Karan M wrote:Rudradev, US has sold Iraqi AF 18 Block 52 F-16Ds which are getting built at LM facilities...doubt whether they can do much against dispersed guerillas
Karan ji... but they're not dispersed, are they.
Insurrectionist forces behave quite differently depending on their strategic environment.
In Phase I, when the State has a strong grasp on governance, infrastructure and security, and enjoys the confidence of a majority of the population... that's when Insurrectionists essentially operate in dispersed guerilla bands employing disruptive hit-and-run tactics. They do not have any chance of wresting strategic initiative (which is entirely with the State) so their offensives are limited to seizing tactical initiatives when the opportunity presents itself: plant an IED here, attack a police outpost there etc. The rest of the time they win merely by surviving. Here they rely on the belief that the State lacks the political will to go after them in unfamiliar, remote hideouts and exterminate them, because the State does not believe that losses to government troops or collateral damage to innocents will be worth it. I would say 90% or more of Insurrectionists in the world operate at Phase I; from our own Northeast, J&K and Maoist groups to the ETA, FARC, Shining Path, FALN etc. all over the world.
Phase II is quite different, and this is where ISIS is operating now. This occurs when the State has only a tenuous grasp on governance/infrastructure/security and has lost, or is vulnerable to losing, the confidence of a large mass of people. When an Insurrectionist group smells the blood, it goes in for the kill by seizing the strategic initiative. It is no longer dispersed, but very much consolidated as it embarks on a strategic offensive. You can't be dispersed and follow hit-and-run tactics if you're besieging cities, marching on the capital and dominating arterial infrastructure. In Phase II the Insurrectionist group behaves very much like a regular army (though it moves faster for lack of bureaucracy, and also depends very much on sustaining a momentum of serial victories in order to maintain discipline). This is typically seen in the final moments of regimes against which insurrectionist groups were arrayed: Mao's PLA marching on Beiping in 1948-49, Castro's Libradores rolling into Havana on commandeered Sherman tanks 10 years later, Taliban fanning out across Afghanistan in 1996.
In Phase II the Insurrectionist group is very much vulnerable to air attack and concentrated firepower, just as a regular land force is. They have heavy equipment, captured tanks and artillery pieces; they have logistical tails to worry about; and they have to (at least temporarily) ditch cover and fight in the open, on terrain where they don't have the advantage of intimate familiarity. This is where a functional Iraqi Air Force, had it existed, would have found the opportunity to crush the ISIS. So many things to hit from the air as the jihadis march in the open, carrying crucial supplies behind them.
Even if the IQAF had a squadron of F-16s, they could have restrained the advance and made serious dents in the ISIS' numbers and morale. But as Nagesh ji writes they have only ONE F-16. So the US' claim to have "sold F-16D Block 52" aircraft is worth absolutely nothing. Did anybody seriously think ISIS types were going to wait around while an Iraqi Air Force was slowly cobbled together at MMS speed? Frankly, the entire decimation of Iraq's security armature has been preposterous. Compare the situation in which the US left South Korea after withdrawing the majority of its troops in the 1960s, or Taiwan after the communist takeover of the mainland... those nations were given more than sufficient capacity to defend themselves against known threats.
Even if the US didn't have that level of resources to commit to the post-withdrawal defence of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were many effective steps they could have taken. The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Air Force could have been reconstituted after purging the top leadership of hardline Saddam loyalists... as institutions, they had defended the country for decades and had the expertise, background and commitment to do it. Note that even the much-demonized Khomeini freed pilots of the Shah's air force from jail and reinstated them in their cockpits to counter Saddam's air raids in the Iran-Iraq war. By contrast, under Bush's viceroy Paul Bremmer, the US followed a deliberate policy of completely shutting down the Iraqi army and air force, with NO attempt to reconstitute them or leverage their human resources. Lakhs of willing, capable officers and soldiers were suddenly told they had no jobs and no way to feed their families. Unsurprisingly, most of them either turned to organized crime or joined militant groups, adding to the troubles of both the US occupation army and the new Iraqi government.
So this business about "selling F-16D Block 52s" is just for show (and to fatten up Lockheed Martin's GOTUS contract account). It's already proven 100% useless when needed. It's more important to consider the more commonsensical, less expensive things that were NOT done. The urgent refurbishing of even Soviet-era Floggers and Flankers, and consolidating a force of career servicemen to fly and maintain them, would have been enough to deter Phase II ops by the likes of ISIS.
What we will soon see, instead, is ISIS moving to Phase III: the establishment by an insurrectionist group of a
para-state with its own administration. As with Dudayev in Chechnya, Pirabhakaran in Jaffna, and even Baitullah Meshud in Swat for a while. This changes the State vs. Insurrectionist equation once again. The Insurrectionists now have to hold AND govern territory, trying to win (by fear or favour) the confidence of the mass population that was once reposed in the State. This, typically, is where many Insurrectionists falter: they no longer have the freedom to pick and choose tactical opportunities as in Phase I, and they can't focus all their resources onto a single strategic initiative as in Phase II, but are stuck halfway to becoming a real nation-state with all the distractions of that undertaking.
Accordingly, since the 1979 Iranian revolution I don't think there's been a single case of insurgency successfully winning total control of a nation state by effectively destabilizing the regime and holding on to power on a national level. It remains to be seen whether ISIS can actually achieve this.
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Nagesh ji, unlike the $hitish for example, Saddam was actually quite egalitarian and merit-based in determining the composition of his armed forces officer cadre. Yes, some units of the elite Republican Guard were composed nearly exclusively of not only Sunni arabs but people of his Tikriti tribe... they were his "insurance" against a coup d'etat from the ranks. But on the whole, he did not do the $hitish thing of elevating favoured "martial races" and discriminating against others. There were Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and even Christians holding high office in his government and military.
That said, I don't think there's much hope of reconstituting a "last minute Air Force" quickly enough to fight off ISIS advances towards Baghdad. The Iraqis are going to have to rely on either the Americans or the Iranians (I believe there are already Iranian units fighting against ISIS in norther Iraq) for that sort of help.
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Symontk ji, I have my doubts. No Insurrectionist group in its right mind is going to vacate oil-rich Northern Iraq in lieu of occupying relatively useless territory in Syria (that can always be done using Northern Iraq as a base for attritive warfare, FATA style, but it isn't going to be at the cost of the big prize). From the US/KSA/GCC point of view, the whole exercise of destabilizing Assad was directed at preventing the construction of an Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline that would rival the planned South Pars-GCC-Turkey pipeline as a conduit for energy to the EU market. If ISIS takes control of much of Iraq, the pipeline is scuttled anyway, and deposing Assad becomes a sideshow.