thedrifter
02-08-07, 03:23 PM
The Petraeus Thinkers: Five Challenges
Published February 7th, 2007 by Herschel Smith in Terrorism, War & Warfare, Iran, Small Wars, Iraq, Department of Defense, Jihadists, al Qaeda, Ansar al Sunna, Force Projection, Syria |
The Small Wars Journal has a fascinating discussion thread that begins with a Washington Post article by reporter Thomas Ricks, entitled “Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort.” Says Ricks:
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.
Army officers tend to refer to the group as “Petraeus guys.” They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.
Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.
“Their role is crucial if we are to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war,” said a Special Forces colonel who knows some of the officers.
But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.
“Petraeus’s ‘brain trust’ is an impressive bunch, but I think it’s too late to salvage success in Iraq,” said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.
The related conversation in the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal ranges from doctrinal observations on counterinsurgency strategy to personal reflections on the public’s view of the military concerning whether there is sufficient brain power in the conventional military to develop a strategy to pull off a victory in Iraq.
I do not find it at all odd that ‘warrior-philosophers’ or ‘warrior-scholars’ would be involved in the development of strategy, while at the same time I see no compelling argument to suggest that they are situated any better than their predecessors or the balance of the military to develop the going-forward doctrine for OIF.
While a wildly unpopular view, I have been critical of the recently released counterinsurgency manual on which General Petraeus spent much of the previous couple of years developing. In War, Counterinsurgency and Prolonged Operations, I contrasted FM 3-24 with both Sun Tzu (The Art of War) and the Small Wars Manual, regarding the understanding of both of the later of the effect of prolonged operations on the morale of the warrior, and the reticence of the former on the same subject. In Snipers Having Tragic Success Against U.S. Troops (still a well-visited post), I made the observation that while snipers were one of two main prongs of insurgent success in Iraq (IEDs being the other), FM 3-24 did not contain one instance of the use of the word sniper. The retort is granted that FM 3-24 addresses counterinsurgency on a doctrinal level rather than a tactical level, but the objection loses its punch considering that (a) the Small Wars Manual addresses tactical level concerns, and (b) the fighting men from the ‘strategic corporal‘ to the field grade officer work with tactical level concerns on a daily basis. If FM 3-24 does not address tactical level issues, one must question its usefulness.
I have also questioned the Petraeus model for Mosul, stating that at all times and in all circumstances, security trumps nonkinetic operations, politics and reconstruction. The question “what have you done to win Iraqi hearts and minds today,” should have been replaced by the question, “what have you done to provide security today?” Yet the questioning attitude has not stopped with Petraeus and the Mosul experience, but extended to the previous defensive strategy in Iraq (in Habitually Offensive Operations Against Guerrillas). While it is laudable that the previous strategy has led to low casualties (i.e., the withdrawal to safe FOBs for force protection and reliance on patrols), the argument goes that not only is withdrawal to FOBs a losing strategy, but in the end it will be more costly in U.S. lives and treasure.
The Petraeus strategy holds the promise to be more population-centric, and while this strategy is more aggressive than the previous, the model has some significant hurdles to jump in order to be an effective means of long term pacification. I have previously addressed problems with the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, as well as made recommendations for moving forward. Those main ideas will be recast in this article to address the going-forward strategy in Iraq in terms of five challenges that the “Petraeus thinkers” face: [1] unmet expectations for Iraqi behavior, [2] small footprint model, [3] single insurgency focus of the COIN model versus realities on the ground, [4] ’security first’ versus violence as an exclusive-use procedure by the insurgency, and finally [5] the dynamic battlespace.
Unmet Expectations for Iraqi Behavior
The “we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up” mantra has been pivotal in the way in which the U.S. has approached the Iraq counterinsurgency for most of the four years since cessation of conventional operations. But because of religious affiliations, tribal loyalties and years of brutality under the previous regime, trust and responsibility are hard to come by in Iraq. The prevailing opinion of the Iraqi troops currently engaged in the Baghdad security plan is that they are ill-trained, ill-equipped and unprofessional as compared to the U.S. forces. Retired Iraqi officers are said to have been ’shocked’ at their performance during recent operations.
In addition to the lack of military readiness of the Iraqi security forces, the recent Karbala attack and kidnappings show once again that the apparent should not be confused with the real, and that deception is a way of life in Iraq. This issue might mark the most serious failure of the U.S. strategy since the start of the war. A counterinsurgency strategy must take into account religious and societal characteristics of the population, and in fact, these might be as important as the military approach. I have previously covered this in Iraq: Land of Lies and Deceipt, from which I quote a contractor’s view of the cultural norms in Iraq.
Are lies being told to obtain blood money payments? Some insight comes in this response to the collapse of the British trial by Stephan Holland, a Baghdad-based US contractor.
I’ve been in Iraq for about 18 months now performing construction management. It is simply not possible for me to exaggerate the massive amounts of lies we wade through every single day. There is no way - absolutely none - to determine facts from bulls*** ….
It is not even considered lying to them; it is more akin to being clever - like keeping your cards close to your chest. And they don’t just lie to westerners. They believe that appearances–saving face–are of paramount importance. They lie to each other all the time about anything in order to leverage others on a deal or manipulate an outcome of some sort or cover up some major or minor embarrassment. It’s just how they do things, period.
I’m not trying to disparage them here. I get along great with a lot of them. But even among those that I like, if something happens (on the job) I’ll get 50 wildly different stories, every time. There’s no comparison to it in any other part of the world where I’ve worked. The lying is ubiquitous and constant.
This well-known fact about the Iraqi culture caused one astute commenter in the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal to remark, ” … it sounds like the local Iraqi Police and Army is heavily infiltrated with militias. Getting rid of FOBs and setting up strongpoints with the locals sounds great but I’m not sure I would like to be bunking up with them.”
In “Surging Doubts,” published by the National Journal, Frederick Kagan goes on record conveying doubts about both the size and length of the so-called “surge.”
Despite his support for the Bush strategy, Kagan worries that the administration has fallen short in two areas — sending troops into Baghdad for too short a time and relying too heavily on the Iraqis’ taking the lead. In their report, Kagan and Keane recommend a surge in U.S. force levels lasting 18 to 24 months, a timeline that many experts doubt is feasible given the lack of political backing at home.
“When I hear Bush administration officials talk about this being an Iraqi plan with Iraqis in the lead, it also raises a big red flag to me,” Kagan said. “Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task in the past, and this plan needs to succeed even if they fail again.”
It appears that the current plan does indeed rely on the Iraqis for success.
The Small Footprint Model
The small footprint model has been used throughout OIF. Its roots stem from just war theory, and specifically the tenet of proportionate force. Its strategic justification stems from post-Vietnam counterinsurgency doctrine that attempts to prevent forces from appearing to be an occupying army. Its pragmatic justification stems from the fact that the U.S. cannot field more troops in the Iraq theater, whether because of the troops or the equipment to support them.
But the promulgation of the small footprint model has prevented the force size and force projection necessary to provide security in Iraq. Even if the U.S. has not formally and officially acknowledged that the force size was inadequate, Australia’s General Michael Jeffery has, stating that “there weren’t enough soldiers to seal Baghdad off. Because that didn’t take place everything went counter to the way the coalition and the Iraqi Government were hoping. A lack of troops, a lack of police, the structures weren’t there, the numbers weren’t there and this is a vitally important time immediately after the first battles.”
Further, force size is not equivalent to force projection, and I have pointed out that force projection is inversely proportional to the need to exercise that force. For a reminder of the value of appropriate force projection, we can turn to Thomas Ricks again in his Making the Corps.
The diverse approaches of the Army and Marines to the use of force in the Somalia mission caused the two services to inflict casualties in ways that are counterintuitive … the Marines went into Mogadishu wielding firepower for all to see. The Army tried to act more diplomatically. Paradoxically, the Marines probably would up killing fewer than 500 Somalis, most shot by Marine snipers who were using force precisely, mainly to protect fellow Marines. The Army was initially far more restrained, but then, as its mission fell apart, retaliated with greater firepower, using attack helicopters to fire on mobs in the alleyways of Mogadishu. By some estimates, these tactics killed more than 5000 Somalis.
The contrasting approaches of the Marines and Army were noted by others on the ground, friend and foe. Robert Oakley, the veteran U.S. diplomat who was the Bush administration’s special envoy to Somalia, observed that “the departure of the heavily armed, aggressively patrolling Marines from south Mogadishu obviously had a much greater psychological effect (sic) on the Somalis … than the continued presence of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) from the (Army’s) 10th Mountain Division.”
The Small Wars Journal discussion thread mentioned above contains a query: will there be a surge-II? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has hinted that the answer is no, and that forms the backdrop for the force size problems that the Petraeus thinkers have going forward. The same small footprint model that at least in part led to the current lack of security in Iraq continues unabated as the going-forward strategy. The “surge” is not large enough and does not last long enough.
The Single Insurgency Focus of Traditional Counterinsurgency Doctrine
The counterinsurgency doctrine outlined in FM 3-24 and flowing from the Vietnam experience is primarily tooled to address an insurgency. That is, the current understanding of COIN addresses the insurgency as a monolith, subject to well-aimed and executed kinetic and nonkinetic operations to pacify the population. As I have discussed in The Surge and Coming Operations in Iraq, contrary to the assertion by Gates that there were four wars going on in Iraq, I have asserted that there are no less than eight distinguishable wars:
The sectarian violence in and around Baghdad, especially in areas where there are mixed religious traditions living together.
The AQI war against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
The AAS war against the same, coupled with the war between AQI and AAS for dominance in the region.
The war of terrorism being waged by foreign fighters, jihadists whose suicide services are purchased by AQI and AAS from right across the Syrian border.
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq (primarily in Anbar), populated by the Saddam Fedayeen and other diehard Baathists, coupled with internecine tribal warfare between tribes loyal to their own purposes and those loyal to AQI.
The war between the Shi’a and Kurds for control of Kirkuk and its oil supply.
The purported operations between the Turkish forces and the Kurds.
The regional covert war being waged against the U.S. by Syria and Iran.
The difficulty with such battlefield chaos is that whether kinetic or nonkinetic operations, any action by the U.S. forces stands the risk of upsetting the balance within the region. Some operations have consequences that are so upsetting to this balance that they attempt to achieve mutually exclusive goals. What may weaken one group of insurgents serves to strengthen another. The Shi’a applaud when U.S. forces target Sunnis, and AQI benefits as we take out AAS.
Security First
Continuing a long-standing theme, in Hope and Brutality in Anbar, I asserted once again that “so-called ‘nonkinetic’ operations to win the hearts and minds of the population (candy for the children, reconstruction for the adults, pedialyte for infants) are ineffectual when violence and torture win the day. A piece of candy can’t compete with a few holes put into your rib cage with a power drill because you cooperated with the Americans … Security, i.e., a substantially defeated insurgency, is the antecedent for a successful Iraq.” The insurgents and terrorists employ violence and torture as an exclusive-use procedure to keep the population in submission because it works. They have not had to transition to government and caretaking of the population (as with traditional counterinsurgency doctrine) because their goal is not care of the population. This concern is also raised in the aforementioned National Journal article.
Perhaps the biggest mistake in the effort to rebuild Iraq, in the view of some experts, was the belief that meaningful economic development was even possible absent a base level of security that was never met in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.
“Iraq today is essentially a failed state that cannot consistently enforce the rule of law, secure its own people, or even deliver services in the face of a violent civil war,” said Carlos Pascual, the former coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the State Department. “Frankly, in such an environment, it’s next to impossible to get governmental and nongovernmental civilians to come in and effectively establish programs to employ the tens of thousands of people who need jobs. If you look at Bosnia and other civil wars, what you find is that economic activities only take root after a peace accord is signed.”
Presupposing the accuracy of this view along with the salience of the first three challenges mentioned above, there may be too many insurgencies with too few U.S. troops and too many ill-prepared Iraqi troops to provide the needed security for Iraq to succeed.
The Dynamic Battlespace
In The Broader War: Redefining our Strategy for Iraq, I discussed the continual stream of insurgents crossing the border into Iraq, and the dynamic battlefield space that this creates, stating that “The battlefield, both for military actions and so-called “nonkinetic” actions to win the people, is dynamic. As one insurgent is killed, another pops up in his place, coming not from any action the U.S. has or has not taken in Iraq, but rather, coming from hundreds or even thousands of miles away due to a religious hatred that has been taught to him from birth. The war in Iraq is both figuratively and quite literally a war without borders.”
It has been said, and correctly so, that the loss in Vietnam didn’t cause the enemy to follow us home, while a loss in Iraq will. Counterinsurgency doctrine flowing from Vietnam was unprepared for jihad - holy war - against U.S. interests, including the homeland, flowing from religious indoctrination of children from their infancy all the way through to adulthood. Pacification of cities in Iraq has usually suceeded due to the elimination of the foreign threat from the population.
It is a painful thing for the administration finally to face and admit the significance of the role of Iran in the affairs of Iraq (and in fact, in support for terror world wide). But without addressing this threat, the thinkers are surely in the unenviable position of knowing that there is nothing that can be done to win the counterinsurgency in Iraq. It is a regional war, and will require a regional solution. There is a chorus of voices urging talk with Iran and Syria, but the thinkers surely know that twenty five years of talking has placed us precisely where we are at the moment.
Will the thinkers be able to persuade the administration that we must engage the regional war in order to win in Iraq? The latest Strategic Forecasting intelligence report waxes bleak. Concerning the Karbala attack and kidnapping, along with the kidnapping of the Iranian embassy official Jalal Sharafi, Friedman and Bokhari summarize a lengthy and sweeping report with the following assessment of the U.S. situation.
An action like the Sharafi abduction allows the signal to be sent, while still falling short of mounting overt military strikes against Iran — something for which the United States currently has little appetite or resources. A covert war is within the means of the United States, and the Americans might hope that their prosecution of that war will convince Iran they are serious and to back off. Therefore, even if the kidnapping had nothing to do with the United States and Iran misreads the incident, it still could serve American interests in signaling American resolve. Given the state of the U.S. position in Iraq, the strategy well might fail — but once again, it is one of the few cards the United States has left to play.
Stratfor may be right. Even now an Iranian agent is active in the Iraqi parliament (h/t Blogs of War).
A man sentenced to death in Kuwait for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies now sits in Iraq’s parliament as a member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s ruling coalition, according to U.S. military intelligence.
Jamal Jafaar Mohammed’s seat in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Washington says he supports Shiite insurgents and acts as an Iranian agent in Iraq.
U.S. military intelligence in Iraq has approached al-Maliki’s government with the allegations against Jamal Jafaar Mohammed, whom it says assists Iranian special forces in Iraq as “a conduit for weapons and political influence.”
This kind of open, blatant warring against Iraq and the U.S. interests suggests that there is more than just a covert war occurring, with the U.S. still not fully engaged. But the importance of what is happening in Iraq cannot be underestimated. Victor Davis Hanson has expressed it well, saying We are in a rare period in American political history, in which the battlefield alone will determine the next election, perhaps not seen since 1864. The economy, scandal, social issues, domestic spending, jobs, all these usual criteria and more pale in comparison to what happens in Iraq, where a few thousand brave American soldiers will determine our collective future.
Ellie
Published February 7th, 2007 by Herschel Smith in Terrorism, War & Warfare, Iran, Small Wars, Iraq, Department of Defense, Jihadists, al Qaeda, Ansar al Sunna, Force Projection, Syria |
The Small Wars Journal has a fascinating discussion thread that begins with a Washington Post article by reporter Thomas Ricks, entitled “Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort.” Says Ricks:
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.
Army officers tend to refer to the group as “Petraeus guys.” They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.
Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.
“Their role is crucial if we are to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war,” said a Special Forces colonel who knows some of the officers.
But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.
“Petraeus’s ‘brain trust’ is an impressive bunch, but I think it’s too late to salvage success in Iraq,” said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.
The related conversation in the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal ranges from doctrinal observations on counterinsurgency strategy to personal reflections on the public’s view of the military concerning whether there is sufficient brain power in the conventional military to develop a strategy to pull off a victory in Iraq.
I do not find it at all odd that ‘warrior-philosophers’ or ‘warrior-scholars’ would be involved in the development of strategy, while at the same time I see no compelling argument to suggest that they are situated any better than their predecessors or the balance of the military to develop the going-forward doctrine for OIF.
While a wildly unpopular view, I have been critical of the recently released counterinsurgency manual on which General Petraeus spent much of the previous couple of years developing. In War, Counterinsurgency and Prolonged Operations, I contrasted FM 3-24 with both Sun Tzu (The Art of War) and the Small Wars Manual, regarding the understanding of both of the later of the effect of prolonged operations on the morale of the warrior, and the reticence of the former on the same subject. In Snipers Having Tragic Success Against U.S. Troops (still a well-visited post), I made the observation that while snipers were one of two main prongs of insurgent success in Iraq (IEDs being the other), FM 3-24 did not contain one instance of the use of the word sniper. The retort is granted that FM 3-24 addresses counterinsurgency on a doctrinal level rather than a tactical level, but the objection loses its punch considering that (a) the Small Wars Manual addresses tactical level concerns, and (b) the fighting men from the ‘strategic corporal‘ to the field grade officer work with tactical level concerns on a daily basis. If FM 3-24 does not address tactical level issues, one must question its usefulness.
I have also questioned the Petraeus model for Mosul, stating that at all times and in all circumstances, security trumps nonkinetic operations, politics and reconstruction. The question “what have you done to win Iraqi hearts and minds today,” should have been replaced by the question, “what have you done to provide security today?” Yet the questioning attitude has not stopped with Petraeus and the Mosul experience, but extended to the previous defensive strategy in Iraq (in Habitually Offensive Operations Against Guerrillas). While it is laudable that the previous strategy has led to low casualties (i.e., the withdrawal to safe FOBs for force protection and reliance on patrols), the argument goes that not only is withdrawal to FOBs a losing strategy, but in the end it will be more costly in U.S. lives and treasure.
The Petraeus strategy holds the promise to be more population-centric, and while this strategy is more aggressive than the previous, the model has some significant hurdles to jump in order to be an effective means of long term pacification. I have previously addressed problems with the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, as well as made recommendations for moving forward. Those main ideas will be recast in this article to address the going-forward strategy in Iraq in terms of five challenges that the “Petraeus thinkers” face: [1] unmet expectations for Iraqi behavior, [2] small footprint model, [3] single insurgency focus of the COIN model versus realities on the ground, [4] ’security first’ versus violence as an exclusive-use procedure by the insurgency, and finally [5] the dynamic battlespace.
Unmet Expectations for Iraqi Behavior
The “we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up” mantra has been pivotal in the way in which the U.S. has approached the Iraq counterinsurgency for most of the four years since cessation of conventional operations. But because of religious affiliations, tribal loyalties and years of brutality under the previous regime, trust and responsibility are hard to come by in Iraq. The prevailing opinion of the Iraqi troops currently engaged in the Baghdad security plan is that they are ill-trained, ill-equipped and unprofessional as compared to the U.S. forces. Retired Iraqi officers are said to have been ’shocked’ at their performance during recent operations.
In addition to the lack of military readiness of the Iraqi security forces, the recent Karbala attack and kidnappings show once again that the apparent should not be confused with the real, and that deception is a way of life in Iraq. This issue might mark the most serious failure of the U.S. strategy since the start of the war. A counterinsurgency strategy must take into account religious and societal characteristics of the population, and in fact, these might be as important as the military approach. I have previously covered this in Iraq: Land of Lies and Deceipt, from which I quote a contractor’s view of the cultural norms in Iraq.
Are lies being told to obtain blood money payments? Some insight comes in this response to the collapse of the British trial by Stephan Holland, a Baghdad-based US contractor.
I’ve been in Iraq for about 18 months now performing construction management. It is simply not possible for me to exaggerate the massive amounts of lies we wade through every single day. There is no way - absolutely none - to determine facts from bulls*** ….
It is not even considered lying to them; it is more akin to being clever - like keeping your cards close to your chest. And they don’t just lie to westerners. They believe that appearances–saving face–are of paramount importance. They lie to each other all the time about anything in order to leverage others on a deal or manipulate an outcome of some sort or cover up some major or minor embarrassment. It’s just how they do things, period.
I’m not trying to disparage them here. I get along great with a lot of them. But even among those that I like, if something happens (on the job) I’ll get 50 wildly different stories, every time. There’s no comparison to it in any other part of the world where I’ve worked. The lying is ubiquitous and constant.
This well-known fact about the Iraqi culture caused one astute commenter in the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal to remark, ” … it sounds like the local Iraqi Police and Army is heavily infiltrated with militias. Getting rid of FOBs and setting up strongpoints with the locals sounds great but I’m not sure I would like to be bunking up with them.”
In “Surging Doubts,” published by the National Journal, Frederick Kagan goes on record conveying doubts about both the size and length of the so-called “surge.”
Despite his support for the Bush strategy, Kagan worries that the administration has fallen short in two areas — sending troops into Baghdad for too short a time and relying too heavily on the Iraqis’ taking the lead. In their report, Kagan and Keane recommend a surge in U.S. force levels lasting 18 to 24 months, a timeline that many experts doubt is feasible given the lack of political backing at home.
“When I hear Bush administration officials talk about this being an Iraqi plan with Iraqis in the lead, it also raises a big red flag to me,” Kagan said. “Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task in the past, and this plan needs to succeed even if they fail again.”
It appears that the current plan does indeed rely on the Iraqis for success.
The Small Footprint Model
The small footprint model has been used throughout OIF. Its roots stem from just war theory, and specifically the tenet of proportionate force. Its strategic justification stems from post-Vietnam counterinsurgency doctrine that attempts to prevent forces from appearing to be an occupying army. Its pragmatic justification stems from the fact that the U.S. cannot field more troops in the Iraq theater, whether because of the troops or the equipment to support them.
But the promulgation of the small footprint model has prevented the force size and force projection necessary to provide security in Iraq. Even if the U.S. has not formally and officially acknowledged that the force size was inadequate, Australia’s General Michael Jeffery has, stating that “there weren’t enough soldiers to seal Baghdad off. Because that didn’t take place everything went counter to the way the coalition and the Iraqi Government were hoping. A lack of troops, a lack of police, the structures weren’t there, the numbers weren’t there and this is a vitally important time immediately after the first battles.”
Further, force size is not equivalent to force projection, and I have pointed out that force projection is inversely proportional to the need to exercise that force. For a reminder of the value of appropriate force projection, we can turn to Thomas Ricks again in his Making the Corps.
The diverse approaches of the Army and Marines to the use of force in the Somalia mission caused the two services to inflict casualties in ways that are counterintuitive … the Marines went into Mogadishu wielding firepower for all to see. The Army tried to act more diplomatically. Paradoxically, the Marines probably would up killing fewer than 500 Somalis, most shot by Marine snipers who were using force precisely, mainly to protect fellow Marines. The Army was initially far more restrained, but then, as its mission fell apart, retaliated with greater firepower, using attack helicopters to fire on mobs in the alleyways of Mogadishu. By some estimates, these tactics killed more than 5000 Somalis.
The contrasting approaches of the Marines and Army were noted by others on the ground, friend and foe. Robert Oakley, the veteran U.S. diplomat who was the Bush administration’s special envoy to Somalia, observed that “the departure of the heavily armed, aggressively patrolling Marines from south Mogadishu obviously had a much greater psychological effect (sic) on the Somalis … than the continued presence of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) from the (Army’s) 10th Mountain Division.”
The Small Wars Journal discussion thread mentioned above contains a query: will there be a surge-II? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has hinted that the answer is no, and that forms the backdrop for the force size problems that the Petraeus thinkers have going forward. The same small footprint model that at least in part led to the current lack of security in Iraq continues unabated as the going-forward strategy. The “surge” is not large enough and does not last long enough.
The Single Insurgency Focus of Traditional Counterinsurgency Doctrine
The counterinsurgency doctrine outlined in FM 3-24 and flowing from the Vietnam experience is primarily tooled to address an insurgency. That is, the current understanding of COIN addresses the insurgency as a monolith, subject to well-aimed and executed kinetic and nonkinetic operations to pacify the population. As I have discussed in The Surge and Coming Operations in Iraq, contrary to the assertion by Gates that there were four wars going on in Iraq, I have asserted that there are no less than eight distinguishable wars:
The sectarian violence in and around Baghdad, especially in areas where there are mixed religious traditions living together.
The AQI war against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
The AAS war against the same, coupled with the war between AQI and AAS for dominance in the region.
The war of terrorism being waged by foreign fighters, jihadists whose suicide services are purchased by AQI and AAS from right across the Syrian border.
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq (primarily in Anbar), populated by the Saddam Fedayeen and other diehard Baathists, coupled with internecine tribal warfare between tribes loyal to their own purposes and those loyal to AQI.
The war between the Shi’a and Kurds for control of Kirkuk and its oil supply.
The purported operations between the Turkish forces and the Kurds.
The regional covert war being waged against the U.S. by Syria and Iran.
The difficulty with such battlefield chaos is that whether kinetic or nonkinetic operations, any action by the U.S. forces stands the risk of upsetting the balance within the region. Some operations have consequences that are so upsetting to this balance that they attempt to achieve mutually exclusive goals. What may weaken one group of insurgents serves to strengthen another. The Shi’a applaud when U.S. forces target Sunnis, and AQI benefits as we take out AAS.
Security First
Continuing a long-standing theme, in Hope and Brutality in Anbar, I asserted once again that “so-called ‘nonkinetic’ operations to win the hearts and minds of the population (candy for the children, reconstruction for the adults, pedialyte for infants) are ineffectual when violence and torture win the day. A piece of candy can’t compete with a few holes put into your rib cage with a power drill because you cooperated with the Americans … Security, i.e., a substantially defeated insurgency, is the antecedent for a successful Iraq.” The insurgents and terrorists employ violence and torture as an exclusive-use procedure to keep the population in submission because it works. They have not had to transition to government and caretaking of the population (as with traditional counterinsurgency doctrine) because their goal is not care of the population. This concern is also raised in the aforementioned National Journal article.
Perhaps the biggest mistake in the effort to rebuild Iraq, in the view of some experts, was the belief that meaningful economic development was even possible absent a base level of security that was never met in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.
“Iraq today is essentially a failed state that cannot consistently enforce the rule of law, secure its own people, or even deliver services in the face of a violent civil war,” said Carlos Pascual, the former coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the State Department. “Frankly, in such an environment, it’s next to impossible to get governmental and nongovernmental civilians to come in and effectively establish programs to employ the tens of thousands of people who need jobs. If you look at Bosnia and other civil wars, what you find is that economic activities only take root after a peace accord is signed.”
Presupposing the accuracy of this view along with the salience of the first three challenges mentioned above, there may be too many insurgencies with too few U.S. troops and too many ill-prepared Iraqi troops to provide the needed security for Iraq to succeed.
The Dynamic Battlespace
In The Broader War: Redefining our Strategy for Iraq, I discussed the continual stream of insurgents crossing the border into Iraq, and the dynamic battlefield space that this creates, stating that “The battlefield, both for military actions and so-called “nonkinetic” actions to win the people, is dynamic. As one insurgent is killed, another pops up in his place, coming not from any action the U.S. has or has not taken in Iraq, but rather, coming from hundreds or even thousands of miles away due to a religious hatred that has been taught to him from birth. The war in Iraq is both figuratively and quite literally a war without borders.”
It has been said, and correctly so, that the loss in Vietnam didn’t cause the enemy to follow us home, while a loss in Iraq will. Counterinsurgency doctrine flowing from Vietnam was unprepared for jihad - holy war - against U.S. interests, including the homeland, flowing from religious indoctrination of children from their infancy all the way through to adulthood. Pacification of cities in Iraq has usually suceeded due to the elimination of the foreign threat from the population.
It is a painful thing for the administration finally to face and admit the significance of the role of Iran in the affairs of Iraq (and in fact, in support for terror world wide). But without addressing this threat, the thinkers are surely in the unenviable position of knowing that there is nothing that can be done to win the counterinsurgency in Iraq. It is a regional war, and will require a regional solution. There is a chorus of voices urging talk with Iran and Syria, but the thinkers surely know that twenty five years of talking has placed us precisely where we are at the moment.
Will the thinkers be able to persuade the administration that we must engage the regional war in order to win in Iraq? The latest Strategic Forecasting intelligence report waxes bleak. Concerning the Karbala attack and kidnapping, along with the kidnapping of the Iranian embassy official Jalal Sharafi, Friedman and Bokhari summarize a lengthy and sweeping report with the following assessment of the U.S. situation.
An action like the Sharafi abduction allows the signal to be sent, while still falling short of mounting overt military strikes against Iran — something for which the United States currently has little appetite or resources. A covert war is within the means of the United States, and the Americans might hope that their prosecution of that war will convince Iran they are serious and to back off. Therefore, even if the kidnapping had nothing to do with the United States and Iran misreads the incident, it still could serve American interests in signaling American resolve. Given the state of the U.S. position in Iraq, the strategy well might fail — but once again, it is one of the few cards the United States has left to play.
Stratfor may be right. Even now an Iranian agent is active in the Iraqi parliament (h/t Blogs of War).
A man sentenced to death in Kuwait for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies now sits in Iraq’s parliament as a member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s ruling coalition, according to U.S. military intelligence.
Jamal Jafaar Mohammed’s seat in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Washington says he supports Shiite insurgents and acts as an Iranian agent in Iraq.
U.S. military intelligence in Iraq has approached al-Maliki’s government with the allegations against Jamal Jafaar Mohammed, whom it says assists Iranian special forces in Iraq as “a conduit for weapons and political influence.”
This kind of open, blatant warring against Iraq and the U.S. interests suggests that there is more than just a covert war occurring, with the U.S. still not fully engaged. But the importance of what is happening in Iraq cannot be underestimated. Victor Davis Hanson has expressed it well, saying We are in a rare period in American political history, in which the battlefield alone will determine the next election, perhaps not seen since 1864. The economy, scandal, social issues, domestic spending, jobs, all these usual criteria and more pale in comparison to what happens in Iraq, where a few thousand brave American soldiers will determine our collective future.
Ellie