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Fascinating. I think I can summarize some these lessons.
First of all, it is important to wait and get the UN involved, so that post-combat, you can dump the entire re-construction costs on the rest of the world, while reserving the most profitable contracts for US corporations.
The real problem with Iraq was the US military couldn't secure the bureaucratic infrastructure to loot the country later because the non-aligned looters got there first. Bummer.
Unfortunately the slime neoliberal Demicraps are much better at this fancy looting (called development) than the neo-con nazi-rat Repugnants. The former understand how to finesse the international looting mechanisms of the UN, IMF, WB, and WTO and coordinate these essential efforts to bilk the wretched and helpless of earth while celebrating themselves as humanitarians. These niceties of propaganda are actually essential to the plan of selling these swindles as development, thus enabling post-war allied cost-transfers.
So in the future I think we can utilize the means of international economic sanctions and boycotts to soften the targetted national bureaucratic infrastructures and prepare them for a much smoother take overs, in a more coordinated manner with military assaults. We want to limit the damage to the material infrastructure since that is the most costly to re-build and is also mission critical for the most efficient bilking schemes. To this end, we also need to privatize the military logistical units and bring them into line with modern corporate practices, so as to interject them more quickly and efficiently behind the lines simultaneous with front line combat operations.
The basic idea behind this simultaneous coordination was developed by Nazi Wehrmacht which utilized fast moving light armor combat divisions to sweep forward in moving assaults, followed by heavy divisions as back-up in case of resistance. Then following these heavy units SS logistics and administration units back filled to take over the collapsed civilian and administrative power vacuum---left in the wake of the blitzkrieg. Due to the unfortunate ideological cast of the SS, the great economic efficiencies of looting nations and peoples in depth was not fully realized. The SS bogged down in the logistics of mass deportation and exterminations (see Ukraine for details).
I am sure the US can do much better with the same general Wehrmacht model. This is where the Pentagon planning and beltway stink tanks can really help. What is needed are a variety of large scale privatized corporate contractors like Haliburton to design whole civil systems, as the SS did. The contractors can then be charged to set up entire government service infrastructures in the field as logistics backfill to completely supplant the presumably destroyed native public administration systems. These would include a coordinated scheme of hierarchies and regimes for manning and administering civilian security, utilities, communications, health and education services. These may be a little costly to install, but once all local competition is eradicated, and the temporary contracted systems entrenched in situ they would provide the ideal conduits for bilking the subject masses to perpetuity. This system would of course be the privatization of all public services, which of course depends on fees for service for everything from air, food, and water to sewage, roads, schools, and medical care. While these are primarily urban based enterprises, they would naturally need to be extended into the rural areas through a system of semi-feudal corporate estates (called land reform) to pull agricultural production into the modern world of franken-foods, bio-engineered seed and live stock, petro-chemical feeds, fertilizers and pesticides, and of course the ubiquitous itinerate labor pools---natives rendered landless refugees in their own country by US military efforts to liberate them.
Ah, but these are all pipe dreams, part of the `vision thing' that the poor neo-con trolls in power seem to lack. Oh, if only we had imperial Democrats back in office....
Chuck Grimes