thedrifter
04-09-05, 05:02 AM
04-08-2005
From the Editor:
A Tale of Two Reports
By Ed Offley
It’s no secret that the actual output of the Department of Defense is not measured in trained soldiers or combat-ready military units, but paper – reports, studies, prepared testimony, news releases, audits, you name it.
As Sen. Warren Rudman, a combat veteran of Korea, stated in early 2001, the Pentagon has more auditors than infantrymen. And as humorist Mort Sahl once noted, “Statistically, we won the war in Vietnam.”
Still, there are nuggets of gold in the avalanche. Here are two examples that should be read together.
Over the course of this week, I came upon a pair of separate military reports relating to Iraq whose radically different perspectives, topics and audiences – by themselves and in juxtaposition to the other – reveal much about the true state of affairs in Mesopotamia. The first was “Iraq: Translating Lessons into Future DoD Policies,” a 10-page report from the Rand Corporation to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld itemizing what its authors determined were the critical “lessons learned” from the invasion in terms of future transformation of the U.S. military. The second was “Raven 42 Action in Salman Pak,” an eight-page After Action Report on the March 20 firefight in which nine National Guard MPs fought and defeated a force of up to 50 armed Iraqi fighters that had just ambushed a supply convoy south of Baghdad.
First, let’s look at the “Dear Don” report sent by Rand President James A. Thompson to Rumsfeld on Feb. 7, then forwarded by the SecDef to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior DoD civilian officials on March 1, and subsequently leaked to the world, including DefenseWatch. A synthesis of more than 20 earlier Rand studies into various aspects of the invasion and post-combat counterinsurgency campaign, the Rand study offers a fascinating point-by-point assessment of where Rumsfeld, his senior political aides and the uniformed military leadership nearly botched the campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Here are some of the key shortcomings revealed in the report (titles added), many of which have previously been ventilated in news reports or earlier studies:
* We’ve Won – Now What? The issues of “post conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed [by DoD and CENTCOM] only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult. … The possibility that these activities might require more resources, or a different mix of resources than the earlier military operations, was not contemplated.” And: “No planning was undertaken to provide for the security of the Iraqi people in the post-conflict environment, given the expectations that the Iraqi government would remain largely intact; the Iraqi people would welcome the American presence; and local militia, police and the Iraqi Army would be capable of providing law and order.”
* Armor First: Beware the temptation to use gadgets and computer technology to replace time-tested concepts such as heavy armored vehicles and sufficient mass of ground units in combat or post-combat counterinsurgency operations. The report warned that DoD should “be cautious with respect to Army transformation plans that move to lightly armored vehicles and heavy reliance on networked information systems, given the difficulty in translating good sensor coverage of the battlefield into good situational awareness.”
* Self-Deception through Airpower: The “shock and awe” aerial bombardment campaign neither shocked nor awed anyone in Iraq, except possibly TV reporter Peter Arnett. While agreeing that coalition air supremacy caused Iraqi ground units to disperse and hide, avoiding a force-on-force confrontation, Rand analysts concluded, “Air attacks alone, however, did not achieve the broader strategic objective of *regime collapse through attacks aimed at decapitating, isolating, or breaking the will of the Iraqi leadership – the concept of ‘shock and awe.’ ”
* Back to Basics: While fixed-wing attack aircraft “took up the challenge” of supporting the rapidly-advancing Army and Marine Corps units as they raced toward Baghdad, they “were not responsive enough to take over the Army’s mission of suppressing enemy mortars and artillery,” the report found. Meanwhile, the Army’s decision to mass its AH-64 Apache attack helicopters for a “deep attack” strike “proved risky and not very productive,” a polite way of reminding the SecDef that the Apaches were nearly all shredded by Iraqi ground fire. Rand suggests that both the Army and Air Force return to basics on the close-air support mission (Hint: Don’t let the Air Force jettison the proven A-10 close-air support aircraft as it scrounges for money to buy $300-million-a-pop F/A-22s).
* Calling Jessica Lynch: Prepare all soldiers – not just “front-line” troops, since in Iraq and Afghanistan once again, there is no such thing as a front line – “to be capable of combat.”
* Silence the agitprop machine: Analysts described it as a major error that the campaign failed to shut down the enemy’s television and radio broadcasts, allowing Saddam Hussein (forget poor old “Baghdad Bob”) to be able of “manipulating perceptions internationally” long into the fight because the U.S.-led coalition was chary of taking out his transmitters for fear of causing excessive civilian casualties.
* Get serious about counterinsurgency: “Iraq underscores … the organizational tendency within the U.S. military not to absorb historical lessons when planning and conducting counterinsurgency operations.” Rand analysts strongly recommended that DoD establish an Army “dedicated cadre of counterinsurgency specialists and a program to produce such experts.”
* Get Serious about SOF: While the Iraq invasion constituted the largest employment of special operations forces in U.S. military history, they were used primarily in “direct action” strikes and have been “notably absent” in the post-combat training of Iraqi police and military units, which is a core SOF mission (foreign internal defense).
* Cure the Army Mobilization System: Calling the current system “fragmented” (a more accurate adjective would be “dysfunctional”), Rand recommends a new, centralized office to supervise and manage the call-up of Reserve and National Guard units.
* *Listen to Dissenting Views: Buried in the Rand report, and phrased in the most fuzzy wording since the last diplomatic demarche with France, is one conclusion that one hopes the SecDef by now has tattooed on his forearm: “Some process for exposing senior officials to possibilities other than those being assumed in their planning [italics added] also needs to be introduced.”
One’s reaction after plowing through the Rand document is that any victory we finally achieve in Iraq will occur despite – and not because of – the assumptions and decisions made by Pentagon planners in the months leading up to the invasion.
So where does this leave us?
On the side of the road 12 miles south of Baghdad. Nearly three weeks ago, a squad of nine MPs and a medic from the Kentucky Army National Guard driving three armored Humvees found themselves in the kill zone of a carefully-planned ambush by as many as 50 Iraqi fighters. The Iraqis had shot at a convoy of supply trucks, killing several drivers and forcing the vehicles to a halt when the MPs raced in to intervene.
The After Action report by the brigade S2 narrates with a chilling clarity what the soldiers encountered, and how they dealt with a numerically superior force that also outgunned them:
“They arrived on the scene just as a squad of about ten enemy had moved forward across the farmer’s field and were about 20 meters from the road. The MP squad opened fire with .50 cal machine guns and Mark 19 grenade launchers and drove across the front of the enemy’s kill zone, between the enemy and the trucks, drawing fire off of the tractor-trailers.”
“The MPs crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the [m-249] SAW machine gun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two-story house off on their left.”
In an instant, three soldiers are shot and wounded, and the rest of the squad maneuvered to take the Iraqis under fire while several soldiers applied combat lifesaving measures to the injured. The AAR continued:
“Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded six (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, six RPG launchers with 16 rockets, 13 RPK machine guns, 3 PKM machine guns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-round AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rounds of PK ammo.”
The AAR author explained that what made the MP response so effective and lethal was the professionalism of its NCOs and a careful training plan that paid off when they came under unexpected fire:
“They believed even before this fight that their NCOs were the best in the Army, and that they have the best squad in the Army. The medic who fired the AT-4 [shoulder-fired rocket against Iraqi snipers hiding in a nearby house], said he remembered how from the week before when his squad leader forced him to train on it, though he didn’t think as a medic he would ever use one. He said he chose to use it in that moment to protect the three wounded on the ground in front of him, once they came under fire from the building.”
“The day before this mission, they took the new RFI bandoliers that were recently issued, and experimented with mounting them in their vehicles. Once they figured out how, they pre-loaded a second basic load of ammo into magazines, put them into the bandoliers, and mounted them in their vehicles – the same exact way in every vehicle-load plans enforced and checked by leaders!”
The moral of the story from these two reports is simple. Those MPs on the ground at Salman Pak were operating in a hostile environment created in great part by the myopia and errors of the senior leaders who ordered them to Iraq with a plan that failed to envision or prepare for the prolonged insurgency that followed the fall of Baghdad. They succeeded in what could have been a fatal confrontation because – unlike the suits and four-stars – they were prepared for the ground truth.
We can only pray, as Rumsfeld and the JCS absorb the lessons learned from Iraq in the Rand report, that they take the hard and necessary steps necessary to configure the future U.S. military to perform on a strategic level as well as the MPs from the 617th Military Police Co. performed on that roadside at Salman Pak.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.
Ellie
From the Editor:
A Tale of Two Reports
By Ed Offley
It’s no secret that the actual output of the Department of Defense is not measured in trained soldiers or combat-ready military units, but paper – reports, studies, prepared testimony, news releases, audits, you name it.
As Sen. Warren Rudman, a combat veteran of Korea, stated in early 2001, the Pentagon has more auditors than infantrymen. And as humorist Mort Sahl once noted, “Statistically, we won the war in Vietnam.”
Still, there are nuggets of gold in the avalanche. Here are two examples that should be read together.
Over the course of this week, I came upon a pair of separate military reports relating to Iraq whose radically different perspectives, topics and audiences – by themselves and in juxtaposition to the other – reveal much about the true state of affairs in Mesopotamia. The first was “Iraq: Translating Lessons into Future DoD Policies,” a 10-page report from the Rand Corporation to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld itemizing what its authors determined were the critical “lessons learned” from the invasion in terms of future transformation of the U.S. military. The second was “Raven 42 Action in Salman Pak,” an eight-page After Action Report on the March 20 firefight in which nine National Guard MPs fought and defeated a force of up to 50 armed Iraqi fighters that had just ambushed a supply convoy south of Baghdad.
First, let’s look at the “Dear Don” report sent by Rand President James A. Thompson to Rumsfeld on Feb. 7, then forwarded by the SecDef to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior DoD civilian officials on March 1, and subsequently leaked to the world, including DefenseWatch. A synthesis of more than 20 earlier Rand studies into various aspects of the invasion and post-combat counterinsurgency campaign, the Rand study offers a fascinating point-by-point assessment of where Rumsfeld, his senior political aides and the uniformed military leadership nearly botched the campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Here are some of the key shortcomings revealed in the report (titles added), many of which have previously been ventilated in news reports or earlier studies:
* We’ve Won – Now What? The issues of “post conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed [by DoD and CENTCOM] only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult. … The possibility that these activities might require more resources, or a different mix of resources than the earlier military operations, was not contemplated.” And: “No planning was undertaken to provide for the security of the Iraqi people in the post-conflict environment, given the expectations that the Iraqi government would remain largely intact; the Iraqi people would welcome the American presence; and local militia, police and the Iraqi Army would be capable of providing law and order.”
* Armor First: Beware the temptation to use gadgets and computer technology to replace time-tested concepts such as heavy armored vehicles and sufficient mass of ground units in combat or post-combat counterinsurgency operations. The report warned that DoD should “be cautious with respect to Army transformation plans that move to lightly armored vehicles and heavy reliance on networked information systems, given the difficulty in translating good sensor coverage of the battlefield into good situational awareness.”
* Self-Deception through Airpower: The “shock and awe” aerial bombardment campaign neither shocked nor awed anyone in Iraq, except possibly TV reporter Peter Arnett. While agreeing that coalition air supremacy caused Iraqi ground units to disperse and hide, avoiding a force-on-force confrontation, Rand analysts concluded, “Air attacks alone, however, did not achieve the broader strategic objective of *regime collapse through attacks aimed at decapitating, isolating, or breaking the will of the Iraqi leadership – the concept of ‘shock and awe.’ ”
* Back to Basics: While fixed-wing attack aircraft “took up the challenge” of supporting the rapidly-advancing Army and Marine Corps units as they raced toward Baghdad, they “were not responsive enough to take over the Army’s mission of suppressing enemy mortars and artillery,” the report found. Meanwhile, the Army’s decision to mass its AH-64 Apache attack helicopters for a “deep attack” strike “proved risky and not very productive,” a polite way of reminding the SecDef that the Apaches were nearly all shredded by Iraqi ground fire. Rand suggests that both the Army and Air Force return to basics on the close-air support mission (Hint: Don’t let the Air Force jettison the proven A-10 close-air support aircraft as it scrounges for money to buy $300-million-a-pop F/A-22s).
* Calling Jessica Lynch: Prepare all soldiers – not just “front-line” troops, since in Iraq and Afghanistan once again, there is no such thing as a front line – “to be capable of combat.”
* Silence the agitprop machine: Analysts described it as a major error that the campaign failed to shut down the enemy’s television and radio broadcasts, allowing Saddam Hussein (forget poor old “Baghdad Bob”) to be able of “manipulating perceptions internationally” long into the fight because the U.S.-led coalition was chary of taking out his transmitters for fear of causing excessive civilian casualties.
* Get serious about counterinsurgency: “Iraq underscores … the organizational tendency within the U.S. military not to absorb historical lessons when planning and conducting counterinsurgency operations.” Rand analysts strongly recommended that DoD establish an Army “dedicated cadre of counterinsurgency specialists and a program to produce such experts.”
* Get Serious about SOF: While the Iraq invasion constituted the largest employment of special operations forces in U.S. military history, they were used primarily in “direct action” strikes and have been “notably absent” in the post-combat training of Iraqi police and military units, which is a core SOF mission (foreign internal defense).
* Cure the Army Mobilization System: Calling the current system “fragmented” (a more accurate adjective would be “dysfunctional”), Rand recommends a new, centralized office to supervise and manage the call-up of Reserve and National Guard units.
* *Listen to Dissenting Views: Buried in the Rand report, and phrased in the most fuzzy wording since the last diplomatic demarche with France, is one conclusion that one hopes the SecDef by now has tattooed on his forearm: “Some process for exposing senior officials to possibilities other than those being assumed in their planning [italics added] also needs to be introduced.”
One’s reaction after plowing through the Rand document is that any victory we finally achieve in Iraq will occur despite – and not because of – the assumptions and decisions made by Pentagon planners in the months leading up to the invasion.
So where does this leave us?
On the side of the road 12 miles south of Baghdad. Nearly three weeks ago, a squad of nine MPs and a medic from the Kentucky Army National Guard driving three armored Humvees found themselves in the kill zone of a carefully-planned ambush by as many as 50 Iraqi fighters. The Iraqis had shot at a convoy of supply trucks, killing several drivers and forcing the vehicles to a halt when the MPs raced in to intervene.
The After Action report by the brigade S2 narrates with a chilling clarity what the soldiers encountered, and how they dealt with a numerically superior force that also outgunned them:
“They arrived on the scene just as a squad of about ten enemy had moved forward across the farmer’s field and were about 20 meters from the road. The MP squad opened fire with .50 cal machine guns and Mark 19 grenade launchers and drove across the front of the enemy’s kill zone, between the enemy and the trucks, drawing fire off of the tractor-trailers.”
“The MPs crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the [m-249] SAW machine gun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two-story house off on their left.”
In an instant, three soldiers are shot and wounded, and the rest of the squad maneuvered to take the Iraqis under fire while several soldiers applied combat lifesaving measures to the injured. The AAR continued:
“Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded six (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, six RPG launchers with 16 rockets, 13 RPK machine guns, 3 PKM machine guns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-round AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rounds of PK ammo.”
The AAR author explained that what made the MP response so effective and lethal was the professionalism of its NCOs and a careful training plan that paid off when they came under unexpected fire:
“They believed even before this fight that their NCOs were the best in the Army, and that they have the best squad in the Army. The medic who fired the AT-4 [shoulder-fired rocket against Iraqi snipers hiding in a nearby house], said he remembered how from the week before when his squad leader forced him to train on it, though he didn’t think as a medic he would ever use one. He said he chose to use it in that moment to protect the three wounded on the ground in front of him, once they came under fire from the building.”
“The day before this mission, they took the new RFI bandoliers that were recently issued, and experimented with mounting them in their vehicles. Once they figured out how, they pre-loaded a second basic load of ammo into magazines, put them into the bandoliers, and mounted them in their vehicles – the same exact way in every vehicle-load plans enforced and checked by leaders!”
The moral of the story from these two reports is simple. Those MPs on the ground at Salman Pak were operating in a hostile environment created in great part by the myopia and errors of the senior leaders who ordered them to Iraq with a plan that failed to envision or prepare for the prolonged insurgency that followed the fall of Baghdad. They succeeded in what could have been a fatal confrontation because – unlike the suits and four-stars – they were prepared for the ground truth.
We can only pray, as Rumsfeld and the JCS absorb the lessons learned from Iraq in the Rand report, that they take the hard and necessary steps necessary to configure the future U.S. military to perform on a strategic level as well as the MPs from the 617th Military Police Co. performed on that roadside at Salman Pak.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.
Ellie