Drewm writes, persuasively, about the problems with the Iraqi army, but I think one part of what he quotes of Max Boot is actually the real problem.,
I agree on this with Mr. Boot, with the exception of what I crossed out. I might be wrong about that, but it’s not important to my point so I don’t feel like arguing it.
Iraqi soldiers today are badly trained, badly led,
badly supplied, badly motivated.
I disagree that they are ‘badly supplied”, unless he’s talking about not enough ammo, I’m not in any position to know that, especially as I don’t trust Iraqi soldiers to tell the truth about that, but they’ve been abandoning stuff I would give my left nut to get. Who doesn’t want a Bradley with a 25mm Bushmaster or a HmmmmmmvWVVvvv with a Ma Duece?
But my point is that whenever we see vid of Iraqi soldiers “attacking”, they do not look like military at all, they look like every other Arab army in the world.
Some idiot has a belt-fed weapon that he’s firing from the hip and the rest just sort of stick their weapons out, fire a few unaimed shots, duck behind something, fire wildly again then duck back while the idiot with the belt-fed weapon (that I badly want) fires it from the hip looking as if any passing birds or Allah has more to worry about than the enemy.
I always wonder how many of them die from the backblast from the LAWs we’ve given them because the idiots firing them are, well, ill-trained fools who have too little training to be professional about the business. I bet it’s a non-trivial number.
The men are not trained, they’re “trained”. The trainers and trainees go through the motions (cargo cult thinking) but do not understand or even care about the underlying purpose of the training.
Arab armies are not well led as well as not well-trained.
They’re top-down organizations. All the orders come from the top and you need to follow those exactly. Junior officers are not supposed to show any initiative whatsoever. Sergeants are less non-commissioned officers than peons who are supposed to not think.
I would not be too surprised if they actually had some well-trained folks (the ones we train that are then supposed to train the rest), but I would put up a Texas or AZ Boy Scout troop up against them any day. Hell, at age 11 Audie Murphy and Alvin York would have gone through a company of them like a buzz-saw through rotten spit.
What Drewm got absolutely right was that the venal assholes Bush and Co. pushed into leadership positions were not ready for it.
But look at it this way, if we had left Germany shortly after WWII, Russia would have owned all of Europe or the Nazis would have made a come-back.
In today’s exciting episode, Iran is playing the part of Russia and Saudi jihadis are playing the part of Nazis and we’re playing the part of Wilson after WWI.
doubleplusundead 