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.