"It's a tougher fight than it was at the beginning," the chairman said.
"At the same time, we have 'attritted' somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of his main ground force capabilities," Admiral Mullen said. "Those will continue to go away over time."
I'd love to know what the metric of this is. Is he talking about tanks? All heavy equipment? Because I think Khaddafi could last quite a while under this attrition:
Libya started the war with 2,000 main battle tanks, over a thousand infantry fighting vehicles and armored reconnaissance vehicles, a thousand armored personnel carriers, nearly 2.5 thousand artillery pieces, and nearly 500 anti-aircraft guns which could be used on ground targets, too. If NATO knocks out 50 per day, Libya could in theory carry on for 140 days. Do the British and French have enough precision weapons to carry on at that rate for nearly four months? And Libya is using civilians vehicles, too. Further, while not all military vehicles or heavy weapons are in working order, even the hulks could be towed out to simulate a real, working tank to serve as smart bomb bait.
Using Mullen's figures and assuming he's talking about all heavy weapons, we've knocked out 60-80 heavy weapons every day since we intervened. I sincerely doubt that we have inflicted that much damage each and every day. But until I know what the metric of destruction is, I can't really say.
But just accepting Mullen's statment at face value doesn't mean that Khaddafi's military ground combat capability is reduced 30-40%. Khaddafi uses civilian vehicles to haul around troops and weapons, has called in mercenaries, and--as I've mentioned--only uses a small portion of his arsenal for his remaining forces. How much attrition do we have to inflict before there are any shortages of heavy weapons amongst the loyalists in combat? I mean, if Khaddafi's frontline troops can only man 1,000 heavy weapons of all types (this is purely a wild-ass guess for illustrative purposes only), we'd have to reach the destruction of 6,000 of Khaddafi's pre-war 7,000 (87%) to even begin to impact the equipment levels of the loyalists. Does non-America NATO have that many smart bombs?
And the figure Mullen cites assumes we have accurately assessed the battle damage of our air strikes.
I just don't think heavy weapons counts are any better than body counts in measuring our progress in getting Khaddafi to go. The only sure way is to make sure somebody's army marches into Tripoli.
And with Russia and Greece talking to Libya to save Khaddafi by getting a ceasefire put in place, that army had best march in fast.
