Posted at ARES
On a conference call with bloggers this morning, Maj. Gen. David Perkins, director of strategic effects for Multinational Forces-Iraq outlined how U.S. forces are conducting combat operations, post-Status of Forces Agreement.
Gen. Perkins reiterated that while all U.S. forces will be out of Iraqi cities by June of this year, “the strategy is not changing, there is still a counterinsurgency fight being waged, being fought primarily by Iraqi security forces and not the U.S.” In other words, the insurgency is being dealt with, but what is changing is who is doing the fighting, at least according to Perkins. I’m not on the ground so I can’t say for sure, but I have a hard time believing that the Iraqi army is fully taking the lead in operations at this point, though I have no doubt that IA units are doing more of the fighting, with U.S. forces trying to get them into the action more as time goes on.
Another important point touched on was how U.S. forces are getting Iraqi approval for combat missions, as the SOFA explicitly calls for. Gen Perkins explained that there is a joint military operation committee led by the Iraqi Minister of Defense, General Odierno, and Gen. Austin:
In many cases there is preapproval of missions based on target sets, based on activities, based on intelligence; we sit down with Iraqi leaders and discuss what are the operations that we want to conduct, who the targets are, what the goals and objectives are, discuss what U.S. forces will take part, what Iraqi forces will take part, and then once that is determined, then there are a series of judges that we and the Iraqis work with to get warrants for specific targets.
One of the concerns about this method is that it’s time consuming, and targets might slip away in the time it takes to seek and receive approval from an Iraqi judge. Gen. Perkins said that, on some level, this has been taken into consideration, and that when one operation unearths some intelligence that needs to be acted on quickly, “we have judges we work with as well, to sort of do a fast turn on getting warrants, and on getting approval from our Iraqi counterparts.”
But none of this can be accomplished without some higher-level operational planning, which Gen. Perkins described as looking something like this:
What we do is at the highest level, lay out some of the types of missions, the types of targets, the types of operations, get approval for them, and then when we actually conduct the mission we work with the local Iraqi commanders just as we would in a U.S. operation, [because] you want coordination taking part at the lowest level and make sure that we are partnering with an Iraqi unit. The local Iraqi commander is involved, and therefore if the mission leads to another follow-on mission, you’ve got the Iraqi commander right there who is authorized to approve it on the spot and move forward, so it’s a fairly complicated process, but it has worked out quite well.
We’re still in the early stages of this method of conducting operations, but it looks like American and Iraqi commanders have already outlined a pretty good way forward for increasing cooperation in combat ops.
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