Weapon of Choice (Updated)
Additional Video Interviews Concerning IEDs - Washington Post
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Additional Video Interviews Concerning IEDs - Washington Post
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Blackwater and the Business of War – Los Angeles Times editorial
On Sept. 10, 2001, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a speech at the Pentagon on the need to combat "an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America." The enemy wasn't Russia, China or Al Qaeda. It was the Pentagon bureaucracy. Rumsfeld declared a crusade not merely to attack waste but to transform the military into a technologically superior fighting force that would achieve what no modern military ever had: corporate-style efficiency.
Alas, the dream of managing the government more like a business is central to some of the Bush administration's most disastrous mistakes. It was at the heart of the decision to browbeat the generals into agreeing to invade Iraq with a "light footprint," which allowed the insurgency to flourish. Contempt for the bureaucratic process doomed serious postwar planning -- after all, governmental decision-making is political, collaborative and agonizingly slow, and the result is almost always a compromise that may avoid disaster but stifles innovation. To run the occupation of Iraq, President Bush chose a man who promised to make decisions like a CEO, which is why L. Paul Bremer III made the fatal mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army without consulting the cumbersome Washington bureaucracy. And corporate thinking about efficiency led to vastly expanding the outsourcing of functions traditionally performed by the military. The biggest beneficiary has been Blackwater USA, a private security firm with powerful political and personnel ties to an administration that has awarded it more than $1 billion in contracts since 2002…
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Herschel Smith, Captain’s Journal, weighs in with two posts concerning LTC Gian Gentile’s Armed Forces Journal article Eating Soup With a Spoon and ‘hard vs. soft’ COIN:
... I cannot possibly hope to recapitulate the breadth or depth of discussion in the thread at the Small Wars Council, but would hasten to point out several things concerning the discussion now that the subject has become a little more ripe and the argument is slowing. First, I agree wholeheartedly with Gentile’s rebuke of the notion that counterinsurgency is “armed social science.” Second, concerning Dr. Metz’s statement that “we treat counterinsurgency as a variant of war not because that is the most strategically effective approach, but because we have been unable to transcend Cold War thinking,” I respond that counterinsurgency has been a variant of war since at least the Roman empire (which faced a Jewish insurgency in Jerusalem), or even before. In recent history, all one needs for proof of principal is the Small Wars Manual, published in 1940, well before the cold war...
There is yet another discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal that convinces me that I must try one more time to explain the involvement that coalition forces should have with culture and religion in a counterinsurgency campaign. Much confusion swirls around this issue because, in part, people reflexively respond (a) by assuming that you are calling for a holy war, or (b) assuming that your mindset is one of a social scientist hunting for another lever to pull or button to push to cause certain reactions. The former category reacts to my modest proposal by denying that religion should have any role in how one man relates to another, with the later category honestly attempting to engage the issue, but as counterinsurgency professionals using ideas such as center of gravity and societal power structure. Neither camp really gets it yet. So let’s use two simple examples that might show how religion and cultural understanding might aid the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. These examples are not meant to be sweeping or comprehensive, nor am I constructing doctrine in a short, simple little article. I am attempting to make this simple rather than complex...
Discussion on these issues can be found at the following SWJ and SWC links:
Will the Petraeus Strategy Be the Last? by Bing West
Armed Forces Journal by SWJ Editors
Eating Soup with a Spoon - Small Wars Council
Engaging the Mosque - Small Wars Council
IHT Op Ed: A Soldier in Iraq - Small Wars Council
Does a Bigger Army Mean Another Iraq? - Mark Benjamin, Salon
Hillary Clinton wants 80,000 more soldiers in the Army. Republican hopeful Mitt Romney and Democrat Joe Biden are calling for 100,000 additional troops. Barack Obama thinks the military needs 92,000 more soldiers and Marines. In a speech at the Citadel this spring, Rudy Giuliani said he would add 70,000 new soldiers to the Army. John McCain seems to want 200,000 more soldiers and Marines. John Edwards has said the U.S. “might need a substantial increase of troops,” but has not given a number.
With the Army and Marine Corps stretched to a breaking point because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has become a no-brainer for the major presidential candidates to call for the biggest increase in ground forces since the 1960s. All three Democratic front-runners are either on board or open to the idea, perhaps because for Democrats in particular, it's a risk-free way to look hawkish and burnish national security credentials. "[Democrats] don't want to look weak on defense," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Calling for more troops "is an easy signal of your bellicosity and your willingness to be serious about defense policy."
The next president, therefore, is almost certainly going to be an advocate of adding tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines. But setting aside where these fresh recruits will come from, given current recruiting woes, adding troops will have serious consequences that may not be obvious more than 13 months before the general election. And the consequences may not please antiwar Democratic primary voters. Committing to an expanded Army and Marine Corps implies spending a great deal of additional money on the military. But it also means the presidential candidates are choosing sides in an internal Pentagon dispute -- and they are choosing the side that wants a military designed to fight another war just like the unpopular war the United States has been waging in Iraq since 2003...
Lessons From an Anbar Sheik - Sterling Jensen, Washington Post
From May 2006 until May 2007, I was an interpreter for most of the meetings between U.S. government officials and Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni sheik killed by a car bomb Sept. 13 in Ramadi. I watched as Abu Risha changed over time from an unknown local tribal leader to arguably the United States' best hope in Iraq. His death was a shock to me, but it was not unexpected, given the dangers surrounding him. Unfortunately, though, Abu Risha's life and efforts are being misinterpreted by some in Washington.
Abu Risha was no ordinary sheik or ordinary man -- he was fearless, even if it meant being branded pro-American in an area that not long before had been crawling with al-Qaeda forces…
Abu Risha had hit on how we are going to win the war in Iraq. It's not about having more American troops on the ground. Success will come from supporting local leaders and their security forces…
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September 2007 Foreign Policy Research Institute E-note - Iraq and the “Metrics” System by Michael Noonan. Hat tip to Frank Hoffman for sending this along.
Michael P. Noonan is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he served on a Military Transition Team with an Iraqi Army light infantry battalion. He is the managing director of FPRI’s national security program.
The past few weeks have introduced a whirlwind of reporting on the current situation in Iraq. In particular, the reports of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces in Iraq, the U.S. General Accountability Office’s report, and the September 10-11, 2007 testimonies of Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Army General David Petraeus before the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, respectively, have caused much debate and political mudslinging. The pro- and anti-Bush camps tend to see such reports entirely through their own analytical prism. Worse still, each side has some ground to stand on in making their particular arguments, because the metrics for judging success or retrogression on the ground are often inexact and therefore can yield contradictory findings for or against the war. That being said, the surge and refined counterinsurgency strategy that began earlier this year does appear to be working. Whether the metrics continue on an upward path remains to be seen; still, given the consequences of defeat, they suggest that the current strategy should be allowed to continue until the spring, at which time a fuller picture of the situation on the ground should determine whether the strategy should be totally reexamined and other options undertaken. What follows is a discussion of the surge strategy, the abovementioned reports, and the options moving forward to provide more context and evidence for the position stated above…
Read the entire E-note.
‘I Do Not Belong to Any Tribe’ – W. Thomas Smith Jr., National Review
Iraqi soldiers can fight. That’s something Americans serving alongside them have not always said with complete confidence. At the individual and small-unit level, Iraqis have been fighting well for close to three years. But only now are U.S. troops seeing the dramatic kinds of improvements and capabilities among the brigade and division-sized Iraqi units that one might expect from similarly trained Western forces.
Much of the success of the Iraqi army is a result of training and operational leadership on the part of coalition forces, primarily — at least from my vantage point while there — U.S., British, and Australian soldier-instructors. But there’s another factor: One that has only been a variable in the mix for less than two years: The new Iraqi officer corps.
Iraqi officers today are — by and large — hard-working, battle-seasoned, and generally incorruptible. There are exceptions, (as in any army), but as Iraqi Brigadier General Ishmayil Shihab Muhammad says, “We will deal with them.” …
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The U.S. Department of State has launched its first blog – Dipnote. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Sean McCormack:
Welcome to the State Department's first-ever blog, Dipnote. As a communicator for the Department, I have the opportunity to do my fair share of talking on a daily basis. With the launch of Dipnote, we are hoping to start a dialogue with the public. More than ever, world events affect our daily lives--what we see and hear, what we do, and how we work. I hope Dipnote will provide you with a window into the work of the people responsible for our foreign policy, and will give you a chance to be active participants in a community focused on some of the great issues of our world today.
With Dipnote we are going to take you behind the scenes at the State Department and bring you closer to the personalities of the Department. We are going to try and break through some of the jargon and talk about how we operate around the world.
We invite you to participate in this community, and I am looking forward to stepping away from my podium every now and then into the blogosphere. Let the conversation begin.
Also see the DoS Video / Audio page and YouTube channel.
Hat Tip MountainRunner
MountainRunner discusses the implications of rescinding Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Order 17 and identifies the critical issues associated with integrating Private Military Companies (PMCs) into the military’s mission and providing PMCs with the protection required to successfully conduct assigned tasks.
Iraq's Parliament is considering rescinding CPA Order 17 that protects PMCs from Iraqi law. (BBC and AP stories here). Nice story but bad for the PMCs and incompatible with their mission. If the private military companies, especially the private security companies, are augmenting, or at times replacing US military forces, they must not only be fully integrated into the mission at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, but also protected accordingly. The risk of not doing so is political. By definition, these firms operate in less than secure geographies (no, I'm not using the word state) with weak or absent legal, judicial, and police systems and any action against them such as rescinding CPA Order 17 may be suspect.
The noble but meaningless modification to the UCMJ was a step in the right direction. The companies must be held accountable to the overall mission and not just their profit margin nor beholding exclusively to their principal. The latter is the toughest nut to crack. Also by definition, PSCs are hired for two reasons: military or other security forces are unavailable or they are not flexible enough for the mission…
Read the entire post at MountainRunner.
Bush and Iran – Wall Street Journal editorial
The traveling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad circus made for great political theater this week, but the comedy shouldn't detract from its brazen underlying message: The Iranian President believes that the world lacks the will to stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear program, and that the U.S. also can't stop his country from killing GIs in Iraq. The question is what President Bush intends to do about this in his remaining 16 months in office…
We belabor this rhetorical record because it so clearly contrasts with how little the Administration has done about it. As with Syria, the Bush Administration has repeatedly told Iran that it would have to pay a price for its hostile behavior while in the end demanding no such price. This undermines U.S. diplomacy, but in the case of GIs in Iraq it is worse: It means the Commander in Chief is letting an enemy kill Americans with impunity. And the Iranians have got the message: Mr. Ahmadinejad felt confident enough to declare this week at the U.N. that the issue of its nuclear program was "closed." …
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A Bipartisan Way Out of Iraq - Joe Sestak, Christian Science Monitor
There is a bipartisan "way ahead" in Iraq if viewed in terms of progress for America's security and not solely Iraq's, with a strategy that focuses on our national interests in this conflict, not just the interests of Iraqis.
Our troops have served our country courageously and brilliantly, but our engagement in Iraq has degraded our security, pushing our Army to the breaking point so that it cannot confront other pressing security concerns at home and abroad.
My military service as a three-star vice admiral – having led an aircraft carrier battle group in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as director of the Navy's anti-terrorism unit – convinces me that an inconclusive, open-ended involvement in Iraq is not in our security interests. Ending this war is necessary. But how we end it is of even greater importance for both our security and our troops' safety. These two considerations are the dual catalysts for a bipartisan discussion on this issue…
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Volume 9 was published on 25 Sept 07. Volumes 1-8 are available in the back issues area.
Why I Want to Keep Fighting in Iraq – Chris Brady, Christian Science Monitor
Despite strong public appeals by Gen. David Petraeus and President Bush this month, American views on the Iraq war remain dim. The latest Pew survey shows that 54 percent say US troops should come home as soon as possible, while 47 percent believe the US will probably or definitely fail to achieve its goals in Iraq. Many experts and politicians, meanwhile, have suggested the war can't be won.
I am a US soldier in Iraq. And I disagree. It's not too late to succeed. The stakes in Iraq are too high not to keep fighting for progress.
As a National Guardsman serving on a Provincial Reconstruction Team, I've seen what is working on the ground in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq…
Iraq's Inevitabilities – Richard Cohen, Washington Post
The creation of modern India and Pakistan entailed the uprooting of more than 12 million people. Bangladesh was itself ripped from Pakistan. The creation of Republika Srpska, an entity you probably have never heard of, was a consequence of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, which did not exist before the 20th century and did not make it into the 21st. Countries come and countries go. It is time -- isn't it? -- that Iraq went.
The way it should go was long ago devised by Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, unbeknownst to most Americans, a candidate for president of the United States. Biden and Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations, advocate breaking Iraq into a federation consisting of three parts: a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shiite south. Those terms -- north, center and south -- are the vaguest approximations, but they represent a thought, or a despair, or a resignation: The only way Iraq is going to work is if we concede that it is not likely to work the way we wanted it to…
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The full video of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's Columbia Speech can be found here at CBS’s Raw Video. What follows is a Voice of America report on the same by Gary Thomas.
Iran's president got a frosty reception during a rare public appearance at an American university Monday. As VOA correspondent Gary Thomas reports, the less-than-warm welcome came from an unexpected quarter.Protesters were kept well away from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit to Columbia University in New York. But there was one protester he could not avoid: the university's president, Lee Bollinger.
In blistering opening remarks, the university leader, who had been criticized for inviting President Ahmadinejad to speak, lashed out at the Iranian president for his government's record on human rights, support of terrorism, denial of the Holocaust, and the threat to eliminate Israel...
Return on Success? - Michael Barone, Real Clear Politics
For most of the last year, the dominant narrative in most media, and for most voters, has been that we are getting nowhere in Iraq and that the Democrats, after their victory in last November's elections, are going to get out of Iraq.
But events are not playing out that way. Last week, the Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have made it more difficult to rotate troops into Iraq -- and passed, by a 72-to-25 margin, a resolution denouncing the moveon.org ad that attacked "General Betray Us" for "cooking the books."
Polls show that the public approves of Petraeus' performance and endorses his recommendations for going forward with the surge -- the first margin of approval for the administration's course of action in a long time.
Petraeus argued convincingly that we are making real progress in Iraq, that the downward spiral of violence has been turned around and that the battle against al-Qaida in Iraq is meeting with success...
Can't We Get Along? - Dan Thomasson, Washington Times
The drawdown of troops in Iraq without leaving the country and the region in absolute chaos needs one elusive ingredient to succeed — bipartisanship. Without some political detente between Republicans and Democrats and the White House and Congress, the insurgents, terrorists and warring political factions will continue to be emboldened.
At least that's the consensus of the foreign-policy and military analysts who make a living in the arcane world of international politics by sucking long-range solutions out of their thumbs. In this case, they are probably right, seeing what the lack of civility and extreme partisanship have produced on the domestic front. Extending the presidential election stumping to more than two years has exacerbated divisiveness even on issues like the war that cry out for accommodation…
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Of all the military bugle calls, none is so easily recognized or more apt to render emotion than the call Taps.
The melody is both eloquent and haunting, while the history of its origin is interesting and somewhat clouded in controversy. In the British army, a similar type of signal called Last Post has been sounded over soldiers' graves since 1885, but the use of Taps is unique to the United States military, since the call is sounded at funerals, wreath-laying ceremonies, and memorial services.
A bugle call that beckons us to remember patriots who served our country with honor and valor, it is the most familiar call and one that moves all who hear it.
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Marines in Search of a Mission – George Will, Washington Post
… Marines have an institutional memory of "small wars," from the Philippines to Central America, and this competence serves them well in Iraq, which is, an officer here says, "a thousand microcosms." But the exigencies of the protracted Iraq commitment have forced the Marines to adopt vehicles that are heavier and bigger than can easily travel with an expeditionary force on ships. And there is tension between the "nation-building" dimension of the Marines' Iraq mission and the Corps' distinctive warrior esprit, which is integral to why the nation wants the Corps.
Officers studying here at the Marine Corps University after tours in Iraq dutifully say they understand that they serve their combat mission -- destroying the enemy -- when they increase the host nation's capacity for governance. Besides, says one officer, when his units are helping with garbage collection, they know that "garbage collection is a matter of life and death because there are IEDs [improvised explosive devices] hidden under that garbage."
Still, no one becomes a Marine to collect garbage or otherwise nurture civil societies. And as one officer here notes with some asperity, there is "no Goldwater-Nichols Act for the rest of the government." That act required "jointness" -- collaborative operations -- by the services. Civilian agencies that do not play well together have fumbled the ball in Iraq, and the military has been forced to pick it up. This draws the military deeper into the sensitive responsibility for tutoring civilians who assign the forces nonmilitary tasks…
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Restructuring America’s Ground Forces: Better, Not Bigger - September 2007 paper by Frank Hoffman and Steven Metz for The Stanley Foundation.
The core defense debate of our time is how to make the US military more effective at irregular warfare (IW) and stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations in weak or failing states while still retaining some aspect of its strategic capabilities for major power warfare. Given the current global security system and likely future American strategy, the configuration that provides the best balance is one with ground forces about the size of today’s, with the Marines and the Army organized around a geographic division of labor, but with enough cross-training that each service could, in an emergency, operate outside its normal region. While the ground forces must retain the capability for large-scale conventional combat, they clearly should focus most of their efforts on the requirements of IW/SSTR. This may not be the force we would prefer to have in 2020, but it is the most realistic one for the coming decade.
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Continue reading "Restructuring America’s Ground Forces: Better, Not Bigger" »
Inside the Pentagon’s Fawzia Sheikh reports (subscription required) that Ft. Leavenworth’s new commanding general, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, wants to revamp how Army officers are educated.
Caldwell has decided to focus on developing leaders, increasing the interagency representation of certain officer courses offered by the Command and General Staff School and crafting strategic communications.
How to think, not what to think…
Continue reading "How to Think, Not What to Think at Leavenworth" »
Authors Note: This article was written in late August 2007, well before the present controversy over the Mansour neighborhood shootings by Blackwater Security. It is not a response or intended to address that incident.
The role of Private Security Companies (PSCs) operating in Iraq has always been controversial. It is said Iraq is a ‘different kind of war’. That is true in the sense that all Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines, no matter what their regular duties, suddenly became light infantry in a vicious counterinsurgency. It is a battle without a rear area and an extremely small military presence in proportion to the local population...
Continue reading "All Hands On Deck – Radically Reorienting Private Security in Iraq" »
‘Mugged by Reality’ Part II – Thomas Sowell, Washington Times
Nothing is easier than to second-guess other people's decisions, ignoring the inherent limitations of knowledge, the pressures of circumstances, and the dangers of alternative courses of action.
Americans in all parts of the political spectrum have made serious mistakes about Iraq.
Some have been the mistakes of honorable people — indeed, mistakes to which honorable people may be more prone than others. Other people have acted with utter dishonor and dishonesty — the most shameful recent example the smearing of Gen. David Petraeus as a liar before he had said a word.
Precisely because congressional Democrats already knew there had been progress after the troop surge in Iraq — some of their own colleagues had been there and seen it — they had to discredit Gen. Petraeus to prevent the people from knowing it…
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In a 17 September The Atlantic Dispatch article (Will the Petraeus Strategy Be the Last?) I offer a view from Iraq's restive Anbar province on Congress's recent Iraq hearings...
Continue reading "Will the Petraeus Strategy Be the Last?" »