JANUARY2007
Why 21,500 wrongs won't make it right
By Julian Delasantellis
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA12Ak01.html
SPEAKING FREELY
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Attributed to Confucius is a maxim that advises, "Never kill a mosquito with a cannon." If adapted and updated by the operational strategists directing the United States' war in Iraq, including Tuesday's battle of Haifa Street in Baghdad, it wouldnow advise never to kill a mosquito with a cannon when you can drop a 500-pound bomb from an F-16 instead.
US President George W Bush's Wednesday address in which he committed 21,500 more troops to Iraq proves that he thinks real men don't eat quiche or listen to the Iraq Study Group, and as for the Democratic opposition, they've been cowed into obedience by the prospect of Fox News digging up a 1960s picture of them in tie-dyed shirts flashing peace signs. The upshot is at least two more years of war.
With that the case, some are wondering whether the war can be fought better in the future than it has been in the past, whether anything has been learned from the myriad mistakes over the past three years. Along those lines, much media interest is being focused on the US military's "new" counterinsurgency strategy.
Co-authored by army Lieutenant-General David Petraeus (now nominated by Bush to replace the reportedly insufficiently victory-minded General George Casey as US commander in Iraq), along with marine Lieutenant-General James F Amos, the report's recent unrestricted release has generated some controversy.
Some say the US is giving away military secrets by letting the terrorists know their strategy. Don't worry, America, all the new strategy really says is that everything you've done in Iraq for the past three years is wrong, and if anybody knows that, it is the Iraqi insurgency.
One might have thought that after Vietnam, US ground forces would have obtained a bellyful of hard-won expertise about how to conduct counterinsurgency operations. Too bad they'd rather forget than remember. As Conrad C Crane, the director of the Military History Institute at the Army War College, said in the New York Times on October 6, "Basically, after Vietnam, the general attitude of the American military was that we don't want to fight that kind of war again - the army's idea was to fight the big war against the Russians and ignore these other things."
In the early days of the Iraq war in 2003, from the crossing of the Kuwaiti border to the fall of Baghdad, this was exactly the war the US wanted and exactly what it got. The decrepit Iraqi army on the Tigris played the part of the 1980s Soviet army by the Oder. But after - in the president's words on the USS Abraham Lincoln - "major combat operations had ended", the Iraqis changed their tactics, from stand-up battles against the vastly technologically superior Americans, in which they were getting slaughtered, to insurgency.
Would that the Americans had changed their tactics at the same time.
Petraeus and Amos stress that counterinsurgency is completely different from conventional warfare, in that its objective is not to direct massive firepower on to, and thus annihilate, the armed-force groupings of the enemy, but to win the support of the civilian population. Using the US football metaphor that resonates so strongly with military-minded Americans, one commentator stated that in conventional warfare, the civilian population is the field on which the game is played, while in counterinsurgency the support of the civilian population is the end zone - when you reach it you win the game.
As Petraeus and Amos put it, "The military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents."
Successful counterinsurgents support or develop local institutions with legitimacy and the ability to provide basic services, economic order, opportunity and security. "These efforts purposefully attack the basis for the insurgency rather than just its fighters and comprehensively address the nation's core problems."
In other words, Petraeus and Amos want the troops off those huge US superbases, with their air-conditioning, clean running water and food courts that would put the Mall of America [1] to shame, into the Iraqi towns and villages so they can talk to actual Iraqis and find out what's bothering them, and how the Americans can help.
The most controversial aspect of the new approach, and the one that contrasts most sharply with current operational doctrine, is what Petraeus and Amos call the "paradox of force".
"Any use of force produces many effects, not all of which can be foreseen. The more force applied, the greater the chance of collateral damage and mistakes. Using substantial force also increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda to portray lethal military activities as brutal, " write Petraeus and Amos.
The passage that probably best explains why the bright hopes of Baghdad's liberation have gone so terribly wrong states, "Counterinsurgents should carefully calculate the type and
amount of force and who wields it for any operation. An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents."
In other words, go cold on the mosquito, even if you have target lock and your weapons are hot.
Illustrative of just how much this is a departure from current operational practice is this incident from early December, given the usual cursory coverage in the US media, fuller coverage in foreign news outlets.
US ground forces, on patrol in Salahuddin province, came under small-arms fire. They called in an air strike. The version of the story produced by the US military, and which made it unchallenged into the US media, was that 18 insurgents and two civilian women were killed. Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera said they possessed photographs indicating that 17 civilians, including six children and eight women, were killed in the raid. Local officials, including the police, reported 32 deaths.
Who is right? Who knows? One thing is certain, only the armchair civilian field marshals of US neo-conservatism would postulate that with the powerful high-explosive ordnance dropped from US warplanes, non-collateral-damage-producing air strikes are regular occurrences, or even possible, in modern warfare. Also, something in the prosecution of this war must have happened that now 60% of Iraqis, with majority support in both the Shi'ite and Sunni communities, back attacks on US forces.
But that's all in the past, right? With the new counterinsurgency doctrine, and Petraeus' assumption of command in Iraq, all those applications of disproportionately excessive force that have fueled the insurgency will be ended, the US military will recognize and understand the paradoxes of counterinsurgency, and new, softer-touch tactics will be adopted. Right?
Not on your life, or more accurately, not on a lot of more innocent Iraqi lives. Petraeus' and Amos' hard slog through two millennia of military counterinsurgency history is running straight up against the rocks of US military officer-promotion policies. Petraeus may soon to be at the top of the command pyramid in Iraq, but influencing policy lower in the ranks is difficult for any leader. Watch the military run "counterinsurgency" up the flagpole, watch it get saluted, and then watch the war be prosecuted exactly as before.
Anybody who has ever participated in the creation of one of those fatuous "strategic vision mission statements" that all organizations down to the neighborhood paperboys now spout know that there can be an enormous difference between what an organization says and what it does. Whatever it says, how it rewards or punishes its members illustrates its real priorities.
For US military officers, promotion to the next rank is the carrot. Lack of promotion leading to eventual involuntary separation (in military personnel jargon, you're either "up or out") from the service, is the stick by which the organization implements its priorities.
Promotion to a higher officer rank, which in the US military is a process decided by the individual service's officer promotion boards, is a difficult and by no means automatic process. The simple fact is that the military needs far fewer officers the higher one climbs the promotion ladder. Currently, the US Army has 22,768 officers at the O-3 captain level, but only 8,633 at the O-5 colonel rank.
Exclusive of retirements (rare when you get close to 20 years of service), if these percentages hold, it means that 2.63 captains are bucking for every colonel's billet. The ones left standing when the music stops will eventually be asked to leave the service, most without being in uniform long enough to earn one of those lucrative 20-year pensions. In the Marine Corps, the captain-to-colonel promotion rates are even more bleak, with a 2.98:1 captain-to-colonel ratio.
Okay, let's say you have two ambitious young officers serving in Iraq. Both of their units are under small-arms fire from Iraqi insurgents in a building ahead of them. One has read Petraeus and Amos, so he does not call in an air strike. Maybe he sends in his special-ops infantry team to take out the bad guys with small-arms fire. Maybe one or two of his guys get shot up in the process. Do this in this way enough times, and Petraeus and Amos say you will win the support - the "hearts and minds", as this was called in Vietnam - of the local population.
Do this enough times, and your unit could get shot up pretty bad, with attrition rates possibly approaching 50%. Yes, maybe your sector of command would be pacified, but maybe it wouldn't; how could you know what the future would hold when you first start fighting Petraeus-Amos style? Even if your operations succeed and you pacify your area, your unit will soon be transferred out of there, and who knows if your successor will be equally enlightened?
That is what happened to US Army Colonel H R McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in the Sunni city of Tal Afar. A prominent military intellectual (author of Dereliction of Duty, which stated that high-ranking military officers failed to challenge president Lyndon Johnson sufficiently when they knew his Vietnam War decisions were wrong), McMaster employed tactics that eventually made it into Petraeus-Amos. McMaster's success in the pacification of Tal Afar, against the reported resistance of then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian neo-conservative Pentagon management team, produced results so positive that even Bush cited it in exhorting
"stay the course".
But with army-unit rotation policies being what they are, eventually McMaster's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was rotated out of Tal Afar, and a new commander, less committed to the counterinsurgency theory of Petraeus-Amos, as implemented by McMaster, took over. As in most of Iraq, chaos is returning to Tal Afar.
Contrast this to the operational practice of most US commanders in Iraq, the practice decried by Petraeus-Amos.
A US unit comes under small-arms fire from a building. Air strike. Boom. No more small-arms fire, no more 20 or 30 Iraqi civilians, no more building, but no additional US casualties. The unit moves down the street. More small-arms fire, more air strikes, more collateral damage. At the end of this day, this officer may have taken out a few dozen insurgents, and 100 or so civilians, and maybe created 500 more vengeance-seeking insurgents among the dead's relatives. But in the short-term perspective that so seduces Americans both in and out of uniform, this officer's US military casualties that day are much more limited than the idealistic counterinsurgent's.
The living ghost of the secretary of defense in the Vietnam era, Robert McNamara, still haunts the Pentagon, in that they still feel best when making decisions backed up by an extensive quantitative foundation. Therefore, when both these officers appear before the promotion board, who has the better chance of advancement? Is it the one with an amorphous, and possibly ephemeral success in "pacification"? Or is it the one who has created thousands of extra insurgents who will have to be eventually dealt with but, for now, has not brought home a unit with so many casualties that the US press, Congress and general population have any further reason to pester the Pentagon brass with inopportune questions about their role in creating and furthering this long and now seemingly pointless bloodbath?
A few months ago, a US Army officer being deployed to Iraq was interviewed on local television. He said his main priority was to bring all his troops home safely. In the feel-good atmosphere that now defines US popular culture's relationship with its military, this was probably seen as noble, but nothing could be further from the truth.
As retired special-officer-turned-professor at the Naval Postgraduate School Kalev Sepp put it in The New Yorker, "It's absurd to think that you can protect the population from armed insurgents without putting your men's lives at risk. If you really want to reduce your casualties, go back to Fort Riley [Kansas]."
But that's the point, isn't it? The US military is not fighting this war in Kansas, or in any other place where it really gives a damn about the local population. If it was, the calculus between an officer's career and local civilian lives wouldn't be weighing so heavily in favor of career advancement. Despite all the focus-group-generated spin about noble troops bravely sacrificing so the grateful Iraqis can lead better lives, this war has the United States treating the Iraqis exactly as it sees the rest of the Arab world - as terrorists, towelheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers - precisely how the late Edward Said said the West saw and treated the "Other".
This choice between doing counterinsurgency right and doing it wrong is no real choice at all. Doing it wrong is not made right by doing it wrong with 21,500 more troops. Doing it wrong will not be made right by, in the president's words, loosening the "too many restrictions on the troops". This only proves that just because the president appointed Petraeus doesn't mean he read Petraeus.
Do counterinsurgency right, or not at all. Do it right, or bring the troops home.
Note
1. The Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the largest shopping mall in the US.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and professor of international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2006 Julian Delasantellis.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.