america-s-moder...). Reviews have been very skeptical.[1,2]

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0968344517747141k

[2] https://www.miwsr.com/2016/downloads/2016-039.pdf [PDF]

I'm shocked at the lack of humanity in this story. Every once in a while an "enemy" will start a war, and we'll get a bunch of coverage about orphans and mothers and fathers and horror, and I think maybe just maybe people will realize that all wars are terrible. Except when we start them, then I guess it's mostly kind of funny because our intelligence wasn't as great as it could have been?

The US didn't start the war that Desert Storm ended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_invasion_of_Kuwait

All wars are bad and the US doesn't go to war because it thinks it's funny. Unrelated people may joke about it, as usual.

Why were we in Iraq the second time?

Why were we in Vietnam?

Why did we stay in Afghanistan for so long?

The military industrial complex does indeed find war funny. It's called laughing all the way to the bank.

This is what war is all about.

This is why many want cooler heads to prevail in the Russia-Ukraine war now!

Those who have lived through war know how horrific and uncontrollable it is and how sociopathic you need to become to wage it successfully.

Intelligence is the first problem. Then the model to fit it to. Then the conclusions to take from it. Each layer is HIGHLY prone to error.

Just an example: precision munitions largely eliminate the odds of NOT killing to zero but then it's the intelligence and interpretation that becomes the weak link: are you really hitting the right target for the larger purpose, or are you doing everything wrong hitting the wrong target because you are measuring success wrongly (e.g. body count - as we did in Vietnam and then returned to in Iraq and Afghanistan - simply because it was the only thing we could measure; classic "streetlight fallacy")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Sometimes, war is necessary and early action prevents a far worse outcome. You could argue that if Hitler had been dealt with earlier (e.g. when he invaded Poland), he would not have been able to get started causing such a rampage. But fear and inaction by other European powers at the time caused him to be emboldened by early success, and to pick off neighbors one by one.

I would argue Russia is in a very similar position today, and if we don't act decisively now, we're just enabling Putin to do far more damage in the long run. The risk of WWIII and a nuclear exchange does exist, but the risk of on inaction is just as high.

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