Very Expensive Education

Capt. [Roger] Johnson very clearly identifies the deficiency the U.S. had in senior leadership during and after Iraqi Freedom [the letter “Aftermath an Afterthought,” February issue]. As a Navy chief, particularly as a leading chief in a small unit, I considered my most critical duty was to “think around the bend” and make sure my CO didn’t get surprised. If the CO wins, we all win.

The U.S. went into Iraq with our own “battle plan.” We insisted on fighting the way we wanted to fight, without any regard to the most unavoidable of facts:

The enemy decides when he is defeated. Not us. When the enemy decides that he no longer has the means, or the will, to fight, he is defeated and not before.
Bypassing and scattering an enemy force is not militarily defeating the enemy, as we are now relearning.
You can’t conquer large civilian concentrations without huge masses of ground troops — a lot more than we have. Baghdad has more than 5 million people. Germany never completely controlled Paris during World War II. Civilians were killing randomly selected Germans from the first day to the last.

The Iraqi regime was Saddam’s defender. They had to be defeated. We should have sought battle with them and destroyed them in detail. We didn’t. You don’t win the boxing heavyweight championship by sneaking in and slitting the tires of the incumbent champion’s car. You have to get in the ring. We never got in the ring.

What we should have done was arrayed a force around Baghdad and laid siege to that city. Nothing in, nothing out. Sooner or later, the Iraqi military would have had to come out and fight. And that would have been the destruction of the Iraqi military, in detail.

So, now, we have established a venue for killing Americans, not unlike Vietnam, frankly. I think Iraq is drawing volunteers from more places than the Vietcong did. But the concept is the same: people who don’t even speak the same language are now shoulder-to-shoulder with one common, binding purpose — killing Americans. We thought we understood “urban warfare.” We’re now gaining a very expensive education. It’s the same one the Germans learned in Paris in the early ’40s.

Michael D. Lee
BMCS, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
Jacksonville, Fla.

Message Strikes a Chord

The message from [Sheila] McNeill, national president of the Navy League, that appeared in the March 2004 edition of Sea Power [“Note to Congress: Be Careful What You Wish For”] has prompted me to write you with my observations and comments as to the validity and wisdom the president is conveying.

Good article. It struck a chord with me because the message is sensible, and can be taken from the rulebook of how a successful business runs itself. The solution to increased productivity, and results, has never been to blindly add more manpower to the mix. In my opinion, current operations, no matter the industry, must continuously be assessed to guard against the status quo that ignores advances in technology, and revamping of policies and procedures.

Of course, your message speaks to a much higher priority — that of protection of the country and its citizens and of the men and women who serve in the military — however, it is a tenet that I’ve personally tried to follow with the various departments I’ve managed over the years.

Linda Norby
Via e-mail

Suez Remembered

As a new member of the Navy League of the United States, I am most interested in the letter — “Suez Most Severe” — in the March 2004 issue. After two years in the Mediterranean, I was appointed to command a [Landing Ship Tank] for this operation.

It [the 1956 Suez Canal crisis] was a real mess from the outset, but responsibility for the Middle East and the Arab world was still largely in the hands of the British and French and several of us New Zealanders were serving in the British forces. As I recall, the focus of the Sixth Fleet, stationed in Naples, was largely on Greece and the Balkans. Only 12 years before, “Ike” [Dwight D. Eisenhower] had been our supreme commander and we felt considerable loyalty toward him.

The political situation that year had been changing constantly. For one thing, the Red Army moved into Hungary and that certainly risked World War III. Also, “Ike” was facing a difficult presidential election. The British Prime Minister [Anthony Eden] was in no position to mildly accept [Egyptian President Gamel Abdel] Nasser’s takeover of the Suez Canal and there were plenty of Egyptians unhappy about Nasser’s coup. The French were fully occupied with Algeria.

Before our forces left Malta, we were led to believe that we were going to Suez to separate the Israeli and Egyptian armies, but when we opened our operational orders we discovered that the aim of the operation was for “the RAF to bomb Cairo and break the will to resist of the Egyptian people.”

I could go on, but the full story of that year will never be written since at least one of the records was fudged on orders from higher up. It is nevertheless relevant history in that it is part of the West’s dealings with the Middle East and the Arabs have very long memories. In comparison with the past, lessons do seem to have been learned and the Bush Administration deserves better than what most of the Europeans have come up with.

John S. Pallot
Lt. Cmdr., Royal Navy (Ret.)
Christchurch, New Zealand