``...What I did not know, which is becoming very apparent, is that while Donald Rumsfeld was imposing his vaunted "Revolution in Military Affairs," his crackpot theory of "network centric warfare" that substitutes technology for leadership (against fierce resistance from the Army and Marines) on the US armed forces, there was another revolution in military affairs going on inside Iraq. The Iraqi military was reorganizing from the ground up for an agile, decentralized, urban-based warfighting capability, that abandoned Soviet-style conventional armor-centric doctrine for something more akin to doctrine that was taught but seldom practiced by Special Operations forces in the US during the Cold War, particularly "stay-behind" disruption of enemy lines of communications, once the primary mission of 10th Special Forces in the event of a general conflict with the Warsaw Pact...'' (Stan Goff's War Bulletin)
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This general tactic of elastic retreat is something that the Soviets learned in the German invasion, Operation Barbarossa. They tried fixed positions and set-piece battles and lost something like ten armies, a million troops in six or seven months, culminating in the mass captures during the fall of Kiev (Nov 1941?)
In the following spring Hitler changed the strategic goal from decapitation of the Soviet state (Leningrad and Moscow) to capturing the grain, oil, and industry of the southern front. As the Germans advanced after Sevastapole and Rostov and headed toward Stalingrad, the Soviets changed their tactics to the above mentioned elastic retreat. They mounted massed battles (usually in front of rivers) to stop the German advance, then dissolved immediately in a retreat to escape encirclement---avoiding their mistakes in Kiev. Meanwhile the Germans had to weaken their stalled northern and central fronts, by moving troops and supplies south.
So Iraqi need to perform something similar. Stop, wage some opposition and then retreat to keep from being cut off. Then leave embedded professionals behind to organize and coordinate popular based militia opposition behind the fluid US fronts---which are completely hollow due to insufficient troops and extended supply lines.
The real difficulty the Germans faced was lack of air support, something the US has in abundance. In one sense such air support doesn't matter that much in the end since Iraq doesn't have to win ground. Iraq is still held by Iraqis, even if their military units are defeated by mass air strikes. This is in effect what is happening as popular militia spring up behind the US fronts.
It still seems to me the Iraqis can ultimately win this by default for the simple reason Iraq is Iraq. In other words all Iraq has to do to win is stop the US-UK from winning. The counter objective for the US-UK makes this so, because for the allied forces to win, they must take Baghdad and Basra, control the land in between, and get the entire population to comply and accept this conquest. That seems unlikely.
Of course it is too early to speculate about outcomes, but that's what it looks like so far. And then there is this, in the advent that the US-UK succeed in taking Baghdad (which I think is impossible at the moment):
``We will win the battles of Basra and Baghdad.
We will then have our very own West Bank, only ours will be 166,000 square miles larger than the one Israel occupies.
We will then have our very own Northern Ireland; only ours will have 23 million more people.
We will then have completed our very own Soviet-style invasion, setting up a puppet government that is hated by its populace and is mistrusted by the international community. We will be surrounded by nations whose teeming multitudes, and often their leaders, hate us and seek to do us harm. Even our friends and allies will seek our failure and humiliation...''
(from Steve Phillion fwd: Tim Kessler: Future hold both victory, quagmire.. our new west bank...)