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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! March 31, 2011 The Shores of TripoliBy Greyhawk
Oh my! There might be CIA agents and MI6 and SAS and lions and tigers and bears (but no US military forces) on the ground in Libya and we might arm the rebels and some might be al Qaedies and maybe we aren't just protecting civilians after all! I'm shocked, shocked I tell you. Who knew?! Back to that later, but first, a tactical update. When last we looked in on the situation, the rebels were approaching Qaddafi's hometown of Sirt.
Another reason that's a good place for a tactical pause should be easier to understand with a look at a map. Here's one I borrowed from here:
Click it for a larger version. Sorry for the spelling differences between the reports you'll read and the map (and lack of depictions of smaller locations like Bin Jawwad - between Ras Lanuf and Sirt), but I think it's good enough for the average person to achieve understanding of the tactical situation on the ground. Look at the upper right corner of Libya, that's where the action is. Everything east of Sirt (in the middle of the coast line) is the area where we're most interested in protecting civilians and preventing massacres for now. Here's a close up.
Eventually we'll hopefully be able to get over to western Libya and protect the civilians there, too - but for now we'll have to settle for protecting the civilians east of Sirt. If we were completely in control of the rebel alliance that tactical pause would have been achieved, gains would have been consolidated (oil could flow from the upper right corner - or "Cyrenaica", if you prefer - at least), the force would hopefully grow a bit (an infusion of a full brigade or two of former Qaddafi troops would have been especially nice, along with some uprisings in the west. Want to be on the right side of history? Sorry, Foreign Ministers need not apply...) and later So, let's begin our update with this News Hour report I watched immediately prior to President Obama's Libya speech. Excerpts:
They couldn't, as we'll soon see. "Without coalition airstrikes," Hilsum concludes, "the fighters are simply outgunned." Take any description of the enemy from a fighter on the ground ("They were Gadhafi's tribe and mercenaries from Africa") with a grain of salt. But from the above you can grasp another good reason why the rebels lacked air support at that point - or a reason why pausing east of Sirt would have been a good idea. "Those approaching Sirte had been attacked by armed civilians loyal to Col. Gadhafi" and "Col. Gadhafi has armed civilians up there. There's been hand-to-hand combat." When armed civilians clash with armed civilians it becomes difficult to protect civilians with airpower without hurting civilians. In a civil war, the definition of "civilian" becomes very murky - even on the ground. You can imagine the difficulties of properly identifying them from 30,000 feet. For what came next, here's a New York Times report: Having abandoned Bin Jawwad on Tuesday and the oil town of Ras Lanuf on Wednesday, the rebels continued their eastward retreat, fleeing before the loyalists' shelling and missile attacks from another oil town, Brega, and falling back toward the strategically located city of Ajdabiya. Seemingly bad news. However, if we want to protect civilians but aren't ready for them to move west, the fact that Qaddafi's legions have shoved our civilian friends back eastward is not totally bad. (And really, a useful tactical pause for one side is also a tactical pause for the other; they get to regroup, reorganize, and re-supply, too.) Back to the New York Times: But military experts said they expected the counterattack to expose Colonel Qaddafi's forces to renewed attacks, and an American military spokesman said that coalition warplanes resumed bombing the pro-Qaddafi units on Wednesday, without specifying either the timing or locations.And an AFP report:
The headline over that story is "For no-fly zone, four NATO sorties: US military." I do believe we've been promised that we'd need fewer and fewer air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone, and that we can consider that a promise kept. In other news, the operation - now led by NATO - is now called Operation Unified Protector. And NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen says that (per UN Security Council mandate) NATO's operational focus will be "on protecting civilians and civilian-populated areas against the threat of attack." Lt Gen Charles Bouchard (the Canadian general now "in charge") "warned forces attacking civilians in Libya that they would be "ill-advised" to continue." NATO is also looking into reports that some attacks on civilians may have come from NATO.
If all that confuses you, go back and study the maps. (More to follow, of course.) Posted by Greyhawk / March 31, 2011 11:11 AM | Permalink 2 TrackBacksIt's a classic cartoon. Unfortunately, it's also an illustration of the planning for our excellent Libya operation. Back to that in a moment, first a note from the Telegraph - "Gaddafi troops renew assault on rebel-held Misrata"Libyan army forces unle... Read More Unbelievable! You might cry. Of course it is. (If it wasn't, it wouldn't be deniable.) But that doesn't matter. You're along for the ride... When it comes to Libya planning, I keep coming back to this cartoon.... I suppose I should explain it in full. ... Read More |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
