War, the military, COIN and stuff

Blogging the Long War

In one of my last official acts as a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, I wrote a long profile of milblogger Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal site. I finished the piece up while I was in Iraq this past February, where I added some on-the-ground material to it. The piece was published in the March/April edition of CJR, and this week,  they posted it on their Web site. Free of charge.

It starts off a little something like this:

For much of the twentieth century, Americans co-existed with the country’s armed forces in a way we don’t anymore. In the 1940s and ’50s, millions of Americans served in the fight against imperial Japan and Hitler’s Germany, as well as Kim Il Sung’s North Korea and its Chinese allies; in the sixties, millions of boomers wore the uniform in the jungles of Vietnam or on large bases in Europe, Asia, and in the States. Service, or the possibility of service, was a way of life.

After the draft was abolished in the 1970s, the military increasingly became an institution apart from society at large, a process that was hastened by the “peace dividend” that followed the end of the cold war, which allowed for a significant downsizing of the armed forces. While those who served continued to pass along the tradition to subsequent generations, those who didn’t hardly gave the armed services a second thought. It was an arrangement that seemed to work well for both groups as long as peace prevailed.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, among the seven-hundred-odd journalists who embedded with combat units were few who were familiar with the military in any intimate way. To many critics, especially those with military experience, this revealed itself in the press’s coverage of the war, which they felt often missed the mark when it came to explaining the hows and the whys of the fight, as well as the mundane realities of military life and culture. It wasn’t long before a rash of blogs—dubbed “milblogs” and written by soldiers in the field and civilians back home, many of whom were veterans—emerged to describe life in a military at war and complain about the press’s failings, real or imagined. Anyone familiar with the way milbloggers set upon and picked apart a series of controversial dispatches by Private Scott Beauchamp, an active-duty soldier serving in Iraq, published last summer in The New Republic, has a good sense of the kind of in-the-weeds analysis this community is capable of.

Please read the rest over at CJR.

   

Iraqi Army gets stuck

As fighting rages for a third day in the Iraqi cities of Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere between government forces and Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and perhaps more troubling, between the Mahdi Army and its rival Shiite group the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, we’re being given a glimpse into how the Iraqi army functions without the safety net of American or British military support.

One aspect of the fight is how the IA is using its technically superior equipment to leverage some advantage over the militia groups.

Please read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog 

All the young punks

Earlier this week, I participated in a Pentagon conference call with Colonel Daniel Roper, director of the Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Since I’ve spent the bulk of my time on this site writing about the big counterinsurgency effort currently underway in Iraq—funding the Sons of Iraq movement—I figured it would be fruitful to ask the Colonel what the Center thinks is the way forward with the group.

Remember, the Sons of Iraq—or Concerned Local Citizens, take your pick—are comprised of 80,000 armed Iraqis the American command is paying $10 a day apiece to, so that they’ll pull security in their own neighborhoods. The plan has cost the American taxpayer $143 million so far, and I was wondering what the endgame was, from the perspective of a American military think tank devoted to just such issues.

 Turns out, I asked the wrong guy. The Counterinsurgency Center isn’t studying the issue at all. The Colonel did, however, offer that:

I saw a statement Lieutenant General Odierno made shortly after coming back from MNTI Command, and I believe he said that approximately 20 percent of the people that were recruited into the…[Sons of Iraq]…were going to make their way into the Iraqi security -- you know, actually, the Iraqi police or maybe the Iraqi army because of the different requirements physical and so forth for them to -- to meet those demands and those criteria.

But it's an initial step -- the CLC by itself is not -- is not any kind of long-term strategy. It does an initial bit of vetting, it gets the bad guys off the street, it gets them, you know, in the tent, and then it's up to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi governance processes to provide them the economic opportunity to have some other meaningful form of employment.

This was really disappointing, considering that, as Col. Roper said earlier in the call, his organization is tasked with “researching best practices from the past in order to prepare ourselves for the future,” and working on the improvement of doctrine. What better way to improve doctrine and research best practices than to look at what is a major part of our current counterinsurgency plan in Iraq?

His answer resembled what commanders on the ground in Iraq told me when I asked what they thought we should do with the Sons of Iraq. The difference being, Col. Roper’s center is supposed to be figuring this stuff out, whereas the soldiers on the ground are merely following orders.

For a better look at what’s happening with the Sons of Iraq groups, and efforts to wrest some of these fighters away from their checkpoints and into other lines of work, check out the Los Angeles Times’ Alexandra Zavis’ latest piece from Iraq:

U.S. and Iraqi officials are now hammering out details of a plan to revive local economies and create new opportunities for the fighters through vocational training, public works schemes, farm revitalization programs, micro-grants and business start-up loans. The two governments have committed $155 million apiece to the projects.

Problem is, not all of the guys at the checkpoints are interested in being retrained.
 

Nasir, the unemployed wedding singer, readily agreed to join the new program. But it has not been easy to persuade the proud tribesmen to trade in their AK-47s for trash bags and brooms. Some were wealthy landowners under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime. Many hold university degrees.

"I graduated from the teaching college. I don't want to sweep the streets," said Daoud Salman, a tall man in traditional Arab robes.

Salman, a father of four, said his former comrades-in-arms laugh at him when they see him picking up trash and burning reeds to clear canals supplying water to farms.

This isn’t to say that the job training programs won’t be successful, at least in part. But with 80,000 mostly Sunni men out there—only 20 percent of whom the Shia-controlled government is willing to absorb into the Army and Police—we better get the Iraqis to pony up more money to get these guys some more comprehensive training than sweeping the streets.

The Grunts and the Press

A handful of soldiers stood around a bonfire at Joint Security Station Tarmiya, feeding the flames by tossing empty cardboard boxes from that day’s mail delivery into the pit. The former youth sports complex that serves as the home base for the 180 men of C company has an open courtyard in the middle where a fire pit has been set up, and it has become the place where soldiers gather in the evenings to get out of the confining space of the building to smoke, listen to music, and more often than not, stare into the flames in silence.

In the middle of this daily routine one night this past February, the familiar crack of automatic gunfire broke the relative stillness just outside the walls of the base, causing a few soldiers to turn down the country music they had been listening to. Another pop went off, then nothing more. The silhouettes of the guards up on the roof could be seen darting back and forth looking for the source of the gunfire, but as so often happens, the shooter had melted away into the night.

At the time, I had been in the middle of a conversation with a soldier who, when I told him I was a reporter, said, “Man, you must be making a lot of money to be here.”

If a soldier had only said this to me once, I probably would have forgotten it; twice, a coincidence. But at least a half dozen times over the four weeks I spent with infantry units in Iraq, soldiers suggested I must be getting paid extra to be there. In a way, this disconnect between perception and reality is funny, because journalists often joke about how little money we make. When I would tell the soldiers that I was making just as much by coming to Iraq as I would sitting in my office in New York, they invariably asked why I had come. The grunts didn’t seem as worked up about the lack of coverage back home of the war, which in a way makes sense: they’re living it. But in writing this series, I’ve received enough e-mails from mothers, fathers, and wives of soldiers deployed in Iraq who told me how hard it is to get any news out of Iraq these days.

Five years into the war, news organizations have understandably cut back a bit, given the immense cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau. From life insurance for reporters to guards, armored cars (which not all bureaus have), and fortified houses outside of the Green Zone, reporting from Iraq is an incredibly expensive proposition.

But embedding with infantry units is free. Flights to Kuwait, where the Army public affairs team picks you up and puts you on a military aircraft to Iraq, and insurance still cost, but once you’re embedded, your expenses end. And that’s why I can’t understand why every major news organization doesn’t have one reporter embedded with a combat unit at all times. They won’t always be able to file stories, but they can contribute a steady stream of material about the fight—and the ground-level diplomacy—being waged by young American captains, lieutenants, and sergeants. The fact that I spent four weeks in Iraq and only ran into one stringer working for an American newspaper is testament to how few reporters are out in the field. Of course, there are reporters in Iraq, and my time bouncing between combat outposts constitutes an official census; but it is significant that in every unit I was with, I was the first reporter they had seen. It was the same story back in 2006, with I embedded with the 2nd Marine Division in Fallujah....

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The Bridge

This past week,  I left my job as a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review to take a position as Senior Editor of Defense Technology International, the coolest defense mag in the biz. While I'll be cranking out longer pieces for the print magazine, I'll also post regularly at ARES, the magazine's awesome blog. If you haven't already done so, bookmark that  page right now. I'm going to keep at it on this blog, too, so don't abandon ship.

I finally blogged my my first post today on a look inside an American air strike inside Pakistani territory on March 12 that Long War Journal embedded reporter Phil Peterson witnessed from  inside Bagram Air Base’s Joint Operation Center's operation cell. Check it out. 

Idiot of the Week

In a recent House hearing on the status of American efforts to assist the millions of Iraqis displaced by the war, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher spit out some lines that deserve some ridicule.

Arguing that things are so safe in Iraq these days that there's nothing more for these refugees and displaced people to be afraid of, Rohrabacher said, "It is not the job of the people of the United States to subsidize the existence and living standards of refugees in Jordan or anywhere else if they have the option of going home."

The problem is, for many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees stuck Jordan, Syria,  Turkey, and Egypt, going home isn't an option.  Part of the reason that violence in Iraq is down is that many neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed, with one group being pushed out almost completely, and their houses taken over by people of the rival sect. Simply put, many of these refugees have no place to go home to.

Rohrabacher isn't much better when it comes to the matter of Iraqi terps, either. The United States has alloted 500 visa slots for translators who have worked for U.S. government or military units--a number which has already been reached for 2008. While the president signed a bill to increase that number to 5,000, according to the Washington Post, "it may be months before guidelines are drafted" to actually get the law on the books.

And in the meantime, Rohrabacher thinks they'll do just fine where they are. "They're wonderful people who'd like to live here, especially the ones who have helped us, but the last thing we want to do is to have people who are friendly to democracy . . . moving here in large numbers at a time when they're needed to build a new, thriving Iraq." While many of these wonderful people would no doubt like to stay in Iraq, what they do for a living--work for the Americans--make them targets for insurgents. They're considered collaborators by those Iraqis who haven't yet decided to stop the killing, which means that no matter how much they might want democracy in their country, if they stay, they won't live to see it.

 

 

The Enemy of My Enemy

Captain Christopher Loftis, commanding officer of C company, 2/25 in Tarmiya, was trying to feel out a group of Iraqi men who hoped to join the Sons of Iraq movement. The men were standing around a checkpoint that flew the yellow flag of the Anbar Awakening movement at an intersection a few miles outside of town, and he was asking them how things were going.

The response was the same each time: “more weapons” to fight the insurgents. Loftis would smile, shake the man’s hand, and move on. It was the usual request, always denied, but given that these men weren’t even under contract to provide security, the plea was a little premature. The captain had come out to this checkpoint in front of a former Saddam-era uranium processing plant not just to meet these men, but the men who organized them, along with about six hundred others who wanted a contract with the American Army to provide security.

The Sons of Iraq program, begun in the spring of 2007 and funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune thus far of $123 million and counting, is basically a private militia—80,000 strong at this point—hired by the American military to help fight the insurgency. Not surprisingly, the success of the SOI has produced conflict with the Iraqi government. At a meeting the day before with the local Iraqi police commander, the police complained that two people had been kidnapped and released by an “illegal checkpoint” manned by the SOI the night before, and that some of the men at these new checkpoints were wearing masks. The police commander wanted to make some arrests, which brought the American civil affairs officer assigned to Tarmiya, Major Guidry, to the edge of his seat. “Just get their names and give them to us,” Guidry warned. “We don’t want to put you in a position where you’re in conflict with Abna al-Iraq [Arabic for Sons of Iraq],” The police colonel frowned, but agreed not to do anything drastic.

This is how easily things can turn in Iraq. If the police commander had rolled up on the checkpoint and tried to arrest the men staffing it, the situation could easily devolve into a gun battle between Iraqi government forces and the irregular forces being paid by, and deriving their legitimacy from, the Americans. It’s not a situation that anyone, for obvious reasons, wants. For starters, it would spotlight the fact that the American military is paying citizens to do the work that the Iraqi government security forces have been unable to do, therefore calling into question the effectiveness of the government itself. Also, in Iraq’s tribal society, such a confrontation would likely start a bloody cycle of revenge with U.S. forces caught in the middle.

In a piece about the increasing use military contractors by the American military, Michael Walzer wrote recently in The New Republic that:

the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force…This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before anything else—shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state’s grip on the use of violence…

But this loosening of the state’s grip on the monopoly of violence is the only way that the American military has found to pull Iraq back from the unrestrained chaos of 2007, which set records for American and Iraqi deaths. And for now it’s working, at least when it comes to keeping the American death toll lower than it had been for much of the past several years.

None of this is ever far from the minds of American commanders, and as Captain Loftis walked up to the gates of the factory he told me that, just a week earlier, “these guys were not on the radar screen. It actually kinda surprised us when we saw the first new checkpoint about a week ago and we were like, ‘Who are these guys?’”

Loftis continued, "We’re very cautious when we see Sons of Iraq groups, not so much because we’re worried that they’re doing some kind of nefarious activity, but it’s more of, we want to make sure they’re part of the security solution. Let’s make sure they’re part of the security solution, let’s embrace them and see who they are. We can’t be naïve about it, though. Some of these guys might be exactly the people we were fighting five or six months ago, maybe last week before they threw up the checkpoint. It could be a cover, but this is all about them making legitimate progress to secure their area....."

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The Road to Tarmiya

Even with all of it’s high-tech communications and optics equipment, there are times when riding in a Stryker vehicle is like sitting in a sensory deprivation tank.

Unless you’re the vehicle commander up front or one of the two rear gunners, who stand partially exposed out of the top of the vehicle, your only chance to see what the world outside looks like is if you’re lucky enough to be positioned to see the .50 caliber machine gunner’s video screen, which he rotates back and forth to either side of the road, scanning for IEDs.

Ensconced inside this metal bubble is how I rode from combat outpost Courage to combat outpost IBA, and then from camp Taji north of Baghdad to Joint Security Station Tarmiya, the third company-sized combat outpost I would visit in Iraq.

After spending almost a week at IBA, I accompanied a convoy back to the big base—Camp Liberty—where the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team is based. Accommodations at Liberty are luxurious compared to life at the combat outposts. Part of the sprawling Victory-Liberty-Baghdad Airport megabase, Liberty features a massive PX where you can buy everything from DVDs to cases of non-alcoholic beer to flat-screen TVs. The dining facility, looks like an airplane hanger full of food stations staffed, as is everything, by foreign contractors and guarded by Ugandan security contractors. The dining facility offers a massive array of options, from burgers to various ethnic foods, and comes with a long salad bar and ice cream station. If that isn’t to your liking, across the road there are several trailers with fast food outlets like Pizza Hut and Burger King for that greasy taste of home.

All this only adds to the resentment that infantry soldiers have for “Fobbits”—slang for the soldiers who never leave the big, Forward Operating Bases (FOB). It’s telling that while sitting in the mess tent one night at outpost IBA, several soldiers were comparing how much weight they’ve lost since getting to Iraq, while at Liberty, I once heard two soldiers talking about how much weight they’ve put on since their deployment.

But it’s not like the soldiers out at the combat outposts never get to enjoy the relative comforts of the big bases. The infantry companies stationed at Courage and IBA send platoons back to Liberty on a regular basis for a day or two of refitting, sleeping, haircuts, and gorging on greasy food.

This rotation back to the big bases was how I got out to JSS Tarmiya, about thirty kilometers north of Baghdad. From Liberty, I caught a short helicopter ride north to Camp Taji, where I spent a night near an artillery battery (the 2nd Battalion, 11th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd SBCT, 25th Infantry Division) firing illumination flares that rattled the walls of my room.

The next morning I was placed in the hands of 1st Lieutenant Matt Ives, who was taking his platoon from Taji back to Tarmiya—home of the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. There was a bit of excitement before I left Taji however. While waiting to leave the dining area one afternoon, word started trickling back that someone had—just minutes before—lobbed two rockets at the base, and they landed about fifty meters away from the DFAC near the PX. One round hit the trailer containing the beauty salon, leaving a hole in the side of the structure, while the other landed nearby. One soldier got a few scrapes, but other than that, no one was seriously wounded. It was another example of how, even at the big bases, the war is never far....

Read the rest of this story at the Columbia Journalism Review

The End of the Weapons Cache

We parked the Strykers next to a deep, wide canal, whose bright blue water rushed under a narrow bridge blocked by two concrete traffic barriers. Lieutenant Max Pappas went through the plan again: we would cross the bridge on foot, run a few hundred meters along a dirt road bordering a reed line, plunge through the canal at a narrow point and converge on the farmhouse where we had found the weapons cache the day before.

There had been reports that a few military-age males had been seen at the house after 1st platoon arrested the young man suspected of planting the weapons cache the day before, and Captain Higgins wanted to see if he could catch anyone poking around the house.

Once everyone had jumped over the yard-high concrete barriers on the bridge and started running down the narrow dirt road, I realized how weighed down American soldiers are by their heavy ballistic vests, M-4 rifles, extra ammunition clips, first aid pouches, and the other burdens of an infantryman at war. This is to say nothing of the soldiers carrying M-249 SAW rifles, which clock in at about fifteen pounds each, or the platoon’s radio officer, who lugs around cumbersome communications equipment. I moved much more lightly—my ballistic vest was smaller, and the only things I carried were a notebook, some pens, a voice recorder, a camera, and a few Power Bars I shoved in my pocket in case we found ourselves out all day.

As we huffed down the road, a few of the guys carrying heavier loads started to lag behind, but it didn’t take long for others to drop back and take up some of their load, making sure everyone kept the tight formation. We reached the spot in the reed line where the lieutenant wanted to cross, and the platoon plunged, single file, into the frigid, knee-deep water, scrambling across the canal and up the few feet of muddy bank on the far side. After the first few soldiers made it across, the splashing of the water made the canal banks even more slick, and footing became difficult. I was set to go across somewhere in the middle of the pack, and as the lone civilian, I was concentrating on not slowing up the process. I jumped in, waded across, and on the other side found that a soldier was struggling on the bank. I grabbed the bottom of his ballistic vest and pushed up, just as the soldier behind me began pushing me up in front of him, and suddenly, I was out of the reeds and standing, exposed, on a dirt road directly next to the farmhouse.

“Go, go!” Sergeant Flick bellowed as a squad with a SAW flopped down in the muddy bank of the canal to cover the rest of the platoon’s dash up to the house. I briefly wondered if I should run to the house, too, or hang back, but since I found myself running, figured that my legs had made the decision for me....   

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

Part II: The Suicide Bomber

Read Part I here.

I tried to squeeze into the Stryker to head to the site of the suicide bombing, but Captain Higgins needed the space for troops, not reporters, so I stayed to watch the EOD team pack the weapons cache with thirty pounds of C4 explosive and blow it in an impressive blast. At the same time, Lt. Pappas took the suspect to a larger forward operating base for processing and interrogation.

Leaving the farmhouse with Cpt. Higgins and the explosives team to investigate the suicide bomb site, we stopped at the IED that we had identified earlier—just long enough for the EOD team to frantically tell us that were sitting on top of an IED, and refuse to go any further. We moved on while they stayed behind to blow it.

By the time we made it to the scene of the suicide bombing, the force of the blast was evident. Twisted cars were still smoldering on the side of the road, walls of a makeshift guardhouse had been knocked down, and there was a blast pit ten feet by twelve feet, six feet deep. The bomb had killed one of the Sons of Iraq as well as the bomber, with fourteen others wounded, including eight that the Americans had helicoptered out for treatment. All that was left of the bomber were a few fingertips and the front halves of his feet, attached to blackish red slop that represented what once the bombers’ legs. When I started to photograph the remains, an Iraqi moved in to the frame to pose with them, then led me over to another pile of reddish black muck. He would point to it, then his stomach, and I assumed he was telling me that this was some part of the bomber’s intestines.

Abu Zakaria, the man whose house was hit, leads a group of 395 Sons of Iraq volunteers in the area, and apparently got the job because his brother is a big political player. Still, Higgins and the other officers at IBA sang his praises, telling me he ran a tight ship, and kept his men alert and well-disciplined. A short, solidly built thirty-six year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, Zakaria was clutching a small club behind his back when I saw him, and he looked shaken, but angry. He and Higgins walked through the crumbled bricks and the still-smoking debris, with Zarakia assuring Higgins that he was committed to staying put, and Higgins offering suggestions for securing his property.

One young Sons of Iraq member with cuts on his arms and face told me that he had seen the whole thing. A “foreigner” with a “pale face and a long beard” pulled around the corner in his car and stopped directly in front of the checkpoint in front of Zakaria’s house. Waiting to be checked, the driver pulled out a grenade and tossed it under a truck in front of him that was carrying large 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel, and just before the explosion, the young man said, he jumped into a canal across the street to save himself.

1st Lieutenant Pete Cox, a twenty-three year-old Class of 2006 West Point grad, was in the base at the time of the explosion, and helped coordinate the treatment of the wounded Iraqis. There were no interpreters on base at the time, so Cox and others had to rely on their rudimentary Arabic and sign language to communicate. “Remember that famous picture from Vietnam with the little girl running from the napalm?” he asked, “it reminded me of that scene. I’d never seen injuries like that, I’d never seen burns like that. You had some guys with small shrapnel cuts and burns, and then you had guys with compound fractures and cuts all over their body and burns all over their body.”

One of the injured was a young boy, who had been at Zakaria’s with his father. His face was badly burned. “He looked like his face had been exposed to the flame, but the rest of him was fine. It looked like he was behind a wall, maybe, and only his face was exposed.”

The explosion and the aftermath was a test Lt. Cox felt that the patrol base passed. “The soldiers were pretty inventive about where to hang the IV bags, and figure out ways to help these people. You only have so many medics and when you have a mass casualty situation like that, you just don’t have enough, you can’t tend them all at the same time.”

Within thirty minutes of the blast, two Army helicopters actually landed on the small patch of land inside the base to ferry the most badly wounded Iraqis to an Army hospital, a risky move that impressed Cox, and one he hoped impressed the Iraqis, as well. It showed the Iraqis, he believes, that while groups like al Qaeda want to sow death, the Americans are willing to risk their lives to save Iraqi lives.

The attack came at a time of increasing al Qaeda attacks on Sons of Iraq checkpoints, a gambit that doesn’t seem to be accomplishing its objective of getting Iraqis to quit the groups.

“That we’re taking more Iraqi casualties means that they’re getting involved,” Cox told me that evening. “And it’s not just bystanders but guys who are putting their life on the line. The fact that they were targeted—Abu Zakaria and the Sons of Iraq—means that they’re considered a threat. And if al Qaeda thinks they’re a threat that means that they’re doing something right.”

Still, while that may or may not be true, the events of a single day at combat outpost IBA show that this war is far from over, and the complex maneuverings of fighting a counterinsurgency are only now starting to become fully apparent.

Both parts can be read together at the Columbia Journalism Review