Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
Zarqawi was a convict and former street thug whose formal weapons handling training approximated zero. The better comparison would be between Zarqawi and your average mid-level Crip leader rather than Zarqawi and an American soldier.

Compare vs. Arab forces which are actually motivated and trained as Western forces are --- i.e. Hizbullah and Amal, both trained by Iranians. Even their village militias showed excellent fire discipline in 2006.

If you want to believe that Omar Bradley made a perfectly reasonable decision based totally on his own military judgment in 1944, I suppose I won't be convincing you otherwise. Corlett himself thought that Bradley was snubbing him out of prideful disdain rather than reasonable disagreement, however. According to Corlett:

"I was pretty well squelched for my question [regarding why Army troops would attack using LCVPs and LCAs instead of LVTs]. I soon got the feeling that American generals in England considered anything that had happened in the Pacific strictly 'Bush League stuff' which didn't merit any consideration.'"
If you read one of the articles posted, you would have seen that the same remark was made about the performance of some Iraqi troops being trained by the US.

I do not believe that Bradley had a completely objective military basis for the judgement he made, but he did have one, however flawed that was, given the resources at his disposal and his professional appreciation of what he was facing. That personal feelings affected this does not change the fact that he still had a military basis upon which to render the judgement he did, however faulty that judgement was (and it most certainly was flawed) and the role of emotions in colouring that judgement. The Saudi general in his own admission, did not, and consciously and deliberately rejected any and all outside help even as he knew that his own troops had neither training nor equipent at hand for the breech. Bradley may have deceived himself, believing that all the firepower and engineer resources he had at hand would certainly be sufficient to do the job; the Saudi was not deceived, and went ahead anyway.

Hezbollah is in no way representative of the armies of the Arab world in general, and even the latter suffered tactical defeat by the end of last year's Israeli invasion (a pyrrhic victory to be sure). As you observed, intensive Iranian training has had its effect - but unlike many other Arab armed forces, these two have been engage in more-or less constant wars for survival, which may have softened their resistance to outside training - even to help from the "Persians" - albeit fellow Shi'a. Amal has not been a major factor for some years, and its fighting prowess dubious.

And Hezbollah, for all the striking political success it scored, has suffered the loss of the majority of its best fighting men. It is now a shell of what it used to be, and has kept fairly quiet, militarily, ever since. Not to mention thst the Israelis, by their own admission, were even maintaining their own fighting standards, having not only let them slip in order to concentrate on intrnal security operations, but in fact had cancelled the annual training of Reservists - which has since ben restored.

There are points in the two articles that I posted the links to that have not been addressed. Here is a more direct handling of the matter by a USMC trainer of the Iraqi Army posted on our own site: "partnering with the Iraqi Security Forces" by Lt.Col. P.C. Skuta, CO 2/7th Marines:


http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/skuta.htm

About a quarter of the way down the page he makes the observation that US trainers should:

Start off slow. Lawrence says, “Go easy for the first few weeks. A bad start is difficult to atone for, and the Arabs form their judgments on externals that we ignore.” How true. It was beneficial for the battalion to take a ‘crawl, walk, run” approach to training and operating with the ISF. Especially if there is a lack of trust, and underdeveloped personal relationships, the Iraqis would be hesitant to adopt U.S. processes. This was not because the Iraqis had a negative view of U.S. military techniques, quiet the contrary; it was because they maintained Arab and Iraqi pride. (boldface added)