Review: The Iraqi Army

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The Iraqi Army: Organization and Tactics

The NTC special text dubbed “The Iraqi Army: Organization and Tactics” is a valiant attempt at quickly trying to adapt to a different enemy. While the Iraqis used lots of Soviet equipment, their actual doctrine was more British-based on paper and often varied from both (usually for the worse). Just all on its own, it’s a fairly conventional and standard OPFOR document. But I find the context incredibly fascinating.

Like in Lester Grau’s much later The Russian Way of War, a tightrope had to be walked between the observed performance and the theoretical doctrine. Given the latter country’s vast paper trail and its known obsession with quantifying everything, separating the two was/is an easy task. As is/was noticing when theory inevitably diverged from practice, from Grozny to Hostomel.

Here, not so much. The Iraqi Army was notoriously slapdash, so the challenge was even greater. One example I like is that an Iraq War wargame supplement even told the player not to try and use any kind of standardized formation for them at all (!). On the more important doctrine, it acknowledges the flaws shown in the war with Iran, but cautiously and wisely goes with what can be paraphrased as “This may have been an aberration, treat them as a mechanized force worthy of their equipment”. That in many cases they turned out not to be showed the importance of assuming strength rather than weakness.

As a primary source, this is a very interesting snapshot. Plus it’s in the public domain and available readily now.

Even Cheapies Are Expensive

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So take these cheapie eastern night vision division devices: Good for a range of 150-200 meters depending on context, around $700 a pop. Both goggles/binoculars and rifle scopes for different contexts.

Yukon Tracker
Yukon NVRS Scope

To equip the line personnel (defined here as those in the actual fighting regiments/brigades) of one small division in the absolute most oversimplified fashion would be around $7-10 million, depending on the exact size. Getting around 5,000 sets, but then there comes the hard part: Maintaining 5,000 sets, keeping track of 5,000 sets, making sure that those 5,000 sets aren’t lost (via honest or dishonest means…), and so on.

Now apply this to almost any even slightly expensive piece of military equipment and you can see why, for instance, Egypt still issues its draftees equipment left over from the Yom Kippur War. That’s an extreme example, but you can see how even the individually “cheap” stuff can be expensive, particularly for less funded armies. And you can see both the political and military advantage of reserving such a thing for “elite” units if one has no choice but to only acquire a limited number of said items.

And you need a lot of stuff, to the point where it’s almost an “I, Pencil” situation. Boots, uniforms, load bearing equipment, helmets, packs, shelters, it all adds up. The bottlenecks can appear where you wouldn’t think they would. For instance, many people know of WWII Germany’s fuel shortages, and historians know of their special alloy shortages, but what a lot of either don’t know is of their cotton shortage resulting in less effective leather load bearing equipment.

Review: Conclave

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Conclave

There’s this only half-joking thought I’ve often stated in regards to book writing that, if you’re stuck, just write the characters fighting a bunch of crazy bikers. This is a lesson I learned from The Survivalist. And I saw something like that in a place I didn’t expect.

Robert Harris’ Conclave is the tale of a papal succession by a well-known author who’s written the alternate history classic Fatherland. He does not have the cardinals face off against crazy bikers. But he does have them encounter what seems like everything else. The writing itself is often good, and certainly Harris’ skill is on display. The setup of the book is excellent, save for a contrivance where a secret cardinal manages to slip into the conclave in spite of historical precedent.

…And then the plot goes off the rails into more and more melodrama. One of the papabili is felled by baby mama drama. Then another, who steered the baby mama into the Vatican to crush his rival, has his machinations uncovered and his candidacy sputters. Then the main character finds the papal equivalent of Regina George’s Burn Book and metaphorical chaos happens. Then there’s a terror attack outside the chapel (really) and literal chaos happens.

With all of the rivals having shot themselves in the foot (and the book has gotten to the point where a papabili cardinal pulling a Plaxico Burress wouldn’t be surprising), Mr. Sneaky Cardinal then becomes pope. Then in the final twist, it turns out that the new pope was born a girl , mixing the Pope Joan legend with the likes of such highbrow epics as Fate Stay/Night and Sleepaway Camp. The book ends with Pope Joan Angela Saber I Innocent XIV taking the throne.

I mean no transphobia, and think that you could make a perfectly tasteful, good, and profound novel with that (and its discovery) as the premise. But as the biggest swerve in a book full of them, it still comes across as bizarre and tacky. Even if the concept is quite doable, the execution here falls flat.

In fact, as another review in the conservative Catholic World Report has noted, Harris’ sources in the acknowledgements are a little questionable. Imagine a military novel where the sources are well-intentioned and good-hearted but obviously slanted antiwar activists and axe-grinding Pentagon Reformers, and you can get an idea for how skewed this is (even if I agree with a lot of it on the merits as a nonreligious descendant of Lutherans).

This isn’t the equivalent of one of the worst popes ever. But it isn’t one of the best either.

Baseball Returns

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Major League Baseball, after an owners lockout, has returned to being after a new collective bargaining agreement has finally been agreed upon. It’s very hard to sympathize with either side. The owners are what you’d expect from billionaire sports team owners, and the players have been desperately trying to hold onto a classic seniority cartel that has been eroded by analytics and too many bad megadeals.

Now we can actually talk about the game on the field.

The Airlifters

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Airlifters are very interesting to me, especially mega-lifters. But “exotics” are also fun, like tilt-ducted fans, compound helicopters, convertiplanes, flying wings, and much more. I think there’s several reasons why I’ve taken a liking to them, besides some very good sources that I’m eager to review.

  1. They represent an army marching on its stomach, or in this case, flying on its stomach. They’re the behind-the-scenes things that no one can do without.
  2. They’re military but not inherently destructive (unless converted to bombers, of course). Thus they can serve humanitarian and civilian support efforts very well.
  3. Finally, the numbers analyst in me likes seeing, especially for inherently risky airborne drops/landings, what you can accomplish with X number of airlifters with a capacity of Y per unit. Operations researchers with far more resources and far better command of math than me have been studying this since the parachute was invented.
  4. Plus I live fairly close to an airlifter base and see the big grey Globemasters and Galaxies flying overhead fairly frequently.
  5. Paradropping can be used as a way to add drama to the characters in a story, regardless of the overall force balance.
  6. It’s hard not to be impressed by something weird and/or big.

What I’m most interested in at the moment is: “To what extend does having big lifters that can reach the LZ safely remove bottlenecks?”

Review: Final Target

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Final Target

John Gilstrap’s Final Target is a Jonathan Grave retread. “Grave gets in a tussle down south of the Rio Grande” is basically the plot of the book. Which he’s done before. Oh, and he helps rescue a group of kids/teenagers as well. Look, cheap thrillers don’t exactly have the most intricate plots.

Being a retread, this is a 51% book. There’s little in it that hasn’t already been done in previous Grave novels. But this is a 51% book in the best possible way. It’s comfortingly familiar, and all the fundamentals are sound. The writing is good and so is the action. There are worse things to read than a book in a series you like that demonstrates all the qualities that made you enjoy the series in the first place.

Review: Journey’s End

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Journey’s End

Amazingly, surprisingly, the Kirov series has gotten a formal conclusion with Journey’s End. I’d predicted that there was no way for the series to end gracefully after 64 clunky volumes. And my prediction turned out to be accurate. A lot of this is de facto flashbacks to each ill-developed member of the crew. The final battle is just a wargamed clash like the hundreds before it. The hanging threats of Volkov and the aliens are dealt with hurriedly and contrivedly.

The conclusion is “a generally happy ending is stuffed in at the last second due to yet more time travel technobabble.” Schettler was clearly desperate to finish Kirov so he could write a fantasy novel series (which are no stranger to giant, bloated, sagas), and it shows. Still, that a 64 book epic with millions of words was completed at all is no small accomplishment.

A Thousand Words: Alien3 The Gun

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Alien3: The Gun

Based off the ugly duckling of the Alien franchise (infamous for killing off the beloved non-Ripley cast of Aliens, for starters), Sega’s Alien3: The Gun was an arcade lightgun shooter a la Revolution X. Unlike that “how do you do fellow kids” game, this actually manages to be atmospheric. The visuals match the movie’s themes well, and the music is excellent.

In fact, this is the rare game that manages to have its cake and eat it too. Alien properties, following in the wake of the second movie, have this tendency to turn xenomorphs into uglier Koopa Troopas, being generic expendable enemies. (The game Alien: Isolation was a deliberate reaction to this trope). Naturally, a light gun arcade game can only do that… but it still manages to be chilling and foreboding too.

Then there’s how the action is jury-rigged into the movie plot. The player controls an anonymous marine who somehow ended up on the doomed Sulaco and goes through all the parts of the actual movie. There are robots, including a giant tank. Despite there being hordes of xenomorphs, the real one from the actual movie is inexplicably more durable as a boss. And finally, the last boss, in a game full of hideous monsters is….. a human with a flamethrower. It would be annoying in other contexts, but here it’s endearing.

This is the rare quarter-muncher with class and poise, and a pleasant surprise from a genre with low expectations.

Review: Siege

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Siege

Edwin Corley’s Siege is a 1968 thriller with a bizarre premise. In many ways it’s like the ahead-of-its-time version of Mike Lunnon-Wood’s Dark Rose. Except everything the much later Dark Rose does right, this does wrong.

The premise here is that Black Power militants are holding Manhattan hostage so that the American government will give them New Jersey as a new homeland for African Americans. As a New Yorker, I am obligated to bash Jersey, but I will suppresses the urges here. This makes it seem like the book would be wacky. But it’s actually not. It’s very dreary and sometimes even ugly.

First, the obvious issue. You might think a cheap thriller from 1968 would not be the most progressive or racially sensitive novel. And you would be right. But even by those low standards, the racial content becomes outright uncomfortable too many times here. Second, even leaving that aside, the book is terribly paced. Like Richard Rohmer, it’s just mostly meetings and plans, and the competence of the characters changes on a dime. Skip this book. It’s not worth it.

The Differences

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Just as how Hector Bywater’s The Great Pacific War got a lot of specifics from the later conflict off but the general feel of a Japanese-American war completely right, I figured I’d look at my Soviet/Romanian War (which I’ve outlined) and see the differences.

  • First, the absolute biggest. Instead of being against an elected government and earning massive condemnation, this is against the odious regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. The prevailing outside sentiment would be sympathy for Romania’s people, but very little for their government.
  • Second, the force structure of the invaders is different and both stronger and weaker. Belarus has been replaced with Bulgaria, which has mobilized a gargantuan army in and of itself-albeit an army that still uses T-34s (really, there were units with those, as in Romania, up until the very end). Whereas the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, for the most part (especially in its Mobile Force units), is a lot deeper than what I’ve seen from the Russians IRL in terms of substantive modernization (where a lot of old equipment, and, more importantly, stuff like few night vision devices and still using unsecure commercial radios beneath their shiny digi-flora uniforms)
  • Third, the invasion is a lot smoother out of the gate (note that I’m not speculating on the ultimate outcome in real life as of now). This is because, if nothing else, Romania is a lot smaller, less populous, and the invasion force is a lot bigger. Oh, and said horrendous Romanian government leading to apathy rather than near-unified disdain.

However, one thing that did appear in fiction and fact is the use of high-risk to the point of questionable VDV (Airborne Forces) operations. Of course, given their prominence, this is of little real surprise. Also, writing this post was tough, as is anything in a fluid, confusing situation.