War, the military, COIN and stuff

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.

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.

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.

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?

 

Priceless?

The pricetag for the American policy of paying Iraqis to guard their own neighborhoods—from themselves—just keeps going up.

According to a recent news report, the Stryker units I kicked around with just northwest of
Baghdad back in January and February

employs more than 9,000 "Sons of Iraq," or armed militiamen, to help keep the peace, a commander said.

That translates to U.S. payments of at least $2.7 million a month.

Now for the $2.7 million a month question: With no political reconciliation on the horizon between the warring Iraqi factions, and increasing violence in the Shia areas, how long can we keep paying the tab to keep the Sunnis quiet?

Srtykers on the Ground

When I went to Iraq this past January, it wasn’t only to report on the “awakening”/Concerned Local Citizens/Sons of Iraq movement--take your pick as to what you want to call them--I also requested to be embedded with Stryker units, so I could see how the new-ish Stryker vehicles were performing in combat situations, and what the soldiers thought of them.

I hadn't seen any stories that looked at how effective the vehicles were in combat, so I figured that I'd go out there and poke around myself.

Turns out, the Joes love ‘em. I have the story (Nextbooks file!) of the Army's success in fielding the fast, highly maneuverable, and best of all, relatively comfortable, vehicles in this month’s issue of Defense Technology International magazine.

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.