War, the military, COIN and stuff

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Posted over at ARES: JSF, Gripen and the PR Battle .

Iraqisms, Artillery and Counterinsurgency

Yesterday, Jason Sigger flagged  a Phil Carter post  who had flagged a Fred Kaplan article  (ah, the Internet!)  about LTC Paul Yingling, the Army officer who made a huge splash last year by publishing an article  called “A Failure in Generalship” that took apart the job the Army brass had done over the past several years.

The upshot of all of these links to links is that Yingling, whose article hardly endeared him to the top brass, was recently deployed to Iraq. Kaplan give the timeline:

Soon after the article was published, Yingling was put in command of the 1-21 Field Artillery battalion, but that move had been scheduled months before. The real story lay in what happened next. His battalion was assigned not, say, to fighting insurgents but rather to prison-guard detail…This could be an interesting, potentially important job, but it's hardly in the center of things, and it's the very opposite of a career enhancer.

 I’m not so sure about Kaplan’s dour assessment. Neither is Phil Carter, who writes that,

detention operations are absolutely critical for counterinsurgency. When you get them wrong, you lose…Detention facilities can be leveraged to win hearts and minds (see David Galula's experience in China). They can also be used to harvest human intelligence and build informant networks. The military police and military intelligence communities now call this “COIN inside the wire.” It's an important mission in Iraq, and one which will fully engage Yingling's talents and those of his battalion.

 Not only are detention operations critical, the fact that Yingling’s battalion was given this assignment is probably more a function of need, rather than punishment. A Major who I spoke to in Baghdad a few months back introduced me to the term “Iraqism”—which he used to describe the way the 2^nd Stryker Cav. Regiment had been broken up and parceled out to units throughout the Baghdad area of operations. In general, though, the term refers to how, due to the lack of troops in Iraq, and the complicated counterinsurgency missions they’re performing, the way the Army conducts its business in Iraq is often ad hoc.

While up in Taji, I saw the same thing when I spent some time with the 2-11 FA (2^nd Battalion, 11^th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd SCR), who had packed up their big guns—aside from a couple M777 Howitzers which they used to shoot illumination rounds at night—and were conducting security for the forward operating base. Is this what they were trained to do? Nope. Officers there told me that the unit had trained to assume a combat and counterinsurgency role, and only found out that they would be pulling guard duty once they were in Kuwait. This is simply what Artillery units do these days. Given the absence of big, stationary targets to shoot at, artillerymen are conducting combat patrols, guarding FOBs and running detention centers. It's an Iraqism.

As Carter said, detention ops are critical in a counterinsurgency, and the fact that a thinker like Yingling running the show is probably good news.

Bulldog front

Spencer Ackerman has been kicking the crap out of Fred Kagan for the past couple days over a piece Kagan wrote  for the Weekly Standard, where he dresses up the situation in Iraq as one that’s primed for victory, if only we don’t give in to Iran.

There’s a lot to be said about this, but for the moment, Ackerman and Dr. Irack over at Abu Muqawama have pretty much ripped the piece to shreds quite sufficiently.

 One of the passages that seems to have people worked up is this:

 It is also clearly against America’s interests for Iraq to become an Iranian puppet. Some in the United States, however, see that development as inevitable; they point to geography and religious ties. Some even say that the United   States should not only acquiesce in the inevitable but embrace it, reaching out to the Iranians for their assistance in smoothing our withdrawal as they establish their domination. But why? Iran has not dominated Iraq in centuries. True, the Sunni-Shia divide is profound, but so is the Arab-Persian divide. Iraq’s Shia, remember, enthusiastically supported Saddam Hussein’s war against their Iranian co-religionists in the 1980s–a sectarian “betrayal” for which the Iranians have never forgiven them.

In arguing that “some” people think that Iraq will become an Iranian puppet, while dismissing another group of “some” people for saying the United States should suck it up and just accept it, Kagan falls into the classic strawman trap. Who are these people? Do they exist, or did he dream them up in that hot little head of his in order to try and make his point? It’s the laziest form of writing to trot out anonymous enemies in order to knock down their argument--which is really just one you've invented for them--but it’s one that is used on practically a daily basis by people too lazy or intellectually dishonest to bother to argue with real people with real opinions.    

Kagan also writes that some, unspecified “American troops and civilians” in Iraq “report a dramatic rise in anti-Persian sentiment, coincident with a rise in Iraqi Arab nationalism.”

I can’t say he’s wrong here, because as I found in Iraq a few months back, there most certainly is a distinct anti-Iranian sentiment among Iraqis. But it all depends on which Iraqis you talk to—something Kagan doesn’t bother to bring up, or explain. Time and time again, I heard from Sunni “Sons of Iraq” volunteers that the “Iranians” (read: the Shia, Maliki government) in Baghdad was refusing to invest in their area, because the Iranian-controlled government wants to keep the Sunnis down. I can’t necessarily argue with that, since essential government-sponsored services in Sunni-dominated areas are virtually nonexistent, but that doesn’t mean that their conspiracy theories are right. We’ve seen recently that  services like garbage collection are lacking in the Shia Sadr City district of Baghdad, due to the recent fighting. Given that al Qeada has only recently been pushed out of most of the Sunni areas of Iraq, the lack of government presence there probably has as much to do with security issues as anything else. Still, for Kagan to make the blanket statement that Iraqis are increasingly "anti-Persian" with no evidence to back it up, and with no nod to the fact that Sunnis are more apt to see Iran as the enemy than Shia, (all the major Shia political parties are backed, on some level, by Iran) exposes his whole argument for what it is: wishful thinking.

But to bring up all that is to paint a picture of an Iraq that has more moving parts than most pundits ever bother to acknowledge. And why would they? It’s far easier to speak in grand generalities, and let the sops who believe what they read in the Weekly Standard nod in agreement.

Working on leaving the living

Over at Defense Technology International's ARES blog, I've got a post  about the failures of our national missile defense (aka "Star Wars") program...

Who owns Sadr City?

Earlier this week, the New York Times'€™ Michael Gordon wrote a piece about the pathetic state of government-sponsored services in Baghdad'€™s Sadr City—specifically, the Malaki government's failure to provide basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection, which is "€œjeopardizing the effort to win over the area's wary residents." This is a problem in and of itself, but it gets worse when you look at it through the lens of counterinsurgency operations. Since Sadr City is the base of operations for Moqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army, any lapse in government services directly aids Sadr, and harms the government. In fact, it's not far-fetched to say that for every pile of trash that the government lets pile up, another potential Sadr supporter--and anti-government fighter--€”is born.

Over at his blog, Global Guerrillas, John Robb writes that the situation in Sadr City is an example of how "€œcounter-insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq aren't gaining traction despite the enormous cost in lives and treasure already paid."

Robb tosses in his idea of what he terms "€œcommunity resilience," which he says, allows the "€œsmallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid" in areas like providing energy, food, security, communications and transportation. 

The concept can also be applied to counterinsurgencies, to "€œprovide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world."€ Essentially, then, the resilient community has some sort of reserve supply of goods and services, and enough of a cohesive civic structure to look after itself if there's a disruption of the systems that normally provide these goods and services. 

The question of how to do this is another story, and one that Robb's been thinking through over at his site. Robb i€™s right in saying that at the very least, the failure on the part of the government to provide basic services is a major problem for the forces fighting the Mahdi Army. It creates a legitimacy crisis. If a government can'€™t fulfill the most basic tenants of the social contract, then the people will go elsewhere for what they need. Just like Hezbullah in Lebanon, Sadr's forces have stepped in to fill this gap—providing medical care and financial assistance to the neighborhood's homogenous Shia population when the government can'€™t, or won'™t. If you were a poor Shia in Sadr
City, who would you side with, a mostly invisible government who allies with the occupiers, or the group of local nationalists who gave your kid medicine when she was sick?

In this vein, Michael Gordon's piece in the Times this morning is interesting, since it shows the US Army stepping in to fill the role the Iraqi government should be playing, by having U.S. Army medics treat sick and wounded Iraqi civilians in Sadr City.

As a side note to the Gordon story, does anyone know if he’s been embedded with the troops in Sadr City this whole time? He seems to file a story a day from the belly of the beast, and is making B company’s Captain Logan Veath a star.

Splitting the Difference

For all of the squabbling between the Army and the Air Force over who should own—and thereby run—the military’s growing fleet of unmanned aerial assets, it looks like the Army is taking a page out of the Air Force’s playbook in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way it deploys its UAVs. According to the Air Force Times,

An Air Force team is rigging an Army RQ-7 Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle so it can be flown by operators who are thousands of miles from the aircraft itself, the same way the Air Force operates its Predator UAVs. 

This is a pretty big departure for the Army, which normally fields its UAVs as battalion-level assets that move in and out of theater with the units to which they’re assigned. Having the “pilots” based stateside will allow the Army to leave its UAVs in theater permanently, while allowing the Army to deploy fewer soldiers, since the operators can stay stateside, just like the Air Force does.

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.

Automatic Man

Check this by my few favorite blogger, retired Army officer Robert Mackey:

First, any money we put into Iraq or Afghanistan is like giving money to your worthless brother-in-law. All they will do is make a bunch of promises "to getta job t-day!", and then they'll show back up two days later smelling of Mad Dog 20/20 and hooker. And promising that "this da lastest time! promize!" before collapsing on what was once your couch. You get to go back to work to keep the slob fed. Same with the US in IZ and AF. We take the hard-earned resources of the US taxpayer and throw it into the empty void in the hopes that "things will work out." Screw that.

Perfect.

Canadian tanks go 5-hole

So you think that heavy tanks—entire squadrons of heavy tanks—have no place in a counterinsurgency fight? You better take it up with Major Trevor Cadieu of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, the storied Canadian armored regiment.

Recently returned from his second tour in Afghanistan, Maj. Cadieu has taken to the pages (PDF!) of The Canadian Army Journal to argue that tanks are an integral part of the fight in Afghanistan. In December 2006, the Canadians deployed a squadron of Leopard C2 tanks armed with 105-mm L7A3 guns, which come with computerized fire control systems, thermal imaging, and a laser range-finder. The Major writes that “after deploying forward…the tank squadron and armoured engineers featured prominently in all major combat operations undertaken by the Canadian BG…Since May 2007, the tank squadron has fought almost constantly alongside Canadian and Afghan infantry in close combat with the Taliban.”

Maj. Cadieu quotes Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie, commanding officer of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group as saying, “If you’d asked me five months ago, ‘do you need tanks to fight insurgents?’ I would have said, ‘No, you’re nuts.’” But “Because [the Taliban] are acting conventionally, then conventional assets like tanks, armoured engineering vehicles, and armoured bridge-laying vehicles certainly have their place here.”

One of the big knocks against using tanks and heavy artillery in a COIN fight is that both weapons systems have the very real potential of killing innocent civilians and causing collateral damage. In Maj. Cadieu’s estimation, this isn’t the issue that many make it out to be. Since commencing combat operations nine months ago, he writes, “Canadian tanks have killed dozens of insurgents in battles throughout Kandahar Province, yet  there has been no  suggestion of civilian deaths attributed to tank fire during this entire period."

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.

McCain-isms

Via Moira Whelan at Democracy Arsenal, it looks like John McCain has messed up again.

At an Associated Press meeting yesterday, McCain was asked if he was “open to diverting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan” to catch Osama bin Laden. McCain replied that he would, but “I would not do that unless General Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.” Only problem is,   Gen. Petraeus is in charge of Iraq, and Iraq only. This means that he has no say in where troops are  deployed outside of Iraq. At the moment, Petraeus doesn't run CENTCOM, which has the responsibility for overseeing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A guy named Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, not Gen. Petraeus, makes decisions like this. Whelan writes that,

By my count, this makes 6 times this month that McCain has screwed up basic foreign policy facts…the other 5 being various conflations of who exactly is fighting in Iraq....

This is not deep homework, and has nothing to do with running for President. For John McCain to make this many mistakes while holding an important national security post as Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee is simply unacceptable. These types of mistakes would prevent John McCain from getting a job as a research assistant at any think tank in DC, let alone delivering anything resembling a responsible foreign policy as president.

You might argue that McCain is simply being misunderstood, and that he meant to say that he would move troops to Afghanistan if Petraeus said he didn't need them in Iraq any longer. This argument was advanced  by conservative bloggers after he repeatedly confused Shia and Sunni a few weeks ago. No doubt the same excuse will be used again, but if the guy can't explain his ideas clearly, without follow-up clarifications by his staffers, does he really have a handle on what he's talking about?

 

The Dismemberment Plan

Even if the Pentagon isn’t tracking with any serious degree of specificity how much it will cost to rebuild the armed services after the bulk of combat troops are pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan; while at the same time funding new programs and transforming to the “modular Army” concept—which seeks to change the Army’s traditional division-based force structure to smaller brigade formations—you can count on the Government Accountability Office to step in to fill the gap.

In a new report , (PDF alert!) the GAO says that based on its own independent  analysis of Army cost estimates and cost data, it looks like though the price tag will for “equipping modular units, expanding the force, resetting equipment, and replacing prepositioned equipment sets will be at least $190 billion dollars from fiscal years 2004-2013.”

In case you missed it, that doesn’t include ongoing combat/stabilization missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total breaks down something like this...

Read the rest at Defense Technology International 's  ARES blog.