Comments on: How many troops does Sadr have, exactly?

By: George

George — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 21:02:18 +0000

Late to the party here, but the answer is likely to be either (a) Sadr is successful at recruiting lots of young, inexperienced (and easily killed) fighters, or (b) initial estimates were low.

By: gijoe

gijoe — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 23:35:18 +0000

vietnam? lol stand with your troops you freedom-freeloader

By: tom beta 2

tom beta 2 — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 14:34:40 +0000

In his post, Daniel notes: ...the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1000. (emphasis mine) He then concludes: So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters Note this was a minimum estimate from the Pentagon. has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Nobody claimed to have killed 1,800 of Sadr's core fighters. 1,800 out of a force estimated to have up to 10,000 fighters isn't that much of a stretch. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 Whoever heard of groups of guerrillas based in different parts of a country gathering for an attack? Novel idea, that. Something doesn’t add up You're right about that.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:31:31 +0000

‘Under discussion is the tendency of forces in being to retreat from a tactical situation, when they can retreat at all. ’ Jim- I agree with the point you’re making to Francisco re the War of the Triple Alliance. But more generally I think you’re badly wrong: Sadr’s militia is not a ‘force in being’ in the sense in which, say, the 82d Airborne is a ‘force in being’. Sadr’s forces are those proportion of the (already heavily armed, already firearms-trained) Iraqi population prepared to back him against US and/or other Iraqi forces. Kill x percent of a battalion of US soldiers and they will lose unit cohesion- with x being lower if there is no system of battle casualty replacements, low unit morale, poor leadership, etc, and higher if those conditions are reversed. But the battles in Najaf and elsewhere are a whole other ballgame: there has to be a risk that if one kills x percent of Sadr’s gunmen one degrades the ‘unit cohesion’ of his existing militia but incites currently neutral or anti-Sadr Iraqis to join in the struggle against the Americans. ‘Unit cohesion’ for conventional forces is one thing: can a formally structured, lengthily-trained body of men continue to carry out demanding orders for an extended period of time. Sadr’s forces don’t have to have ‘unit cohesion’ in that sense: their goals are a mix those of a street gang, a protest movement and a political party.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:16:51 +0000

John- fair enough. I feel, and no doubt you do too, that the Americans needed to start thinking, from 1st May 2003 if not before, that success would be measured by things like the number of hours of electricity available to major urban centres, and the number of Iraqis prepared to offer intelligence on jihadists- not on any body count. As you say, banging on about the latter is a very bad sign, for all sorts of reasons.

By: Jim Henley

Jim Henley — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 22:49:53 +0000

I think it’s safe to say there’s not an upper number beyond which a country stops fighting, valid for all cases. Francisco: The Paraguayan example doesn’t seem comparable. The scale is wrong – a whole war when we’re talking about individual battles – and the deaths are, as even the brief Wikipedia account notes, compounded by disease, malnutrition and no doubt not a few massacres. Under discussion is the tendency of forces in being to retreat from a tactical situation, when they can retreat at all. That’s a whole ‘nother thing.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 21:47:39 +0000

Dan, I didn’t mean to say that overestimation implies that war is going badly. What I meant is that, in the leadup to a full-scale war, both sides tend to exaggerate the casualties by enemy action and minimise or deny any harm they have done themselves. The idea is that “we are the defenders of peace, they are wanton aggressors”. It’s a bad sign when this pattern is replaced by exaggeration of casualties inflicted precisely because this implies that all-out war has begun.

By: Francisco

Francisco — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 19:43:07 +0000

Paraguay lost 95% of its male population on the triple alliance war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Triple_Alliance). I think it’s safe to say there’s not an upper number beyond which a country stops fighting, valid for all cases.

By: Rajeev Advani

Rajeev Advani — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:47:45 +0000

Daniel, I agree with your emphasis, and would second it because by the mid 1960’s Ho’s heirs had already marginalized him (they thought the old man was losing it). In that case I suppose it becomes possible to make a comparison between Sadr and Le Duan, but I don’t know enough about either.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:30:26 +0000

Rajeev: fair enough. I have to confess that I gave up half way through the Duiker book because of the failure of my third attempt at a coloured highlighting system to keep track of all the Nugyens. Though perhaps worth emphasising that the Americans were for the most part fighting the (second) Vietnam War against Ho’s heirs rather than he himself.

By: Rajeev Advani

Rajeev Advani — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:16:41 +0000

Daniel, What I wrote was based off the conclusions of William Duiker’s biography, Ho Chi Minh – A Life. What many tend to do is mix up Ho’s views with those of his underlings: Truong Chinh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Le Duan, and so on. When it comes to Ho himself, he was a nationalist first. I won’t deny that he was a fervent Communist, but he was by no means totalitarian. Some objections to characterizing him as Stalinist: 1) When the North Vietnamese attempted a land reform program in the 60s, Ho Chi Minh repeatedly urged caution—he had learned from the mistakes of Stalin and Mao. 2) When the Vietnamese people were suffering from famine, instead of callously disregarding the problem like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh fasted himself 1 day out of 10. 3) Unlike Stalin, who consolidated all power, Ho devolved most of his power to his underlings in the Party, and only kept an interest in foreign affairs. 4) While Ho was alive the Party never engaged in any Stalin-esque totalitarian purges, nor were any Vietnamese Gulags constructed, nor 4) In Ho’s later years, when he actually had power, he called for freedom first, everything else second. 5) In his will, Ho called on Le Duan to extend a one year moratorium on all taxes to peasants, knowing that they had suffered the brunt of the pain from reunification and land reform. Not exactly Stalinist. As William Duiker summarizes, Ho was not Stalinist, but one part Lenin, one part Gandhi, with a dash of Confucism. Unfortunately today many people conflate what happened in Vietnam with him directly, when many of the North Vietnamese atrocities were either spillover effects from an uncontrolled revolution or the results of rabidly Communist local policies put in effect by lessers in the party. Regarding the point about democracy: I recall reading somewhere (but I’ll have to verify this) that 90% of the population supported him for President, and that’s including the South. What I do know for sure is that the South Vietnamese revolution was not started by Ho Chi Minh—he simply guided what was an upstart, national revolution against the Diem (and the successor) regime. Regarding his time in France and China. While in France under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot!) he was only attracted to Communism becuase of its obsession with anti-imperialism (and admitted this much in later interviews). So that’s easy to square away with nationalism. Regarding his time in China: he spent most of that time arguing against the hard-liners in the party like Ha Huy Tap, who called for a tight and vicious Communist revolution. Ho Chi Minh believed—and this is anti-Stalin—in a united front revolution that would bring the Communists together with lesser bourgeois elements. Granted of course, that this was to be followed, eventually, by a Communist revolution—but nevertheless it shows Ho putting nationalism first. (It’s ok about the tone, blogging has thickened my skin… and I expect somebody to bash me for painting too rosy a picture of Ho Chi Minh here)

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 17:43:14 +0000

A general point is that soldiers generally tend to overestimate enemy deaths- not just when, as John Q suggests, the war is going badly for them. (Just to be clear: the war is, I think, going very badly for the Coalition right now.)Any history of the Battle of Britain has the RAF pilots overestimating enemy ‘kills’ by 300% or more: a more accurate figure was privately arrived at by RAF intelligence who collected shot-down planes on the ground, but the higher estimates were published to aid morale. On the ground, I can think of lots of examples. Martin Middlebrook, in ‘The battle for the Malvinas’, recounts the Royal Marine patrol on (I think) Mt Harriet, who bumped an Arg unit and shot them up before getting the hell out: they reported at least 18 enemy deaths, but Middlebrook dug out the Argentine papers and witnesses and found it was three. His whole book is replete with such examples of British over-reporting: and remember, the men reporting the inflated body counts were not cowboys but some of the best light infantry in the world.(They also had little motive to exaggerate: there was no ‘body count’ policy as per Vietnam.) It’s not hard to see why squaddies exaggerate: a lot of terrified, hyped-up men all firing at individual targets, which may hit the ground because they’re dead or because they are taking cover- who knows how many get killed. The only thing one can trust, I think, when compiling casualty figures, is an actual count of dead bodies on the ground. And this isn’t happening in Iraq: Iraqi civilians and militiamen alike have both customary and prudential reasons for burying their dead asap without notifying the local Coalition forces. Btw, Praktike’s point about killing lots of militiamen being good is bunk: all accounts of Iraq agree that the blood feud is a live-and-kicking custom for many locals, so if you kill a large number of militiamen without then paying blood money to his family and tribe, you get all his kinsmen taking revenge potshots at you. D-squared: for estimates of things like combat effectiveness, unit cohesion etc a good place to start is S.L.A. Marshall’s studies of WW2 and Korea. These are out of date. Military institutions- in Britain, for example, the Royal College of Defence Studies- produce updated versions, but so far as I know the UK documents are classified. Possibly current Pentagon estimates are out there. I would say that applying ‘unit cohesion’ to the Sadrist insurgency, as Jim Henley does, is a bit of a category error. As Juan Cole pointed out- and as, before him, the Brigadier running British forces in Basra noted- if the Iraqi Shi’ites kick off an Iranian style ‘crowd revolution’, then it’s game over. ‘Unit cohesion’ and other narrowly military measures are less important than measures of broad political support and alienation, in this war. Kill enough Shi’ite civilians and we will have all the survivors at our throats. As Clausewitz might have told us, no possibility of divorcing the military from the political. On those grounds, I am very much a pessimist.

By: Jane Galt

Jane Galt — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 17:22:18 +0000

Kevin, South Vietnam as a separate region, culturally and administratively, has a much longer history than a “unified” Vietnam. Though the Vietnamese began expanding south along the Mekong delta in the 12th century, they didn’t fully assimilate the territory of the south until the mid-18th, and by then Vietnam had already been split into two administrative districts, under two separate ruling families, for roughly 200 years—the South was basically only truly a part of a unified Vietnam from 1802, when Nguyen Anh consolidated the two regions, until 1858, when the French invaded to revenge the slaying of a bunch of French missionaries. Not that that has anything much to do with the topic at hand, but while I’m for anything that has to do with getting rid of the French, who were really appalling colonial masters even by the standards of western imperialism, Vietnamese nationalism of the sort that demands a unified north and south has somewhat shaky roots. Or at least that’s my understanding from my rather shallow dive into Vietnamese history.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 17:19:28 +0000

Praktike: blah blah Vietnam blah blah didn’t work blah … tell me when this gets boring. Jim: I also tried to look up that number, but was also unable to find any source for it other than rulebooks for playing games with lead figures. I’ve got a couple of Liddell Hart books downstairs but I can’t find anything useful in them. All readers: It really is worth making the effort to look into the archives of Jim’s blog for last winter for his posts on the Samarra casualty count; I read them at the time and remember them as being quite excellent.

By: Dept. of Made-Up Statistical Thresholds

Dept. of Made-Up Statistical Thresholds — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 17:13:35 +0000

The policy of the U.S. Government that if twice the total number of enemy is killed, the remaining number of enemy should drop by one half. As only 150% of the enemy was killed, it is not unexpected that the number of enemy should increase. BTW, the increase in fighting demonstrates that they are desperate and we are winning. DMUST