Here's an excellent article from the James Glanz at the New York Times that recasts the battle for Baghdad within the context of systems disruption (Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity, December 19, 2006):
Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.Classic global guerrilla methods were employed. Small, repetitive attacks in unguarded areas of critical infrastructure (few casualties and high returns due to indirection and swarming):
The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night.Attacks on repair crews (see "The Failure of Defense and Rapid Repair" for more):
Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.Completion of the cycle through looting/crime to fund ongoing operations (see "Guerrilla Entrepreneurs Revisited" for more):
...when the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.And finally, the use of network analysis for a very simplistic, but effective, systempunkt selection:
The reason that the attacks on the high-voltage electrical lines, known as 400-kilovolt lines, have been especially devastating is that they serve as the arterial roads of the national grid, the gargantuan electrical circuit that was designed to carry power from the energy-rich north and south to the great population center in Baghdad. Throughout the country, there are perhaps 15 particularly critical 400-kilovolt lines, carried by their unmistakable 150-foot towers. The entire network runs for 2,500 miles, often passing through uninhabited desert, said Fouad Monsour Abbo, the assistant director for transmission in the Electricity Ministry.The aha moment for Iraq's global guerrillas when they discovered how to accomplish an effects based operation using broad-based systems disruption:
Electricity officials say the decisive moment came July 6, when saboteurs mounted coordinated attacks across the country, gaining a lead in the battle that the government has not been able to reverse. “They targeted all the lines at the same time, and they all came down,” Mr. Abbo said. Mr. Abbo said a typical strategy was to set off explosives at the four support points of a single tower, which would then pull down two or three more towers as it toppled. As repair crews moved in hours or days later, another tower farther up the line might be struck, and then another, in a race the government had little chance of winning.NOTE: this is a great example of how ideas are driving the evolution of warfare and will ultimately decide the winners and losers in this long war. It's interesting to note that the DoD doesn't have a mechanism for purchasing ideas that would help them win. They can spend trillions on contextually useless weapons systems and personnel but can barely free up a couple of thousand dollars on the ideas necessary to win this war (let alone a couple of million on a research firm dedicated to this).