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More on Mosul Offensive

Christopher A. Lawrence
September 29, 2016

Ran across this very optimistic article on Mosul: Uncertainly Roils Planning for Mosul Liberation

As the sub-headline notes, “ISIS fighters fleeing Iraq’s second largest city as coalition forces prepare for tough fight.” If ISIL fighters are fleeing the city….it may not be that tough of a fight.

A few notes:

U.S. Army asked for another 500 troops (I gather the real number is 615).
U.S. “authorities” say they will need at least 24,000 trained, well equipped Iraqi soldiers (this is less than the 30,000 reported in some articles).
Provides three specific accounts of recent ISIL losses in battle (from sources I don’t know). The two from air strikes that could easily be over-estimated, but the 40 lost from a counterattack in the Qayara area gets my attention. Was this a company-sized attack?
Approximately 20,000 “terrorists” are in Mosul.
There is a force of 1,000 “resistance fighters” in the city, meaning a Iraqi fifth column.

Article was written by someone named Douglas Burton who is: “…a former U.S. State Department official in Kirkuk, Iraq and writes news and commentary from Washington, D.C.”

Anyhow, unusually optimistic article. If true, Mosul could easily fall. We have seen before in Iraq and Afghanistan that some of these climatic fights are indeed anti-climatic as the defending force mostly bails out ahead of time.

Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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