RUSSIAN SITE’S VERSION OF COL. DOWDY REMOVAL:

RUSSIAN SITE’S VERSION OF COL. DOWDY REMOVAL: Back on March 25, I wrote about the pair of Russian websites that seem to be being maintained by Russia’s GRU military intelligence. Since then, I’ve intermittently been trying to assess these sites’ output.
Today, a piece on the English-language version of www.iraqwar.ru writes about yesterday morning’s surprise removal/replacement of the commander of the 1st Expeditionary Marine Squadron, Col. Joe Dowdy. No public explanation of this move has yet been provided by the US brass. The Russian site says that Col. Dowdy was, “deposed, ‘?for utmost hesitation and loss of the initiative during the storm of An-Nasiriya?’. This way the coalition command in Qatar found an excuse for their military faults by that town. The ‘guilt’ of the colonel was in his refusing to enter the town for almost 3 days and trying to suppress Iraqi resistance with artillery and aviation, trying to avoid losses.”
The Russians give no source for the portion they put in quotes there. Elsewhere, they frequently cite “intercepted communications” as their source.
Last week, reading a piece on one of the GRU sites, I got pretty excited that they seemed to have good knowledge of internal communications not just in the battlefield in Iraq, but also inside the Pentagon. Things they were writing then would appear in the Washington Post two or three days later. Then I thought, Nah, maybe it’s not the Pentagon they’re bugging. Maybe it’s just the internal chitchat among the WP reporters.
Back in the 1980s, I used to study the Russian military quite closely. Back then, of course, they were still the Soviets. Their military analysis then was often pretty sophisticated, and it still seems to be so. One of the things they often do on these new websites, this one and this one, is to assess the effectiveness that the US military’s tactics, as revealed in Iraq, would have on any operations inside northern Eurasian terrain. By no means a stupid thing to do!
And they also seem happy to let readers see– to some degree– how smart they are at whatever combination of actual listening and disinformation this is. Not stupid at all. And often, actually, quite interesting and well done.
Please send me your comments.