Quote:
Originally posted by Colin
I agree that the occupation is messy- certainly more difficult than planned for. The daily bombings and assassinations are just that. Historically, exceptionally quick military victories lead to difficult occupations. The Phillipines during the Spanish-American War, Yugoslavia during World War II. Lightning quick victories leave millions of rounds of unused munitions in the field and leave an enemy not having felt their defeat. This has happened many times.
People like "Joe Citizen" believe the US military is omnipotent and that anything short of perfection is due to poor planning. They felt triumphant when a single American Apache was downed in the early stages of the war - as if the expectation was zero - as if the US military were gods. The truth is quite different. 150,000 troops are occupying a country of 25 million Muslims after a historic and lightning quick blitzkrieg to occupy a nation's capital. The US military is great but not perfect.
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thats the thing though.. there was almost no planning on what would happen from the moment the statue was toppled. It's an incredibly obvious blunder.. that you would hope an organization the size of the US army would be able to avoid.. nothing about them being perfect.. just semi-competent.. what you had was a drastically low amount of invading troops, which was fine as a technologically advanced crushing force.. but absolutely hopeless at the "oh shit, the regimes gone - we don't even have half the troops we need to guard Saddam's weapon dumps" part.. Where you now have soldiers dying because the army wasn't thinking far enough ahead to stop these millions of round of amunition, guns and shells falling into guerilla hands.
Too much blind faith in the transformation doctrine on a micro level.