Archive for the 'Small Wars' Category

In Sand Berms Around Haditha and Security and WHAM: Getting the Order Right, we discussed in some detail the methodology that had been enacted to win back Haditha.  It involved strong leadership, limitations on movement, and complete cuttoff from the infiltration of the rogue foreign fighters from Syria by means of sand berms.  Subsequent to our articles, Stars and Stripes published a very similar article entitled Unit sees efforts stabilize city, drive back insurgents.  In the dangerous land that is Anbar, security is paramount, and without it, “winning the hearts and minds” of the population has proven to be next to impossible.

Also in Hope and Brutality in Anbar, we reiterated that the primary procedure used by AQI, AAS and the foreign fighters has been threats, torment, torture and houses of horror.  The threat made by the terrorists is that without cooperation of the people of Anbar, there will be no security since retaliation is a mainstay of the terrorist strategy.  Without conscience, the insurgents are willing to carry out their threats in houses of horror.  This tactic, in addition to scaring some of the population into submission, also has as its very nature a tenuous balance, where the very tactic itself is seen by the population as a lack of security.

The counterinsurgency continues, and with coalition forces unwilling to relent, the acts of holding women and children hostage during gunbattles, hiding in the people’s houses during combat operations (only to invite a direct hit by a JDAM), bullets flying freely through the streets due to sniper operation, and innocent people dying in torture sessions can turn the tide against the insurgents.  In fact, this is happening with greater regularity.

The tactics have not changed, and yet another torture house was recently discovered and shut down near Fallujah.  But tiring of such things, the tribes are reacting against the brutality.  Azzaman reports:

Some Arab tribes in the central and western parts of the country seem to have been fed up with the violence Al-Qaeda operatives are causing in Iraq.

At least one chieftain of the powerful Dulaimi tribe in northern Baghdad has decided to wage an open battle against al-Qaeda.

Mahmoud al-Fahdawi, head of Dulaimis in Tarmiya, Dhaloiya, Balad and Taji, some of the most violent areas in Iraq, is reported to have ordered his tribesmen to wage war on Qaeda.

Fahdawi’s men have captured three Saudi Nationals who reached the area a month ago and started setting up Islamic courts.

“The Saudi nationals sentenced innocent people to death on the pretext of cooperating with U.S. and Iraqi troops,

Earth moving equipment constructing sand berms around Haditha in order to prevent the influx of foreign fighters into the city.

On January 13th I wrote a short article entitled Sand Berms Around Haditha, linking to a story published by AFP.  Except for one particularly clever reader, this story got almost no attention.  Perhaps it should have.  With all of the noise and fury of the Baghdad security plan, the small things can get buried, but sometimes it is the small things that can teach us the big lessons if we’re not to hurried to pay attention.

This little story fascinated me from the beginning.  Consider what is occurring here.  Heavy equipment – enough of it to construct an earthen berm around a city – has been moved half way around the world into a desert in Western Iraq.  This equipment needs trained operators, and each piece has hundreds of grease fittings that require attention every day.  The engine and hydraulics need continual maintenance, and this maintenance itself requires a trained staff to pull it off.  The fuel and repacement parts must be available, and the security must be provided for those trained staff to effect equipment repair and maintenance.  Why would the United States Marines even consider something like this?

In Concerning the Failure of Counterinsurgency in Iraq, I pointed out that:

The battlefield, both for military actions and so-called “nonkinetic

The Small Wars Journal has a fascinating discussion thread that begins with a Washington Post article by reporter Thomas Ricks, entitled “Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort.”  Says Ricks:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Army officers tend to refer to the group as “Petraeus guys.” They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.

“Their role is crucial if we are to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war,” said a Special Forces colonel who knows some of the officers.

But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.

“Petraeus’s ‘brain trust’ is an impressive bunch, but I think it’s too late to salvage success in Iraq,” said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.

The related conversation in the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal ranges from doctrinal observations on counterinsurgency strategy to personal reflections on the public’s view of the military concerning whether there is sufficient brain power in the conventional military to develop a strategy to pull off a victory in Iraq.

I do not find it at all odd that ‘warrior-philosophers’ or ‘warrior-scholars’ would be involved in the development of strategy, while at the same time I see no compelling argument to suggest that they are situated any better than their predecessors or the balance of the military to develop the going-forward doctrine for OIF.

While a wildly unpopular view, I have been critical of the recently released counterinsurgency manual on which General Petraeus spent much of the previous couple of years developing.  In War, Counterinsurgency and Prolonged Operations, I contrasted FM 3-24 with both Sun Tzu (The Art of War) and the Small Wars Manual, regarding the understanding of both of the later of the effect of prolonged operations on the morale of the warrior, and the reticence of the former on the same subject.  In Snipers Having Tragic Success Against U.S. Troops (still a well-visited post), I made the observation that while snipers were one of two main prongs of insurgent success in Iraq (IEDs being the other), FM 3-24 did not contain one instance of the use of the word sniper.  The retort is granted that FM 3-24 addresses counterinsurgency on a doctrinal level rather than a tactical level, but the objection loses its punch considering that (a) the Small Wars Manual addresses tactical level concerns, and (b) the fighting men from the ‘strategic corporal‘ to the field grade officer work with tactical level concerns on a daily basis.  If FM 3-24 does not address tactical level issues, one must question its usefulness.

I have also questioned the Petraeus model for Mosul, stating that at all times and in all circumstances, security trumps nonkinetic operations, politics and reconstruction.  The question “what have you done to win Iraqi hearts and minds today,

Anbar is a province where there is hope, but this hope seems a dim prospect when torture houses are still in existence.  Anbar is still a restive place, with corruption a way of life, the Syrian border still porous, suicide bombers still crossing into Iraq, and Mujahideen fighters still active in the cities.

U.S. Marines assigned to Golf Company, Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, patrol through the streets of Haditha, Iraq, looking for weapons caches.

Reliable sources are indicating that the insurgency in and around Baghdad is slowly being defeated.  The composition of the insurgency is dynamic, and as the size of the various insurgent groups dwindles, al Qaeda, or rather, its successor organization, the “Islamic State of Iraq,” absorbs the radical and hard-core elements into its ranks.  The diehard Baathist elements are joining under the leadership of al Qaeda, and according to Major General Richard Zilmer, most insurgents who are battling U.S.-led forces in Iraq’s Anbar province are local Iraqis loyal to al Qaeda, and not foreign fighters.  These insurgents want to build a caliphate similar to the Taliban’s Afghanistan regime.

Taking on an increasingly important role in Anbar are the Sunni tribes.  While there is still a very active insurgency, tribal leaders were responsible for more than 2,000 men joining the police in recent months and turning the Al Qaim area near the Syrian border, once infested by al Qaeda, into a relatively secure location.  Yet even the increased cooperation of the local tribal leaders brings with it a mixture of blessing and curse.  With the increase in influence of tribal leaders comes corruption and the attendant largesse.

Some Iraqi politicians and Anbar residents who oppose the U.S. presence describe the confederation, known as the Awakening, as a divisive group that pits tribes against each other, uses police officers as armed guards to protect tribal territory and harnesses American support to consolidate its power.  One journalist describes the ‘Awakening’ as a group of gangsters, asserting that the Awakening’s leader, of the Sattar of the Albu Risha tribe, is reputed to have amassed a fortune as part of a criminal network that robbed travelers on the desert highways of Anbar.

The factious nature of the tribal elements creates an unstable basis for government, and leads ultimately to a divided defense against the insurgency.  The insurgency takes advantage of this and continues its campaign of intimidation and torture to suppress the population in Anbar while at the same time stirring up sectarian strife in and around Baghdad, thus causing more retaliation against the Sunnis by Shi’ite militia, and so the cycle goes.

This campaign of torture and intimidation exemplifies brutality at its worst.  Iraqi police and Marines recently completed “Operation Three Swords” south of Fallujah, the purpose of which was to detain members of murder and intimidation cells within the rural area of Zaidon and the villages of Albu Hawa, Fuhaylat and Hasa.  During the operation, members of the Fallujah police Department and Coalition Forces discovered a torture house and rescued three individuals.  The house had blood-stained walls, and the torture devices included shackles, chains, syringes, rifles, knives, chord, clubs and a blow torch.  The condition of the torture victims was said to be dire.

Torture, whether at the hands of the Sunnis or Shia, is a commonly practiced means to intimidate and brutalize the enemy in Iraq, and in fact, throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia.  Palestinians are fleeing Iraq, and probably for good reason.  More than 600 Palestinians are believed to have died at the hands of Shia militias since the war began in 2003, including at least 300 from the Baladiat area of Baghdad. Many were tortured with electric drills before they died.

The historically successful operations to pacify an area have included security as the primary consideration.  There has recently been a significant degree of success in the pacification of Haditha, but this success has required the construction of sand berms, with controlled checkpoints as a means of ingress into and egress from the city.  With focused leadership and isolation from the rogue elements coming across the border from Syria, cities can be pacified one by one.

While it has been strongly recommended that the borders with Syria and Iran be sealed because of the dynamic battlefield space created by open borders, it is also recognized that there are not enough troops to secure the borders.  Therefore, offensive operations against insurgent safe havens inside Syria are necessary to cause the cessation of the stream of fighters from Syria and other locations (Jordan, the ostensible ally of the U.S., presents a particular problem, as does Saudi Arabia, and border incursions by U.S. troops might be problematic).

A U.S. official recently acknowledged that the vast majority of suicide bombers came across the border from Syria, and that they received training for their task within Syria as well as inside Iraq itself.  The official further admitted that “We have been wholly unsuccessful in affecting Syrian behaviour with regard to the passage of these elements.”  There is a recent attempt to close the borders with Syria, but this effort might be more effective at stopping fleeing refugees than in stopping the flow of jihadists into Iraq.

Whether suicide bombers coming in from Syria, or co-opted Sunni mujahideen working for al Qaeda, the tactics are the same, and involve the intimidation of the local population.  The defeater for this intimidation has always been the removal of the rogue elements, and the affect of the battle between these two forces was recently manifested in a remarkable portrait of Iraqi life in a report directly from Iraq by Andrew Lubin.

Not unlike a meet-and-greet patrol, a census operation generally involves handing out candy to children, shaking hands with parents, and doing some generic waving and smiling. This one, into a slightly different part of the city than yesterday (but only 400 yards away), had a bad feel to it from the start.

Instead of approaching, the children actively waved us off as we offered candy. They held their hands in front of their faces so we could not photograph them. Parents and adults withdrew from the street and shut their doors, except for those who fixed us with hostile, threatening stares.

We pressed on.  In two houses, we visited Iraqis and performed the normal routine of census operations.

By the time the Marines got the third house, the reason for the apparent fear became obvious.  A census operation turned into a gunfight between Marines (along with Iraqi forces) and insurgents.

While two Marines and several IP’s stood guard in a courtyard, an insurgent in the adjacent courtyard tossed a hand grenade into ours. You could hear the hiss as it was lobbed in the air, and it landed in the lap of a seated Marine. Reacting quickly, he slapped it out of his lap, and as it rolled to his feet, it exploded.

Although protected by his body armor, shrapnel ripped into LCpl “Smith’s

In General David Petraeus: Softly, Softly?, I argued, as I have previously, that the Iraq model for counterinsurgency is backwards.  The customary understanding of Galula’s COIN doctrine has the insurgent attempting to win the population, with the government forces attempting to hold them in submission. The Iraq model has this turned entirely on its head. The insurgents are holding the population in submission while we are attempting to win them, with insurgent terror proving to be more compelling than our so-called “nonkinetic

It had to happen sooner or later.  Son and faithful reader Joshua sends me this link.  Jihadists have read, and are ridiculing the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM 3-24.

Jihadists and their supporters are reading and mocking the Pentagon’s new counterinsurgency field manual, which was released publicly and posted on several Department of Defense Web sites Friday even though it addresses such sensitive topics as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting.

One Arabic-language jihadist Web site linking to the Pentagon’s 282-page counterinsurgency manual is Tajdeed.net, which routinely calls for the killing of U.S. and British forces in Iraq; praises bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the 9/11 attacks; and whose sponsor, Mohamed al Massari, has called for the assassination of George Bush and Tony Blair.

Al Massari, an expatriate Saudi dissident, and his jihadist Web site are based in Britain, where he lives despite calls by some British leaders for Al Massari’s deportation or arrest.

On the same Tajdeed Web page providing a link to the Pentagon’s new counterinsurgency manual (linked from a related Reuters story posted on the site), there is a gruesome photo of the body of a U.S. Air Force pilot whose parachute is still strapped to his back (apparently Major Troy Gilbert, whose plane went down north of Baghdad in late November).

Next to that photo is a computer-generated smiley face with these words in Arabic: “This one won’t be reading the manual.”

The Arabic-language Tajdeed message board posting is headed: “The American occupation publishes a booklet containing directives to its soldiers on facing the mujahadeen.”

Notable Arabic-language comments from readers of the Tajdeed posting include “Bless you, you who have broken the U.S. and its military and made it resort to booklets.” Also: “The Pentagon is distributing the booklet to save whatever is left of it!,” referring to the U.S. military.

As of 0015et (0815 Iraq time) Monday, 363 people had read the Arabic-language message board containing the link to the manual and the photo of the dead U.S. airman.

The Tajdeed Web site also showcases gory videos of attacks against western targets in Iraq, provides de facto insurgent training manuals, and provides tips for jihadis on how to sneak into Iraq.

Initial reaction to the Pentagon’s global, unrestricted distribution of the counterinsurgency field manual was one of disbelief.

One British private security contractor with employees in Iraq said: “Only in the land of the free could (such) a handbook be produced and issued to the enemy.” The contractor spoke on the condition of anonymity because his company works with the U.S. military.

I have been critical of the COIN manual.  In War, Counterinsurgency and Prolonged Operations, I contrasted FM 3-24 with both Sun Tzu (The Art of War) and the Small Wars Manual, regarding the understanding of both of the later of the effect of prolonged operations on the morale of the warrior, and the reticence of the former on the same subject.  In Snipers Having Tragic Success Against U.S. Troops (still a well-visited post), I made the observation that while snipers were one of two main prongs of insurgent success in Iraq (IEDs being the other), FM 3-24 did not contain one instance of the use of the word sniper (at the time I assessed the draft manual, but the longer, final version suffers the same flaw).

The manual is written more on a doctrinal than tactical level.  It contains broad, sweeping prose on strategical approach, devolving into platitudinous ramblings in places.  Frankly, it is difficult for me to see the advantage that the insurgent might gain by knowing its content.  Body armor improvements and, on the tactical level, things such as satellite patrols, are much more important to the soldier or marine in the field than what FM 3-24 says or doesn’t say.

It would be more detrimental for the Small Wars Manual to fall into the hands of the enemy, if we had followed its counsel (e.g., increasing force size to match the threat, disarming the public, etc.), but of course, it is too late to recall it from the public domain.

In the end, it is true that the openness of the American culture has hindered the war effort.  But the lesson of this story is not that FM 3-24 should have been OPSEC.  It was released into the public domain for a reason.  However, the fact that the British will not deport the individual responsible for this web site points to the robust existence of a pre-9/11 fantasy in which, to the Brits, the blogger is apparently just some boyish amateur rather than a part of jihadism and therefore a mortal danger to the survival of the west.

I am more concerned about the blogger than FM 3-24 or what happens to it.

It is important to understand just what the would-be savior of Operation Iraqi Freedom will do in Iraq. What is our way forward? In an important and provocative article on Petraeus, the Times Online gives us some insight into the man and his philosophy:

Having co-authored the US military’s counter-insurgency manual, General Petraeus believes that only by combining military strength and sensitive interaction with locals can an insurgency be defeated. He has been influenced by a study of the British in Malaya during the 1950s by John Nagl, a Pentagon official.

Colonel Nagl compared Malaya to America’s failure in Vietnam, where the US Army approached the conflict as a conventional war. The British defeated the insurgency in Malaya, he writes, because of a “civil-military strategy based on intelligence derived from a supportive local population

From the Telegraph, we learn that the insurgents are learning information mined from the internet to target British bases in Iraq.

Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp’s precise longitude and latitude.
“This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks,” said an intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group. “Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?

“We are concerned that they use them to plan attacks. We have never had proof that they have deliberately targeted any area of the camp using these images but presumably they are of great use to them.

Anyone who has used Google Earth knows how dated the satellite information is.  For instance, if you pull up the information on your home, you will probably see a photograph from months ago, and more than likely so many months that it is a different season of the year.

In conventional war (e.g., WWII), where forces are fairly mobile and pressing a known enemy towards a known end, months-old intelligence would be meaningless.  This is the advantage of the fighter in an insurgency and the disadvantage of the counterinsurgent.  The insurgent is mobile, and the counterinsurgent is not.

I have previously argued that the mobility of insurgents in Anbar challenges U.S. abilities to maintain security; that the constant resupply and safe haven across the Syrian border makes the battlefield dynamic to the point of making standard counterinsurgency tactics inapplicable.  From Haditha, we learn that tactics are being used to seal off insurgents.  Non-human resources are being used as a force multiplier in this region.

Adapting ideas tracing back from ancient history to modern Israel, US Marines have sealed off flashpoint towns with sand walls in a new counter-insurgency tactic to quell the wilds of western Iraq …

When 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines deployed to western Al-Anbar from Hawaii in mid-September they sustained casualties in Haditha every day for 45 days. Then on November 10, gun battles in the town stopped.

Captain Matthew Tracy, whose marines patrol Haditha, attributes the lull to a local strongman, a former officer in the Saddam Hussein army known simply as Colonel Faruq, with the power and charisma to bring the town to heel.

Provided, that was, the Marines built a defensive sand wall sealing off Haditha from the porous desert, with checkpoints and traffic restrictions.

So last month, “berms” stretching 20 kilometres (12 miles) were built around Haditha and two neighbouring towns to cut off insurgent supply lines. A simultaneous US-led raid left dozens of insurgents dead or captured.

Ultimately, the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran will have to be completely sealed, and safe haven denied to would-be insurgents inside Syria.  The vulnerability of the tactic described above is that it relies on a local “strongman.”  Assassination of this strongman might cause a problem, so the ability to resupply elements of terror across the border must be stopped.

This article has been updated with Security and WHAM: Getting the Order Right

The coming weeks will set the course for the closing of U.S. action in Iraq.  Given the recent flurry of activity to put the final pieces in place, it is wise to reflect on the failure of counterinsurgency thus far in Iraq, and ascertain exactly what more proposed troops will do, how they will do it, and what would demarcate a victory.

There is no doubt that positive reports can be found concerning the state of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and particularly so when the reports come straight from the front by Milbloggers. There is of course progress being made, but this progress may be characterized as slow, arduous and dangerous, whether from Milbloggers or main stream media.

The Marines, Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen involved in OIF have performed marvelously, have done everything that has been required of them, and have made progress despite the overly-restrictive rules of engagement, lack of appropriate equipment (e.g., fourteen Marines getting killed by an IED due to driving down a desert road in an Amphibious Assault Vehicle) and lack of adequate forces to do the task at hand.

The emphasis on force protection for U.S. troops has led to low casualties, by design, compared with previous wars.  This is an admirable feature of the war planning for OIF. But it is becoming clear that the application of counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics in Iraq, and particularly for the Anbar Province, have been a dismal failure as it regards effecting the desired outcome.

In Eschatology and Counterterrorism Warfare I discussed the exodus that is occurring from Iraq, with the Anbar and Diyala Provinces being particularly hard hit. There are now 1.4 million displaced Iraqi citizens and every day sees three thousand more who flee the country. Working the back alleys and neighborhoods where there is no constant U.S. presence, the Sunni insurgents are waging a campaign of murder and intimidation to demonstrate that neither the Iraqi government nor U.S. forces can protect people.

It is stylish to cite David Galula and claim that the U.S. approach to Iraq has been too heavy handed. The solution, it is claimed, is to see that 80% of the solution is and will always be political. But just to show how utterly irrelevant Galula’s system is to Iraq, consider a single quote: “The battle for the population is a major characteristic of the revolutionary war. . . . The objective being the population itself, the operations designed to win it over (for the insurgent) or to keep it at least submissive (for the counterinsurgent) are essentially of a political nature. . . . And so intricate is the interplay between the political and military actions that they cannot be tidily separated; on the contrary, every military move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects, and vice versa.”

It sounds nice. Now take a closer read: “The objective being the population itself, the operations designed to win it over (for the insurgent) …,” has exactly backwards what the insurgents and counterinsurgents have been doing.  The U.S. has been trying to win over the population, not keep it submissive, and the insurgents have been trying to keep them submissive, not win them over.   If anything, intimidation has been the one and only tactic of the insurgency.  The premise being false, the system then suffers in misapplication. Perhaps a more poignant example comes from a West Point essay, “Hearts and Minds as a Misleading Misnomer.”

The easiest way to understand legitimacy is to ascertain how or to whom a citizen turns to solve his or her social, political or economic problems. If citizens desire educational reform, and they rely on the government to fix that, then the government’s system has legitimacy … similarly, if citizens have decided that the insurgent’s system will best provide land reform, then the insurgent has captured legitimacy from the regime … in many instances (the Viet Cong was a great example), terror, violence, and coercion are short-term “sticks” that the insurgency employs until the long-term “carrots” (solving citizen problems) validate their proposed system.

This philosophy marks the COIN training in the U.S. armed forces today. Solving social, political and economic problems is the hallmark of successful COIN, it is believed, and hence the U.S. attempts to do it better than the insurgents.  Far from being too late or not vigorous enough in the application of Galula’s views, we have applied his theories with a vengeance.

Yet upon serious reflection, the reader will see that something is deeply wrong. The insurgents in Iraq have never transitioned to the next phase of insurgency, the phase we’ll call “system validation.” The only interest that they have shown in education has been to threaten and kill teachers and professors; in the words of one Baghdad citizen, “I forced my son to leave school. It’s more important that he be alive than educated.”

Among conservative Milbloggers, of which I am one, it is not popular to say that our strategy is wrong in Iraq, perhaps because it is seen as a reflection on the troops rather than of the leadership. But the idea that a failure rests on the shoulders of the troops is surely false and just plain wrongheaded.  With perfect troops, the wrong strategy will doom U.S. efforts. In addition to studying positive reports about the successes in Iraq, it is useful to study contrary viewpoints to round out our understanding of the situation.

Some reports directly from Iraq paint a picture of the nation as a killing field, leading exactly to the exodus we are witnessing.

The last three months have been the worst in Iraq’s history. There have been more killings of innocent people than the worst days and months the country has passed through in the past.

According to official figures at least 100 innocent Iraqis perish everyday. The figures of course cannot be trusted as many more murdered Iraqis are buried as relatives find it unnecessary to report their deaths.

Our municipalities now spend more time collecting human corpses form (sic) the streets of major cities, particularly in Baghdad, than gathering garbage.

Most of these corpses do not carry identity cards and hospitals lack the means to identify them. Many are buried in mass graves.

Closer to home, in testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. General Michael D. Maples admitted to a badly deteriorating security situation in Iraq.  NCOs who have been to Iraq report stories reminiscent of the wild west: “The locals have repeatedly conveyed to us horrid tales of shop owners being pulled from their places of business and executed directly outside their storefronts, or mysterious uniformed men driving up and snatching people right off the street, never to be heard from again. Most of the wealthy homes now stand empty, their owners having fled to less politically free but certainly less volatile Middle Eastern countries.”  The Anbar Province is described as a wasteland.

Ramadi has been laid waste by two years of warfare. Houses stand shattered and abandoned. Shops are shuttered up. The streets are littered with rubble, wrecked cars, fallen trees, broken lampposts and piles of rubbish.

Fetid water stands in craters. The pavements are overgrown. Walls are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel. Side roads have been shut off with concrete barriers to thwart car bombs. Everything is coated in grey dust even the palm trees. The city has no functioning government, no telephones, and practically no basic services except sporadic electricity and water supplies. It has been reduced to a subsistence economy.

There are stray cats and wild dogs, but few cars or humans. Ramadi’s inhabitants have either fled, or learnt to stay indoors.

Concerning amelioration of the violence, Maliki stopped the targeting of the Sadrists, and the U.S. is in what is called by the U.N. Security Council a ‘security partnership’ with the Iraqi government.  The U.S. can no longer take unilateral action in Iraq, of course, unless the political will exists stateside to do so.  This is doubtful.

So why the failure of the Galula model for COIN? What is so different about Iraq? Perhaps the following list is a beginning point for what will without a doubt be the subject of many future dissertations at war colleges.

First, treating the disenfranchised sect as if they were “in play.”  Robert Haddick (Westhawk), similar to Michael Rubin, recommending that the U.S. give up on Sunni reconciliation, comments:

As General Abizaid predicted, Iraqi society, at least the Sunni Arab portion, rebelled against the “antibody.” Since then, the U.S. military has attempted to fight a counterinsurgency campaign, using several standard techniques. Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad, America’s very demanding ambassador in Iraq, has forced Iraq’s political elites to form a “national unity” government. He has also worked tirelessly on political reconciliation with Iraq’s rebellious Sunni Arab community. The U.S. has spent the past two years developing and mentoring an Iraqi army and police force. Military operations have been restrained and highly discrete, with the aim of targeting those who might intimidate the population, while also attempting to avoid alienating the population into siding with the insurgents.

These are all classic counterinsurgency gambits, designed to provide an attractive alternative to the insurgency, with the hope of drying up its support. Unfortunately, the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign has failed. The failure rests more with Saddam Hussein’s legacy than it does with American tactics. Iraq’s Sunni Arabs were never “in play,” ready to be talked or bribed into supporting the Shi’ite/Kurdish majority government in Baghdad. As for Iraq’s Shi’ites and Kurds, they have thirty years of very painful memories. And the recent failures at reconciliation have done nothing to improve trust among Iraq’s sects.

If Haddick is right, and I believe that he is, the effort to win the hearts and minds of the Sunni minority was doomed from the beginning.  The overthrown sect had too much at stake simply to crumble and acquiesce to Shi’ite and/or Kurdish rule, or so they thought.  The situation was never conducive to the application of Galula’s principals.  We tried to fit a square peg into a round hole, and all the more so each time it didn’t work.

Second, ignoring the affects of a thousand-year religious war within the population in Iraq.  Sunni-Shi’ite relations constitute a thousand year religious war, and to assume that democracy (or freedom) would heal divisions and become seminal in the region with the overthrow of Saddam’s regime might have been hamhanded and naive.  At the very least, plans to address this deeply held religious divide should have been made, and security in such a powderkeg would certainly necessitate more force projection and quicker response to the initial violence upon toppling of the regime.

Third, failing to recognize the affects of the previous regime having trained the Iraqi people to cower in fear of violence.  American freedom for several hundred years has created an indomitable spirit that would make an occupation of the U.S. impossible for foreign troops, no matter how many there were or how long they tried.  Iraq is the perfect contrast.  Saddam’s secret police created such a culture of fear and treachery that they were ready-made for the brutality employed by the insurgency.  They have decades of simply staying alive under their belt as preparation for the terrorists.  They knew exactly what to do, and it didn’t include sustaining risk to assist the U.S. in hunting down the enemy.

Fourth, oil money.  The scandalous and idiotic oil-for-food program poured money into a region that was otherwise destitute because of sanctions, and this money didn’t go to the people who needed it.  So even sanctions didn’t help to strip the enemy of his funds.  In the broader region, the ready availability of large sums of cash make it easy to hire mercenaries, from both inside and outside Iraq, to battle U.S. troops.  The easy availability of oil money also creates criminal elements when there is no stable government to police them.

Fifth, the nexus of terrorism and technology.  Just forty years ago, an insurgent may backpack a single artillery shell along the Ho Chi Minh trail for months, only to see it used in a second, and then turn around to hike the trail and do it all over again.  Technological advances and the cheap availability of high tech equipment has radically changed the face of terrorism.

The world is now characterized by the near-instantaneous proliferation of information and misinformation, ease-to-use communication systems, and technologies that provide cheap, readily improvised WMD capabilities. At the same time, the development of our cultural, social, economic, industrial, and political structures offers vulnerabilities never dreamed of by earlier terrorists. This presents unprecedented problems for security forces, problems that are neither purely military nor purely law enforcement, but a mixture of both, with a lot of complex intelligence demands. All this places complex strains on governmental jurisdictions, and the intersection of the public and private sectors, not to mention civil liberties, cultural traditions, and privacy.

We were utterly unprepared for the toll that IEDs would take on U.S. troops, and even after it became obvious that this was a leading tactic of the enemy, we reacted with lethargy.

Sixth, not recognizing the dynamic scope of the battlefield.  Recently captured intelligence documents show an undeniable link between Iran and the violence in Iraq.  John Little comments that “If these documents actually surprised anyone in our intelligence community we’re in trouble. Finding supporting documentation is a good thing but Iran’s desire to destabilize Iraq, and their willingness to deal with anyone in the process, should have been well understood before these documents were siezed.”  But we may indeed be in trouble, not learning our lessons from years gone by.  Michael Rubin points out that from even before the war began going on into the first months of the war, Iran was training militia and sending huge sums of money and materiel into Iraq.  Their plans have been active for years.  Over to the west, insurgents pour in across a Syrian border that has not been securred.  The battlefield, both for military actions and so-called “nonkinetic” actions to win the people, is dynamic.  As one insurgent is killed, another pops up in his place, coming not from any action the U.S. has or has not taken in Iraq, but rather, coming from hundreds or even thousands of miles away due to a religious hatred that has been taught to him from birth.  The war in Iraq is both figuratively and quite literally a war without borders.

Seventh, the utilization of violence as an exclusive-use procedure by the insurgents.  The insurgents have not yet transitioned from violence to “system validation.”  There is no compelling need to do so, as Iranian influence in eastern Iraq exceeds that of the U.S., many of the Sunnis want nothing of reconciliation, and there is an exodus of refugees from Iraq to other parts of the world.  The success achieved by the insurgents (and Shi’ite militia) ensures the continued use of violence.  There is no need to fix something that isn’t broken.

It has been said that successful COIN warfare takes ten years on average.  Even if this is true, we do not have ten years to perform COIN operations in Iraq.  And the U.S. public is not to blame.  Four years has been given to the administration, and at least the first couple (after the toppling of the regime) were squandered.  This squandering of time and resources, while it affected public sentiment in the U.S., affected Iraq even more.  The U.S. public, even now, is likely to give the administration longer than the situation on the ground in Iraq will allow.  The critical path to solving Iraq doesn’t rest with public sentiment.  If Iraq is a killing field sustaining an exodus of refugees to Syria and Jordan as it appears is the case, we simply do not have ten years.  The basis for this boundary condition is Iraq, not the U.S.  The same COIN strategy, six years from now, will see the annihilation of the Sunni population and rise of Iran as the only true power in Iraq.

I have been vocal in pointing out the effects of inadequate force projection in Iraq.  It appears at the moment that there will be a modest troop increase.  But force projection is not the same thing as force size.  Victor Davis Hanson’s observations point to a different problem than one of force size.  Hanson’s recommendations focus on the what and how of U.S. engagements.

There have been a number of anomalies in this war, as a brilliant American tactical victory in removing Saddam has not translated into quick strategic success. But one of the most worrisome developments is the narrowing of the recent debate to the single issue of surging troops, as if the problem all along has just been one of manpower.

It hasn’t. The dilemma involves the need to fight an asymmetrical war of counter-insurgency that hinges on what troops do, rather than how many are engaged. We have gone from a conventional victory over Saddam Hussein to an asymmetrical struggle against jihadist insurgents to what is more or less third-party policing of random violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Our past errors were not so much dissolving a scattered Iraqi military or even de-Baathification, but rather giving an appearance of impotence, whether in allowing the looting to continue or pulling back from Fallujah or giving a reprieve to the Sadr militias.

So, yes, send more troops to Iraq — but only if they are going to be allowed to hunt down and kill vicious and sectarians in a manner that they have not been allowed to previously.

This surge should be not viewed in terms of manpower alone. Rather it should be planned as the corrective to past misguided laxity, in which no quarter will now be given to die-hard jihadists as we pursue victory, not better policing. We owe that assurance to the thousands more of young Americans who now will be sent into harm’s way.

Whether we take Haddick’s approach or Hanson’s approach (giving up on the Sunnis and leaving versus forcing their hand by a drastic strategy change), 2.0E4 more troops doing the same things and pursuing the same strategy will bring disrepute to U.S. warfighting capabilities and more U.S. casualties.  It has been said that the difference between the Viet Cong and the jihadist is that the VC didn’t follow us home, and the jihadist will.  And so they will indeed.  Yet we are waging partial war with forty year old COIN doctrine that is more applicable to the VC than the jihadists.  A different paradigm is needed, one that squarely faces the murder and suicide cult that is jihadism; that doesn’t patrol Marines down city streets to get sniped without ever firing a shot at the enemy because we have hamstrung our own snipers with our rules of engagement; that recognizes that mothers don’t care about an education for their children compared to keeping them alive; that recognizes and addresses the dynamic battlefield where borders and foreign fighters are as important as the local government; and that realizes that mutual trust will be difficult, or perhaps impossible, in a land where lies and deceipt are ubiquitous and constant.

A moderate troop size increase coupled with the same strategy and tactics will be likened – and properly so – to Olmert’s last desperate battle with Hezballah where, in order to save face and make the war effort appear as a victory for Israel, he sent more IDF troops to their deaths and then retreated.  It will neither appear as a victory nor accomplish anything good.