The Belmont Club and The Adventures of Chester have excellent coverage of the Fallujah campaign.

What I find interesting is how well the Marines have adapted to urban combat. Of course, there was a huge body of literature on the subject, but this is the first real campaign that shows urban theaters present no great shelter from a modern armed force.

Also interesting is the extent to which infantry is using technology:

For the first time in a major battle, guided artillery is being used quantity. In addition to the now familiar JDAMs, or GPS guided bombs, there are now GPS guided shells. Space based positioning satellites, laser range finding, robotics and networked computing are now as much a part of infantry combat as the boot heel.

Compare this with even the second Gulf War, when poor coordination between various branches of the armed forces (and especially the US and English troops) led to quite a few blue-on-blue casualties. Given that the Fallujah operation occupies a smaller geographical area and thus gives far less wiggle room to the men on the ground, I believe the US armed forces have figured out how to do jointness right.

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Captain’s Quarters quotes from the The Voyage of Earendil, which describes the capture of Morgoth, the renegade Valar responsible for much mayhem in the First Age:

… and all of the pits of Morgoth were broken and unroofed, and the might of the Valar descended into the deeps of the earth. There Morgoth stood at last at bay, and yet unvaliant. He fled into the deepest of his mines, and sued for peace and pardon; but his feet were hewn from under him, and he was hurled upon his face. Then he was bound with the chain Angainor which he had worn aforetime, and his iron crown was beaten into a collar for his neck, and his head was bowed upon his knees.

I was reading this not one week ago, and was struck by the anticlimactic similarity of it as well. Captain’s Quarters continues:

Unvaliant, indeed … his sons died fighting, a tactically stupid thing to do but a mistake that only hastened their eventual fate. Saddam, who had vowed never to be taken alive, did not even draw the pistol he carried when he was caught, and instead surrendered meekly. The Valar thrust Morgoth “through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, and into the Timeless Void”; I suspect the Iraqis have something similar in mind, if less literary and more literal.

Indeed.

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Here’s a theory why Iraqis might hold up signs calling Human Shields ‘wankers’, straight from the horse’s mouth. Salam Pax:

What really got my goat this time was finding out that they get food coupons worth 15,000 dinars per meal, 3 for every day. Fifteen thousand. Do you know how much the monthly food ration for a 4 person family is worth, for a whole month not per meal (real cost, not subsidized)? 30,000 dinars, if you get someone to buy the bad rice they give you for a decent price. 15,000. What are they eating? A whole lamb every meal?

Of course, wankers being such a curious word, unless you regularly dabble in en-gb, it’s also possible that particular sign may have been made up by a (British) human shield as a last sign of defiance, but was co-opted into a Iraqi quickie demonstration.

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The Telegraph, bless its Calcutta heart, headlines its reprint of Reuters’ story on the liberation of Baghdad: America and Anarchy March In, no doubt referring to all the looting around Baghdad and Basra. Meanwhile Scrappleface writes that the looting has suddenly stopped in Baghdad:

The looting in Baghdad stopped suddenly today as Iraq’s largest organized crime family disappeared from the city.

Thousands of Baghdad residents entered government buildings in an attempt to retrieve some small portion of what had been stolen from them for the past 24 years.

Touché.

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Only The Guardian could bring in a reference (twice!) to the Hundred Years’ War in a war that’s lasted 13 days ’til now. (via Inside Ventura County)

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Companion Pieces: Read Rahul Mahajan’s Iraq and the New Great Game and Steven Denbeste’s What Comes Next?. Then see the Powerpoint slides at the end of this article. One thing still puzzles me, though — Iraq as a “tactical pivot” I can get, but why do the slides call Egypt “the prize”?

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