Bloodless Coup

"Awesome"

This post was originally titled "Packer and McMaster", but "Awesome" is much better. No one will understand either title of this post, but it just follow me here.

George Packer writes for the New Yorker. He is a journalist who is covering the ongoing war in Iraq. His book (The Assassins' Gate) is a brilliant look at the decision-making that went on behind the scenes in DC before the war. In addition, the book examines the "facts on the ground" in Iraq and discusses the difficulties of the American attempts to quell the insurgency there.

Packer's latest (The Lesson of Tal Afar in the New Yorker) is more of the same: the US is learning the necessary military, economic, and political lessons to more efficiently fight the war in Iraq - but very late in the game. Perhaps too late, but we shall see.

I absolutely love the following exchange that Packer (in the article) records:

Captain Jesse Sellars, a troop commander in the 3rd A.C.R. [see below - ed.], who fought in some of the most violent parts of western Iraq in 2003 and 2004, told me about a general who visited his unit and announced, “This is not an insurgency.” Sellars recalled thinking, “Well, if you could tell us what it is, that’d be awesome.”

"Awesome." Just imagine that scene. The Captain knows its an insurgency - he's in it every day. If the General doesn't know he's an idiot, and if he does know, he's lying. How are we supposed to "win" (whatever that means - it's still undefined, as far as I know) when even the higher elements of the military are either out of touch or deliberately lying to their own soldiers?

Packer, in the article above, interviews H.R. McMaster, presently the Colonel in charge of the 3rd ACR (Armored Cavalry Regiment - an indepenent brigade of regular US Army soldiers, considered an elite unit as opposed to the Special Forces people who are elite soldiers individually). Interestingly, I've mentioned McMasters before. I liked McMaster's dissertation/book well enough that I assigned it to my class this semester. He is not only a professional military man (anyone commanding any of the ACRs - there are only a few AC Regiments in the entire US Army - is being groomed for a higher command), but someone who clearly thinks about his profession and the connection his profession has to politics (read his book). He is someone, when they talk about Iraq, that you must take seriously (even if you disagree with their strategy or tactics, though I don't).

Packer has a lot to say. I'll recommend highly you read the entire article. I'll suffice to quote a bit more from Paker talking to McMaster:

A proper strategy would have demanded the coördinated use of all the tools of American power in Iraq: political, economic, and military. “Militarily, you’ve got to call it an insurgency,” McMaster said, “because we have a counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to access.” The classic doctrine, which was developed by the British in Malaya in the nineteen-forties and fifties, says that counterinsurgency warfare is twenty per cent military and eighty per cent political. The focus of operations is on the civilian population: isolating residents from insurgents, providing security, building a police force, and allowing political and economic development to take place so that the government commands the allegiance of its citizens. A counterinsurgency strategy involves both offensive and defensive operations, but there is an emphasis on using the minimum amount of force necessary. For all these reasons, such a strategy is extremely hard to carry out, especially for the American military, which focusses on combat operations. Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army’s institutional instincts. The doctrine fell out of use after Vietnam, and the Army’s most recent field manual on the subject is two decades old.

The Pentagon’s strategy in 2003 and 2004 was to combat the insurgency simply by eliminating insurgents—an approach called “kill-capture.” Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer, who now teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said of the method, “It’s all about hunting people. I think it comes directly from the Secretary of Defense—‘I want heads on a plate.’ You’ll get some people that way, but the failure of that approach is evident: they get Hussein, they get his sons, they continue every week to kill more, capture more, they’ve got facilities full of thousands of detainees, yet there’s more insurgents than there were when they started.” In “Dereliction of Duty,” McMaster wrote that a strategy of attrition “was, in essence, the absence of a strategy.”

During the first year of the war, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was the commander of military operations in Iraq. He never executed a campaign plan—as if, like Rumsfeld, he assumed that America was about to leave. As a result, there was no governing logic to the Army’s myriad operations. T. X. Hammes [he's written a book as well, though I didn't like it - too facile - ed.], a retired Marine colonel who served in Baghdad in early 2004, said, “Each division was operating so differently, right next to the other—absolutely hard-ass here, and hearts-and-minds here.” In the first year of the war, in Falluja and Ramadi, Major General Charles Swannack, of the 82nd Airborne Division, emphasized killing and capturing the enemy, and the war grew worse in those places; in northern Iraq, Major General David Petraeus, of the 101st Airborne Division, focussed on winning over the civilian population by encouraging economic reconstruction and local government, and had considerable success. “Why is the 82nd hard-ass and the 101st so different?” Hammes asked. “Because Swannack sees it differently than Petraeus. But that’s Sanchez’s job. That’s why you have a corps commander.” Lieutenant General Sanchez, who never received his fourth star, remains the only senior military official to have suffered professionally for the failures of the Iraq war. (He is now stationed in Germany.)

I want to be very careful in how I say what I'm going to say next: I don't think the US military has been well served by the generals/admirals who have led the services in the past years (since 9/11). This is not a criticism of the actual fighting soldiers (and mostly not a criticism of the officer ranks, up through Colonel), but a charge that the uniformed military leadership has not been sufficiently vocal about the problems and issues confronting the over-three-year-old conflict still raging in Iraq (yes, US casualties are declining; Iraqi civilian casualties are rising - there has been a change of tactics by the insurgency). As best I can tell, the US military has been sent out to accomplish a still-undefined mission of "winning" Iraq with fewer resources (we sent 500,000 soldiers to Vietnam in the late 1960s and Vietnam's civilian population was just under 20 million; today we have about 130,000 soldiers in Iraq, whose population is about 25 million - we didn't succeed in Vietnam, and you do the math). The military is constitutional and legal forbidden from becoming involved in domestic politics (beyond lobbying for weapons systems, but that's an open secret), but that prohibition should not work to prevent the upper eschelon of the military from at least informing the civilian leadership when they are asking too much of the military. That seems clearly the case here (either asking too much, or asking too much with too few resources; we can quibble about which of those it is).

If I could have an hour to talk to anyone about Iraq, it would be H.R. McMaster. I've read his book, and (from that) I think I have some idea about his point of view. I'd be very curious to hear his (uncensored) opinion about the military (not Rumsfeld) decision-making that has been a part of this war. Given his experience (both as an academic, and as someone high in the military command, and as a combat commander on the ground in Iraq), his experiences would be worth recounting.

Read Packer. Then someone can explain to me how (as of early spring 2006) we're going to win this, somehow.

Posted by baltar at April 10, 2006 09:51 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Books | Iraq | Military Affairs