Mosul Was The Largest Battle of The Decade. What Does It Say About The Future Of War

Ben Watson, Defense One: What Was The Largest Battle Of The Decade Say About The Future Of War

The bloody battle to wrest Mosul from ISIS was the world’s largest military operation in nearly 15 years.

Here’s how Western-backed Iraqi soldiers helped break the Islamic State’s grip on a city of more than 1 million people — and what we can learn from it.

DAY ONE

The Mosul offensive began on October 17, 2016, when a variegated body of more than 100,000 troops—local volunteers, regular soldiers, elite Iraqi and Western special forces—collapsed on the country's second-largest city. The force, believed to overmatch ISIS 10-to-1, moved under the cover of airpower provided by a half-dozen nations.

Advancing from the south, east and the north, Baghdad and its allies needed just 14 days to make it to Mosul’s doorstep. Iraqi special forces raced about 15 miles in those two weeks, and became the first to knock on that door. But such large-scale, coordinated assaults would prove much more difficult in the months to come.

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WNU Editor: I posted this before .... but it deserves to be read again. The battle for Mosul is going to be studied by military planners for decades, and from it new tactics and technologies are going to be developed and implemented.

Army's Next Crop of Generals Forged in Counterinsurgency

From The Washington Post:

An Army board headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus has selected several combat-tested counterinsurgency experts for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, sifting through more than 1,000 colonels to identify a handful of innovative leaders who will shape the future Army, according to current and former senior Army officers.

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My Comment: When the Iraq war started he was a major general in command of the 101rst. Now he is the top dog, influencing the selection of future commanders, and clearly is being groomed for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The key paragraph that I liked in this Washington Post story is the following:

In an article published this year on the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, McMaster challenged what he called the military's preoccupation in the 1990s with technology, to the neglect of the political and cultural dimensions of war. Military leaders must end the "self-delusion" that high-tech weapons and a "minimalist" commitment of forces can solve conflicts, he wrote.

It is always people on the ground that makes a difference in any conflict. Technology is a tool to win the battle, but it is understanding political and cultural factors that will win the peace.