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Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent. Fred Burton.

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Random House (June 3, 2008)

Book Review by Jon A. Custis

The Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), with its intermittent hiring freezes and exhaustive screening process, is a fairly well-known government security apparatus. With Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, author Fred Burton pulls back the curtain on the formative years of the DSS's Counterterrorism (CT) Division, an element that began with three agents working in the bowels of the Harry S. Truman Building, behind a secure door and in the midst of the “dead bodies” files. In the process, Burton details his personal involvement in investigations into terrorist acts that occurred as far back as the Beirut Embassy and Marine Barracks bombings of 1983.

This memoir is all at once hard-hitting, well-researched, and an easy read. Organized into thirty-six chapters, with thoughtfully-placed transitions between each, Ghost becomes ones of those books that is easy to put down and return to in a few days. The book's appeal stemmed from the insight it provided on a multitude of state-sponsored and independent terrorist incidents, along with Burton's efforts to glean lessons in prevention. In today's counter-IED terminology, Burton could be considered to have been working towards "getting to the left of boom," as his team sought to determine the vulnerabilities that the Department of State faced abroad and at home. Burton also does an admirable job of delineating the division of labor between the various three-letter agencies that work against terrorism in the "Dark World." He sums it up well by stating: "In many ways, we're America's Dark World redheaded stepchild. We maneuver in the cracks and crevices between the other agencies. It is a tough place to operate." This may be news to the casual reader who previously assumed that the Central Intelligence Agency was the dominant actor in defeating terrorism abroad, and thus those chapters contribute to the book’s readability.

The CT Division's efforts took Burton to Germany for debriefings of Hezbollah captives snatched from the streets of Beirut, to Pakistan as he helped investigate the crash of the Presidential C-130 that killed President Zia-ul-Haq, Ambassador Raphael, and Brigadier General Wassom, (U.S. Army) in 1988, and to Cyprus as he probed the causes of Pan Am Flight 103's break-up over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was illuminating to see how the defensive efforts of the DSS intersected with terrorist acts that captured headlines throughout the eighties and nineties.

The book should not be subtitled as a confessional, since it is not a story of misdeeds, secrets, and recurring lies. Rather, it recounts aggressive actions taken to protect our nation's diplomats -- actions in a campaign that almost cost Burton his marriage and family. Fred Burton left DSS to serve as the vice president for Strategic Forecasting (STRATFOR), and seems to attempt to offer the truth and provide justice for the families of victims who were taken by terrorism's hand. The writing can be a bit clichéd in the early chapters, but picks up its pace and matures along the way. There is nothing earth-shattering about Ghost, but it is good material presented well, and an eye-opener in a few areas: 4 out of 5 stars. It is a good read from a security professional who has been on the front lines of the good fight. It will make for excellent pleasure reading for the aspiring Homeland Security, intelligence, or protective security professional.

Major Jon Custis is Small Wars Council member jcustis and a Marine infantry officer.

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War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Douglas J. Feith.

Hardcover: 688 pages
Publisher: Harper (April 8, 2008)

War and Decision, an analytical description of a dysfunctional National Security Council and disloyal senior officials, will be studied for years by journalists, historians and aspiring political appointees. Half of the book is a convincing refutation of unfair allegations about the author. The other half presents a balanced analysis of policy debates about Iraq inside the administration between mid-2001 and mid-2004. While the length of War and Decision may deter the casual reader, its hefty substance gives credence to three themes.

First, poisonous leaks by senior CIA and State officials corroded trust inside the administration and damaged its public image. Feith cites leak after leak aimed at undercutting him personally, the Defense Department in general and the neoconservative political philosophy. The Bush administration was systematically undercut and trashed by its own senior officials. President Bush, who bragged he did not read newspapers, and his NSC adviser, Condoleeza Rice, tolerated disloyalty and paid the price in plummeting public approval and increasing political opposition.

Feith marshals evidence in great detail that rebuts previous allegations about his supposedly secret intelligence operation to undercut the CIA, the Pentagon’s insistence on placing Chalabi in charge of Iraq or resisting a State Department plan for reconstruction. Unfortunately, his effort is probably to little avail. Facts rarely change ideological attitudes. The leakers effectively appealed to the liberal instincts of many journalists to shape narratives around presumptive political philosophies. Once Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were branded with the scarlet word ‘neocon’, then the substance of their positions - and the credibility of the leaks degrading them - became secondary.

In hundreds of pages, Feith lays out the case that CIA and State officials, disagreeing with Bush’s policies, leaked false stories impugning so-called neocons in order to enlist the press. Journalists who pride themselves on healthy skepticism should read this book to understand how they can be played. As for the disloyal officials, Feith argues they should have resigned honorably. Small chance of that, when you can put the knife into someone’s back.

Potential political appointees should read the book and ask themselves how they would react. Feith depicts Rumsfeld as a crafty, anti-ideological manager and intellectual counter-puncher with “Boy Scout” principles of honor that included not leaking to the press. Loyally obeying his boss, Feith didn’t fight back the way his mentor, Richard Perle, had fought in the ‘80s. “I now see more clearly,” Feith wrote, “the intense animus behind the systematic leaking and “backgrounding” that undermined President Bush and others who supported him. Our failure - as targets - to heed the attack, to protest it, and to fight back, was a form of unilateral disarmament that did not serve the interests of the President, the country, or truth.”

The second theme that emerges from the book is that of a dysfunctional NSC system. According to Feith, “Rice worked to spare the President having to decide between clear-cut, mutually exclusive options.” Before the war, Bush had approved a pre-war plan to place an Iraqi interim government in charge once Saddam was removed. When Baghdad fell, though, State and CIA feared Chalabi would gain power and proposed a multiyear transition. When Bremer left for Baghdad, the Pentagon believed the president had ordered a quick handover to Iraqis; Bremer believed he was to remain in charge indefinitely. “Among Garner, Khalilzad, Bremer, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice,” Feith wrote, “there was not a common, clear understanding of what the President wanted done.”

In chapter after chapter, the book describes an administration where the principals excelled at identifying the defects in any plan and were spared the discipline of having to agree to one course of action and see it through. General Tommy Franks denied that his Central Command and the 170,000 soldiers had any role in Iraq’s reconstruction. Rumsfeld warned that “Yankee can-do” initiative deprived other countries of incentives to pull their own weight. Powell urged a “go slow” approach in Iraq. Bremer reported to Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld, and spoke to Rice almost daily. This meant, Feith wrote, that Bremer “effectively had no boss. This was not how the interagency process was supposed to work.”

The third - and perhaps accidental - theme of the book is the contradiction it draws between the NSC deliberations and the war that was raging. President Bush appears decisive in his own mind, and an enigma to all around him. In Feith’s book, the NSC principals treat the tribal, sectarian, religious and extremist currents roiling Iraq as intellectual concepts that could be resolved by wise senior officials armed with video teleconferencing machines.

Feith did make a two-day visit to Iraq. “In August of 2003 I traveled to Iraq for the first time,” Feith writes. “It is valuable for any top policy official to visit the theater of operations. One can never be reminded often enough that national security policy is ultimately about human beings.”

The human beings who were killing American soldiers had motivations that eluded the policymakers and couldn’t be grasped by short visits. Feith writes that before the war he never saw a CIA assessment warning that the Baathists would organize an insurgency, let alone ally with foreign jihadists. The NSC principals didn’t see the train coming that ran over them. Feith points out that on the one hand he wasn’t sure what the president’s policy goals were, while on the other Rumsfeld excluded the Pentagon policy shop from operational discussions with the military.

Policy, however uninformed, is supposed to direct the selection of a war-making strategy.

That didn’t happen during the Iraq war. An insurgency grows from the bottom up, reflecting Tolstoy’s view that the collective, inchoate will of the people shapes the course of a nation’s history and is indifferent to discussions in the king’s palaces. Washington existed inside its own bubble, showing no humility in the face of a fiendishly complex war. The interagency process in Washington concocted and debated policy theories, explained at length by Feith, that were disconnected from decisions, sensible or otherwise, about military strategy.

These high-level policy discussions didn’t influence insurgent actions. In April of 2004, having ordered the Marines, against their better judgment, to seize Fallujah, a fractious city of 300,000, President Bush then stopped the assault mid-way to permit a 24-hour negotiation. Feith describes how at the NSC level, the battle for Fallujah was discussed in the context of political theories - how to placate the Sunnis, how to handle Sadr, etc. At the time, I was with a Marine commander whose battalion had gained momentum by breaking through a heavily-defended city block, only to be halted by the ceasefire. The battalion held onto that block, beating off attacks for 14 more days, while Feith describes the NSC deliberating political theory before calling off the attack altogether.

The NSC became too wrapped up in itself, forgetting that battle is determined by the spirit of those doing the fighting, and that the first duty of leaders is to take care of their men. One pores over Feith’s book - so meticulous in describing a dysfunctional NSC - looking for the decisions that made a difference in the war. Feith was too much the gentleman to entitle his book, War and Indecision. But aside from handing over the keys to the kingdom to Bremer, it is hard to identify any NSC decision through mid-2004 that affected events on the ground. Feith describes interminable debates inside the NSC about Iraqi attitudes toward sovereignty and the role of expatriates.

“But none of these judgments,” he concludes, “had any reality outside the subjective thoughts of the officials who asserted them.”

That, unfortunately, is a fitting epitaph for the NSC during the early years of the war in Iraq.

Bing West’s third book on Iraq - The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the End Game in Iraq - will be published by Random House in August.

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Continue on for some selected reading on regional, threat, defense and irregular warfare issues...

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Well Intended but Largely Mistaken Attacks on NCTC and DHS “War of Words” Advisories

Parts 4, 5 and 6 of 6.

Part 1.

Parts 2 and 3.

Part # 4: Proofs of The al Qaeda Apostasy

And as proof positive that the terrorists do truly deserve such harsh condemnations, here is a partial "Bill of Particulars" of their many transgressions and willful violations of Qur'anic prohibitions of which the AQ radicals are enormously guilty -- as is further explained in Is it Holy “Jihad” of Unholy “Irhabi Murderdom”???

• Wanton killing of innocents and noncombatants, including many peaceful Muslims
• Decapitating the live and desecrating the dead bodies of perceived enemies
• Committing and enticing others to commit suicide for reasons of intimidation
• Fomenting hatred among communities, nations, religions and civilizations
• Ruthless warring against nations in which Islam is freely practiced
• Issuing and inspiring unauthorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts)
• Using some mosques as weapons depots and battle stations, while destroying others
• Forcing extremist and absolutist versions (and perversions) of Islam on Muslims, when the Qur'an clearly says that there shall be "no compulsion in religion"
• Distorting the word "infidels" to include all Christians, all Jews and many Muslims, as well - when the Qur'an calls them all "Children of the Book" (the Old Testament) and "Sons of Abraham," and calls Jesus one of Islam's five main Prophets
• Deliberate misreading, ignoring and perverting of passages of the Qur'an, the Hadith and the Islamic Jurisprudence (the Fiqh)
• Ruthless recruiting of very young and easy-to-brainwash children into lives of hatred, revenge and suicide mass murder, long before they have reached the age of reaso
• Heartless use and abuse of mentally handicapped women, some of them carrying infant children for disguise, in acts of suicide bombing of fellow Muslims

Continue reading "Well Intended but Largely Mistaken Attacks (Parts 4, 5, and 6)" »

Small Wars Foundation assumed ownership and operation of Small Wars Journal from Small Wars Journal, LLC on June 1, 2008.

Small Wars Journal has never been operated with a profit motive. The LLC was a way to get the site started, add rigor to its management, and maybe allow us to keep our houses (and, accordingly, our wives) in the odd chance we pissed off someone with a good lawyer.

We built it, and you have come. There has been a great response, and we look forward to doing more to serve the community.

Small Wars Foundation is the right corporate structure for the site to move forward, develop more capabilities, sustain operations, and deliver to its vision. Small Wars Foundation is a Virginia corporation formed exclusively for charitable, educational, and literary purposes within the meaning of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Federal filing is in process for formal determination of status as a non-profit organization.

The core vision of the site, outlined on the About page, remains the same. We haven't fired the Editor-in-Chief or Publisher, yet. Other developments to follow.

- Dave & Bill

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The alarm bell has been ringing for some time on China’s involvement on the Dark Continent. The "People's" Republic of China's interest in Africa is not new... (Peter Brookes and Ji Hye Shin in a 2006 Heritage Foundation Backgrounder):

In the 1960s and 1970s, Beijing’s interest centered on building ideological sol¬idarity with other underdeveloped nations to advance Chinese-style communism and on repelling Western “imperialism.” Following the Cold War, Chinese interests evolved into more pragmatic pursuits such as trade, investment, and energy.

In recent years, Beijing has identified the African continent as an area of significant economic and strategic interest. America and its allies and friends are finding that their vision of a prosperous Africa governed by democracies that respect human rights and the rule of law and that embrace free markets is being challenged by the escalating Chinese influence in Africa.

… but should concern us now more than ever. The “why” was provided yesterday by Thomas Christensen and James Swan in their statement before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Christensen is Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and Swan is Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs - two who should be in the know about such matters. The transcript of their statement can be found here...

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Commencement Remarks by Secretary of the Army Pete Geren

US Military Academy, West Point

31 May 2008

Excerpt

Mark Twain told us that history does not repeat itself, but that it does rhyme...

Now, no graduation speech would be complete if I did not attempt to leave a few lessons behind. You enter our Army at a dynamic period in the history of our service-in the history of warfare--policy, doctrine, training and equipping are adapting rapidly to a constantly changing threat--an environment where our Soldiers must hold and build, as well as they clear. You have learned how to "eat soup with a knife" and other important lessons about leadership in your 21st Century Army.

For the lessons I want to leave with you, I will borrow heavily from a man who has spoken here before, as I could not improve on his prose and I share his vision for your service. He summed up succinctly a day in the life of an American Soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan today. He told your predecessors:

• "Your military responsibilities will require a versatility and an adaptability never before required in either war or in peace."
• They will "involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles ... risking their lives, not as combatants, but as instructors or advisors."
• "This is another type of war, ... -- war by guerillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins. War by ambush instead of by combat ... seeking victory by eroding and exhausting us instead of engaging us."
• "The non-military problems which you will face will be most demanding: diplomatic, political and economic."
• "You will serve as advisors to ... foreign governments."
• "You will need to ... understand the foreign policy of the United States and the foreign policy of countries ... that 20 years ago were the most distant names to us."
• "You will need to give orders in different tongues;"
• "You will be involved in economic judgments which most economists would hesitate to make."
• "You will need to understand the importance of military power and also the limits of military power..."

Perhaps most importantly, he told your predecessors:

• "Your posture and performance will provide the local population with the only evidence of what our country is really like."

And, in closing he said:

• "You have one satisfaction, however difficult your days may be: When you are asked by the president of the United States or by any other American what you are doing for your country, no man's answers will be clearer than your own."

History does rhyme. These words were spoken 46 years ago by President Kennedy, standing here, speaking to the graduating Class of 1962."

-----

President John. F. Kennedy - Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, 6 June 1962 (Video)

Secretary of the Army Pete Geren - Biography

Hat Tip to Mr. Michael Brady for alerting SWJ to Secretary Geren's speech.

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This morning I stumbled across (actually it appeared in the left sidebar under Google Ads) what looks like a pretty good resource for students and practitioners of COIN – The Counterinsurgency Library. The site is pretty well organized and contains a lot of historical and recent content. Reminds me of what I had (and still have) planned for our own SWJ library. Until we get there take a look around the COIN library.

Here’s the library’s about statement:

Counterinsurgency has become a subject of great interest in the last few years, and this website is intended to bring together the literature on this vitally important subject in a single location. This is a collaborative website, in which anyone can enter bibliographical references. A user can – and is indeed encouraged to – annotate the entries. Visitors can also search by topic to find a list of articles about specific insurgencies or issues in counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency is a complex subject, as it rests at the intersection of history, economics, military strategy, and even political theory. This site attempts to collect articles on all of these aspects of counterinsurgency. In this respect it is different than other reading lists on, or bibliographies of, counterinsurgency. Some reading lists focus on military issues; others look at specific historical examples.

What makes this site unique is that it is both collaborative and dedicated to both the practical and deeply philosophical issues surrounding counterinsurgency. Many of the articles included here deal with specific counterinsurgencies, ranging from Iraq to Malaysia to Vietnam; other articles address practical questions such as the role of indigenous police forces in counterinsurgency. Still others deal with the theoretical foundations of the state, a subject that, even while largely unacknowledged, underlies all counterinsurgency efforts. At all times, this site is interested in a holistic view of success in counterinsurgency.

Please help us create a resource that can be of use to both scholars and soldiers, to those who are paid to think about counterinsurgency and to merely concerned citizens, and to all who hope for success in the difficult art of counterinsurgency.

The site is divided into two sections - Hot Topics and What's New. The hot topics include posts by country, other categories, Iraq, COIN tactics and theorists.

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Insha'Allah

By Phil Carter

Cross posted here with permission of Phil Carter, Intel Dump.

In 2005, President Bush articulated a national strategy for Iraq that hinged on successfully advising Iraqi security forces. "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," he said.

The critical piece of this strategy was the adviser capability itself. Although the military's special operations community had long nurtured the capability to conduct "foreign internal defense," the Army and Marine Corps had largely marginalized this capability by the time of the Iraq war, disdaining it in favor of conventional combat operations. To achieve the president's vision for Iraq, the Army and Marines would need to build this capability from scratch, tearing officers and sergeants out of their existing combat units, assigning them to newly created adviser teams,and embedding them with Iraqi army, police and headquarters units.

In God Willing, Marine Corps Reserve Capt. Eric Navarro tells his story of serving on one of these teams, as an adviser to the Iraqi Army's battalion in the then-violent Anbar province in Western Iraq. Through graphic and colorful stories, Navarro relates the daily struggles of his adviser team, from training his Iraqi officer counterparts to be leaders to figuring out how to feed and house an Iraqi infantry company.

Having served as an embedded adviser with Iraq's police, I could relate to many of his stories, especially his tale of frustration illustrating the difference between command and influence (advisers generally exercise only the latter). Before I deployed, I read everything I could find on combat advising, The Village, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and A Bright Shining Lie, trying to learn as much as I could to help me climb the steep learning curve of a combat adviser. Navarro's book joins this library of knowledge about combat advising and should be on the pre-deployment reading list for anyone heading to Iraq to do this job.

I had lunch with Navarro last month, after he returned from his second tour in Iraq, to talk about his book and his thoughts on Iraq. A transcript of our Q&A follows...

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Using ODP to Establish a Campaign Design Framework for SFA Activities

The link is to a draft white paper I’ve been working on as part of my duties at the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance. Any comments, criticisms, or suggestions are most welcome. Here are two excerpts, one from the introduction and one from the summary.

Introduction

ODP (Operational Design Process) fills a gap between the issuance of a policy objective, and the planning to achieve that policy objective. Contained within is a description of a way of framing a design for the purpose of proposing a problem, and then developing a theory of action. It is an interpretation and adaptation of the Operational Design Process (developed at SAMS and employed at the Army’s Unified Quest 2008 War Game and is itself an adaptation of Systemic Operational Design). It must be inclusive of not only the “out puts” or “products” of the process, but more importantly the interaction of the people who participate in the process, and who will go forward in planning and implementation / execution. The critical issue ODP highlights is that the right problem is identified and considered based on a thorough analysis to which a theory of action can be developed that can be scrutinized based on continuous interaction.

This is not planning. It is a process that should be done prior to planning, but can be continued through implementation in order to ensure the theory remains valid. Designing the Operational Frame by establishing a theory of reality and a theory of action helps the commander and staff to avoid the effects of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the effect where because a COA has been committed to in planning, all other relevant information which might contradict or conflict with the COA that has been committed to, or invested in, is ignored, bent to establish a fallacious causal relationship, or biased as to have the wrong weight. Cognitive dissonance can cause a commander and staff to see only what they wish to see, and make bad decisions. While all bias cannot be eliminated, the ODP can help mitigate the natural biases commanders and staffs have with regard to a chosen COA. It does this through its interactive nature which better represents reality, and by identifying many of the various potential outcomes, and establishing more explicitly how those outcomes might occur.

Summary

ODP is not planning, it is a theory of reality that informs a theory of action upon which a campaign design can be built and tested through interaction. ODP fills a gap between the issuance of a policy objective, and the planning to achieve that policy objective. This is founded on assessing the environment as holistic, interactive, biological system which recognizes that there are critical subsystems within. These subsystems of people often interact in non-linear ways with produce non-linear outcomes. As a process, it seeks to test the underpinning logic to which we ascribe rationality, with the recognition that although we might consider an act as irrational, the cultural, sociological and political conditions in which the system exist may make the same act plausible, rational or even likely. This process engenders that it is better to think in terms of tolerances and relevance then in absolutes. This process recognizes that as long as there are people and politics there will remain interaction, and as such tolerances and relevance can change over time. ODP can be applied wherever there are complex interactive problems.

Using ODP to Establish a Campaign Design Framework for SFA Activities – June 2008 DRAFT white paper

Discuss at Small Wars Council

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Okay, Herschel gave you Friday night music - we'll give some for Saturday night because we're bad to the bone...

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Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed graduates of the Army War College yesterday at Carlisle Barracks. Major themes included listening to combat-tempered Soldiers and Marines, rebuilding combat capabilities that have atrophied during the protracted counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, gaps in US military capabilities, gaps in professional expertise, building allies’ capacity, improving international and interagency cooperation, and fostering both security and stability through healthy vibrant deterrence.

Here are several press reports on Admiral Mullen's address...

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Westhawk, a first-rate blog and a daily read for me, has a post up titled Remembering America’s New Friends. Here is an excerpt.

This decade, a million American soldiers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many have had a chance to develop relationships with Iraqi and Afghan soldiers, civil servants, and businessmen. Summed together, these relations are now forming bonds that will endure beyond whatever decisions statesmen in these countries decide to take. The personal relationships between Americans and their counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan will influence the strategic balance in the region. These relationships are also likely too numerous and too deep for any statesmen to control.

Rob Thornton is a US Army officer and combat veteran of the Iraq war. He spent a year as an advisor to an Iraqi battalion and now works at the US Army school house at Fort Leavenworth improving the US military’s foreign military advisory efforts. Thornton recently wrote a comment at Small Wars Journal Blog that illustrated the bonds that are strengthening at the personal level between Americans, Iraqis, and, presumably, Afghans...

More, read it all.

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Counterinsurgency Leaders Workshop

The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency (COIN) Center is hosting a five-day program for prospective counterinsurgency leaders, 11-15 August 2008, at the Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The program is focused on equipping leaders with an understanding of the insurgency and counterinsurgency environments, as well as close consideration of the kinds of persons and organizations that usually emerge from insurgencies in contrast to those of conventional conflicts. This event will be held at the Battle Command Training Center (BCTC) Training Facility on Fort Leavenworth. Seating is limited. However, registration is open to any person who serves in any official capacity with regard to dealing with insurgencies, with priority is given to those applying from invited organizations. Other applicants will be reviewed for eligibility on a space-available, case-by-case basis. The duty is uniform/business casual. The deadline for application is 1 August 2008. For more information, contact the COIN Center at 913-684-5196. Application must be completed on-line at the Counterinsurgency Leaders Workshop web page.

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Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan - Seth Jones, Rand

This study explores the nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, the key challenges and successes of the US-led counterinsurgency campaign, and the capabilities necessary to wage effective counterinsurgency operations. By examining the key lessons from all insurgencies since World War II, it finds that most policymakers repeatedly underestimate the importance of indigenous actors to counterinsurgency efforts. The US should focus its resources on helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces to wage counterinsurgency. It has not always done this well. The US military-along with US civilian agencies and other coalition partners-is more likely to be successful in counterinsurgency warfare the more capable and legitimate the indigenous security forces (especially the police), the better the governance capacity of the local state, and the less external support that insurgents receive.

New RAND COIN in Afghanistan Study - Tim Stevens, Ubiwar

Seems like the folks at RAND have been similarly busy, with another COIN report out today: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones, the fourth volume in the RAND Counterinsurgency series. The tone of the report partly reflects what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days about operations in Afghanistan - “comprehensive organisational dysfunction” sticks in my mind - although Jones concentrates more on capacity-building and security security reform.

RAND Study on Counterinsurgency - Herschel Smith, The Captain's Journal

Seth G. Jones of RAND National Defense Research Institute has published Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. It will required several assessments to analyze the entirety of the paper, and in lieu of attempting to assess the paper chronologically, we will address it thematically. Several quotes will be supplied (mainly from Chapter 2 which is entitled Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare).

Pakistan Helped Taliban Insurgents - Jason Straziuso, Associated Press

Pakistani intelligence agents and paramilitary forces have helped train Taliban insurgents and have given them information about American troop movements in Afghanistan, said a report published Monday by a US think tank.

The study by the RAND Corp. also warned that the US will face "crippling, long-term consequences" in Afghanistan if Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan are not eliminated. It echoes recent statements by American generals, who have increased their warnings that militant safe havens in Pakistan are threatening efforts in Afghanistan. The study was funded by the US Defense Department.

‘US Faces Severe Consequences’ - Pakistan Daily Times

The United States and its NATO allies will face “crippling, long-term consequences” in their efforts to stabilise Afghanistan if Taliban sanctuaries in neighbouring Pakistan are not eliminated, a report published on Monday said.

Funded by the Defence Department, The study, ‘Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, has claimed that NATO officials have uncovered several instances of Pakistani intelligence agents providing information to Taliban fighters, including information on “the location and movement of Afghan and coalition forces”.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also pleaded with the global community to address the issue of militant sanctuaries in Pakistan. Afghan intelligence officials say young, uneducated males are recruited in the Tribal Areas to become suicide bombers and fighters.

However, Pakistan denies that it supports the insurgents.

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More on the debate that has played out (and is ongoing) here at the Small Wars Journal, on the Small Wars Council discussion board and the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.

For background see Eating Soup with a Spoon by LTC Gian Gentile at Armed Forces Journal:

The Army's new manual on counterinsurgency operations (COIN), in many respects, is a superb piece of doctrinal writing. The manual, FM 3-24 "Counterinsurgency," is comparable in breadth, clarity and importance to the 1986 FM 100-5 version of "Operations" which came to be known as "AirLand Battle."

The new manual's middle chapters that pertain to the conduct of counterinsurgency operations are especially helpful and relevant to senior commanders in Iraq. But a set of nine paradoxes in the first chapter of the manual removes a piece of reality of counterinsurgency warfare that is crucial for those trying to understand how to operate within it...

LTC Gentile at World Politics Review - Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army's Conventional Capabilities:

... A misleading current narrative contends that the recent lowering of violence in Iraq is primarily due to the American "surge" and the application of so-called "new" counterinsurgency methods. Because these new counterinsurgency methods have worked in Iraq, the thinking goes, why not try them in other places, such as Afghanistan? This hyper-emphasis on counterinsurgency puts the American Army in a perilous condition. Its ability to fight wars consisting of head-on battles using tanks and mechanized infantry is in danger of atrophy.

The truth is that American combat forces in Iraq have been conducting counterinsurgency operations successfully and pretty much by the book since about the middle of 2004. By that time, U.S. commanders had identified the mistakes of the first few months of the occupation, had absorbed a significant number of lessons learned from previous counterinsurgencies, and had started to train units on correct counterinsurgency methods prior to their deployments...

And this by COL Peter Mansoor at Small Wars Journal - Misreading the History of the Iraq War:

... Gentile's analysis is incorrect in a number of ways, and his narrative is heavily influenced by the fact that he was a battalion commander in Baghdad in 2006. His unit didn't fail, his thinking goes, therefore recent successes cannot be due to anything accomplished by units that came to Iraq during the Surge.

The facts speak otherwise. Gentile's battalion occupied Ameriyah, which in 2006 was an Al Qaeda safe-haven infested by Sunni insurgents and their Al Qaeda-Iraq allies. I'm certain that he and his soldiers did their best to combat these enemies and to protect the people in their area. But since his battalion lived at Forward Operating Base Falcon and commuted to the neighborhood, they could not accomplish their mission. The soldiers did not fail. The strategy did.

The "big base" strategy only changed when General Dave Petraeus and Lieutenant General Ray Odierno came to Iraq and implemented the new counterinsurgency doctrine in the recently published FM 3-24. Few U.S. Army units were implementing that doctrine as early as 2004, as Gentile claims. Some units were moving in that direction, as Colonel H. R. McMaster's accomplishments with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in 2005 attest. But these units were exceptions to the general rule. Most units were still more intent on finding and killing the enemy than they were on protecting the Iraqi people and making it impossible for the insurgents to survive in their midst...

Now on to The War We Have by Christopher Griffin, American Enterprise Institute (emphasis and links by SWJ):

The appointments of Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to the head of Central Command and of Multi-National Force-Iraq, respectively, send one clear message: The surge will go on. Its two key architects and most visible proponents, after all, are now at the helm of American military operations throughout the Middle East and Iraq. But as the generals settle into another stint of command, the military is agog in debate as to the success of the surge and what it means for both the Army's future and its past.

Many of these arguments have been conducted on the Small Wars Journal website. Two leading voices so far have been Lt. Col. Gian Gentile and Col. Peter Mansoor. These two soldier-scholars are professors of military history and have combat experience in Iraq, where Gentile commanded a battalion in 2006 and Mansoor serves as Petraeus' executive officer after having commanded a brigade in 2003-2005...

Gentile and Mansoor lay out strong, contrasting views on the history of the war. Either the U.S. wasted its efforts through 2006 by executing a flawed strategy that removed American forces too quickly from the fight, or the U.S. just got lucky rather than better in 2007. Either the surge and the execution of FM 3-24 represents the culmination of years of military learning, or it is waste of military doctrine that will ultimately eat into the ability of American forces to fight conventional battles. And ultimately, either the U.S. is on the path to victory in Iraq, or else it is as contingent as ever upon the willingness of Sunni and Shiite factions to play nice....

One SWJ contributor, "Schmedlap" captures this problem when he observes that the popular narrative of the surge is unfair, but that it really does not matter that it is so: "I agree with the general theme that Iraq has not been turned around by some enlightened soldier-scholar with a Ph.D. rolling into to town and using intellect instead of firepower. That was an image that appealed to the media and academia and was politically expedient. However, Gen. Petraeus made a big difference by simply reversing the FOB consolidation trend." It may indeed not be fair, and when the military's historians review the Iraq war as it was fought year by year and town by town, they will certainly find more nuance than the current explanation that 2006 was a necessary condition before Iraq would experience its annus mirabilis in the surge. Perhaps the last sacrifice of the soldiers who fought in 2006 will be to patiently await the day that their efforts are given a full and proper accounting.

More at The War We Have.

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Detention Centers Give Glimpse Into al-Qaida - Gerry Gilmore, AFPS

Officials who manage detention centers in Iraq are getting a valuable look inside the mind of al-Qaida in Iraq, a senior US military officer said here today.

“We have learned so much about who al-Qaida is; we have learned so much about how they recruit and what their intent is; we have learned so much about how to counter them and how to engage [the detainee population] with a very clear program that breaks away their support base,” Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone told Pentagon reporters.

About 21,000 detainees are being held in detention centers in Iraq under a United Nations resolution, said Stone, who recently completed a 14-month duty tour as the deputy commander of detention operations for Multinational Force Iraq.

Stone said he implemented a system last fall that separated hard-core extremists from more moderate members of the detention population. Moderate, well-behaved detainees, he told reporters, are rewarded with family visitation times, literacy and vocational training classes and more.

Confirmed extremists, including foreigners who entered Iraq to wage war against US and Iraqi security forces and against Iraqi civilians are separated from non-extremists within the detention population, he said.

Moderate-thinking detainees deemed not to be security threats want to re-enter Iraqi society as peaceful, productive citizens, Stone said. The majority of these detainees, he explained, got into trouble helping insurgents by being lookouts or performing other low-level tasks -- not because they shared the extremists’ philosophy, but because they were desperate for money.

Voluntary education and vocational programs offered at detention centers are providing moderate-thinking detainees a conduit to re-enter society as productive citizens, Stone said.

The Fate of The Worst - Max Boot, Contentions

One of the unheralded heroes of the past year in Iraq is Major General Douglas Stone of the US Marine Corps, who has just ended a stint as commander of detainee operations. His most notable innovation has been to institute “COIN behind the wire” — that is a counterinsurgency program aimed at weaning detainees away from terrorism. It is too soon to tell to what extent this program has succeeded, but early indications are positive. The program is now being put to the test because the US command is reducing the number of detainees in American custody. The total has already dropped from 25,000 to 21,000, as noted in this Washington Post article, yet the amount of violence for the past three weeks has been at its lowest level since early 2004.

General Stone’s Exit Interview - Matt Armstrong, MountainRunner

Very briefly but worth your time watch the video below, at least the first seven minutes. Major General Doug Stone, formerly of Task Force 134, gave an exit interview after turning over command of detainee operations in Iraq. I recommend watching his opening remarks as he speaks directly to the point who the detainees are, their motivation, and how he managed to attain a recidivism rate of... well it is “miniscule” as he noted (only 40 returned out of about 10,000 released).

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The transition of security to Iraqi control and responsibility involves much more than merely building units and transferring equipment; the process includes building ministerial capacity for generation and replenishment of capability. The common point of view is that for the transition of control there must be a balance of meeting security requirements and transition activities, each as separate activities. The reality is that in Iraq there must be security while transitioning, and the two activities of security and transition are simultaneous and complementary.

Simply generating forces and getting them into the fight also falls short of a long-term solution; forces must be generated while the long-term capability to replenish those forces is developed using a systems of systems approach. This enduring capability requires an “enterprise mindset” to manage those forces and capabilities throughout the entire life cycle of force management, acquisition (including both personnel and equipment), training, distribution, deployment, sustainment, development, and separation and release from active duty (also including both personnel and equipment). Proper stewardship of these processes requires leader development and national-to-tactical resource management – which requires a shift in the ministerial mindset in the aftermath of the Saddam regime...

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The Erosion of Noncombatant Immunity within Al Qaeda
by Carl J. Ciovacco, Small Wars Journal

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Since its inception, al Qaeda’s treatment of noncombatant immunity has migrated from full observance to complete disregard. In just over a decade, al Qaeda transitioned from basing entire operations on the inviolable nature of noncombatant immunity to specifically targeting noncombatants. From 1991 until 2002, al Qaeda evolved through five distinct phases in its observance of noncombatant immunity. These phases transition from Phase One’s complete respect for noncombatants to Phase Five’s intentional targeting of millions of noncombatants with weapons of mass destruction. More recently, however, al Qaeda appears to be taking stock of the harm that targeting noncombatants is having on its cause. This paper will provide a phased analysis of how al Qaeda’s provision of noncombatant immunity disintegrated over time and why it may be returning today. This progression of thought and action concerning noncombatants serves as a roadmap by which to understand how and why al Qaeda made these ideological leaps.

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One of the key areas to build security capacity in Iraq is the development, training, equipping, and sustaining of the police forces under the Ministry of Interior. The mission of the Ministry of Interior is to “provide the Iraqi citizens with a free and peaceful society through its security forces. The Ministry of Interior forces arrest people who threaten the stability and security of Iraq in the civil sector, combat terrorism and continues to improve its forces to ensure order throughout Iraq. The Ministry of Interior is here to serve the public of Iraq.”

As part of the Ministry of Interior, the Iraqi Police Services (IPS) have the mission to “serve the public by providing law enforcement, public safety and internal security. The IPS Directorate has its own unique tasks and duties. The IPS first priority is to protect its citizens from terrorists, criminals and all those who seek to harm to the people of Iraq. The IPS protects people, their freedoms, public & private wealth as well as protect its citizens from any hazards and persons which compromise their safety. The IPS work to curb crime by implementing laws, arresting criminals who violate those laws and keeping public order.”...

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The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), an independent and bi-partisan national security think tank, released new reports at its second annual all-day policy forum, “Pivot Point: New Directions for American Security," on Wednesday, 11 June.

Continue on for the CNAS Reports and a synopsis of each...

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Video of Skirmish Along Border - Candace Rondeaux, Washington Post

The US-led military coalition in Afghanistan released video footage Thursday that apparently shows militants firing on Afghan troops from a mountain ridge near the country's northeast border with Pakistan, prompting a deadly skirmish that Pakistan has blamed for the deaths of 11 of its soldiers. A Taliban spokesman said 10 others also died in the military operation, which occurred late Tuesday evening just a few hundred feet inside Pakistan's troubled Mohmand tribal area and has threatened to further destabilize the increasingly fragile alliance between the United States and Pakistan. The footage of the incident, which was shot from above by an unmanned aerial vehicle, was issued as Pakistani government officials unleashed a torrent of criticism about the US military operation along Pakistan's porous border with Afghanistan.

US Releases Video of Pakistan Airstrike - Mike Nizza, New York Times

The United States military today confronted the sharpest criticism of an airstrike that left 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers dead on Tuesday night by releasing what it says is a video of the incident. (For background, see this article by Carlotta Gall and Eric Schmitt). Rather than it being a “completely unprovoked and cowardly act” - a charge from a Pakistani military officer that was later leavened by other officials - the Pentagon hoped the video would persuade the public that the American air attack was a legitimate act of self-defense. While it generally confirms aspects of both the American and the Taliban accounts of the border clash on Wednesday, the released video shows only part of the operation - the striking of three bombs, out of a total of about 12 that were used, officials said.

Air Strike in Pakistan ‘Legitimate, Self-Defense' - John Kruzel, AFPS

Defense Department officials called a US air strike in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border “legitimate” and “self-defense,” and said they are investigating the attack with Pakistani officials. “Every indication we have at this point is that the actions that were taken by US forces were legitimate, in that they were in self-defense after US forces operating on the border of Pakistan in Afghanistan territory came under attack from hostile forces,” Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in a news conference today. “In self-defense, they called in an air strike, which took out those forces that were attacking them,” he added.

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A Tale of Two Countries
Counterinsurgency and Capacity Building in the Pacific
by Dr. Russell W. Glenn, Small Wars Journal

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It is sometimes said that “Small is beautiful.” That does not imply that small is simple or easy. Two ongoing Pacific region contingencies - one in Solomon Islands, the other in the Southern Philippines and neither with over 500 military personnel on a typical day - provide many lessons for those conducting, planning, or studying counterinsurgency (COIN) and capacity building undertakings regardless of size. Those lessons validate many drawn from historical events of the past. Others reflect challenges more characteristic of insurgency in its evolving, twenty-first-century form. Though the soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and civilians of nations participating in the two operations have seen considerable progress, those individuals share a common realization that success during such operations is a never a given. The outsider complementing previous triumphs is ever reminded that any thoughts of success apply only to actions “so far.” This unwillingness to presume seems another trait shared with predecessors of ages past. Success, it seems, is a description that only historians should feel comfortable applying to a counterinsurgency.

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The Defense of Jisr al Doreaa by Captains Michael Burganoyne and Albert Markwardt.

This is another type of war new in its intensity, ancient in its origins - war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him… it requires in those situations where we must counter it… a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

--President John F. Kennedy, 1962

The advent of the War on Terror and t e evolution of guerilla tactics into a decisive form of warfare in its urban and rural form s have impacted the way western forces conduct warfare. The US deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have created a plethora of lessons learned and adjustments to doctrine. However, harking back to officer training and the simple but effective “Defense of Duffer’s Drift” by E.D. Swinton we believe that this short story will be of value to any young officer or small unit leader engaged in the complexities of counterinsurgency warfare.

The following story embodies the recollection of things done and undone in Iraq between 2003 and 2008. We hope that this fictional example will promote the application of the critical fundamentals of counterinsurgency and prevent their absence due to ignorance, arrogance, or misunderstanding. As the forces of liberal democracy continue to face the challenge of radical extremists, it is hoped that this simple text will provide a basis for additional study and discussion on counterinsurgency tactics.

Captain Michael L. Burgoyne
Captain Albert J. Marckwardt

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To whom it may concern,

The Honorable Robert M. Gates must continue on as the Secretary of Defense in your administration.

Our Nation and Armed Services require his leadership and a continuation of the policies he has set in motion.

Thank you for your consideration,

Small Wars Journal

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The status of the new Iraqi Armed Forces (IAF) is clearly outlined in Article 9 of the Iraqi Constitution, which states that the Armed Forces shall be “subject to the control of the civilian authority” and “shall defend Iraq and shall not be used as an instrument of oppression against the Iraqi people, shall not interfere in the political affairs and shall have no role in the transfer of authority.”

One of the key areas to build security capacity in Iraq is the development, training, equipping, and sustaining of the armed forces under the Ministry of Defense - a completely different mission from the mission of developing the Iraqi Police because of the dissolution of the military after the 2003 invasion. The build-up of Iraqi Armed Forces, begun in 2004 with the training of the first infantry battalion, has continued to evolve to a focus on not only combat forces, but also the enablers required to sustain the force...

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Judah Grunstein has an interesting series posted over at World Politics Review on France’s strategic posture.

Over the course of the past month, World Politics Review met with leading figures representing a wide range of France's national security and foreign policy community. Our interlocuters, all of whom were extremely generous with their time and insight, included Eric Chevallier, special advisor to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner; Michel Miraillet, the director of the Defense Ministry's Strategic Affairs Directorate; Sen. Didier Boulaud (PS), member of the Senate Commission on Foreign Affairs, Defense & Armed Forces, who resigned in protest from the Livre Blanc Commission; Maj. General Vincent Desportes, commander of the Force Employment Doctrine Center for the French Army; Yves Boyer, deputy director of the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS); Bruno Tertrais, who spoke with us in his capacity as research fellow at the FRS but who is also a member of the Livre Blanc Commission; and Jean-Pierre Maulny, deputy director of the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégique. We also had the privilege of interviewing former foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the full text of which will conclude the series of articles to follow.

Here are links to each segment of the series:

France's Strategic Posture: Series Introduction
NATO Reingtegration and European Defense
A Widening Focus
The Temptation of Forward Defense
An Interview with Hubert Védrine

The series is a very good read, providing excellent background and insights on the complex issues facing France as it looks ahead in regards to that country’s national security interests.

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What Rumsfeld Got Right - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic

Rumsfeld, one former Pentagon official told me, saw Iraq’s degraded military as an easy target for our own; its destruction would provide a quick demonstration of American power, as well as get rid of the regional threat that the Iraqi regime constituted. No firm believer in democratic transformation, he probably assumed, as did many other people at the time, that any new regime in Baghdad, even a military one, would be a dramatic improvement, in strategic terms for the US and in human-rights terms for the Iraqis. Rather than a fear of chaos, what is more apparent at this stage is a certain complacency on Rumsfeld’s part. For example, he evidently did not challenge the personnel system’s choice of ground commander in post-invasion Iraq. The Army’s 5th Corps was slated to rotate out of Germany and into Iraq. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the 5th Corps commander, and his staff, despite their service in Bosnia, had done little thinking about counterinsurgency. From that set of circumstances, a long trail of well-documented mistakes followed. In this and other cases, Rumsfeld, who is often accused of micromanaging, did not micromanage enough.

Kaplan on Rumsfeld - Max Boot, Contentions

Robert D. Kaplan, one of our most thoughtful and enterprising foreign correspondents, has an intriguing article in the Atlantic headlined, “What Rumsfeld Got Right.” He admits that the Rumsfeld legacy is not a good one, as seen in the worsening situation in Iraq and Afghanistan on his watch. But he tries to argue that Rumsfeld wasn’t wrong about everything. “Even before 9/11,” he writes, “Rumsfeld saw a new strategic landscape of manifest uncertainty, of fundamental and catastrophic surprise.” In responding to that changed environment, Rumsfeld moved tens of thousands of troops out of established bases in Europe and Asia

A Transformer in Disguise - Thomas Donnelly, Weekly Standard

Donald Rumsfeld's primary mission when he returned to the Pentagon as secretary of defense in 2001 was to transform the US military to meet the missions of the new century. Today it seems more likely that it is his successor, Robert Gates, who will leave the lasting legacy. It's not just the high-profile firings - Air Force secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Michael Moseley recently joined former Army secretary Francis Harvey, CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace on the list of senior defense officials Gates has pushed out. Nor is it simply the critical promotions of General David Petraeus to replace Fallon and General Raymond Odierno to take Petraeus's place in Iraq. What these decisions reflect is Gates's larger purpose: to make the US military focus on the war they've got rather than the war they'd like to have. Though he's only been in the job for 18 months and will presumably be gone with the rest of the Bush administration next January, Gates has managed to push aside what he calls the "next-war-itis" that metastasized during Rumsfeld's reign and became almost as intractable a problem as al Qaeda or the Taliban. It wasn't supposed to be this way. When he replaced Rumsfeld after the Republican "thumping" in the 2006 elections, Gates was widely viewed as the man who was going to end the futile fighting in Iraq, slay the neocon dragons, and return a sensible "realism" to the land.

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Donald Rumsfeld - Wikipedia

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Restraint as a Successful Strategy in the 1999 Kargil Conflict
by Colonel Devendra Pratap Pandey, Indian Army, Small Wars Journal

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In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) of the Pakistan Army, orchestrated a major intrusion into an unoccupied but strategically sensitive complex of Kargil along the northern border of India. The Kargil intrusion was an operation of strategic importance conducted by Pakistan to provide a much required momentum to its weakening proxy war in the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), a state of India. Pakistan had waged an irregular war, in J&K, for a decade, exploiting religious similarities to incite secessionist activities, by actively supporting, financing, and training insurgents, while exporting foreign radicals and so called jihadist elements across the borders. This latest aggression across the border by the Pakistan Army was another attempt to redeem its prestige after the defeats of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971. The 1998-99 act of intrusion was of even greater significance because it was enacted during a political peace process when the then Indian Prime Minister was visiting Pakistan on invitation. The surprise intrusion, along a stretch of the border that had historically remained peaceful due to the terrain difficulties, was a spark in an already charged regional tinderbox.

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Mullen Hails Iraqi Political Debate on U.S.-Iraq Strategic Framework
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 12, 2008 – Ongoing debate within Iraq’s political realm about negotiations over the U.S.-Iraq strategic framework agreement indicates the healthy development of Iraq’s young democracy, the U.S. military’s top officer said here today.
The completion of the agreement would allow for continued U.S. military operations in Iraq after the United Nations security resolution ends Dec. 31.

Political debate in Iraq “historically, has not taken place,” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted at a Government Executive Magazine-hosted breakfast at the National Press Club.

Mullen said he is encouraged by what he called the “healthy aspect” of Iraqi officials’ statements regarding the agreement. Such debate over policy would be inconceivable under Saddam Hussein’s regime, he noted.

U.S. State Department and Iraqi officials are in negotiations over the agreement, which, among other things, specifies how U.S. troops posted in Iraq would be treated under Iraqi law as part of a status-of-forces pact.

The United States does not want a permanent presence in Iraq, Mullen said.

“This is no desire to have permanent bases in Iraq,” Mullen emphasized. “The desire, quite frankly, is to return our forces [home] as rapidly as we can.

“But, at the same time,” the admiral continued, “we’re also committed to providing the security that they need until they can stand up and provide their own security.”

If no strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq is in place before Dec. 31, Mullen said, the U.N. resolution would have to be extended.

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Iraq Ain't No Insurgency, Say Former Petraeus Aides

By Noah Shachtman - Cross-posted at Danger Room

Iraq cooled from a raging boil to a slow simmer, thanks mostly to tactics taken from the military's counterinsurgency manual. Or, at least, that's the accepted wisdom. But a group of military thinkers and Iraq veterans says the established narrative is all wrong. According to them, Iraq may not even be an insurgency at all.

In the classic insurgency scenario, you've got a group of guerrillas on one side, and an otherwise-legitimate host government on the other. It's the job of a military like America's to tip the balance towards stability and order, by keeping the insurgents from overthrowing that government.

But in Iraq, the bulk; of what used to be the insurgents have now realigned themselves with the American forces against the nihilistic-Islamist terrorist Al Qaeda in Iraq. Lt. Col. Douglass Ollivant notes in the latest edition of Perspectives on Politics, which is devoted to a critique of the now-famous counterinsurgency manual. With the Sunni nationalists at least temporarily allied and AQI deprived of its sanctuary among the Sunni population, just who are the insurgents in Iraq against whom a counterinsurgency might be conducted?...

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France's Livre Blanc

By Judah Grunstein - Cross-posted at World Politics Review

France's Livre Blanc was finally released today (French version here and here, parts 1&2, both .pdf), and the only real shock is seeing in print what's basically trickled out in leaks and declarations over the past few months. It's a very well-written document, coherently argued and convincingly articulated. As expected, counterterrorism and the integration of defense with homeland security play a prominent role, with an emphasis on developing intelligence capacity, both human and satellite-based, in the context of a newly added Anticipation component. There's also a significant reduction of the French armed forces, from a total of 271,000 to 225,000 by 2015 (Army 131k, Navy 44k, Air Force 50k), mainly from the administrative back office, but which will necessitate politically unpopular base closings.

But the real story to my eyes is the prominence of Asia as a strategic focus of interest, which surprised me even after having already called attention to it in last week's series. The document doesn't make a case for intervention so much as careful management, calling for the West to take a greater interest in stabilization of region. It makes mention of the continent's three nuclear powers, three major unresolved crises (Korean Peninsula, Taiwan Straits and Kashmir), and the lack of any real regional, multilateral security instrument...

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The Problems with Afghan Army Doctrine

By Sergeant First Class Anthony Hoh, US Army

A critically important security transition task that is often a secondary effort is the development of host nation military doctrine. This effort is paramount to the creation of a successful and independent force. When the world’s focus has moved on to other issues, and the coalition advisory effort draws to an end, the Afghan National Army (ANA) security foundation will rely heavily on their doctrine to continue the fight and provide national security and stability. So a few critical questions one must ask is; are we on track with the current doctrine development program? Do we have the right formula for developing doctrine on behalf of the ANA? Is developing doctrine for the ANA the right approach?

Joint Pub 1-02 defines doctrine as the “Fundamental principles by which the military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives. It is authoritative but requires judgment in application.” It is important to note that this definition of doctrine does not describe doctrine as how the Army wishes to fight, or how it may be able to fight at some point in the distant future. Obviously, doctrine profoundly affects a nation’s military development, but it should not be used too heavily as the catalyst for change in terms of simultaneously trying to quickly modernize an immature force. In the writing of Afghan doctrine we fail to account for Afghanistan’s history, technology, social constructs, and the nature of the threats that its armed forces face. We should no longer attempt to gift the ANA tactical, strategic or operational doctrine. Current ANA doctrine that has been “Afganisized", consists of manuals that have been cut copied and replaced… M4 for M16 or AK, Javelin for RPG. The utility of such an approach remains questionable, when manuals like the 7-8 MTP instruct Patrol Leader’s to submit overlays with route classification formulas. (ANA 7-8MTP TSK# 07-3-2000), suggests the use of soft rounds when clearing staircases (ANA 7-8MTP TSK# 07-3-1000), or describes the use of integrated BOS (Battlefield Operating System) in the ANA 7-20 MTP. In fairness, none of these items are tactically obtuse, far from it. However when taken on the whole they are not part of the “fundamental principles by which these military forces guide their actions”. This doctrine is generally light years ahead of anything that Afghan Army is capable of now or can be in the foreseeable future. To be clear this is not a slight towards the ANA, they can function without map overlays at the platoon level and continual BDE MDMP (Brigade Military Decision Making Process) seminars, they could get by with a few TACSOPs and GARSOP’s (Tactical and Garrison Standing Operating Procedures) that are linked with each other...

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Christopher Griffin and Thomas Donnelly have a new study posted at the American Enterprise Institute on a very topical and very contentious issue - building the capabilities of our allies and security partners. In The Frontline Country Team: A Model for Engagement the authors provide a critique of the development and current practice of American security cooperation programs and a proposal for how they may be improved.

From the AEI synopsis:

For over sixty years, the United States has sought to build the capabilities of its allies and security partners. This is a mission that has accelerated since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and it is one that any administration, be it Democratic or Republican, will inherit in January 2009. As a longstanding strategic goal, building partnership capacity has also dredged up a series of contradictions and conundrums for American policymaking, as officials attempt to foster governance without fueling dictatorships, engage "frontline states" without becoming enmeshed in their internal feuds, and manage the details of convoluted international partnerships from the confines of Washington. Resolving these contradictions--or at least mitigating them--is the principal ongoing challenge of American security cooperation programs.

In this report, we provide a critique of the development and current practice of American security cooperation programs, as well as a modest proposal for how they may be improved in the future. We find that many of the authorities and instruments for engagement already exist, but that they may be more effectively harnessed if leadership is devolved from Washington to the "frontline country team," in which the ambassador is responsible for coordinating and directing American policy. We argue that the country team is the point at which the rubber of American policy hits the road and where it will ultimately succeed or fail.

The Frontline Country Team: A Model for Engagement

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From: GOMO
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 2:32 PM

Subject: CSA Sends - Transition Team Commanders (UNCLASSIFIED)

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

CSA SENDS

Soldiers that serve on our Transition Teams (TTs) and our Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are developing exactly the type of knowledge, skills and abilities that are vital for our Army to be effective in an era of persistent conflict. These are tough, demanding positions and the members of these teams are required to influence indigenous or surrogate forces as they execute missions that are of vital interest to this Nation. The tasks associated with Transition Teams, from direct combat to stability operations, will be a major part of full spectrum engagement in theaters of interest now and for the foreseeable future. I want to ensure that the officers that lead these teams are recognized and given the credit they deserve.

I am directing that the Major's positions on these teams be immediately designated and codified in DA PAM 600-3, for all branches, as Key and Developmental (KD). Any officer holding one of these positions will be considered "KD" for his or her branch as a Major. Additionally, these officers will be afforded the opportunity, should they desire, to hold an additional 12/24 months of a branch specific KD position (e.g. XO, S-3, etc). Our promotion board guidance already stresses the importance of these positions and this additional information will be added to all upcoming board instructions. Additionally, because the success of these teams requires our best leaders, I have directed HRC to award Centralized Selection List (CSL) Credit for LTCs serving specifically in the TT Commander positions that have direct leadership responsibility for a training/transition team.

Therefore, we are creating a new CSL sub-category called "Combat Arms Operations". It will be open to all eligible officers in the Maneuver, Fires and Effects (MFE) branches and to Foreign Area Officers (FAO). It will fall under the Operations category and will be effective on the FY 10 CSL board which meets this September.

As a bridging strategy, for FY09 we will activate officers for these command positions from the alternate lists of all four major MFE command categories - Operations, Strategic Support, Training, and Installation. Officers accepting and who serve will be awarded CSL credit in the Operations category for serving as a Transition Team Commander. Additionally, if selected by the FY 10 CSL board, the officer may opt to command in the category they are selected after completion of their TT Command. Those that do command will receive credit for a second CSL command. If chosen, and they opt not to command, they will still receive credit for their TT command.

Our ability to train and operate effectively with indigenous forces will be a key element of 21st century land power. We need our best involved.

GEN Casey

-----

Discuss at Small Wars Council

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Gordon Lubold has an informative article in today’s Christian Science Monitor titled Pentagon Ponders Transition in Time of War.

The Pentagon is making a pointed effort to ensure that the transition to a new administration in January 2009 – the first time in 40 years that a handover of power will take place during wartime – goes smoothly, minimizing the risk of disruptions or attacks on military operations during the changeover….

Well worth reading in its entirety - and we even get a plug.

Meanwhile, Gates's reputation for demanding accountability without trumpeting his own personality is popular across the department and in Congress, too. "I think he may be the best secretary of defense we ever had," says one active-duty Army officer in high-level circles.

Now, some would like him to stay on. One respected website devoted to irregular warfare called the Small Wars Journal contains an open letter to the new administration asking that whoever wins to consider keeping Gates.

Shortest, but Most Important SWJ Post to Date - Small Wars Journal, 13 June 2008

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When to Leave Iraq by Colin H. Kahl and William E. Odom, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008.

In "The Price of the Surge" (May/June 2008), Steven Simon correctly observes that the Sunni turn against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), known as the Sunni Awakening, has been a key factor in security progress during the period of "the surge." Simon is also on point when he notes that the Awakening, which began before the surge, was not a direct consequence of additional US troops. But although Simon gets much of the past right, he ultimately draws the wrong lessons for US policy moving forward.

Rather than unilaterally and unconditionally withdrawing from Iraq and hoping that the international community will fill the void and push the Iraqis toward accommodation -- a very unlikely scenario -- the United States must embrace a policy of "conditional engagement." This approach would couple a phased redeployment of combat forces with a commitment to providing residual support for the Iraqi government if and only if it moves toward genuine reconciliation. Conditional engagement -- rather than Simon's policy of unconditional disengagement -- would incorporate the real lesson from the Sunni Awakening...

Simon provides a brilliant analysis of Iraq's political realities, past and present, exposing the effects of the U.S. occupation. Sadly, neither the administration nor all but a few outside analysts foresaw them. More recently, most media reporting has wholly ignored the political dynamics of the new "surge" tactic. And peripatetic experts in Washington regularly return from their brief visits to Iraq to assure the public that it is lowering violence but fail to explain why. They presume that progress toward political consolidation has also been occurring, or soon will be. Instead, as Simon explains, political regression has resulted, a "retribalization" of the same nature as that which both the British colonial rulers and the Baathist Party tried to overcome in order to create a modern state in Iraq.

This should hardly come as a surprise. The history of tribalism in Iraq is well known. When the United States replaced the British in the Middle East after World War II, it set "stability" above all other interests there, maintaining it through a regional balance of power. President Bush's invasion of Iraq broke radically with this half-century-old strategy. The prospects of success, as Simon shows, were worse than poor...

When to Leave Iraq

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Ann Roosevelt reports in Defense Daily (subscription required) that US Joint Forces Command has created an Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) that is expected to have 30-40 personnel assigned – but will leverage existing resources without requesting new money or personnel through “reprioritizing” internal JFCOM assets. The IWC will focus on general-purpose forces while working with US Special Operations Command to work out IW-related roles and missions.

JFCOM Commander General James Mattis has directed that the command "make irregular warfare a command core competency."

Nothing follows.

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The DNI Open Source Conference 2008 has been added to the SWJ Events Calendar.

11-12 September - DNI Open Source Conferece 2008 (Public Event - Conference). Washington DC. Sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Office of the DNI is pleased to announce the "DNI Open Source Conference 2008" to be held on Thursday, 11 September and Friday, 12 September, 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington DC.

The conference is free; however, all who wish to attend must register online in advance (deadline 31 July). The two-day conference will explore a wide range of open source issues and open source best practices for the Intelligence Community and its partners. We invite participants from the broader open source community of interest including academia, think tanks, private industry, federal, state, local and tribal entities, international partners, and the media to attend. The conference will include speakers from across the broader open source community participating in panel discussions and focus group sessions.

Information about the agenda and break-out sessions is now available. The DNI Open Source Conference 2007 was held 16-17 July 2007 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. More than 900 registered participants and speakers attended. Presentations made at the conference break-out sessions are available on the DNI Open Source Conference 2007 website.

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Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens

By Robert Lamb

I was the lead author of the DoD report Ungoverned Areas and Threats From Safe Havens that William McCallister cites in his SWJ Blog piece, "Operations in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas". With full respect for the author, I would like to clarify what seems to me a serious misreading of the report's central argument.

Mr. McCallister begins his article by criticizing the UGA/SH report's definition of "governance" as implying "a social service centric function for government emphasizing 'delivery' and distribution of social services. It further implies that only democratic institutions are a safeguard against militancy, extremism and terrorism."

In fact, the definition implies nothing of the sort; it is a fairly standard academic definition of governance: "delivery of public goods," with "public goods" spelled out for non-academic audiences.

More importantly, the report itself says explicitly that U.S. efforts to build what we consider to be "democratic" or "good" governance usually fail to counter militancy, extremism, and terrorism precisely because we fail to account for how local populations view what counts as legitimate ways of governing -- the same point Mr. McCallister makes in his next sentence: "Not all cultures view the role and function of government in quite the same way. Tribal society, particularly along the North-West frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan judges the role and function of effective government quite differently."

As the report's lead author, I couldn't agree more!

As the report's second main finding states: "In many cases, provincial, local, tribal, or autonomous governments ... are simply better positioned than the central government to address the local conditions that enable illicit actors to operate there." It goes on to suggest that "capacity-building" as a foreign-assistance model for countering safe havens is generally not effective unless it facilitates "legitimacy-building": That is, if we want local populations (e.g. tribal leaders) to be inhospitable to terrorists, imposing outside control or foreign models of governance on them will probably backfire spectacularly. Instead, we need to do something more difficult: help build relationships with them, taking their own views of what counts as "legitimate" as given.

The report defines "legitimacy" as "the political support or loyalty that a local population provides to a central, provincial, local, tribal, or autonomous government because the population believes the government has a right to govern or is worthy of their support or loyalty" -- it purposely mentions nothing about social services or democracy. (For the record, I am a strong supporter of democracy -- but there are many forms that "rule by the people" can take, and democracy is more enduring when its form is defined locally.)

In short, Mr. McCallister gets it exactly right, and his article is important for the precisely the reasons the UGA/SH report gives for why our efforts to counter illicit "safe havens" are often less than successful in places such as Pakistan.

Continue reading "Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens" »

Constitutional Cartography & the Parsing of Terrorist Space

By Mike Innes - Cross-Posted at CTLab

I've been reporting on the Opinio Juris Insta-Symposium (OPJIS) on the Boumediene Case in dribs and drabs as I stumble through the wealth of offerings from various contributors. My cherry-picking certainly doesn't do justice to the whole of it, and I'm not certain I'll have the time to review the proceedings in toto for CTLab. Suffice it that anyone looking for first-round responses on the case from the law-bloggigentsia should go to it and start digging in. Meanwhile, I cite the bits that catch my eye, the parts that I can relate back to my own research on sanctuary concepts and practices.

Much of the discussion at OPJIS turned on issues of territoriality and territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. Constitution. OPJIS convener Roger Alford introduced the issue in his post, "The Territorial Reach of the Constitution". Citing earlier spatial models of Constitutional jurisdiction - "universalism, membership, territorial, and a balancing approach of global due process" being the major ones - he asks...

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Captain Tim Hsia has a new article in the American Foreign Services Association's Foreign Service Journal titled Building on the Goldwater Nichols Act.

Here are the take-aways:

1) The Department of State (DoS) like the Army needs to greatly expand in order to have the proper force structure for the wars we are fighting.

2) Although there has been bureaucratic tension between the DoS and the military, at the lower levels both agencies work well as demonstrated by the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT).

3) The dysfunction of the higher levels is demonstrated by the creation of Lieutenant General Douglas Lute's position of "war czar" and the need for a better organized National Security Council. The best way to fuse the DoS and the Department of Defense is to expand on the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 and create a Foreign Policy Director (FPD) who would manage both departments. If this happened, bureaucratic rivalries would diminish much like Goldwater-Nichols eliminated much inter-service rivalry.

4) Goldwater-Nichols has been a tremendous success, in Iraq today we have Navy and Air Force personnel serving with Army Soldiers at the platoon level. Building on this, we should in turn have the DoS and the Army work at battalion and lower levels.

5) Counterinsurgency is not only the realm of the military but also the State Department. The DoS has the personnel who have the intellectual capabilities to tackle many of the issues relating to Counterinsurgency. They should be the "spoon" for eating the soup we call insurgency.

6) The PRT model should be preserved even after the conflicts at hand are over. Its predecessor, the CORDS program, was quickly eliminated in Vietnam. The PRT has many uses beyond just counterinsurgency, e.g. humanitarian missions and building military and diplomatic ties at the midlevel between the US and other nations.

Continue reading "Building on the Goldwater Nichols Act" »

Irregular Warfare Presents Challenge For U.S. Military, General Says
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., June 19, 2008 – The U.S. military will be engaged in irregular warfare operations for some time to come, a senior U.S. military officer said here today.
“Irregular warfare, from my perspective, is the key problem that we face today,” Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command, told attendees at the 2008 Joint Warfighting Conference...

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Foreign Fighters: How Are They Being Recruited?
Two Imperfect Recruitment Models
by Clinton Watts, Small Wars Journal

Download interim version of article as PDF

Currently, debate focuses on two models of foreign fighter recruitment and transit to theaters of open conflict. The first model is one of top-down recruitment where al-Qa’ida recruits young men and coordinates their travel to an operational theater. The second model suggests the opposite where young men recruit themselves and find their way to open theaters of conflict joining a global Jihadi movement inspired but not necessarily led by al-Qa’ida.

Both models assign a role to the Internet in this process. The first model (top-down) holds that militant propaganda on the Internet makes young men susceptible to recruiters. The second model (bottom-up) holds that the Internet not only radicalizes young men, but also helps them find a way to travel to open theaters of conflict.

Download interim version of article as PDF

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Larry Smith. Iwo Jima: World War II Veterans Remember the Greatest Battle of the Pacific. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008.

SWJ Book Review by Bill Van Horn

With more and more of the World War II generation passing away, oral history has become an important component of much recent scholarship, adding the memories and experiences of those who took part in the battles to what might otherwise be standard battlefield histories. Interest in Iwo Jima was revived by director Clint Eastwood's two fine movies (Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima), so it seems fitting that a book would come along combining the finest elements of oral history with the conflagration on Iwo Jima. Larry Smith has crafted such a work with Iwo Jima. Any reader with an interest in how combat impacts the individuals involved, and in seeing how a single battle can touch many different areas of military activity, would do well to read and re-read Iwo Jima....

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Multi-National Force-Iraq Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance

- Secure and serve the population. The Iraqi people are the decisive “terrain.” Together with our Iraqi partners, work to provide the people security, to give them respect, to gain their support, and to facilitate establishment of local governance, restoration of basic services, and revival of local economies.

- Live among the people. You can’t commute to this fight. Position Joint Security Stations, Combat Outposts, and Patrol Bases in the neighborhoods we intend to secure. Living among the people is essential to securing them and defeating the insurgents.

- Hold areas that have been secured. Once we clear an area, we must retain it. Develop the plan for holding an area before starting to clear it. The people need to know that we and our Iraqi partners will not abandon their neighborhoods. When reducing forces and presence, gradually thin the line rather than handing off or withdrawing completely. Ensure situational awareness even after transfer of responsibility to Iraqi forces.

- Pursue the enemy relentlessly. Identify and pursue AQI and other extremist elements tenaciously. Do not let them retain support areas or sanctuaries. Force the enemy to respond to us. Deny the enemy the ability to plan and conduct deliberate operations.

- Generate unity of effort. Coordinate operations and initiatives with our embassy and interagency partners, our Iraqi counterparts, local governmental leaders, and nongovernmental organizations to ensure all are working to achieve a common purpose.

- Promote reconciliation. We cannot kill our way out of this endeavor. We and our Iraqi partners must identify and separate the “reconcilables” from the “irreconcilables” through engagement, population control measures, information operations, kinetic operations, and political activities. We must strive to make the reconcilables a part of the solution, even as we identify, pursue, and kill, capture, or drive out the irreconcilables.

- Defeat the network, not just the attack. Defeat the insurgent networks to the “left” of the explosion. Focus intelligence assets to identify the network behind an attack, and go after its leaders, financiers, suppliers, and operators.

- Foster Iraqi legitimacy. Encourage Iraqi leadership and initiative; recognize that their success is our success. Partner in all that we do and support local involvement in security, governance, economic revival, and provision of basic services. Find the right balance between Coalition Forces leading and the Iraqis exercising their leadership and initiative, and encourage the latter. Legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people is essential to overall success.

- Employ all assets to isolate and defeat the terrorists and insurgents. Counter-terrorist forces alone cannot defeat Al-Qaeda and the other extremists; success requires all forces and all means at our disposal—non-kinetic as well as kinetic. Employ Coalition and Iraqi conventional and special operations forces, Sons of Iraq, and all other available multipliers. Integrate civilian and military efforts to cement security gains. Resource and fight decentralized. Push assets down to those who most need them and can actually use them.

- Employ money as a weapon system. Use a targeting board process to ensure the greatest effect for each “round” expended, and to ensure that each engagement using money contributes to the achievement of the unit’s overall objectives. Ensure contracting activities support the security effort, employing locals wherever possible. Employ a “matching fund” concept when feasible in order to ensure Iraqi involvement and commitment.

- Fight for intelligence. A nuanced understanding of the situation is everything. Analyze the intelligence that is gathered, share it, and fight for more. Every patrol should have tasks designed to augment understanding of the area of operations and the enemy. Operate on a “need to share” rather than a “need to know” basis; disseminate intelligence as soon as possible to all who can benefit from it.

- Walk. Move mounted, work dismounted. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot and engage the population. Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting with the people face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass.

- Understand the neighborhood. Map the human terrain and study it in detail. Understand local culture and history. Learn about the tribes, formal and informal leaders, governmental structures, and local security forces. Understand how local systems are supposed to work—including governance, basic services, maintenance of infrastructure, and the economy—and how they really work.

- Build relationships. Relationships are a critical component of counterinsurgency operations. Together with our Iraqi counterparts, strive to establish productive links with local leaders, tribal sheikhs, governmental officials, religious leaders, and interagency partners.

- Look for Sustainable Solutions. Build mechanisms by which the Iraqi Security Forces, Iraqi community leaders, and local Iraqis under the control of governmental institutions can continue to secure local areas and sustain governance and economic gains in their communities as the Coalition Force presence is reduced. Figure out the Iraqi systems and
help Iraqis make them work.

- Maintain continuity and tempo through transitions. Start to build the information you’ll provide to your successors on the day you take over. Allow those who will
follow you to virtually “look over your shoulder” while they’re still at home station by giving them access to your daily updates and other items on SIPRNET. Encourage extra time on the ground during transition periods, and strive to maintain operational tempo and local relationships to avoid giving the enemy respite.

- Manage expectations. Be cautious and measured in announcing progress. Note what has been accomplished, but also acknowledge what still needs to be done. Avoid premature declarations of success. Ensure our troopers and our partners are aware of our assessments and recognize that any counterinsurgency operation has innumerable challenges, that enemies get a vote, and that progress is likely to be slow.

- Be first with the truth. Get accurate information of significant activities to your chain of command, to Iraqi leaders, and to the press as soon as is possible. Beat the insurgents, extremists, and criminals to the headlines, and pre-empt rumors. Integrity is critical to this fight. Don’t put lipstick on pigs. Acknowledge setbacks and failures, and then state what we’ve learned and how we’ll respond. Hold the press (and ourselves) accountable for accuracy, characterization, and context. Avoid spin and let facts speak for themselves. Challenge enemy disinformation. Turn our enemies’ bankrupt messages, extremist ideologies, oppressive practices, and indiscriminate violence against them.

- Fight the information war relentlessly. Realize that we are in a struggle for legitimacy that in the end will be won or lost in the perception of the Iraqi people. Every action taken by the enemy and United States has implications in the public arena. Develop and sustain a narrative that works and continually drive the themes home through all forms of media.

- Live our values. Do not hesitate to kill or capture the enemy, but stay true to the values we hold dear. This is what distinguishes us from our enemies. There is no tougher endeavor than the one in which we are engaged. It is often brutal, physically demanding, and frustrating. All of us experience moments of anger, but we can neither give in to dark impulses nor tolerate unacceptable actions by others.

- Exercise initiative. In the absence of guidance or orders, determine what they should be and execute aggressively. Higher level leaders will provide broad vision and paint “white lines on the road,” but it will be up to those at tactical levels to turn “big ideas” into specific actions.

- Prepare for and exploit opportunities. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” (Seneca the Younger). Develop concepts (such as that of “reconcilables” and “irreconcilables”) in anticipation of possible opportunities, and be prepared to take risk as necessary to take advantage of them.

- Learn and adapt. Continually assess the situation and adjust tactics, policies, and programs as required. Share good ideas (none of us is smarter than all of us together). Avoid mental or physical complacency. Never forget that what works in an area today may not work there tomorrow, and may or may not be transferable to another part of Iraq.

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Video Brief

Bloggers Roundtable

U.S. Army Colonel Thomas McGrath, commander of the Afghanistan Regional Security Integration Command-South, described operations in response to the Taliban’s raid on a prison in Kandahar province on 13 June 2008. (Transcript, Audio)

AFPS Article

General Cites Security, Development, Governance Gains in Afghanistan

By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 24, 2008 – U.S., coalition and Afghan security forces are hunting down the Taliban and other insurgents operating in Afghanistan, while vital reconstruction and governance programs continue to spread across the country, a senior U.S. military officer said today....

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Terrorists and Terrorism
The Cost of a Redundant State Media Strategy
by Adam Hammond, Small Wars Journal

Download interim version of article as PDF

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher once said Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

Her choice of terminology reflects the traditional use of State media strategy to maintain popular support by de-legitimizing the causes of insurgent groups. This very strategy was employed by France during the unsuccessful Battle of Algiers, and continues today in the Coalition “War on Terror” despite radical changes in the nature of what many continue to refer to as “terrorism”.

The world is in fact in the midst of a global insurgency, a worldwide revolutionary war the likes of which it has never before seen. The results of outdated strategy and its inherent terminology are of no small consequence. They range from operational planning problems at the tactical level, to a fundamental misalignment at the strategic level between the “Three Pillars of Counter-Insurgency”: Governments, Security Agencies, and Economic actors. Until this misalignment is addressed, it will be impossible to effectively counter global insurgent activity in a sustainable fashion.

What is required with respect to both international and domestic matters is therefore nothing short of a wholesale re-think of government media strategy and the very terminology used to describe “terrorists” and “terrorism”.

Download interim version of article as PDF

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The Royal United Services Institute and the author have kindly granted SWJ permission to post John Nagl’s review of The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War by Brian McAllister Linn that appeared in the April issue of the RUSI Journal.

Brian McAllister Linn’s The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War is an important and profoundly disturbing book for anyone who loves the United States Army or cares about the security of the Western world. Linn, the foremost historian of the Army’s counter-insurgency effort in the Philippines at the start of the last century, fundamentally challenges the Army’s self-concept in the twenty-first century. Linn notes that for the majority of the Army’s history, it has been at peace, preparing for the next war – and, all too often, getting that preparation not just wrong, but almost completely wrong...

Read the entire review here at Small Wars Journal. You can also read a "review of the review" by Mark Safranski at ZenPundit.

John Nagl is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A retired US Army officer, his last assignment was as Commanding Officer of 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. He led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm and served as the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl earned his doctorate from Oxford University, taught national security studies at West Point, and served as a Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and was on the writing team that produced the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Discuss at Small Wars Council.

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Yesterday's bombing in Baghdad, an apparent attempt on the life of Sadr City Council Deputy Hassan Hussein Shammah, killed two US Soldiers (not yet identified by the Department of Defense); Steven Farley, a State Department employee working as a member of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team responsible for the Sadr City and Adhamiyah districts of Baghdad; and Nicole Suveges, a DoD contractor working with the Human Terrain System in support of the 4th Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

From today's Washington Post - 4 Americans Die in Attack During Sadr City Meeting by Ernesto Londoño:

Steven L. Farley, a State Department official working to build up the local government in the Baghdad enclave of Sadr City, knew he and his colleagues had taken a bold step, his son Brett recalled Tuesday.

Farley and other U.S. officials had learned that the Sadr City District Council's acting chairman was loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and had urged other members of the local advisory group to force the man to resign.

That was last week. On Tuesday, Farley, 57, and three other Americans were killed when a bomb exploded in the District Council building, just minutes before the selection of a new chairman was to begin.

Capitalizing on recent security gains in Iraq, U.S. soldiers and diplomats have waded deep into Iraqi politics in an effort to build moderate and responsive government bodies that they hope will erode the appeal of extremists...

The article has much more on Steven Farley's work as a PRT member in Iraq and American Embassy, Baghdad, issued a statement by Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

A BAE Systems press release provides some background on Nicole Suveges:

Nicole Suveges, a BAE Systems political scientist, was killed Tuesday in a bombing in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq. She was supporting the U.S. Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 4th Infantry Division, as part of the Human Terrain System (HTS) program.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Nicole Suveges,” said Doug Belair, president of the company’s Technology Solutions & Services (TSS) line of business. “She came to us to give freely of herself in an effort to make a better world. Nicole was a leading academic who studied for years on how to improve conditions for others. She also believed in translating what she learned into action. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends and colleagues.”

Suveges began her current tour in Iraq in April of this year. Before joining BAE Systems, she had worked in Iraq for one year as a civilian contractor. Previously, Suveges served as a U.S. Army reservist in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, supporting the multinational SFOR/NATO Combined Joint Psychological Operations Task Force.

More by Mike Innes at CTLab and Noah Shachtman at Danger Room.

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Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile has a new piece in World Affairs titled A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects. Here is the intro:

U.S. Army’s new strategy in Iraq—launched in February 2007, along with a surge of 25,000 additional American troops—qualifies neither as particularly new nor even as a strategy. Better to call it, instead, an enhanced reliance on tactics and operational concepts previously in use. Or, put less charitably, an over-hyped shift in emphasis that, on the one hand, will not necessarily yield an American victory in Iraq but, on the other, might well leave the United States Army crippled in future wars.

Properly understood, the surge narrative is really not about Iraq at all. It is about the past and future of the U.S. Army. It resurrects dubious battlefield lessons from the past—Vietnam, principally—applies them to Iraq, and extrapolates from there into an unknown future. On all three counts—past, present, and future—the narrative suffers from numerous and irreparable defects. Its reading of the past, grounded in the cliché that General Creighton Abrams’s “hearts and minds” program “won” the war in Vietnam, is a self-serving fiction. Its version of the more recent past and even the present is contrived and largely fanciful, relying on a distorted version of both to tell a tale in which U.S. forces triumphed in Iraq in 2007 and did so despite the misguided efforts of their predecessors even a year before. More than anything else, the surge narrative stakes a claim on the future, instructing us that its methods of counterinsurgency will be uniquely suited to the next war and to the one after that.

From the surge, its most fervent advocates have extracted a single maxim: that they and only they have uncovered the secret to defeating insurgencies. Prior to the surge, in this telling, only a few exceptional units were engaged in proper counterinsurgent operations...

Much more at World Affairs.

Discuss at Small Wars Council.

UPDATE: With a hat tip to Charlie at Abu Muqawama, here is a good campanion piece to Gian's World Affairs article - Review Symposium on the New U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual at Perspectives on Politics Journal.

UPDATE 2: More - Gentile, Not Gentle by Dr. iRack at Abu Muqawama.

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From the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy:
No One in PD Conducts PD Overseas

By Matt Armstrong - Cross-posted at MountainRunner

Strong words from the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Strong and brutally honest. The Commission, an organization reporting directly to the President, unlike any other report before, whether from the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Defense Sciences Board, or any other body, assessed the human resource elements of U.S. Public Diplomacy. The topic for this report originated in the Commission. The findings will be presented tomorrow, Wednesday, 25 June 2008, but the report is available at the Commission’s website now or at MountainRunner (PDF, 2.2mb).

The function of the Commission is to provide independent oversight and make recommendations on the activities and effectiveness of America’s information activities and education and cultural exchanges. It was was established by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and was two bodies, one the Advisory Commission on Information and the other Advisory Commission on Educational Exchange.

Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity to sit down with the chairman of the Commission, Bill Hybl, to discuss the report to be publicly presented tomorrow. Bill said that a core requirement is to address people and issues in local terms, including identifying common ground. This requires engagement, something Bill noted is absent. It also requires continuity at the very highest level, which he noted has also been missing with the turnover at the Under Secretary position...

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Information Operations

By Andrew Exum

I have a few questions for the learned readership of Small Wars Journal. The first is, how many of you have ever looked up the official Department of Defense definition for ‘Information Operations?’

According to JP 3-13, Information Operations, the term is defined as “the integrated employment of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

I am confident there exist more confusing definitions in the U.S. military lexicon, but surely there cannot be too many. In effect, the Department of Defense has taken the term ‘information operations’ as understood by cyberwarfare types and mashed it together with the term ‘information operations’ as understood by those of us waging wars of narratives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The resulting confusion has left us with a definition that tries to be everything to everyone while at the same time leaving us with a shoddy definition to communicate what we’re talking about as counter-insurgency theorist-practitioners when we use the term...

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Sebastian Sprenger at Inside the Pentagon (subscription required) is reporting that the draft Irregular Warfare (IW) Directive has sparked "intense controversy" within the Department of Defense. Originally scheduled to be released this month, ITP reports the directive is now scheduled for a fall release. The fall release will coincide with the unveiling of the Pentagon’s response to a congressionally mandated review of roles and missions within the Department.

Several items concerning the directive from the ITP article:

1) To replace DOD Directive 3000.5 that placed Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations on par with “traditional” combat operations.

2) Directs “host of efforts” to improve coordination between Defense and other government agencies.

3) Defines IW as comprising Counterinsurgency (COIN), SSTR, Counterterrorism (CT), Foreign Internal Defense (FID), and Unconventional Warfare (UW).

4) Instructs the Services to balance their capabilities to conduct both regular and irregular warfare.

ITP reports that critics contend that including SSTR under IW would cast stabilization operations, in which help from civilian government agencies and non-governmental organizations is crucial in too militaristic a light.

There is much more at Inside the Pentagon.

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Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Public Event). Washington, DC. The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) is sponsoring a discussion on counterinsurgency on 22 July 2008, at the National Press Club (the Holeman Lounge), Washington, DC. Dr. John Nagl (Center for a New American Security), Dr. Daniel Marston (Australian National University), and Dr. Carter Malkasian (CNA) recently collaborated on Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Osprey, 2008), an edited book that examines 13 of the most important counterinsurgency campaigns of the past 100 years, including the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Dr. David Kilcullen (U.S. State Department), the renowned counterinsurgency expert, will moderate the discussion and provide critical commentary. Lunch will be provided. Books will be available to purchase at a discounted rate. For more information, visit the first link above. RSVP at kattm@cna.org or 703.824.2436.

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Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas by Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II, US Army War College - Strategic Studies Institute.

The author discusses several types of wars of ideas in an effort to achieve a better understanding of what wars of ideas are. That knowledge, in turn, can help inform strategy. It is important to note, for instance, that because ideas are interpreted subjectively, it is not likely that opposing parties will “win” each other over by means of an ideational campaign alone. Hence, physical events, whether intended or incidental, typically play determining roles in the ways wars of ideas unfold, and how (or whether) they are end. Thus, while the act of communicating strategically remains a vital part of any war of ideas, we need to manage our expectations as far as what it can accomplish.

Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas

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The Interagency and Counterinsurgency Warfare: Aligning and Integrating Military and Civilian Roles in Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations edited by Jay W. Boggs and Colonel (USA, Ret) Joseph R. Cerami, US Army War College - Strategic Studies Institute.

For decades since the formation of the defense establishment under the 1947 National Security Act, all U.S. cabinet departments, national security agencies, and military services involved in providing for the common defense have struggled to overcome differences in policy and strategy formulation, organizational cultures, and even basic terminology. Post-September 11, 2001, international systems, security environments, U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the greater Global War on Terrorism have confronted civilian policymakers and senior military officers with a complex, fluid battlefield which demands kinetic and counterinsurgency capabilities. This monograph addresses the security, stability, transition, and reconstruction missions that place the most pressure on interagency communication and coordination. The results from Kabul to Baghdad reveal that the interagency process is in need of reform and that a more robust effort to integrate and align civilian and military elements is a prerequisite for success.

The Interagency and Counterinsurgency Warfare: Aligning and Integrating Military and Civilian Roles in Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations

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Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan - June 2008 Report to Congress in accordance with the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act
(Section 1230, Public Law 110-181).

This report to Congress is submitted consistent with Section 1230 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (Public Law 110-181). It includes a description of the comprehensive strategy of the United States for security and stability in Afghanistan. This report is the first in a series of reports required every 180 days through fiscal year 2010 and has been prepared in coordination with the Secretary of State, the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and the Secretary of Agriculture. This assessment complements other reports and information about Afghanistan provided to the Congress; however, it is not intended as a single source of all information about the combined efforts or the future strategy of the United States, its Coalition Partners, or Afghanistan. The information contained in this report is current as of April 10, 2008.

United States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces - June 2008 Report to Congress in accordance with the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1231, Public Law 110-181).

This report to Congress is submitted consistent with Section 1231 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (Public Law 110-181). It includes the United States plan for sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF). In accordance with subsection (a), it includes a description of the long-term plan for sustaining the ANSF, with the objective of ensuring that the ANSF will be able to conduct operations independently and effectively and maintain long-term security and stability in Afghanistan. The report includes a comprehensive strategy and budget, with defined objectives; mechanisms for tracking funding, equipment, training, and services provided to the ANSF; and any actions necessary to assist the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to achieve a number of specified goals and the results of such actions. This report is the first of the annual reports required through 2010 on the long-term plan for Afghanistan. Consistent with this Act, this report has been prepared in coordination with the Secretary of State. This assessment complements other reports and information about Afghanistan provided to the Congress; however, it is not intended as a single source of all information about the combined efforts or the future strategy of the United States, its international partners, or Afghanistan.

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Notes Towards a Theory of Information Operations (IO) - Marc Tyrrell, In Harmonium

Yesterday (June 26, 2008), Andrew Exum posted a blog entry over at Small Wars Journal on Information Operations. As part of the post, he laid out a challenge to SWC members.

So far, as of early morning the following day (June 27, 2008), a rather active thread on the question has emerged. Part of the thread was a comment I posted that tried to pull apart the roots of Information Operations (IO) so that an actual, analytically useful, definition could be produced. After working on the post for half an hour, I realized that it would require a lot more thought and detail, hence this post...

Good reads all, Ex's and Marc's posts and the Council discussion.

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Improving Information Operations in Iraq and the Global War on Terror
by Farook Ahmed and Oubai Shahbandar, Small Wars Journal

Download interim version of article as PDF

The Surge of US military forces in Iraq has delivered a tremendous level of success in providing security to areas of Iraq that were previously under insurgent control. In order to build on these successes in the future, the United States would greatly benefit from force multipliers that can help promote security and foster political reconciliation as the extra troops provided by the Surge withdraw.

A cheap and effective way to augment the Soldiers on the ground is to defeat radical extremist groups’ ideologies and continue to win over the Iraqi population. The first step in developing this capability will be for the United States to establish a strategic framework that provides a central role for information operations (IO). These operations are analogous to a political campaign; they revolve around putting together and conveying a coherent message that convinces people to be sympathetic to one group and oppose that group’s adversary. In Iraq and in the broader war against violent Jihadism, the United States not only needs the power to act, but also the power to influence how its actions are interpreted.

Download interim version of article as PDF

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The latest issue of Joint Force Quarterly has been posted. JFQ is published for the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, to promote understanding of the integrated employment of land, sea, air, space, and special operations forces. The journal focuses on joint doctrine, integrated operations, coalition warfare, contingency planning, military operations conducted across the spectrum of conflict, and joint force development. Here are the featured articles:

ISR Evolution in the Iraqi Theater by Raymond T. Odierno, Nichoel E. Brooks, and Francesco P. Mastracchio

Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices by Michael T. Flynn, Rich Juergens, and Thomas L. Cantrell

Tribal Engagement in Anbar Province: The Critical Role of Special Operations Forces by Thomas R. Searle

The Imbalance in Iraqi Security Force Transition by Scott S. Jensen

The Influence of Just War Perspectives: Implications for U.S. Central Command by Tyler Rauert

Forty Years of COIN: The Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories by Nathan W. Toronto

Israel’s Survival Instincts and the Dangers of Nuclear Weapons in Iranian Hands by Richard L. Russell

Integration of Coalition Forces into the USCENTCOM Mission by John F. Couture

Battling Misperceptions: Challenges to U.S. Security Cooperation in Central Asia by Roger D. Kangas

Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies: Building Relationships, Enhancing Security by John D. Lawrence

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With a hat tip to Daniel Troy of the Consortium for Complex Operations - United Press International recently ran a three part series titled Emerging Threats: USAF Counterinsurgency authored by Shaun Watterman. From the introduction in Part 1:

The veteran military officials picked by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to take over the Air Force face a tough job redefining the service's role in what many see as the key kind of combat the U.S. military will face in the immediate future: counterinsurgency.

The problem, say many who have studied the topic, is that the things the U.S. Air Force has made its priority capabilities -- establishing air supremacy over the enemy and perfecting the timely and pinpoint delivery of high explosives -- tend to be less useful in irregular or asymmetric conflicts like those in which the U.S. military is currently engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In particular, critics have singled out an over-reliance on air strikes in Afghanistan as a significant barrier to the success of a "hearts and minds" strategy on the ground, given the inevitability of "collateral damage" -- the accidental killing of civilians.

"From an Air Force perspective, we were told to plan for a different kind of war," Lt. Col. Michael Pietrucha told United Press International, commenting on the general direction of post-Cold War strategic thinking, which emphasized the potential for conventional conflicts with strategic competitors or regional powers like China or Iran.

Pietrucha, a specialist in irregular combat who until recently worked at the Air Force Warfare Center, stressed he did not speak for the service.

He added it was appropriate the Air Force had different priorities, because of its strategic roles in assuring "force projection" -- the ability of the U.S. military to strike anywhere in the world -- and in operating the nation's nuclear strike capabilities.

"We have a set of global responsibilities that require us to keep a slightly different focus," he said, adding that while counterinsurgency might be the most common kind of conflict the military would face in the immediate future, "The most common conflicts are not necessarily the most dangerous."

Other observers agree that, if the Air Force has been slow to meet the counterinsurgency challenge, they have other priorities, too.

"They have always put their emphasis on air supremacy," said a senior congressional staffer, "on the basis that unless you have that, your troops on the ground are at risk."

"The question," he added, "is whether they have overemphasized it."

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Analysis: USAF's Counterinsurgency Plan

Discuss at Small Wars Council

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Today's Financial Times contains a detailed and thought provoking article by Andrew Woods on efforts by Major General Douglas Stone and Task Force 134 in conducting "counterinsurgency inside the wire". Here are several excerpts, be sure to read the entire article...

... An imperial city like this – guarded by an occupying army whose legitimacy has been in the balance since the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in 2004 – is an unlikely place to test the claim that a more humane military is a more effective one. But, then, Stone is an unlikely commander. A Marine reservist who made a fortune in Silicon Valley before taking a doctorate in public administration, he is now fanatical about winning what he calls “the battlefield of the mind”.

Since arriving in Iraq, he has instituted significant changes to coalition detention centres, including new review boards which explain to detainees why they are being held and what they can do about it; a pledge-and-guarantor programme whereby soon-to-be-released detainees swear in front of a judge that they will not return to the fight; increased family visits to the prisons; education programmes, including maths, Arabic and English classes; vocational training programmes; and religious discussion classes, where privately hired sheikhs discuss the Koran with detainees...

... Stone himself brags that he has “a high tolerance, a very high tolerance” for killing. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “You have to have violence. The moderate mosques had extremist imams. Those extremist imams are now with Allah.”

Stone’s great innovation, however, is that the US and its allies must limit indiscriminate killings – and detainee mistreatment – as a matter of public diplomacy rather than principle. This theory is a military doctrine that offers rare common ground for human rights advocates and hard-nosed generals, and it is one Stone has been working on for a while...

... Euphoric as it sounds, this is the way Task Force 134 was originally envisioned. Several policy planners say, off the record, that detention was always thought of as the cornerstone of a new civil society in Iraq. Because they suspected that the rule of law was corrupted under Saddam, American planners decided they would have to rebuild the country’s legal system from the ground up. Detention was seen as a good incubator for “rule of law programmes” – a training ground for Iraqi judges and lawyers, and thereby a means of manufacturing civil society.

None of that materialised. By the time the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004, detention was a shambles and cycles of rioting and repression were the norm. While Abu Ghraib provoked better oversight – at least of soldiers’ cameras – detention’s basic contours remained static, but the number of detainees was rising fast...

Much more, read and learn.

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General David H Petraeus: The General's Knowledge - Charles Sennott, The Sunday Times

General David H Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, looked exhausted. A competitive miler who loves to challenge young field commanders to five-mile running races and push-up contests (which he usually wins), he appears fit as ever. But there are dark circles under his eyes. Leading this war has begun to exact a visible toll.

“You are on the edge of having just enough sleep to sort of make it through every day,” he says, conceding that he has reconfigured his schedule to a less gruelling pace than when he first led the “surge” of 30,000-plus American troops into Iraq just over a year ago. “There is a point of no reservoir.”

It’s a cool, grey day outside his office inside the former Republican Palace of Saddam Hussein, in the heavily fortified green zone in Baghdad. On a delicate tea table sits a folder bulging with field reports and “weekly attack trends”, as well as a series of charts tracking the body count in Iraq. The office is in a corner of the palace he shares with Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq. Crocker arrived in Baghdad with Petraeus in February 2007. Both came intending to undo a series of mistakes by the generals and diplomats who preceded them and brought the war to the edge of defeat. Petraeus brought a new playbook: a 240-page counterinsurgency manual he wrote during 2005-6 and whose precepts he was determined to test...

General David H Petraeus: The General's Knowledge

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Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History - Michael Gordon, New York Times

... The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own nearly 700-pag