Unmasking the enemy
Key flaw in war strategy is assuming the enemy fights and looks like you

By David Wood
Newhouse News Service

The capture of a powerless and virtually helpless Saddam Hussein, alleged mastermind of Iraq’s bloody resistance, has exposed a major flaw in American strategy in the war on terrorism, analysts say.
It’s called “mirror-imaging” —assuming the enemy looks like you and thinks like you, and basing your plan of action on that assumption.

That may help explain why, eight months after the fall of Baghdad and even after Saddam’s arrest, the United States is deeply engaged in combat that it didn’t foresee or prepare for, a multibillion-dollar war that is killing scores of American soldiers, hampering Iraq’s reconstruction and draining the Pentagon of critical manpower.

The tactical breakthrough that led to Saddam was a sharp departure — and some analysts are cautiously hopeful that it signals overarching change.

Mirror-imaging is not a new problem. It helps explain why hordes of Chinese communist fighters overwhelmed American forces in Korea in late 1950.

“We didn’t understand them then, and the same thing applies today in Iraq,” said Rod Paschall, military historian and former commander of the U.S. Army’s elite anti-terrorist commandos, Delta Force.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has fumed at the problem and, in a memo this fall, seemed to despair of finding a solution.

The Defense Department, Rumsfeld wrote Oct. 16, “has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror.”

For months, the hunt for Saddam focused on finding a hierarchy of command of the kind the Pentagon would construct to run a war — battalions reporting to divisions reporting to commanders reporting to a commander in chief. Up and down communications. Sections for finance, intelligence, logistics, personnel.

Cut off the head of this organization and it would wither away, the theory said — which is why American military doctrine refers to it as “decapitation.”

That theory drove the Bush administration’s strategy of “shock and awe” and dictated early attempts to collapse Iraqi resistance by killing Saddam and his top leadership with precision-guided bombs.

In the end, of course, there was no such structure. Saddam was tracked down through “a handful of key families,” said a 4th Infantry Division brigade commander, Army Col. James Hickey, whose men made the snatch.

That tactic of working through the families may be an important turning point. But critics say most of the U.S. strategy in Iraq still suffers from mirror-imaging.

“Our whole defense structure is designed to oppose something roughly like itself,” said William Lind, a seminal Washington-based author and strategist. “The mistake is to think that whoever we are fighting has to fight just the way we do.”

But the enemy increasingly is looking like something else.

“Central to Western culture is the belief that ordinary citizens can do nothing without a strong leader. But in the far older Eastern cultures, people have long realized they can make a tremendous difference, together, without any leader at all,” said retired Marine Lt. Col. H. John Poole, a veteran war fighter and tactics instructor.

That, Poole said, means that the enemy in Iraq is decentralized, small and loosely connected cells operating autonomously and sparking almost spontaneous local attacks.

Reshaping U.S. forces

The effective response is to decentralize U.S. forces, giving more authority to the sergeants who lead platoons working city neighborhoods, getting to know the people and following local tips and leads, said Poole, who details these ideas in a new book, “The Tiger’s Way.”

“The problem is, that right there goes against everything we do,” he said.

Instead of working in small units and mingling with people, Poole said, U.S. forces in Iraq move in convoys of armored Humvees. When they do dismount, they are swaddled in layers of protective gear that mark them off from Iraqi civilians.

The traditional U.S. approach can lead to dangerous or counterproductive tactics, analysts said.

Seeking to break up the terrorist “infrastructure,” for instance, U.S. forces in Iraq got tough this fall. In a series of strikes called “Operation Iron Hammer,” troops sealed off “enemy” villages and towns, demolished the homes of suspected terrorists and used airstrikes against enemy positions in crowded urban neighborhoods.

Such tactics, Lind said, cannot break up a nonexistent terrorist command structure. But they can and do enrage the local population and make more enemies.

The CIA, in an effort to beef up its “cultural intelligence,” is reported to be sending as many as 100 agents and analysts to Iraq. The United States continues to suffer a shortage of specialists who can do such work, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported July 31.

Even so, the successful manhunt for Saddam, in the end, signals to some observers a bright new approach with enormous promise for the United States in the fighting in Iraq and elsewhere.

“We’re not quite there yet,” said Gregory Treverton, a Rand Corp. analyst and former vice chairman of the White House National Intelligence Council.

But he said the capture of the former Iraqi dictator is “an important signpost en route.”

David Wood can be contacted at david.wood @newhouse.com.


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Sempers,

Roger