ARVN and Iraqi army : were they (consciously) conceived as dependant forces ?

[Dracolithfiend]

I can't help but compare the progress of the Iraqi army to that of the Kurds. They have more men, more money, more armor, more air support, more everything. I blame their poor performance squarely upon the shoulders of their officer Corp. In 9 months they advanced an average of 8 METERS a day. War sucks. It is terrifying and people are killed. If you play it cautious you might save lives but taking 9 months to go 21km is no longer caution. It is either the generals staff butt @#$&ing each other instead of commanding, the majors/colonels revolting, or Lt's/captains disobeying orders.

 

[Kgw]

Also, let's remember that the Kurds know perfectly who they are, why are they fighting and who's the enemy... and how far they'd fight. Defending Kirkuk? No problem. Mosul? "No business there".
In the other hand, Iraqi forces:
1. Were affected by Daesh's propaganda: "Do you want me to fight them? They are madmen who'll behead me! No way!"
2. Had to be rebuilt a nth time from scrap. Training, equipment, high command... everything.
3. Had to build a "hearts and minds" campaign. Let people in the Mosul area they are not invaders with the wrong religion. So you can't carpet bomb the city.

I don't know if they could've done it faster, but if going slow helps you to save lives and, specially, denies Daesh the final glorious battle they were seeking , the better.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

I would also advise looking up the essay on why Arab armies always lose. It is a cultural thing of overestimating oneself, corruption, undermining one another, paranoia, intrige and general hoarding of information. The goal of the Iraqi army members - like in all Arab armies - is to be important. Because that makes money and keeps them in a position of power.

The Iraqi army never had or has a unified goal of being an effective fighting force, certainly not to die for one's country (and then certainly not for someone else's tribe). It's all about officer status and personal gain.

Thank you for the pointer. That essay has some interesting ideas but undoubtedly very provocative, as it doesn't seem to show much awareness of the history of Orientalism.

Some important evidence published after De Atkine is a RAND (right-wing think-tank) report on why Iraq lost the 2003 war (PDF). It was written in 2003 and badly underestimates the seriousness of the insurgency, but it contains a lot of anecdotes on the massive cultural problems within the Iraqi army. Officers and men ran away and command was impossible because everybody lied to the level above them. RAND claim the culture of deceit and self-preservation was created by Saddam's personal rule; you claim that this is common to all Arab armies. I wonder whether it could be explained by any situation that combines high power distance and mass poverty.

 

[D Inqu]

In the other hand, Iraqi forces:
1. Were affected by Daesh's propaganda: "Do you want me to fight them? They are madmen who'll behead me! No way!"

Which is a sign of major problems within the army itself. Armies should not be collapsing in front a vastly inferior force, both in numbers and equipment. An armored brigade should not be running and abandoning vehicles to a force with no armor, no airforce, no heavy artillery. The only comparable example I could think of outside the middle east is the collapse of the Russian army following the revolution in 1917.

2. Had to be rebuilt a nth time from scrap. Training, equipment, high command... everything.

That still does not explain why the Iraqi army did poorly in the Iran-Iraq war. And just retraining does not explain the collapse.

3. Had to build a "hearts and minds" campaign. Let people in the Mosul area they are not invaders with the wrong religion. So you can't carpet bomb the city.

I am not sure we are talking about the same Mosul here. The one in Iraq was completely flattened. News reports, UN and any visiting journalists all seem to agree that the city was devastated and rebuilding could take over a decade.

I don't know if they could've done it faster, but if going slow helps you to save lives

True, but unfortunately "saving lives" was not on the priorities list. Amnesty did a report on that recently.

It was written in 2003 and badly underestimates the seriousness of the insurgency, but it contains a lot of anecdotes on the massive cultural problems within the Iraqi army. Officers and men ran away and command was impossible because everybody lied to the level above them. RAND claim the culture of deceit and self-preservation was created by Saddam's personal rule; you claim that this is common to all Arab armies. I wonder whether it could be explained by any situation that combines high power distance and mass poverty.

This is all common to all armies. However, western armies had a very long brutal "school" in the form of WW1 and WW2 in which every mistake had a cost in lives. Thus for post-WW1 armies, the idea of, for example, digging in not a question, it was something naturally done. As were many other things. It's more than just "training", which only lasted few months for infantry anyway. Which is why in 1941 the outumbered British garrison of Habbaniya mounted a defence and later counter-attacked the besieging force which just fled a few days later. By contrast, the Iraqi garrisons were giving up with minimal fighting, even though their equipment was not much different.

 

[DoomBunny]

Which is a sign of major problems within the army itself. Armies should not be collapsing in front a vastly inferior force, both in numbers and equipment. An armored brigade should not be running and abandoning vehicles to a force with no armor, no airforce, no heavy artillery. The only comparable example I could think of outside the middle east is the collapse of the Russian army following the revolution in 1917.

There are plenty other examples of armies just collapsing. For example, the Iraqi army in 1991, the Iraqi army in 2003, the Iraqi army in...

 

[HanSime]

[...] you claim that this is common to all Arab armies. I wonder whether it could be explained by any situation that combines high power distance and mass poverty.

I think it may also have to do with the (nomadic) tribalism origins in the entire region which linger on in M-E politics today. If you're 'naturally' distrusting of (individuals from) other tribes and their political goals / ambitions on a bigger level, that may also work on a lower cognitive level. You may want to keep them away from things (like knowledge, information and connections) that may threaten you and your clan in the long run.

I also think the machismo culture has a lot to do with it as well. If you've been treated as a 'little prince' at home (and probably quite 'we Arabs/Turks/etc. are awesome and always right'), you may (over)stimulate the Dunning-Kruger effect and loss of face becomes a psychological treshold. The Dunning-Kruger effect is where one due to lack of experience and knowledge, thinks one already is an expert, knowing everything there is to know already and is therefore above critique and reproach. Thus making one less receptive and open to training, tips and taking orders.

Play any online game and you'll find thousands of such people who would rather throw a tantrum or do the most foolish things or making bad decisions like saving oneself rather than holding the line and work for the group.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is also known to stimulate scapegoating and throwing tantrums, but usualy has the effect of either someone ending up panicking and making bad decisions, due to lacking discipline and training and disintegrating as an army, or to simply give up while blaming everything else, rather than try and work harder.

Being told by foreigners that you need training therefore probably isn't very effective until they fully realise and admit to themselves it's true and even then don't have any other options than to admit they were wrong to an external party due to the loss of face (and standing) involved with a public admittance.

 

[D Inqu]

There are plenty other examples of armies just collapsing. For example, the Iraqi army in 1991, the Iraqi army in 2003, the Iraqi army in...

I did specifically say "outside of the middle east"

 

[Kgw]

Well, we can talk about if the Iraqi Army was badly leaded, or if ARVN and Iraqi forces were created as dependent forces.

My answer is 1) yes 2) no, but they weren't treated like proper allies, too.

 

[gagenater]

I think it may also have to do with the (nomadic) tribalism origins in the entire region which linger on in M-E politics today. If you're 'naturally' distrusting of (individuals from) other tribes and their political goals / ambitions on a bigger level, that may also work on a lower cognitive level. You may want to keep them away from things (like knowledge, information and connections) that may threaten you and your clan in the long run.

I also think the machismo culture has a lot to do with it as well. If you've been treated as a 'little prince' at home (and probably quite 'we Arabs/Turks/etc. are awesome and always right'), you may (over)stimulate the Dunning-Kruger effect and loss of face becomes a psychological treshold. The Dunning-Kruger effect is where one due to lack of experience and knowledge, thinks one already is an expert, knowing everything there is to know already and is therefore above critique and reproach. Thus making one less receptive and open to training, tips and taking orders.

Play any online game and you'll find thousands of such people who would rather throw a tantrum or do the most foolish things or making bad decisions like saving oneself rather than holding the line and work for the group.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is also known to stimulate scapegoating and throwing tantrums, but usualy has the effect of either someone ending up panicking and making bad decisions, due to lacking discipline and training and disintegrating as an army, or to simply give up while blaming everything else, rather than try and work harder.

Being told by foreigners that you need training therefore probably isn't very effective until they fully realise and admit to themselves it's true and even then don't have any other options than to admit they were wrong to an external party due to the loss of face (and standing) involved with a public admittance.

This is an interesting angle to take on the traditional 'why do Arab armies suck so bad' topic.

IMHO one thing is for sure - the Iraqi army after this prolonged and grueling war with ISIS won't be composed of people with this sort of attitude for at least a generation, and possibly much longer if the state stays cohesive beyond that. Too many men participated in too much combat action, and learned too much practical knowledge for these sorts of effects to easily reassert themselves.

 

[gagenater]

I can't help but compare the progress of the Iraqi army to that of the Kurds. They have more men, more money, more armor, more air support, more everything. I blame their poor performance squarely upon the shoulders of their officer Corp. In 9 months they advanced an average of 8 METERS a day. War sucks. It is terrifying and people are killed. If you play it cautious you might save lives but taking 9 months to go 21km is no longer caution. It is either the generals staff butt @#$&ing each other instead of commanding, the majors/colonels revolting, or Lt's/captains disobeying orders.

I have read some reports about the battle for Mosul, and it seems that going has been very slow for a combination of reasons:

• A desire to carefully and thoroughly secure outlying areas, and cut Mosul off from sources of logistical supply before starting the 'main battle' so that ISIS members can't simply escape, lay low and start up again in a few years
• A desire to by VERY careful to actually catch/kill real ISIS members, but not indiscriminately kill or imprison civilians in the process - this seems to require that a lot of intelligence information from residents of Mosul be gathered, then cross checked, then confirmed by questioning almost everyone - this takes a lot of time in a city of a million people or so. This is being done to try and avoid creating a new generation of angry and upset Sunni martyrs ready to start up a new insurgency.
• A desire (and actual logistical need) to rotate forces both to allow time for them to re-equip and rest, and to get real life training for as many different units as possible
• The fact that the original army of Iraq had evaporated prior to the start of the ISIS campaign, so this represents not just a war, but the creation of an army during the war
• The large scale aid (especially air and artillery support) by so many different national forces requires a lot of coordination, and none of them had ever worked together before
• The allied air support in agreement with the Iraqi ground forces purposely destroyed nearly all key roads and road junctions to interdict ISIS movement - of course this hampered their own movement as well.

It's not as though slow going in sieges/battles for large cities is unprecedented. Look at Stalingrad or Leningrad or the siege of Sevastopol for real life vivid examples - the shortest one was Stalingrad and it took 5 1/2 months, and even then was decided early by other events (the Russians threatening to encircle it forced the Germans out)
The siege of Sevastopol took 9 months before it fell, and Leningrad was sieged for 2 1/2 years and didn't fall.

 

[BaronNoir]

In the case of the ARVN, what strikes me is that this was an army that was supposed to do what the Americans essentially failed to do
1) using the American methods (super heavy firepower, air mobility, staggering air power)
2)but without the American tools.

 

[HanSime]

This is an interesting angle to take on the traditional 'why do Arab armies suck so bad' topic.

IMHO one thing is for sure - the Iraqi army after this prolonged and grueling war with ISIS won't be composed of people with this sort of attitude for at least a generation, and possibly much longer if the state stays cohesive beyond that. Too many men participated in too much combat action, and learned too much practical knowledge for these sorts of effects to easily reassert themselves.

Depends, seen a lot of Iraqi and Syrian combat footage of self-proclaimed "elite" troops, or "veterans" doing really stupid things.


Ask @DarthShizNit, he fought with the YPG in Syria and doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of any of the factions involved. He claims in some cases the only reason they could win was excessive A-10 cover.

The stories he told of idiocy encountered is just mind boggling.


I mean, I have seen people with a Maus and IS-7 in WoT with 20.000 battles and still think they are artillery units...

 

[gagenater]

Depends, seen a lot of Iraqi and Syrian combat footage of self-proclaimed "elite" troops, or "veterans" doing really stupid things.


Ask @DarthShizNit, he fought with the YPG in Syria and doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of any of the factions involved. He claims in some cases the only reason they could win was excessive A-10 cover.

The stories he told of idiocy encountered is just mind boggling.


I mean, I have seen people with a Maus and IS-7 in WoT with 20.000 battles and still think they are artillery units...

Yes - I dont expect them to be at the level of western or Asian troops but they will be far better than most Arab armies.

 

[HuzzButt]

(ARVN : Army of the Republic of Viet Nam)
A thing that struck me upon reading of the collapse of those armies and their very relative successes (the Iraqi army achievement of retaking Mossul after seven months of strike and overwhelming advantage in numbers and material is not exactly impressive) is that they were maybe independent forces on paper, but required lavish air support and ''counsellors'' to make any headway.

Was it consciously, or not, on purpose ? The French were quite open, in Vietnam and elsewhere, to have ''local'' forces incapable of using aircraft or tanks (while pretending it was because equipment was too complex for colonials) : after all, special forces and heavy airstrikes are theoricaly cheaper and more palatable to public opinion than large ground forces....

Well yes.

I wouldn't say it's unfair but it is beside the point to fault the Iraqi army for it's failures and slow progress against ISIS because it was never designed to deal with a conventional, large scale threat. Both the ARVN and the post 2003 Iraqi army were created as gendarmes to maintain and enforce civilian peace. The Iraqi army was constructed to deal with non-conventional threats. The decentralized command structure likewise is the conventional wisdom when dealing with local, small scale threats. Given the resources the alternative approach would have been to have the occupying force to undertake policing actions while having the national army of Vietnam or Iraq to devote themselves to face a conventional but non-existing threat.

 

[gagenater]

Well yes.

I wouldn't say it's unfair but it is beside the point to fault the Iraqi army for it's failures and slow progress against ISIS because it was never designed to deal with a conventional, large scale threat. Both the ARVN and the post 2003 Iraqi army were created as gendarmes to maintain and enforce civilian peace. The Iraqi army was constructed to deal with non-conventional threats. The decentralized command structure likewise is the conventional wisdom when dealing with local, small scale threats. Given the resources the alternative approach would have been to have the occupying force to undertake policing actions while having the national army of Vietnam or Iraq to devote themselves to face a conventional but non-existing threat.

The armed forces of Iraq were supposed to have more time to get organized before the US left, AND Maliki screwed the pooch badly in his bid for total power over the Iraqi state.. The Bush Administration signed off on 'mission accomplished' in 2008 with terrorism in Iraq at a rock bottom low after the surge in 2007. Part of the agreement was that the US would leave after 2009 with only a skeleton training and tripwire' force to remain. The Obama administration failure to get a status of forces agreement forced the US to leave before the military of Iraq was really ready to go. To be fair though, this wasn't really a failure on the part of Obama or the US - it was due to Iraqi Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki refusing to sign one, under any conditions - reasonable or unreasonable that the US had to leave completely. By October 2011 all US forces had left, and ISIS started rumbling along in 2011 and openly began capturing territory in 2014. Maliki made the whole situation MUCH worse than it had to be by openly splitting Iraq along sectarian lines, and purging all Sunni's from every element of state power.

 

[Gordy]

Thank you for the pointer. That essay has some interesting ideas but undoubtedly very provocative, as it doesn't seem to show much awareness of the history of Orientalism.

Some important evidence published after De Atkine is a RAND (right-wing think-tank) report on why Iraq lost the 2003 war (PDF). It was written in 2003 and badly underestimates the seriousness of the insurgency, but it contains a lot of anecdotes on the massive cultural problems within the Iraqi army. Officers and men ran away and command was impossible because everybody lied to the level above them. RAND claim the culture of deceit and self-preservation was created by Saddam's personal rule; you claim that this is common to all Arab armies. I wonder whether it could be explained by any situation that combines high power distance and mass poverty.

No-one needs to have any awareness of the "history of orientalism". It's a BS concept designed by those who lack any proper arguments to dispose of opposing viewpoints.

You wonder if "high power distance and mass poverty" are better explanations but you have no evidence or theoretical justication for this and worse you ignore that very many Arab countries are insanely wealthy and their militaries are still dreadful.

My view is that no special theories are needed to explain why Arab militaries are so awful. The Arabs are awful at everything. Their dysfunctional mlitaries are only to be expected given how dysfunctional everything else is. We're talking about economies that are almost entirely based on oil and gas exports because they don't make anything at all that anyone else would want.

"High power distance" whatever that might mean precisely is again down to dysfuncitonal socieities..

 

[ramius3443]

In the case of the ARVN, what strikes me is that this was an army that was supposed to do what the Americans essentially failed to do
1) using the American methods (super heavy firepower, air mobility, staggering air power)
2)but without the American tools.

Thats not really true: the ARVN had massive equipment stockpiles available to them, and were only really lacking in the kind of things you just dont give away (Napalm and heavy bombers come to mind), and ammunition later one once their supply networks collapsed. The US did all it could to supply them with weapons, advisors, and airsupport; their failures were their own.

The ARVN collapsed for very related reasons as the Iraqi army: completely inept and corrupt chain of command (officers were commonly the first to run), where units had no loyalty to other units and thus fled all at once. Unlike the Iraqi army, the ARVN were fighting a conventional force, so once a few units broke now suddenly the entire line had to pull back. Once they start pulling back however, the roads became jammed by refugees and deserting soldiers, so organized retreat immediately became a rout. Efforts to get troops forward either didn't materialize in time or at all (corrupt chain of command), or got bogged down on route by the refugees (whose presence did not exactly help morale). The North Vietnamese, after their initial offense, for the most part only encountered light or ad hoc resistance until they made it to Xuan Loc. The few remaining units the ARVN had left in reserve were the disciplined units that didn't dissolve when given the chance, so they put up a good fight before eventually just being swamped by the entire North Vietnamese army.

The ARVN were not wanting for men or equipment. They lost because, put simply, they couldn't trust the soldier or unit in the next position to actually do its job.

You wonder if "high power distance and mass poverty" are better explanations but you have no evidence or theoretical justication for this and worse you ignore that very many Arab countries are insanely wealthy and their militaries are still dreadful.

My view is that no special theories are needed to explain why Arab militaries are so awful. The Arabs are awful at everything. Their dysfunctional mlitaries are only to be expected given how dysfunctional everything else is. We're talking about economies that are almost entirely based on oil and gas exports because they don't make anything at all that anyone else would want.

"High power distance" whatever that might mean precisely is again down to dysfuncitonal socieities..

Bingo

 

[Gordy]

A stat I saw today is that only 13% of Saudis take regular exercise. Given that Saudi has a very young population this is an astonishing stat. It's not surprising that their military is rubbish.

I saw serving young Saudi officers given a fitness test for initial officer training in the UK, less than a third of them passed, a minority were not able to jog let alone run because they were too fat.

 

[SFSLovenought]

I saw serving young Saudi officers given a fitness test for initial officer training in the UK, less than a third of them passed, a minority were not able to jog let alone run because they were too fat.

Officers in what branch of the military? Not Infantry, at least?

 

[Gordy]

Officers in what branch of the military? Not Infantry, at least?

To be fair, it was the Navy not the infantry. It was the same in Iraq, a senior RN commander told me that they could never get the Iraqis to do physical training as they just refused.