1. How Will the Iraq War End? By Peter Grier

From the point of view of the US, the Iraq war might be over when a president simply declares an endpoint. To an Iraqi, it might take much longer than that. Iraq today might be only at the midpoint, even the beginning, of a cycle of epic geopolitical change, say some analysts in a Monitor survey of experts in the region as well as in the US. For evidence, look at the Balkans, they say, which is still experiencing the geopolitical aftershocks of its mid-1990s wars.

2. Is Life for Iraqis Improving? By Sam Dagher

When asked how they expect things to be one year from now, 45 percent of Iraqis said things would be somewhat better or much better, according to the results of a poll commissioned by the BBC and ABC News and released Monday. That's up from 29 percent six months ago, but lower than in 2005. The poll shows that Shiites and Kurds are more optimistic than Sunnis.

3. A Deep Disquiet in the U.S. By Peter Grier

The Iraq war has been perhaps America's bitterest lesson since Vietnam in the realities of war and geopolitics -- profoundly altering ordinary citizens' sense of their country, its essential abilities, and the overall role it plays in the world.

The series also includes links to audio slide shows and past CSM war in Iraq coverage.

More on this roundtable at Argghhh! - Counterinsurgency: Forest and Trees.

Also on the 20th, Colonel Peter Baker, Commander of the 214th Fires Brigade, particpated in a roundtable to discuss the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq's Wasit province and several programs the PRT has undertaken to build long-term policing, education, medical, and engineering capacities. That transcript can be found here.

By Brigadier General Thomas M. Jordan (USA Ret.)

With the newly released publication of its principal operational manual, FM 3.0, the Army defined the principal conceptual underpinnings which will drive operational concepts over the next 10-15 years. The latest edition recognized the importance of understanding the complexity of the operational environment, and the nature of persistent conflict where the application of the military element of power is just one of the key ingredients necessary to achieve success. In light of this understanding, the Army adapted and raised the importance of stability operations onto an equal footing with combat operations. While the Army has made some important changes in training to implement this idea, the pending HQDA approval and resourcing decision of the Theater Military Advisory and Assistance Group (TMAAG) design and implementation strategy represents a visible and demonstrable investment in resources that reinforces the Army commitment to building partnership capacity (BPC) in an uncertain world. The proposed implementation strategy would establish one TMAAG for USARSO in FY10 (EDATE: 16 Oct 09) as proof of principle (PoP). The PoP would test the concept and make appropriate refinements as part of the overall determination to resource additional TMAAGs.

TMAAG's origin was the Army's "Unified Quest 2007" series of seminar wargames that supported the Chief of Staff of the Army's (CSA's) annual study plan. One of the resulting insights was a potential gap in the Army's ability to meet Combatant Commanders' daily operations requirements regarding theater security cooperation, military engagement, and Building Partnership Capacity (BPC). The CSA directed TRADOC, and in turn, the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as the lead to develop an operational concept and organizational solution to the perceived gap.

In concept, TMAAG is an Army organization under the command of the Army Service Component Commands (ASCCs). It executes specific theater security cooperation tasks or activities in support of the Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs) Theater Security Cooperation Plan (TSCP) during the period of Shaping Operations (Prevent/Prepare phase of Military Operations; Joint Pub 5-0). TMAAG provides the ASCC with a dedicated General Purpose Force (GPF) that operates in the lower end of the spectrum of conflict (Stable Peace and Unstable Peace) and conducts Stability Operations by providing support to governance under the operational themes of Peacetime Military Engagement and Irregular Warfare. As described in FM 3-0, the security cooperation tasks TMAAG can perform include some forms of security assistance (e.g.. training) and indirect support to foreign internal defense (FID) focused on the brigade level and below. Both security assistance and indirect support to FID emphasize increasing Host Nation (HN) military capabilities and HN self-sufficiency, thus reducing US military requirements. In other words, they assist in Building Partnership Capacity.

TMAAG-F consists of a headquarters and three Security Cooperation Detachments (SCDs). The 39-personnel headquarters provides planning and administrative support for the employment of the SCDs. It was not designed to be a rotational asset for warfighting tasks or to provide direct operational command and control over subordinate units conducting security cooperation activities in HNs. This Colonel-level headquarters receives missions from the ASCC and coordinates with the Security Assistance Office (SAO) to plan and execute GCC-specified theater security cooperation activities. Additionally, the headquarters analyzes missions and assigns subordinate teams to execute tasks within its capability and coordinates training for the team members as required.

The 22-personnel SCDs are the core of the organization. The personnel are trained in languages and cultures specified by each individual ASCC to support security cooperation training, small unit military exercise programs, and other military-to-military engagement activities with host nation military forces. The SCDs provide a limited capacity to train HN forces on command, headquarters and staff functions, as well as conventional military skills. Within the HN, training is targeted at the tactical level (Brigade and lower) and can be tailored with additional capabilities as required (Civil Affairs (CA), Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Military Police (MP), Engineers, etc). Given COCOM direction, SCDs can also assess HN training requirements and provide trainers to fill the requirement (if within their capability) or provide training to general purpose forces that are assigned security cooperation missions that are beyond TMAAG capability.

Unlike Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF), SCDs do not have a combat advisory role. They do not train the host nation's SOF or counterterrorism units. The SCDs are seen as strictly complementary to ARSOF; they focus on the host nation's general purpose forces, allowing ARSOF to focus on the host nation SOF or counter-terrorism forces.

TMAAG demonstrates the Army's clear commitment to its role in stability operations. It provides a part of the Army solution to the BPC gap identified during the "Unified Quest 07" series of seminar wargames; but only the combined efforts of the Army, Joint, and Interagency solutions can address the full range of theater security cooperation requirements.

BG Thomas Jordan retired January 1, 2007 after serving 33 years in the United States Army as an Infantry Officer. After retiring, BG Jordan moved to Kansas to begin his new career as the Director of the Force Management Directorate (FMD), Combined Arms Center, at Ft. Leavenworth.

Where we're at:

... Security in many parts of the country has improved markedly due to a host of factors: the Sunni "Awakening," Moktada al-Sadr's ceasefire, the shift in U.S. strategy to protecting the Iraqi population, the surge of U.S. forces in Baghdad, increasingly effective operations against al Qaeda and greater professionalism among some (though not all) Iraqi military units. Having lived through the sectarian violence of 2006 and early 2007, many Iraqis now feel that Iraq has been given a second chance.

But increased security has also created rapidly rising expectations for essential services like electricity, for political reconciliation and open, free and fair elections, for equitable distribution of Iraq's vast oil wealth, and for jobs.These expectations must be met to consolidate recent security gains.

We are now in what U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine calls the "build" phase — certainly the hardest phase in which the primary objective is enhancing the legitimacy of the host-nation government in the eyes of the population. The problem is that, to date, improved security has increased our legitimacy, not that of the Iraqi government...

What needs to be done:

... Unless we succeed in pushing the Iraqi government to embrace political accommodation and invest in its own country in the coming months, the Bush administration risks not only losing hard-fought security gains but also bequeathing to the next president an Iraq in danger of sliding back into civil war.

Read it all and also check out Foreign Policy's graphic representation Iraq by the Numbers - five years on, key indicators paint a picture of a country trying to rise from the rubble.

As the fight in Iraq drives fundamental changes to the military, it is also forcing a debate on how far those changes should go.

Five years of war in Iraq have emphasized how US forces need to be adept at fighting so-called irregular warfare: One moment, troops are conducting full-combat operations, while the next, they're handing out candy and soccer balls.

But as the fight in Iraq -- and in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- drives fundamental changes to the military, it is also forcing a debate on how far those changes should go, especially as the Pentagon looks ahead to potential future conflicts.

At the center of this debate is a proposal to create a permanent force of 20,000 new "combat advisors." Such a force would position the Army to better train indigenous forces to take on counterinsurgencies for themselves. The idea behind it is that today's wars are not fought with tanks and bombers so much as with hearts and minds, and many officers believe the Army needs to train a generation of soldiers as "warrior diplomats."

More at CSM.

Discuss at Small Wars Council

... It is impossible to gauge the degree to which the U.S. Army's conventional combat skills have been eroded by the focus on counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is certainly likely that the high operations tempo, endless deployments and shortened training schedules have more to do with any erosion in collective task proficiencies than counter-insurgency manual FM 3-24. Yet, the U.S. military is almost certainly drawing the wrong lessons from the 2006 war if it is used to ignore the hard won lessons of counter-insurgency and revert back to the kind of conventional war-fighting with which the U.S. military has always been more comfortable.

Drawing the wrong lessons has happened before...

Again, excellent article and well worth the read.

24 March issue of Newsweek - Five years on, the war is transforming the American officer corps...

Scions of the Surge by Babak Dehghanpisheh and Evan Thomas

... Many Americans were asking that question last spring and summer. While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights. "You can't kill your way out of an insurgency," Petraeus told Newsweek, in an interview in his Baghdad headquarters last month. He has moved soldiers out of their secure megabases and into small outposts deep inside once alien and hostile neighborhoods, and he has ordered his men out of their armored convoys. "Walk ... Stop by, don't drive by," says Petraeus, reading from a "guidance" he is drafting for his soldiers. The objective, he repeats over and over, is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.

But this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior, and it needs tens of thousands of them. Five years into the longest conflict the U.S. military has fought since Vietnam, young officers like Tim Wright have been blooded by multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've learned, often on their own, operating with unprecedented independence, the intricacies of Muslim cultures. Faced with ineffective central governments, they have acted as mayors, mediators, cops, civil engineers, usually in appalling surroundings. Most recently, and hardest of all, they've had to reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own soldiers. Brought up in rigid, flag-waving warrior cultures that taught right from wrong, black from white, they've had to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies...

The Fight Over How to Fight by Evan Thomas and John Barry

... But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world's greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight "big wars" against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term "low-intensity conflict" but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the "savage wars of peace"—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq.

The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today's messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds...

The Enemy Comes in From the Cold by Larry Kaplow

Hawija is a mean town, decaying and sullen. Not long ago a sniper hit a soldier from Black Sheep Company while he was standing inside a downtown police station. But the company's commander, 32-year-old Capt. Quinn Eddy of the 87th Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, speaks without malice of the insurgents taking potshots at his men. "A lot are just triggers who get paid," he says. "They're just trying to survive." Before Iraq, Eddy served a tour in Afghanistan. The enemy in Hawija, he says, is "not the same Al Qaeda that you and I know."...

'A Good Way to Spread a Message' by Babak Dehghanpisheh

... Greater cultural sensitivity has long been a goal of the U.S. Army in Iraq, but only lately, as soldiers come back for the second or third time and deploy deeper into Baghdad neighborhoods, has it become a reality. It's paid off. Late last summer, Marckwardt bonded with a soft-spoken university professor named Abu Muthana over their shared love of Spanish. Disillusioned with the insurgency, Abu Muthana now commands a U.S.-supported neighborhood patrol group. "We thought the Americans were our enemy," he says. "But we Iraqis woke up and realized we have a common enemy." That's not all they have in common.

'The Fight That We Are in Now' by Larry Kaplow

Capt. Neil Hollenbeck declines to second-guess whether America should have invaded Iraq. What he will say is this: "The reason we invaded Iraq to begin with and the reason we're fighting now are different. We're fighting different enemies now." He pauses to think. "The threat we're fighting now is instability and terrorism." Another pause. "The fight that we are in now is not one of our choosing. It's just one we're choosing not to walk away from." Questions of winning and losing are above his rank, he adds, although he thinks a stable Iraq, with a government that can grow into its responsibilities, is "obtainable."

That's why he's here, hunting down the last Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters in the rural Arab Jabour district, south of Baghdad. Hollenbeck and his troops live in an abandoned farmhouse with no running water or electricity, only a generator to run their radios and a light or two. He doesn't mind roughing it; that's part of the strategy. The main thing is to protect the people: you have to live among them, not on heavily fortified bases, as Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency manual says. When the book first came out, Hollenbeck was at Fort Benning, taking classes in conventional warfare between deployments to Iraq. He remembers how good it felt to read something that actually applied to the unconventional conflict he had seen in Iraq...

Images of War: Photographic timeline of the five years of conflict in Iraq

Video: U.S. Troops in Their Own Words

Video: Inside an Iraq Preschool

The call to war is often met by young Soldiers who lack an understanding of what they are about to encounter. These young Soldiers must be trained, prepared, and then led in battle by those with experience and understanding---the Noncommissioned Officer Corps. In an effort to preserve the history of the US Army Noncommissioned Officer and to provide future noncommissioned officers with an understanding of the actions necessary to prepare Soldiers and to lead them in war, the US Army Sergeants Major Academy undertook a program to gather and publish the stories of NCOs who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the papers received were from students of the US Army Sergeants Major Course who had already deployed to either Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom. This work highlights a few of those stories. A wide range of topics have been chosen to allow the reader to understand the preparations, training, and actions needed for NCOs to accomplish their missions.

The work is prepared in two sections: the first we call Stories from Afghanistan and the second, Stories from Iraq. Stories from Iraq is further broken down into "Fighting the Iraqi Army" and "Fighting the Insurgency." Each story has a brief introduction to provide the reader with a background and setting for the story. Timelines are also provided to assist the reader in following the stories in relation to other events that are taking place during the same time frame. In addition, maps provide the reader with an understanding of where in Afghanistan or Iraq those events occurred.

To help readers understand many of the acronyms used by the US Army and specific units, a Glossary is made available as well; it is by no means inclusive of all Army acronyms.

Colonel David J. Abramowitz and Command Sergeant Major James E. Dale charged three members of the US Army Sergeants Major Academy staff to put this work together: Jesse McKinney (SGM Retired), School Secretariat Director; MSG Eric Pilgrim, Editor-in-Chief of the NCO Journal and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom; and L.R. Arms, Curator of the NCO Museum and a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran. They were assisted in their efforts by Ms. Melissa Cooper, Museum Specialist, Ms. Jeannie Tapia, Academic Records Technician, and SPC Joseph Edmondson, Graphic Artist. Together they reviewed more then 683 papers to determine which papers would be included in this work. Many of the selected stories were shortened and edited for clarity; however, every attempt was made to remain true to the author's original intent. In the future, the Sergeants Major Academy will hopefully continue to produce works of this nature, ultimately retaining the knowledge and experiences gained in warfare by noncommissioned officers.

L.R. Arms

Curator

US Army Museum of the Noncommissioned Officer