Vietnam collection (lessons plus)

[SWJED]

18 Dec. Boston Globe - Vietnam and Victory (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/18/vietnam_and_victory/).


Some claim that the US strategy of ‘clear and hold’ had largely defeated the Viet Cong by 1971, and that the same tactics can work in Iraq. But that gets Vietnam wrong, say the war’s historians.

...''National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,'' unveiled Nov. 30...

The document envisions a three-pronged security strategy for fighting the Iraqi insurgency: ''Clear, Hold, and Build.'' It is no accident that this phrase evokes the ''clear and hold'' counterinsurgency strategy pursued by the American military in the final years of the Vietnam War. For months, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius and The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan have reported, influential military strategists inside and outside the Pentagon have been pushing to resurrect ''clear and hold'' in Iraq, claiming that the US effort to suppress the Viet Cong was actually a success.

...the idea that the strategy that beat the Viet Cong could work in Iraq elides a fundamental question: Did ''clear and hold'' actually beat the Viet Cong? For most historians of the war, not to mention for those who fought on the winning side, the answer is no. And the lessons for Iraq are far from clear.

...In sum, where Sorley paints a picture of in-depth village-level deployments between cooperating American and Vietnamese units, combined with economic aid, building villagers' loyalty and sense of security, Elliott and Hien paint a picture of indiscriminate firepower driving villagers off of their land, creating an atomized and demoralized, but controllable, population. This, presumably, is not the new strategy the US envisions winning hearts and minds in Iraq.

...Ultimately, it's not necessary to make the claim of a squandered victory in Vietnam in order to argue that ''clear and hold'' was effective, or is the right strategy for Iraq. Even General Hien thinks ''clear and hold'' was superior to ''search and destroy.''

''I wouldn't say 'clear and hold' was a 'better' strategy,'' Hien says-since, obviously, he wanted the United States to lose. ''But it was a more appropriate strategy for the US.''

[SWJED]

The Small Wars Journal / Small Wars Council has been given permission to republish several articles from the archives of the Marine Corps Gazette (1916 – 2005).

We have been researching COIN related articles from the Vietnam War era and there is an outstanding selection to choose from. The linked article is the second posted here and on the SWJ Library page (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/reference.htm).

We enjoin you to post Vietnam-related topics that you would like posted and we will see what we can come up with through a data-base search...

Kit Carson Scouts (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/cowan.pdf) by Captain William Cowan, USMC. Marine Corps Gazette, October 1969.


Immediately west of the main Citadel in Quang Tri City, capital of South Vietnam's northernmost province, lies a small but strongly fortified compound. Built with Marine Corps money and materials, it is defended only by former North Vietnamese regulars and former Viet Cong. Though few Marines know of its whereabouts or purpose, the products of that compound represent a potent asset to the small unit leader operating against Communist forces in the Republic of Vietnam.

It is the 3rd Marine Division's Kit Carson Scout School, staffed by Marines and dedicated to the task of training former enemy to work with units of the 3rd Marine Division. The Kit Carson Scout program was originated and implemented by Marines. It started when the 1st Marine Division decided to use defectors to locate enemy weapons caches and booby traps.

Though they were mostly untrained, their exceptional performance with Marine units was noted in Saigon, and Gen Westmoreland issued a message in September, 1967, directing all infantry divisions in Vietnam, both Marine and Army, to begin using Kit Carson Scouts in conjunction with friendly operations.

In addition, Gen Westmoreland directed that a minimum of 100 scouts per division was necessary to insure effectiveness. The 3rd Marine Division was the first unit in Vietnam to reach that level when the fourth Kit Carson Scout class graduated from the school in Quang Tri City in December, 1967.

The Scouts are known as Hoi Chanhs (generally translated in Vietnamese as "one who has returned"), and their reasons for defection from the VC or NVA differ. Although many are disillusioned with communism or unfulfilled Communist promises of land, money or battlefield glory, most of them return to the Government of South Viet Nam (GVN) control because they are tired of the constant pressure of allied operations and honestly believe they are on the losing side…

[SWJED]

29 Dec. Washington Post Op-Ed - Three Lessons From Vietnam (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/28/AR2005122801144.html) by Dale Andrade.


It's not uncommon these days to hear talk of "lessons" learned in Vietnam and their application to current U.S. conflicts. Unfortunately, most observers have ignored the uniqueness of the Vietnam War, picking and choosing the lessons learned there with little regard for their application to the present.

This is particularly true with the current buzz over the "clear and hold" concept...

Stripped to essentials, there are three basic lessons from the war. All must be employed by any counterinsurgency effort, no matter what shape it takes.

First, there must be a unified structure that combines military and civilian pacification efforts. In Vietnam that organization was called CORDS, for Civil Operations and Rural Development Support...

The second lesson involves attacking the enemy's center of gravity. An insurgency thrives only if it can maintain a permanent presence among the population, which in Vietnam was called the Viet Cong infrastructure, or VCI. This covert presence used carrot and stick -- promises of reform and threats of violence -- to take control of large chunks of the countryside...

Finally, it is crucial to form militias in order to raise the staff necessary to maintain a permanent government presence in dangerous areas. This is the only way "clear and hold" has any hope of working....

In the end America failed in Vietnam, and it is difficult to convince the public or policymakers that there is anything to learn from a losing effort. But the U.S. military did make important headway in pacification, and it would be foolish to let that experience slip away....

[Brian B]

"Finally, it is crucial to form militias in order to raise the staff necessary to maintain a permanent government presence in dangerous areas. This is the only way "clear and hold" has any hope of working...."

Good article. Points out some of the blaring gaps we have had in our game plan that have been discussed in several of the threads.

In regards to the use of militias, haven't we replaced that strategy in Iraqi by finally placing Iraqi units to hold areas we've cleared? I know we haven't got enough of them trained to hold every place, but isn't that the path we're on instead of militias?
Seems to me that there are enough divisions within Iraq and a tendency to want to stay with them (religious, secular, tribal, etc) that militias might just make a road block that would need cleared later......

[Tom Odom]

http://ebird.afis.mil/ebfiles/e20051228409203.html


Miami Herald
December 28, 2005
Pg. 1

Kurds Preparing Takeover; U.S. Exit Strategy At Risk

The U.S. plan for leaving Iraq is in trouble, with more than 10,000 Kurds in the Iraqi army prepared to seize control of northern Iraq for an independent state.

By Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder News Service
KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.

This article points out the dangers inherent with militias--some of which are very much still in place.

Best
Tom

[Bill Moore]

Mr Andrade’s article, unlike his book, is full of the same errors he accuses others of; that of picking and choosing lessons from Vietnam with little regard to their application to the present.

How he only came up with three basic lessons I’ll never know, but the ones he identifies are not necessarily relevant to OIF and OEF-A as he claims. Additionally his attempts of identifying overarching lessons that must be employed are in fact simply a series of techniques, tactics, and procedures that worked to some degree in Vietnam instead of counterinsurgency principles.

First he calls for a unified (military and civilian) pacification effort. No one will argue that, and of course that is what we’re attempting to get to, but his explanation of CORDS was a poor example. First off he confuses the terms streamlining and inflation when the military takes the program over from the CIA. He also failed to mention that the problem with GEN Westmoreland’s version of CORDS is that he undermined the program (unintentionally) by employing these home village defense force as an offensive force, in effect a back door draft. There is big difference between signing up to protect your family and leaving your family to fight a war that you don’t really understand.

The author’s second lesson is that an insurgency thrives only if it can maintain a permanent presence among the population, so we need to have a Phoenix Program to root it out. First off in all insurgencies we have attempted to identify and neutralize insurgent infrastructure, and granted the Phoenix Program was effective, but then again Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t Vietnam. Phoenix was effective in Vietnam for a number of reasons, but the situations were dealing with in the Middle East are entirely different. First the degree of hostility to Westerners is greater than it was in Vietnam. In Vietnam they embraced a political ideology in hopes of building a more equitable economic system, and that logic could be countered with effective economic carrots and basic security. In the Middle East much of the population hates what we represent and don’t trust our motives. Economic carrots alone may buy some cooperation, but in the end they want us out. Furthermore the insurgents (plural in every sense of the word) don’t have a single unified infrastructure or ideology that we can target, so centers of gravity are numerous and of less value than they were in Vietnam. The bottom line is we’re already going after the insurgent infrastructure.

His final argument is the least logical, and that is stating that the formation of militias is “necessary” to win. I can’t think of any militia groups that have been necessary to defeat an insurgency, nor can I think of any militia groups that have been effectively reintegrated into society after the war, so in effect this option produces armed criminal gangs, some quite dangerous and effective ranging from the drug lords of Burma to the warlords of Afghanistan. If our definition of victory is a united Iraq, I’m not sure how forming militias will get us there?

I like the author’s book, but think he missed the boat with this article.

[SWJED]

4 Jan. Washington Post Letters to the Editor (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010301428.html) in response to the Three Lessons from Vietnam Op-Ed piece.

[Merv Benson]

One of the letter writers uses the Bush and Johnson lied us in to war argument. This is really weak. The progress toward war in Vietnam was much broader than events in the Tonkin Gulf that may or may not have happened. If the Johnson administration was looking for a causus belli, it did not have to wait for action on the high seas. The North Vietnamese were already in clear violation of the Geneva Accords which prohibited all parties from military activities in Laos. The reason Johnson did not use this as his reason for going to war was his reluctance to engage in Laos where the violation was taking place. Shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have defeated the communist, according to their own historians, but Johnson and McNamara were not willing to use overt force in Laos. By restricting the US to transitory force, i.e. raids by special forces and raids by air craft, and refusing to use a blocking force, they committed the US to a much more difficult war in South Vietnam.

They further complicated the war within South Vietnam by restricting the number of troops below that needed to control the space. Unlike Iraq where the commanders have gotten all the troops they requested, in Vietnam troops provided were always significantly below the amount requested. ( I know about Shinseki's observation of troops needed in post war Iraq, but he was never a commander of operations in Iraq and his statement was made in the context of a wag (wild ass guess) in a congressional hearing and not as a result of analysis by staffers working the problem. The facts are that Gen. Franks and Gen Abizaid got the troops they requested.

The WMD "lied us into war meme" is also weak. First those making it also believed Saddam had WMD, they just were not willing to go to war to remove the threat. Second there were several reasons beyond that for going to war and one of the most important was Saddam's failure to account for his WMD as required by his cease fire agreement in 1991 and by numerous UN resolutions. His failure to account was reason enough to believe he posed a threat. Even after all the work by the Iraqi survey group, much of his WMD is still unaccounted for. Saddam's failure to account put the US in the position of taking the word of a madman or going to war. Apparently the crits would have preferred to take the word of a despotic psychopath.

[Stu-6]

They further complicated the war within South Vietnam by restricting the number of troops below that needed to control the space. Unlike Iraq where the commanders have gotten all the troops they requested, in Vietnam troops provided were always significantly below the amount requested. ( I know about Shinseki's observation of troops needed in post war Iraq, but he was never a commander of operations in Iraq and his statement was made in the context of a wag (wild ass guess) in a congressional hearing and not as a result of analysis by staffers working the problem. The facts are that Gen. Franks and Gen Abizaid got the troops they requested.

I wonder if this is because they really don’t see a need for more troops or because they feel pressured not to use more troops. If so they wouldn’t be the first senior officers to tailor their assessment to please political bosses. The fact of the matter is that the number of troops in Iraq has always been unusually small for that type of mission (historical speaking). Also while Shinseki was never a commander there I don’t think his assessment can be dismissed as a guess, the man has vast experience in these types of affairs. For the senior political leadership to dismiss out of hand the recommendations of the Army Chief of Staff shows that their minds were made up about the war and how they would deal with Iraq, decisions which seem to have come back to haunt us all.

[Merv Benson]

Both the Secretary of Defense and the President have said repeatedly that if the commanders want more troops all they have to do is ask for them, That does not sound like they are being pressured not to ask for them. The commanders have also repeatedly testified before the congress that they did not need more troops. I get the impression that they felt like the smaller foot print to maintain the situation until the Iraqis could take over was their plan all along. They all have been recommending Laurences Seven Pillars which says you need to get the Arabs involved. At this point I do not see any reason not to take the commanders at their word.

[Stu-6]

I disagree, after what happened with Shinseki it would have been obvious to anyone what answer the administration wanted to hear with regards to troops levels. That is very obvious pressure to not ask for more troops. Also Laurence is good reading but he was trying start a guerrilla war not end one, just something to think about.

[Merv Benson]

Stu-6,

The position you are suggesting is that the President, the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Abizid, Gen. Franks and Gen. Casey are not telling the truth. Do you really believe that?

[Bill Moore]

Our President is definitely a leader, and while he may or may not harbor private doubts, he can’t afford to air them in public. Can you imagine the impact on our revolution if George Washington aired his serious doubts about our Army’s chances of winning to the common soldier at Valley Forge? Our current national leaders understand the concepts of leadership and loyalty, and obviously have the best interests of our nation foremost in mind when they make decisions, but there is a dangerous flip side to this also that can lead to poor decision making despite everyone’s best intentions.

I’m not pretending to be a sociologist or a psychologist, and definitely welcome the opinions of those who are better versed in these fields than I am, but as a long time observer of human behavior (like the rest of us) I think there are factors that weigh on our decision making and perceptions that prevent us from being as objective as we would like, and these are very prevalent in the military service. Two relevant factors I think are relevant are Group Think and loyalty.

Group think is when a group shares a certain view of the world, and if you don’t share it you may very well find yourself outside the group, such as GEN Shinseki did. GEN Shinseki’s analysis about several things ranging from the Stryker Bde concept to the amount of forces needed in Iraq to conduct stability operations were correct based on his well reasoned assumptions (his estimate was not a WAG as stated earlier). However, if you assumed like many in the administration that the Iraqis would embrace us and that mankind naturally embraces democracy then GEN Shinseki’s estimates would seem absurd. Can there be two truths? Within the Army there are different positions (or opposing Group Think positions) on this, so we are far from a consensus. Several senior officers state off the record that they think we need more troops, but out of “loyalty” to their chain of command feel morally constrained from going public with their opinions, then there is another Group of officers that sincerely think we need to downsize our forces in OIF, because they believe our presence is the catalyst that drives the insurgency. Both sides can make logical supporting arguments for their cases, but Group Think generally prevents us from honestly considering a view of the world that is counter to our Group. Groups tend to cherry pick intelligence, history, and daily incidents to support their Group’s view. Objective thinking is hard work, because it requires subordinating the ego to logic, and it can be especially hard if you reach conclusions that are counter to your Group’s commonly held perceptions (paradigm shifts).

So we have a combination of loyalty and Group Think that tends to make the truth far from perfect, but that isn’t necessarily the act of lying. In short, I don’t agree with Stu’s statement that our senior officers are under no pressure not to ask for more troops. Group Think and loyalty provide that pressure, and would have a big impact on me if I was in their shoes, because I would think that if I asked for more troops that I would be hurting our President, so I would be very hesitant to do so, even if I really thought that the right answer based on my assessments. The President is not pressuring them, but the influence of Group Think and loyalty is because that is what we perceive as the President’s intent. This is a global phenomenon, not something uniquely American. The old saying about the emperor not wearing any clothes obviously has it roots in long established truths about the way people interact with their leaders. The emperor longs for the truth, but the emperor’s subjects tell the emperor what “they” think he wants to hear.

Another old saying that should be considered is that truth is the first casualty of war. Probably all of our nation’s leaders throughout history had to painfully decide when to lie to the American people for national security purposes. It is a challenging ethical question for a democracy and a nation that is built on its values more than anything else. There is a big difference about lying about having sex with that woman and lying about what the NSA is doing. One is self serving and the other serves to protect the nation, or so we think, but in so doing are we threatening the constitution we swore to defend? No easy answers that I can see, so Charlie Mike (or continue mission)

[Merv Benson]

Bill raises some interesting points about group think. It is interesting that when Schartzkoph was asked if he had all he needed he had no difficulty in asking for more. It is not really a question of whether Shinseki or Franks and Abizaid were right on the number of troops needed, it is really a question of what is the best way to get to that number. For reasons that appear sound to me, Abizaid and Casey thought that the best way to get to the force to space ration needed was through training Iraqis and making them responsible. This was a decision that obviously lengthened the time it took to suppress the enemy in western Anbar where US forces were frustrated by having to buy the same ground more than once. I think they were concerned that if the US supplied that force it would result in two problems. The first is greater resistance to US occupation than Iraqi occupation. The second is the Laurence point, if you do not get the Iraqis involved in their own defense, they would have been content to let us do it for a longer time. I think there is a third element also working based on advice from Israel and that relates to the matter of intelligence. Initially when the more troops issue was raised the command's response was that they did not need more troops, they needed better intelligence. It appears that they wound up getting better intelligence when they got more Iraqi troops involved.

[Stu-6]

Stu-6,

The position you are suggesting is that the President, the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Abizid, Gen. Franks and Gen. Casey are not telling the truth. Do you really believe that?

That is not even close to what I am suggestion. What I am saying is that there is obvious pressure on those involved not to ask for more troops and that may be influencing their actions. In fact I think that is a very high probability, but I have not accused anyone of not telling the truth as they see it . . . yet.

[Strickland]

I dont think anyone here is suggesting that our leadership has been dishonest; however, it is difficult to understand how every after-action report you read written from someone other than a general officer or think-tank states that we lack the appropriate numbers of infantry. While the number of troops necessary in Iraq may in fact only be 150,000; it needs to be 150,000 ground combat forces, and not 35,000 infantry or provisional infantry and 115,000 support personnel to include all members of the National Guard. If New York City maintains a police force of nearly 30,000, then surely a congruent amount of infantry is needed in Iraq. It is all about expectations. If you cannot secure your own border at home, should anyone expect that we can do it in Iraq? If you cannot stop drugs and other contraband from freely flowing around the US, can we expect to stop the flow of bombs and weapons around Iraq?

[SWJED]

US Army Center of Military History - Reorganizing for Pacification Support (http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/Pacification_Spt/index.htm) - study by Thomas Scoville.


This study describes the background and implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's decision in May 1967 to create a civil/military organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development; Support--CORDS, to manage US advice and support to the South Vietnamese government's pacification program. It focuses on the years 1966*68 when the organization was conceived and established, and it relates events both from the perspective of government leadership in Washington and the US mission in Saigon. Over these years, the organization changed three times, culminating in CORDS. Each change is examined with special emphasis on the role of important officials, such as General Westmoreland, Ambassador Komer, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and President Johnson.

Parameters - Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification Policy (http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/05autumn/jones.htm) - article by Frank Jones.


From Komer’s arrival in Vietnam in May 1967 through the end of the pacification program in February 1973, two leading authorities on this subject, Richard Hunt and Thomas Scoville, credit Komer, who left Vietnam in November 1968, and his successor, William Colby, later Director of Central Intelligence, with making CORDS largely successful on several levels.

First, Komer integrated the organization effectively into the US Mission and Westmoreland’s headquarters, thereby promoting healthy working relationships with Bunker and Westmoreland and helping CORDS not only survive later changes in military and political leadership but improving, as was necessary, US military-civilian coordination and programs under a single manager. Although the US military contributed the bulk of the personnel, funding, and resources, civilians held numerous policymaking positions as well as serving as field advisers, thereby improving cooperation between military and civilians...

[Stratiotes]

In another group I mentioned Father Hoa (http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyHoaAug.htm) in Vietnam. Somebody asked if I knew of his final fate - I do not. And, I haven't found anything on the web that might indicate what happened to him or the other "fighting fathers" after the fall of Saigon.

Does anybody here know any details on this subject?

[SWJED]

11 April Washington Post commentary - Vietnam's Forgotten Lessons (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041001027.html) by Richard Cohen.


...We all know the cliche about generals fighting the last war, but in Iraq it is not the tactics that were duplicated -- certainly not compared to the Persian Gulf War -- but the tendency of the military to do what it was told and keep its mouth shut. Shelton, who retired in 2001, cannot be blamed for this and maybe no one but Donald Rumsfeld can, but the fact remains that the United States fought a war many of its military leaders thought was unnecessary, unwise, predicated on false assumptions and incompetently managed. Still, no one really spoke up.

Now, some have -- although from retirement. In recent days, three former senior officers have called for Rumsfeld to be sacked. The most recent is Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who does not stop at faulting Rumsfeld but blames himself as well. "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda," he writes in a Time magazine article this month. He joins Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who commanded the training of Iraqi security forces and who has also called on President Bush to fire Rumsfeld. "President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once," Eaton wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece.

The third retired general is Anthony Zinni, a four-star Marine with vast experience in the Middle East. (He was Bush's Israeli-Palestinian negotiator for a while.) He goes further than (merely) recommending Rumsfeld's political defenestration. He also strongly suggests that something is broken in the American military, that its priories are misplaced. Too many senior officers put their careers first and candor or honesty second. One who did not, the then-Army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, was rebuked by Rumsfeld and his career essentially ended. After that, the brass knew that the path to promotion was to get with the program. They saluted Rumsfeld and implemented a plan many of them thought was just plain irresponsible...

[Merv Benson]

Cohen recycles the Shinseki myth. The General served his full term before retiring.

Cohen also tries to make a comparison between McNamara and Rumsfeld which fails when faced with the facts. McNamara turned down requests for troops and Rumsfeld did not. Rumsfeld has said tht he was prepared to provide 400,000 or more troops for the Iraqi operation, but that General Franks and General Abizaid told him they did not need that many.

I am not being critical of that judgement on their part, but if you are going to criticize the decision on the number of troops, it should be focused on the General's decisions and their rational and not on some mythical restrictions by the President and Secretary of Defense who have consistently said that the troops levels are a decision made by the commanders. If you have any doubt on this, just read the Prolog to Tommy Franks' book American Soldier.

I think guys like Cohen know they could not win a debate with the generals so they keep hacking away at a strawman argument.

Having former generals second guessing those who succeeded them is nothing new. Many have made a career of it on TV. Cohen just likes Zinni et.al. because they reinforce his prejudice. There are a lot of former generals out there who probably support the decisions of Franks and Abizaid, but because of that fact their opinions are not news.

In case you are not aware of the arguments for the smaller number of troops, there are several including an offensive based on a rapid advance that disorients and overwhelms the enemy. More troops would have made this much more difficult because of the logistical support train needed for the additional troops. Winning in three weeks pretty well confirms Franks' judgement on that point. In terms of troops needed after major combat operations, Abizaid wanted to have the Iraqis take over the combat space as soon as possible. When the Iraqi Army disintegrated during the war, rebuilding became a major task, with several blips along the way. However, the new Iraqi Army is taking shape and taking over much of the battle space and is giving the force to space ratio needed to make the insurgency less effective.

There is obviously more to it than I can summarize in this space, but if you read Franks book you will not regret it.

[Nat Glozer]

There are so many contradictory points out there. In his book, Cobra II, General Trainor expresses the view that CENTCOM was micro-managed by Rumsfeld and the civilians in OSD, and that the low troop levels were pushed on Franks. So what is the truth? Don't know what your sources are, Merv, perhaps you do know the answer. But with all due respect, unless you were there, I don't see how you can say what the truth is regarding this question given that several credible sources say completely different things. The more important question is whether more troops would have limited or prevented the insurgency. I think that the vitriol and bad faith on the part of the media and anti-war politicians has prevented this important debate from taking place. The conversation should focus on that so that we can better our game for the next round.

[Merv Benson]

Please read the Prolog to General Franks' American Soldier. It is not even arguable. I would also add that General Pace confirmed the issue on troops levels in a press briefing today. Trainor may be relying too much on his NY Times co author. His assertions are clearly refuted by the statements of Franks and his component commanders. If you get further into the book, Franks lays out his reasons for his requested force levels. At no time does he suggest that he got less than what he asked for.

I would add that even Sen. Kerry backed off the Shinseki myth when reporters confronted him with the facts during the 2004 campaign.

BTW, the Trainor book also seriously misstates the events surrounding the flap over Gen. Wallace's purported statements concerning whether there was adequate wargaming on dealing with the Fedayeen. They also overlook the rather clever way the Centcom staff found to deal with the Fedayeen. I base this last comment on the excerpt of the book I saw in the NY Times that dealt with that kerfufle.

[SWJED]

12 April Los Angeles Times - Top General Disputes Criticism Against Rumsfeld (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rumsfeld12apr12,1,7886502.story?coll=la-headlines-nation).


Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, facing calls for his resignation by three retired senior officers for his handling of the Iraq war, received a full-throated endorsement Tuesday from the U.S. military's top general, who insisted that "this country is exceptionally well served" by Rumsfeld's leadership.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed accusations from retired top officers that Rumsfeld had forced the uniformed military into an invasion plan they didn't fully support.

"We had then, and have now, every opportunity to speak our minds, and if we do not, shame on us because the opportunity is there," Pace said at a Pentagon news conference. "The plan that was executed was developed by military officers, presented by military officers, questioned by civilians as they should, revamped by military officers, and blessed by the senior military leadership."

Pace's remarks, the most pointed on the Pentagon's leadership since he assumed the chairman's post in September, were prompted by a series of highly critical articles and interviews in recent weeks by former generals who were directly involved in the war or who served in top positions...

[Merv Benson]

CNN's (http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/11/rumsfeld.iraq/index.html) report on Pace's statments includes the following:


Rumsfeld said Newbold "never raised an issue publicly or privately when he was here that I know of." Pace also said he was unaware of any objections Newbold raised.

Pace said plans for the invasion were significantly overhauled between the time Newbold retired and the day American troops crossed the Iraqi frontier in March 2003.

He said members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed on to the war plan presented by Gen. Tommy Franks, then-commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, before it was presented to Rumsfeld and President Bush, and top officers had "every opportunity to speak our minds."

"And if we do not, shame on us, because the opportunity is there. It is elicited from us, and we're expected to," Pace said. (Emphasis added.)

[SWJED]

12 April St. Paul Pioneer Press commentary - South Korea, Not Vietnam, is the Parallel for Iraq (http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/14319001.htm) by Robert Killebrew.


Standing in the center of bustling Seoul in Thanksgiving, I found it hard to believe that 53 years ago the city was a pile of rubble, the ruined capital of a ruined country. The full scope of the Korean War is forgotten by many today, eclipsed by memories of Vietnam. But at this time of war and occupation in Iraq, South Korea's story is worth remembering as a case of American nation-building that worked.

To many in 1953, South Korea was an unlikely winner of the savage civil war that had ranged up and down the Korean peninsula for three years. More than a million South Koreans died, and the survivors were reduced to aimless crowds of refugees.

There are, of course, many dissimilarities between the Korea of 1953 and the Iraq of 2006; history repeats itself only in outline, not in detail. But the similarities are also striking... Some in the West in 1953 doubted that Asians brought into the modern world only recently could master democracy and free-market economies. A half-century later, we hear echoes of this regarding Middle-Eastern people.

The U.S., essential ingredient: Certainly South Korea's emergence wasn't easy; it wasn't until 1992 that a truly democratic government was voted in. Meanwhile, though, the country had become a modern state in every other sense, and its progress today would have been almost unimaginable to Westerners in 1953. Iraq, with its comparatively enormous advantages — above all, its oil wealth — may well make comparable or even better progress.

The essential ingredient has been American steadfastness. The role of the United States and its allies in the liberation and development of South Korea is a story so taken for granted that it is sometimes forgotten at home...

Great Britain, France, Turkey and other allies served with us under a U.N. mandate during the war. An American military garrison remains in Seoul. After three years of combat, allied and South Korean forces fought the Chinese and North Korean armies to a standstill and then faced a long, tense standoff. Billions of dollars were spent. Behind the armies, modern South Korea emerged.

Because Americans are famously impatient, we sometimes fail to give ourselves credit for the stick-to-itiveness that it takes to do great things. But in hindsight, all our greatest accomplishments have taken more time than we realized at the start. American democracy took two centuries to reach universal suffrage. Defeating communism took decades and a number of wars — including the one in Korea...

[Merv Benson]

Here is the full transcript (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2006/tr20060411-12800.html) of remarks that the above news articles discuss.

This is a brief excerpt:


...

Let me just give you Pete Pace's rendition of how the process worked building up to Iraq. First of all, once it became apparent that we may have to take military action, the Secretary of Defense asked Tom Franks, who was the commander of Central Command, to begin doing some planning, which he did. Over the next two years, 50 or 60 times, Tom Franks either came to Washington or by video teleconference, sat down with the Secretary of Defense, sat down with the Joint Chiefs and went over what he was thinking, how he was planning. And as a result of those iterative opportunities and all the questions that were asked, not once was Tom told, "No, don't do that. No, don't do this. No, you can't have this. No, you can't have that." What happened was, in a very open roundtable discussion, questions about what might go right, what might go wrong, what would you need, how would you handle it, and that happened with the Joint Chiefs and it happened with the Secretary.



And before the final orders were given, the Joint Chiefs met in private with General Franks and assured ourselves that the plan was a solid plan and that the resources that he needed were going to be allocated. We then went and told the Secretary of Defense our belief in Tom's plan and in the resources, and I know for a fact, because I was there, that when the Joint Chiefs were called over to the White House, several of the questions that the president asked specifically were about our understanding and belief in the plan, and whether or not the amount -- proper amount of resources had been allocated. He did that both with us, just the Joint Chiefs, and then again when all the combatant commanders were in from around the globe well before a final decision was made.

...

This description is consistent with Gen. Franks description of the process. As I have pointed out before in the Prolog to his book Gen. Franks has the transcript of each component commander telling the President and Secretary of Defense that they had everything they needed for the mission.

There are probably enough people invested in the myth of "Rumsfeld did not give them enough troops" that it will keep popping up. However, a more constructive debate would involve asking the commanders why they chose the makeup of the force that they did, instead of assuming something that clearly is not so.

[Strickland]

While I have and will continue to trust and obey the orders of those appointed over me, and thus have no reason not to believe or doubt the integrity and moral courage of the senior leadership of our military, General Krulak once told me that "perception + truth = reality." Based off this formula, the truth may not be a clear cut as we would like. However, as all of us know that have participated in an planning session, "you dance with the girl you brought," or the girl your boss tells you to dance with; thus if all the commanders knew that asking for more troops was akin to asking where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, you develop courses of action consistent with assigned forces.

[SWJED]

13 April Washington Post - Rumsfeld Rebuked By Retired Generals (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201114.html) by Tom Ricks.


The retired commander of key forces in Iraq called yesterday for Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders who have harshly criticized the defense secretary's authoritarian style for making the military's job more difficult.

"I think we need a fresh start" at the top of the Pentagon, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, said in an interview. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork."

Batiste's comments resonate especially within the Army: It is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld...

Batiste said he believes that the administration's handling of the Iraq war has violated fundamental military principles, such as unity of command and unity of effort. In other interviews, Batiste has said he thinks the violation of another military principle -- ensuring there are enough forces -- helped create the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal by putting too much responsibility on incompetent officers and undertrained troops...

[SWJED]

14 April Washington Post - White House Defends Rumsfeld's Tenure (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301689.html).


The White House came to the aid of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, rebuffing calls from several retired generals for his resignation and crediting him with leading the Pentagon through two wars and a transformation of the military.

"The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period in our nation's history," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at a briefing. He went on to read long quotations from the nation's top military officer, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, praising Rumsfeld's dedication and patriotism.

The defense of Rumsfeld is a perennial exercise for the White House whenever a fresh round of Rumsfeld-must-go demands arise on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in Washington. The difference this time is that those insisting that the secretary should step down are recently retired flag officers who appear to reflect widespread sentiment among people still in uniform...

[SWJED]

14 April Washington Times - Retired General's Call Puzzles Rumsfeld Aides (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060413-113036-4341r.htm).


Of the smattering of retired generals who have called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign, none has surprised the Pentagon's inner circle more than retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste.

Gen. Batiste commanded the 1st Infantry Division, responsible in Iraq for the hot spots of Tikrit and Samarra, north of Baghdad. On a chilly December night in 2004, he introduced Mr. Rumsfeld to his soldiers thus: "This is a man with the courage and the conviction to win the war on terrorism."

A Rumsfeld aide said that when the two talked privately, the general voiced no complaints on how Washington, or Mr. Rumsfeld, was waging war...

Five retired generals hardly constitute a groundswell among what the Pentagon estimates are 9,000 active and retired generals and admirals. But Pentagon officials fear there will be more such calls against Mr. Rumsfeld.

The list now reads: Gen. Batiste; Gen. Riggs; retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, who opposed the Iraq invasion from the start; Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton.

"I was particularly taken aback by Batiste," said Larry Di Rita, a senior Rumsfeld adviser. "It seemed very contrary to the interaction I saw in Iraq."

[SWJED]

13 April National Review commentary - Dead-end Debates: Critics Need to Move On (http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200604130743.asp) by Victor Davis Hanson.


Currently there are many retired generals appearing in frenetic fashion on television. Sometimes they hype their recent books, or, as during the three-week war, offer sharp interviews about our supposed strategic and operational blunders in Iraq — imperial hubris, too few troops, wrong war, wrong place, and other assorted lapses...

Imagine that, as we crossed the Rhine, retired World War II officers were still harping, in March, 1945, about who was responsible months during Operation Cobra for the accidental B-17 bombing, killing, and wounding of hundreds of American soldiers and the death of Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair; or, in the midst of Matthew Ridgeway's Korean counteroffensives, we were still bickering over MacArthur's disastrous intelligence lapses about Chinese intervention that caused thousands of casualties. Did the opponents of daylight bombing over Europe in 1943 still damn the theories of old Billy Mitchell, or press on to find a way to hit Nazi Germany hard by late 1944?

More troops might have brought a larger footprint that made peacekeeping easier — but also raised a provocative Western profile in an Islamic country. More troops may have facilitated Iraqization — or, in the style of Vietnam, created perpetual dependency. More troops might have shortened the war and occupation — or made monthly dollar costs even higher, raised casualties, and ensured that eventual troop draw-downs would be more difficult. More troops might have bolstered U.S. prestige through a bold show of power — or simply attenuated our forces elsewhere, in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and Europe, and invited adventurism by our enemies. Too few troops were the fault of the present Administration — or the chickens that came home to roost after the drastic cutbacks in the post-Cold war euphoria of the 1990s.

"Troop transformation" has become equally calcified. We know the script. Pensioned Army and Marine generals appear ever more ubiquitously to assure the public that we have near criminally shorted ground troops. They alone are now speaking for the silenced brave majors and dutiful colonels stuck on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq with too few soldiers — as their four-star Pentagon brass sold out to Mr. Rumsfeld's pie-in-the-skies theorists in Washington.

Maybe — but then again, maybe not. The counterarguments are never offered. If hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in sophisticated smart shells and bombs, drones, and computers, to ensure far greater lethality per combatant, then must traditional troop levels always stay the same? How many artillery pieces is a bomber worth, with ordinance that for the first time in military history doesn't often miss? Has the world become more receptive to large American foreign bases? Or depots to housing tens of thousands of conventional troops and supplies? And did lessons of the Balkans and Afghanistan prove the need for far more ground troops and traditional armor and artillery units?

The point is simple: Somewhere between the impractical ideas that the U.S. military was to become mostly Special Forces on donkeys guiding bombs with laptops, or, instead, a collection of huge divisions with tanks and Crusader artillery platforms, there is a balance that the recent experience of war, from Panama to the Sunni Triangle, alone distills. And it isn't easy finding that center when we had enemies as diverse as Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.

[SWJED]

15 April Washington Times - Generals Defend Rumsfeld (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060414-110537-1839r.htm).


Several retired generals who worked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yesterday decried calls for the secretary's resignation from other retired officers.

President Bush repeated his support for his point man in the war against terrorists.

"I think what we see happening with retired general officers is bad for the military, bad for civil-military relations and bad for the country," retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Mr. Bush, said in an interview with The Washington Times. He said he would elaborate his views in an op-ed essay.

"I'm hurt," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, who was deputy commander of U.S. Central Command during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and briefed Mr. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

"When we have an administration that is currently at war, with a secretary of defense that has the confidence of the president and basically has done well -- no matter what grade you put on there, he has done well -- to call for his resignation right now is not good for the country," he said.

[SWJED]

16 April New York Times - Generals Break With Tradition Over Rumsfeld (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/washington/16generals.html?).


This week, as the chorus of retired generals demanding Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation grew larger and louder, Gen. Peter Pace stood beside the embattled defense secretary and did what some experts say is his military duty.

"As far as Pete Pace is concerned, this country is exceptionally well-served by the man standing on my left," General Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. "Nobody, nobody works harder than he does to take care of the P.F.C.'s and lance corporals and lieutenants and the captains. He does his homework. He works weekends, he works nights...

Critics of Mr. Rumsfeld, who agree with the former generals who have derided him as wrongheaded and arrogant, may see General Pace's endorsement as fulsome flattery...

But the comments by General Pace of the Marines were more than a public plug for a boss under fire. Scholars who study the armed forces say they were a public restatement of a bedrock principle of American governance: civilian control of the military.

"This is what the chairman of the joint chiefs is expected to do by tradition and law," said Dennis E. Showalter, a military historian at Colorado College who has taught at the Air Force Academy and West Point. Short of submitting his own resignation, General Pace had little choice but to offer a public show of support, Mr. Showalter said.

"If he had not spoken out, he would have been making a very strong statement," he said.

The idea that civilian leaders, as representatives of the people, should have the ultimate say in how the country's military power is wielded dates to colonial resentment of British rule and is embedded in the Constitution.

Tensions between civilian leaders and the military brass are routine and occasionally erupt into public view. But the principle of civilian supremacy has never been seriously challenged; the last plotters of a military coup d'état in American history were disgruntled officers faced down by General George Washington at Newburgh, N.Y., in 1783.

In fact, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribes court martial for any commissioned officer who "uses contemptuous words against the president, the vice president, Congress, the secretary of defense" or other federal or state officials.

That prohibition, of course, does not forbid serving officers from speaking candidly in private when asked for advice on military matters. Some of Mr. Rumsfeld's critics also fault General Pace and others for not being more forceful in questioning the guidelines put forward by Pentagon civilians that have kept American forces relatively lean in Iraq, and which led to the quick disbanding of the Iraqi Army.

Neither does the prohibition on "contemptuous words" apply to retirees. And the propriety of the onslaught of attacks on Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership from recently retired senior military leaders, including some who served in Iraq, is a matter of intense debate....

[SWJED]

16 April Washington Post commentary - Behind the Military Revolt (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401451.html) by Richard Holbrooke.


The calls by a growing number of recently retired generals for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have created the most serious public confrontation between the military and an administration since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951. In that epic drama, Truman was unquestionably correct -- MacArthur, the commanding general in Korea and a towering World War II hero, publicly challenged Truman's authority and had to be removed. Most Americans rightly revere the principle that was at stake: civilian control over the military. But this situation is quite different.

First, it is clear that the retired generals -- six so far, with more likely to come -- surely are speaking for many of their former colleagues, friends and subordinates who are still inside. In the tight world of senior active and retired generals, there is constant private dialogue. Recent retirees stay in close touch with old friends, who were often their subordinates; they help each other, they know what is going on and a conventional wisdom is formed. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who was director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the planning period for the war in Iraq, made this clear in an extraordinary, at times emotional, article in Time magazine this past week when he said he was writing "with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership." He went on to "challenge those still in uniform . . . to give voice to those who can't -- or don't have the opportunity to -- speak."

These generals are not newly minted doves or covert Democrats. (In fact, one of the main reasons this public explosion did not happen earlier was probably concern by the generals that they would seem to be taking sides in domestic politics.) They are career men, each with more than 30 years in service, who swore after Vietnam that, as Colin Powell wrote in his memoirs, "when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons." Yet, as Newbold admits, it happened again. In the public comments of the retired generals one can hear a faint sense of guilt that, having been taught as young officers that the Vietnam-era generals failed to stand up to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson, they did the same thing...

[SWJED]

16 April New York Times - Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/washington/16rumsfeld.html?).


The Defense Department has issued a memorandum to a group of former military commanders and civilian analysts that offers a direct challenge to the criticisms made by retired generals about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The one-page memorandum was sent by e-mail on Friday to the group, which includes several retired generals who appear regularly on television, and came as the Bush administration stepped up its own defense of Mr. Rumsfeld...

The memorandum begins by stating, "U.S. senior military leaders are involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process in the Department of Defense." It says Mr. Rumsfeld has had 139 meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the start of 2005 and 208 meetings with the senior field commanders.

Seeking to put the criticism of the relatively small number of retired generals into context, the e-mail message also notes that there are more than 8,000 active-duty and retired general officers alive today...

[SWJED]

16 April New York Times commentary - The Good Fight, Done Badly (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/opinion/16brooks.html) by David Brooks.


...Donald Rumsfeld, who graduated from Princeton in 1954, was of this type. Athletic, heroic, he never met an organization he didn't try to upend. He made it to Congress in the early 1960's and challenged the existing order. He was hired by Richard Nixon and quickly reorganized the Office of Economic Opportunity, slashing jobs and focusing the organization. He wrote to Nixon that he would upset the education bureaucrats and destroy "their comfortable world."

As his career went on, he took his streamlining zeal to the Pentagon, and then to G. D. Searle & Company, where he dismissed hundreds of executives, spun off losing businesses and streamlined the bureaucracy.

Rumsfeld's style appealed to political leaders who were allied with the corporate world, but hostile to self-satisfied corporate fat cats. Nixon loved Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, the rebel in chief, quickly hired him.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumsfeld held a town meeting in the Pentagon that almost perfectly summarizes his career. There is an organization that threatens the security of the United States, he warned. "With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas." The adversary is close to home, he concluded: "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."

Anti-Organization Men like Rumsfeld value the traits needed to mount frontal assaults on vast bureaucracies: first, unshakable self-confidence; second, a willingness to stir up opposition and to be unmoved in the face of it (on the contrary, to see it as the inevitable byproduct of success).

Anti-Organization Men tend to love fast-moving technology for the way it renders old structures obsolete. They tend to see themselves as event-making characters who exist above their organizations, or in a tightly organized renegade band. Rumsfeld wrote his own rules, and many of them sing the glories of disruption: "You can't cut a swath through the henhouse without ruffling some feathers."...

[SWJED]

15 April Gateway Pundit blog - Judge Rumsfeld by His Successes And Failures (http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/judge-rumsfeld-by-his-successes-and.html).


Before Abu Ghraib was known as a prison of barking dogs, nadedness and pyramiding but was a slaughterhouse where thousands of innocent Iraqis were executed under the Saddam Regime...
Before there were democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq...
Before documents were released showing links between Saddam and Al Qaeda...
Before feminists were so Anti-Jew...
Before the Butcher of Baghdad was given a smackdown as he was dragged from his spider hole...
And, after all of this was accomplished with record low military casualties, civilian casualties and military fatalities...

The mainstream media has been after Donald Rumsfeld...

[SWJED]

17 April Washington Times - Gen. Myers Says Critics of Rumsfeld Out of Line (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060417-122459-2531r.htm).


Retired generals who are criticizing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's prewar planning are out of line and need to remember who their boss is, top military and civilian officials -- including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- said on yesterday's political talk shows.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers said yesterday that the behavior and comments from six generals is "inappropriate" for military officers...

"It's inappropriate because it's not the military that judges our civilian bosses. We'd be in a horrible state in this country, in my opinion, if the military was left to judge the civilian bosses, because when you judge Secretary Rumsfeld, you're also judging the commander in chief, because that's the chain of command, and that's just not appropriate," Gen. Myers told ABC's "This Week" program.

The generals -- four from the Army and two from the Marine Corps -- now say the defense secretary intimidated senior officers and "meddled" in war plans that, they say, resulted in "poor war planning" after Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was deposed. The retired generals said Mr. Rumsfeld lacked ground troops and failed to foresee the insurgency in Iraq by al Qaeda terrorists.

Gen. Myers said the generals did not question the prewar plans, and went a step further by saying that any military officer would be derelict in his duty if he did not voice his concerns...

[SWJED]

19 April Los Angeles Times commentary - A General Disgrace (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot19apr19,0,6685016.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions) by Max Boot.


The American officer corps tried to blame the fall of Saigon on their civilian masters. If not for political restrictions — in particular, no invasion of North Vietnam — the U.S. would have won the war. So argued the late Col. Harry Summers in his celebrated 1981 book, "On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context." That was, at best, a gross oversimplification.

As then-Maj. Andrew Krepinevich showed in "The Army and Vietnam" (1986), the U.S. defeat could be attributed in large part to the inappropriate, firepower-intensive strategy adopted by the Army. In the absence of a better counterinsurgency doctrine, not even occupying all of Vietnam, as the French had once done, would have won the war. If the generals wanted to know who was to blame for their defeat, Krepinevich suggested, they should have looked in the mirror.

His analysis is now widely accepted, yet we are in the early stages of another stab-in-the-back myth in which officers line up to blame their civilian bosses for the setbacks we've suffered in Iraq. In the last few weeks, six retired generals and counting have called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

As it happens, I agree with their advice. As I first said on this page two years ago, I too think that Rumsfeld should go. But I am nevertheless troubled by the Revolt of the Generals, which calls into question civilian control of the armed forces. In our system, defense secretaries are supposed to fire generals, not vice versa.

The retired generals, who claim to speak for their active-duty brethren, premise their uprising on two complaints. First, many (though not all) say we should not have gone into Iraq in the first place. Former Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold calls it "the unnecessary war," and former Gen. Anthony Zinni claims that "containment worked remarkably well."

That is a highly questionable judgment, and one that is not for generals to make. They are experts in how to wage war, not when to wage it. If we had listened to their advice, we would not have gone into Kuwait or Bosnia or Kosovo.

Their second complaint — about how the war has been fought — is more valid. There is no doubt that the president and his top aides blundered by not sending enough troops and not doing enough occupation planning. But what about the blunders of the generals?

To listen to the retired brass, the only mistake they and their peers made was not being more outspoken in challenging Rumsfeld. But that's not the picture that emerges from the best account of the invasion so far: "Cobra II" by veteran correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor. They present copious evidence of Rumsfeld's misguided micromanagement. But they also show that Gen. Tommy Franks, the top military commander, was guilty of major misjudgments of his own...

[Merv Benson]

There is no evidence that civilian leadership turned down any troop request for Iraq. There is abundant evidence that civilian leadership asked the military if they had what they needed for the war in Iraq and if they were satisfied with the plan that Centcom had put together. It wasn't just Gen. Franks who developed this plan. His component commanders were assigned by the Joint Chiefs and they all signed off on the plan. Events have demonstrated that no additional troops were needed through Phase III of the plan which ended with the liberation of Iraq. It is the Phase IV part of the plan that should be the focus of the debate. The person primarily responsible for that part of the plan has been Gen. Abizaid, yet his name never comes up in this debate nor his rationale for his "small footprint" strategy.

It should also be pointed out that the "not enough troops" chorus has not suggested that the US should have waited till it could get more troops into Afghanistan where even fewer troops were used to liberate that country. And, where fewer troops have been needed for Phase IV operations. Logic, history and terrain all suggest that Afghanistan should be the location of the strongest insurgency, but that has not been the case. The insurgency there is even weaker than the weak insurgency in Iraq.

It is time to move this debate from the civilians who approved the plan the military came up with and have an honest debate about the virtues or lack thereof of the "small footprint" strategy during Phase IV.

It is my view that the best way to defeat an insurgency is by having a force to space ratio that prevents enemy movement and denies sanctuaries. Clearly we did not have a force sufficient to do that initially. We attempted to make up for this by focusing on getting actionable intelligece on the enemy. In the meantime we force our troops to buy the same real estate more than once, becuase we did not have enough troops to take and hold areas. The creation of the Iraqi army has had a positive effect in both getting actionable intelligence and in having enough force to take and hold an area and deny enemy movement.

While H.R. McMaster is credited with writing the bible on generals speaking out, his most important work in the Iraq war was his innovative liberation of Tal Afar with the help of Iraqi forces. That is the model the military should be looking at, instead of his book on the history of the joint chiefs of the 1960's. It also shows that civilian leadership did not get in the way of his using his best military judgement in taking effective action in Iraq. Did any of the complaining generals suggest such a plan while they were in Iraq? If so, was it rejected by civilian leadership? I think the evidence is pretty clear.

BTW, Boot is still clinging to the assertion that the insurgency in Vietnam was successful. History shows that after the failure of Tet, the insurgency never had a chance to topple South Vietnam. Conventional warfare was needed to conquer South Vietnam after the Democrats cut off funding for the South Vietnamese and refused to let the US use its air power to stop the communist conventional attack.

[SWJED]

It's Solitaire for Rummy (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/409097p-346282c.html) - New York Daily News Editorial

The Generals War (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008249) - Wall Street Journal Editorial

Growing Calls for Rumsfeld's Dismissal (https://registration.ft.com/registration/barrier?referer=&location=http%3A//news.ft.com/cms/s/c26d7ec2-cdad-11da-afcd-0000779e2340.html) - Financial Times Editorial

The War Against Rumsfeld (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0604190018apr19,0,7415696.story?coll=chi-newsopinion-hed) - Chicago Tribune Editorial

Retired Summer Soldiers (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060418-085948-6705r.htm)- Washington Times Commentary

Generals Put Us On Slippery Slope (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/267124_center19.html) - Seattle Post-Intelligencer Commentary

Why Are They Speaking Up Now? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801172.html) - Washington Post Commentary

Wrong Debate Over Rumsfeld (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060418-091037-9879r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Court of Inquiry (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/court_of_inquiry.html) - Real Clear Politics Commentary

David vs. Goliath in Washington (http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/67207.htm) - New York Post Commentary

A General Disgrace (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot19apr19,0,6685016.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions) - Los Angeles Times Commentary

A Case for Accountability (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801164.html) - Washington Post Commentary

Seven days in April (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060417-094715-2092r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Listen to the Brass (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701260.html) - Washington Post Commentary

Political Hothouse Perennial (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060417-094712-2610r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Roots of the Uprising (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701262.html) - Washington Post Commentary

Public Criticism of Rumsfeld Says it All (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/18/public_criticism_of_rumsfeld_says_it_all/)- Boston Globe Commentary

Why America's Generals Out For Revenge (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2138690,00.html) - London Times Commentary

Rumsfeld's Job Security (http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/67123.htm) - New York Post Commentary

Generally Speaking... With Hindsight (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060416-103032-8282r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

The Good Fight, Done Badly (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/opinion/16brooks.html) - New York Times Commentary

Behind the Military Revolt (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401451.html) - Washington Post Commentary

A General Misunderstanding (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/opinion/16delong.html) - New York Times Commentary

An Officer Responds To David Ignatius (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/blog/2006/04/an_officer_responds_to_david_i.html)- Real Clear Politics Commentary

Rumsfeld Staying Put (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/rumsfeld_staying_put.html) - Real Clear Politics Commentary

Dead-End Debates (http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200604130743.asp)- National Review Commentary

Why Didn't Generals Resign? (http://www.suntimes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt-ref17.html) - Chicago Sun-Times Commentary

Reconcilable Differences (http://conways.nationalreview.com/archives/094868.asp) - National Review Blog

The Troubles of Donald Rumsfeld (http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/04/troubles-of-donald-rumsfeld.html) - Belmont Club Blog

The Incoherence of the Former Generals (http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/incoherence-of-former-generals.html) - Prairie Pundit Blog

Jack Kelly on the Rumsfeld Flap (http://www.irishpennants.com/archives/2006/04/fred_kaplan_is.php) - Irish Pennants Blog

Donald Rumsfeld and the Media, A Bitter Love (http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/03/donald-rumsfeld-and-media-bitter-love.html)- Gateway Pundit Blog

Ignatius Makes A Case About Rumsfeld (http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006759.php) - Captain's Quarters Blog

Judge Rumsfeld by His Successes And Failures (http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/judge-rumsfeld-by-his-successes-and.html) - Gateway Pundit Blog

Rumsfeld and the Generals (http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/rumsfeld-and-generals-there-has-been.html) - ZenPundit Blog

Dear Generals: Please Stop, Immediately (http://www.theadventuresofchester.com/archives/2006/04/dear_generals_p.html) - The Adventures of Chester Blog

The Rumsfeld Detractors (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060419-095404-3995r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Why Bush Should Keep Rumsfeld (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/why_bush_should_keep_rumsfeld.html) - Real Clear Politics Commentary

The Generals are Revolting (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/the_generals_are_revolting.html) - Real Clear Politics Commentary

Rumsfeld Must Resign (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.resign20apr20,0,4004852.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines) - Baltimore Sun Commentary

Railing at Rummy (http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/64724.htm) - New York Post Commentary

Sour Grapes and Cheap Shots (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060420-085559-5621r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

The Generals' Dangerous Whispers (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042001379.html) - Washington Post Commentary

A 4-star Defense of the Republic (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks21apr21,0,4735076.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions) - Los Angeles Times Commentary

The Anger At Rumsfeld (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/blog/) - Real Clear Politics Blog

Former President Ford Defends Rumsfeld (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101841.html) - Washington Post

Generals’ Complaint Arrives Too Late (http://news.bostonherald.com/opinion/view.bg?articleid=136153) - Boston Herald Editorial

They Put Our Side in Danger (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/14402207.htm) - Miami Herald Commentary

It's About Time We Focus on the Enemy (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0604210174apr21,0,4204421.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed) - Chicago Tribune Commentary

All-Star Shame (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060422-110639-4735r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Honor in Discretion (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008275) - Wall Street Journal Commentary

What Generals Have to Say Matters a Lot (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/14399295.htm) - Miami Herald Commentary

Batiste: Why Rumsfeld Must Leave (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3811292.html) - Houston Chronicle Commentary

Good Thing Civilians Direct Generals (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3811845.html) - Houston Chronicle Commentary

Generals' Revolt Still a Hot Topic (http://www.irishpennants.com/archives/2006/04/the_generals_re.php) - Irish Pennants Blog

Footprints in Iraq (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06113/684143-108.stm) - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Commentary

Generals May Need to Stage Retreat (http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/14409315.htm) - Philadelphia Inquirer Commentary

Rumsfeld's Pentagon (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060425-085311-3335r.htm) - Washington Times Commentary

Rage at Don (http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110008284) - Wall Street Journal Commentary

Behind the Revolt (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/25/AR2006042501587.html) - Washington Post Commentary

A Dereliction of Duty (http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200604270710.asp) - National Review Commentary

[SWJED]

23 April New York Times - Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/washington/23military.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).


The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.

Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.

To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.

The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.

"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."

An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: "The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, 'We cannot do this mission.' They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers" who might otherwise have stayed in uniform.

One Army colonel enrolled in a Defense Department university said an informal poll among his classmates indicated that about 25 percent believed that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, and 75 percent believed that he should remain. But of the second group, two-thirds thought he should acknowledge errors that were made and "show that he is not the intolerant and inflexible person some paint him to be," the colonel said...

[SWJED]

March - April issue of Military Review - CORDS / Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/milreviewmarch2.pdf) by Mr. Dale Andrade and Lieutenant Colonel James Willbanks.


As the United States ends its third year of war in Iraq, the military continues to search for ways to deal with an insurgency that shows no sign of waning. the specter of Vietnam looms large, and the media has been filled with comparisons between the current situation and the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War. Differences between the two conflicts are legion, but observers can learn lessons from the Vietnam experience—if they are judicious in their search. For better or worse, Vietnam is the most prominent historical example of American counterinsurgency (COIN) - and the longest - so it would be a mistake to reject it because of its admittedly complex and controversial nature. An examination of the paci*fication effort in Vietnam and the evolution of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program provides useful insights into the imperatives of a viable COIN program...

[SWJED]

March - April Military Review - Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/milreviewmarch3.pdf) by Major Ross Coffey, US Army.


According to the National Strategy, weekly strat*egy sessions at the highest levels of the U.S. Government ensure that Iraq remains a top priority. At the operational level, the “team in Baghdad—led by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey—works to implement policy on the ground and lay the foundation for long-term success.” Each of the eight pillars have corresponding interagency working groups to coordinate policy, review and assess progress, develop new proposals, and oversee the implementation of existing policies. The multitracked approach (political, security, and economic) to counterinsurgency in Iraq has historical parallels with the Civil operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program of the Vietnam War era. established in 1967, CORDS partnered civilian and military entities engaged in pacification of Vietnamese rural areas. The program enhanced rural security and local political and economic development and helped defeat the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. Significantly, CORDS unified the efforts of the pacification entities by establishing unity of command throughout the combined civil-military organization. Lack of unity of effort is perhaps the most signifi*cant impediment to operational-level interagency action today. The victorious conditions the National Strategy describes might be unachievable if the interagency entities present in Iraq do not achieve unity of effort. To help achieve unity of effort, Multi-Force–Iraq (MNF-I) and the nation should consider adopting a CORDS-like approach to ensure integrated action and victory...

[SWJED]

24 April Financial Times - Rumsfeld Continues to Come Under Fire (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b045e176-d3e3-11da-b2f3-0000779e2340.html).


Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, on Monday came under more fire after another retired general joined the growing list of retired brass gunning for his resignation.

Retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, a three-star general who retired in 1997, told Fox News that Mr Rumsfeld was not capable of leading the Pentagon effort in Iraq. He is the eighth former general to call for Mr Rumsfeld to step down.

“When I look at where we are in this war to date, and imagine where we could have been if the right number of troops had been put in at the right time and had been employed correctly, then I think we need new leadership,” said Lt Gen Van Riper. “If I was the president, I would have relieved him three years ago.”...

[SWJED]

8 May issue of the Weekly Standard - No More Vietnams (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/151alsid.asp) by David Gelernter.


... The Vietnam analogy has been part of the Iraq war story since the fighting started (in fact, since before it started). The Bush administration often deals with its critics by ignoring them. This time it can't. Too much rides on the president looking these critics in the eye and telling them: Damned right this is Vietnam all over again. Only this time we will not get scared and walk out in the middle. This time we will stand fast, and repair a piece of the American psyche that has been damaged and hurting ever since we ran from Vietnam in disgrace way back in April 1975.

Of course any citizen is welcome to criticize the conduct of any war--tactfully, without giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Maybe we are doing things all wrong in Iraq. But those who launch the Vietnam analogy at the administration are lobbing heavy artillery for a different reason. They are predicting (with obnoxious schadenfreude) that Iraq will turn out like Vietnam in the end: We will proclaim ourselves beaten, give up, and go home. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we will do the intelligent and humane thing and surrender...

Not many nations get a second chance to show the world and themselves that they are serious after all, that their friends can trust them and their enemies ought to fear them. There is no way we can atone for the blood and death we inflicted (indirectly) on South Vietnam by abandoning it to Communist tyranny. That failure can never be put right. But we can make clear that "No More Vietnams" is a Republican slogan. It means that we will never again go back on our word and betray our friends, our soldiers, and ourselves....

Most wars bog down in hard fighting at some point or other. When that happens, America must be able to trust itself not to run away. George Washington and his men did not run away after General Howe took Philadelphia for the British in September 1777, and Washington's counterattack on Germantown failed in October, and the brand new American army had to settle into miserable, freezing winter quarters at Valley Forge. Every American schoolchild used to know what Valley Forge meant: Stand firm and fight, no matter how terrible things are. The Union army did not run away in the fall of 1862, although Lee and Jackson had won a huge Confederate victory at Second Bull Run, and Lee had crossed the Potomac into Maryland and was threatening Washington, Baltimore, and (again) Philadelphia, and was expected to capture all of Maryland and a crucial railroad bridge in Pennsylvania--which would just about cut the Union in two. But Lincoln and the Union did not give up.The Confederates didn't run away either. Their cause was wrong, but they stood up heroically and fought till they were crushed to bits.

Nor did the American army run away 80 years later in the spring of 1942, although the Pacific fleet had been smashed at Pearl Harbor, Manila had been evacuated, Bataan had surrendered after a desperate, starving defense--and then Corregidor had surrendered too. But MacArthur promised that Americans would return to liberate the Philippines, and that's just what happened...

Those that think that "no more Vietnams" means that cowardice is the better part of wisdom don't know their Vietnam history either. There are many important lies in circulation about Vietnam, like counterfeit $50 bills that keep resurfacing. Those who held these views during the war itself weren't liars; in most cases they were telling the truth as they understood it. But decades later, it requires an act of will to keep one's ignorance pristine...

Much more, follow the link above and read on...

[SWJED]

30 April Washington Times commentary - Lessons for Iraq (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060429-084933-8080r.htm) by Robert Turner.


Today marks the 31st anniversary of that shameful day Col. Bui Tin led a column of North Vietnamese tanks into Saigon to complete the military conquest of South Vietnam. It didn't have to happen, and many contemporary critics of our involvement in Iraq are drawing the wrong "lessons" from that experience.

One of the most common myths is that President Johnson took America to war without congressional or popular support. Actually, Johnson sent combat units to Vietnam pursuant to a 1964 statute approved by a margin of more than 99? percent of Congress (which, on its own initiative, more than tripled his appropriations request) -- and Johnson's Gallup Poll approval rating shot up from 55 percent to 85 percent.

Another widely accepted misconception is that the war could not have been won. To be sure, there was a learning curve associated with guerrilla tactics, and the arrogant incompetence of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara -- who ignored the consistent warnings from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA that his strategy of "gradualism" could not win and was actually encouraging the enemy -- cost a lot of lives.

But, as Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis observed last year in Foreign Affairs, historians now acknowledge we were winning the war by the early 1970s. Even more remarkably, this is admitted by Col. Bui Tin and other former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officials. Their only hope, in the final years, was that Jane Fonda and the American "peace" movement would persuade Congress to pull the plug, which it did in May 1973. In a very real sense, a misguided Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Indochina...

But now that our troops and national credibility have once again been committed, we get a replay of the Vietnam mantra: The president "lied" to trick us into going to war, our soldiers are committing "war crimes," and we must stop this immoral, illegal war now. Virtually no one truly objects to the fact that the National Security Agency is monitoring communications between al Qaeda operatives abroad and people inside this country, but many become frightened when critics tell us this means the president believes he can monitor any American's private phone calls at will. Despite conclusions to the contrary by the unanimous Senate Intelligence Committee, the Silberman-Robb Commission, the Butler Commission in Great Britain, and even The Washington Post (Joseph Wilson "was the one guilty of twisting the truth"), critics still argue we knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and that was the only justification for the war. (As the war began, I wrote a 15,000-word legal defense that barely mentioned the WMD issue).

I don't know whether we should have gone into Iraq. But that is not the issue we face. We made that decision, by an overwhelming consensus, and the issue is whether we will once again abandon those we have pledged to help. Will America let Saddam's henchmen -- reinforced by Abu Musab Zarqawi and other al Qaeda elements -- drive us out of the Middle East? That's a very different question, and in answering it we ought to keep in mind some of the real "lessons" of the Vietnam tragedy.

[Jedburgh]

For those of you with an interest, I turned up this old Congressional Research Service report on My Lai: Issues Underlying the My Lai Trials - June 18, 1971 (http://star.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?euWoqwrrQj18oFKUkK9gwxds2nffAuX@c.vF vxtlYEbFO8Hg5WWx@fbdt2c3i5J@ip1n4e@4@XG139iXvM2LpM El6WEsuja3Ad1s1uJNqSM/2293812005.pdf)

The report also takes a look back at the Sand Creek Massacre during the Indian Wars and two cases from the Philippines - a US incident when fighting the Moros, and the Japanese during WWII.

[Steve Blair]

Thanks for posting this. I had a chance some years ago to pick up a copy of the original Peers report regarding My Lai, and have been kicking myself ever since for not doing so. Unlike the Congressional report, there was a great deal of background material with the original report. Another interesting take on these issues can be found in Self Destruction written by an Army officer using the pen name Cincinnatus.

Instead of Sand Creek, perhaps they should have used the Marias River in 1870. I know this is quibbling after small bits, but Chivington had made it clear from the start that he was going to attack ANY Indians he came across, for a number of reasons (at least one of which centered around his own political ambitions). The Marias, on the other hand, comes closer to the My Lai scenario (IMO, anyhow). Still...an interesting piece.

[slapout9]

Interesting, but it left out that a short time later Pres. Nixon ordered him removed from the stockade and placed under house arrest. Some time in late 1974 he was paroled by the Sec. of the Army. He later married the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Columbus,Ga. And I believe he is still there.

[bismark17]

If you are referring to Lt. Calley, he was selling jewelry in Columbus, Ga while I was at jump school in July of 1989. One of my classmates bought a ring from him.

[slapout9]

Yep, that is who I was talking about. Guess he is still there. website www.law.umkc.edu has information about the trial encluding the Peers report.

[SWJED]

7 July Christian Science Monitor commentary - Lessons from Vietnam in How to 'Flip' an Enemy (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0707/p09s02-coop.html) by Patrick Lange.


Long ago and across the world in Vietnam, I had the job of persuading enemy soldiers to leave their government to join "our side" in the long struggle there against revolutionary socialism. Some of my experiences could be replicated in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, although the recent news makes me wonder if it's still possible to bring people over to our side...

In Vietnam, enemy prisoners of war were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and were given the POW designation. Many people have seen photographs of American or South Vietnamese soldiers with prisoners from the other side, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. Although there were undoubtedly instances in which individual Americans abused prisoners, I would defy anyone to provide photographic evidence of such abuse in a facility for the detention of enemy prisoners of war in Vietnam.

The enemies captured in Vietnam were held by US or South Vietnamese military police (MPs), interrogated by US Army or South Vietnamese military intelligence, and then sent to prisoner-of-war camps that were run by the South Vietnamese Army under the tutelage of American MP advisers.

Some exceptions applied...

Part of my job that year was proselytizing in these camps, trolling for those who might want to change sides. I visited a number of these camps in 1972 and did not see anything very objectionable about them. When the war finally ended, these imprisoned soldiers were returned to their own side.

But as in any war, soldiers who are not so firmly anchored to one side can be persuaded to "come over." Often these men are among the most intelligent and experienced, who have come to see war itself as a cynical game played by the powerful at the soldiers' expense.

Hundreds of prisoners decided to change sides during the Vietnam War and join with US or South Vietnamese forces. One of the most useful projects that the "turncoats" served in were the "Kit Carson Scouts." These former enemy soldiers wore our uniforms, bore arms as part of our combat forces, and accompanied our own soldiers in the field. Their knowledge of the enemy's methods and habits proved invaluable. After demonstrating their loyalty to the American forces during the war, many of them came to live in the US...

[SWJED]

23 July Washington Post - In Iraq, Military Forgot the Lessons of Vietnam (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072200444.html) by Tom Ricks (author of Fiasco (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159420103X/smallwarsjour-20/104-0563752-4865514?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2)).


...there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.

On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, "De-Baathification of Iraq Society." The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending that, "By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you'll really regret this."

He was proved correct, as Bremer's order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.

Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army's interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence" -- that is, soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling...

The U.S. military jargon for this was "boots on the ground," or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers...

The flaw in this approach, Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive."...

Few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt to be overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

Complicating the U.S. effort was the difficulty top officials had in recognizing what was going on in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at first was dismissive of the looting that followed the U.S. arrival, and then for months refused to recognize that an insurgency was breaking out there. A reporter pressed him one day that summer: Aren't you facing a guerrilla war?

"I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one," Rumsfeld responded...

U.S. tactics became more aggressive. This was natural, even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. forces and a series of suicide bombing attacks. But it also appears to have undercut the U.S. government's long-term strategy.

"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam."

For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there, as well.

"What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals...

In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a French army lieutenant colonel who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967.

When the United States went into Iraq, his book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275989410/smallwarsjour-20/103-9768737-6739819?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2) was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed.

Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war.

"A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty," he wrote; "the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire."

The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize.

"The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula wrote.

Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.

Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul...

When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the U.S. experience in Iraq in 2003-04 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home.

Most significant for Peterson's analysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. "Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools," he concluded...

We are finally getting around to doing the right things," Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice observed one day in Iraq early in 2006. "But is it too little, too late?"

One of the few commanders who was successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained.

By the academic year that ended last month, 31 of 78 student monographs at the School of Advanced Military Studies next door, were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier.

And Galula's handy little book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275989410/smallwarsjour-20/103-9768737-6739819?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2) was a bestseller at the Leavenworth bookstore.


Much more at the link... Part II tomorrow...

[SWJED]

Here is the earlier thread on Tom Rick's new book Fiasco (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=907).

Rick's will be participating in an online Q/A Monday at 1300 (ET) (24 July) sponsored by the Washington Post - go here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/07/DI2006070701061.html)to submit questions.


Washington Post staff writer Thomas E. Ricks will be online Monday, July 24, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his new book and to answer your questions.

Thomas Ricks has covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post since 2000, reporting on activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

His book, FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, will be published by Penguin Press in July 2006.

[SWJED]

...is already taking exception - sight unseen - Do You Have A Bad-News Bias If Your Iraq Book Is Titled 'Fiasco'? (http://newsbusters.org/node/6146).

Some of the commentary implies Ricks only interviewed the same-old anti-Iraq war retired officers and that he was a "Baghdad Green Zone reporter" - both of these assumptions are untrue.

[SWJED]

'It Looked Weird and Felt Wrong' (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300495.html) - Fighting the Insurgency One Unit's Aggressive Approach by Tom Ricks.

Today's installment focuses on the Army's 4th Infantry Division and is the second of two articles adapted from Fiasco (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159420103X/smallwarsjour-20/104-0563752-4865514?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2).

[SWJED]

I participated in the online Q&A with Tom Ricks (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/07/DI2006070701061.html) today. Here are the questions I submitted - only number 2 got picked-up for an online answer.

1. In the article adaptation of FIASCO you mentioned the Army’s Command and General Staff College and School of Advanced Warfare curriculum changes. Are you aware that the Marine Corps’ Command and Staff College also completely revamped their curriculum to address the very problems you outlined?

2. Where does the crux of the blame for the FIASCO lie? There were a lot of efforts to incorporate lessons learned and new “ways” of thinking into military concepts, doctrine, education and training prior to OIF. Why did these efforts fail to take?

3. Considering counterinsurgencies have historically taken many years to complete and most, if not all, have had their share of failures and lessons learned, is it possible that we are fully capable of seeing this through to a successful completion given time? How much time and will the American public support a long-term effort?

4. You mentioned Galula's book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I would also recommend a down and dirty piece that lays out COIN in a tactical and practical format - Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. Kilcullen is a retired Australian lieutenant colonel now working for the US State Department. Earlier you mentioned 10-15 years in Iraq. That is if we get it right. Do you see a trend that the “one- third that are trying but not really getting it and the one-third just want to kick a little butt” are being pushed aside or are we permanently handicapped by not being fully combat effective?

Also, counterinsurgencies require all elements of national power and in most cases the military element is secondary to success. How do you view the other (non-DoD) agencies efforts? Is the military doomed to taking on the whole spectrum of Small Wars by default?

Here is one Q&A I found interesting:


Quantico, Va.: First, I'd like to complement you on the large body of balanced material you've produced over the years.

I vividly remember a conversation I had with my Battalion Commander in Camp Lejeune about three years before the war started. I was a Marine Platoon Commander and we were conducting a formal professional discussion with all of the battalion officers on Dien Bien Phu. The subject turned to training for low intensity conflict (which includes counter-insurgency) and our ability to prepare for it adequately. The consensus was that we didn't have the time to prepare for the range of missions we might encounter and that we should focus on traditional high intensity combat. The theory was that we could always scale back but not up.

I think that, collectively, the entire U.S. military probably made the same decision. Thus, when the war evolved into an insurgency we started at a huge deficit. The result was that you ended up with a situation where every commander may have a completeley different idea of how to fight the war in Iraq. Your story of Major General Odierno is just one example of a failure to understand the nature of the conflict. Stories of very senior commanders being upbraided by LtGen Petaues (then the commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command), for instance, have made the rounds among junior officers. My question is this - do you really think that the services are making their best effort to adapt to the nature of the war considering the significant mental challenges that need to be overcome? For instance, we don't reward officers for serving as embedded trainers with Iraqi units. Many senior officers haven't even internalized the tenets of Manuever Warfare, the central warfighting theory of the Marine Corps, do you really think we can get all services to internalize the principles of counter-insurgency?

Tom Ricks: Thanks. Would you take our friend in Corpus Christi aside for a quiet chat?

Seriously, I think you raise good points. Counterinsurgency is tough--especially because it runs so contrary to much the US military has taught over the last two decades. For example, classic counterinsurgency doctrine says to use the minimal amount of force necessary to doing the job, rather than use overwhelming force. And it also says to treat the people well, even prisoners.

One senior officer in Iraq told me earlier this year that about one-third of his subordinate officers "get it," one- third are trying but not reallly getting it, and one-third just want to kick a little butt. That means your force is probably less than half effective, and part of it is counterproductive.

[SWJED]

25 July Washington Times commentary - Freeing Iraq (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060724-083919-5944r.htm) by Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (ret.).

Colonel Anderson's take on Fiasco (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159420103X/smallwarsjour-20/103-9768737-6739819?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2)...


Writing a critical analysis about a war in progress is always a risk. But in a long war, such as the one in Iraq, there is a market for such analysis. Tom Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post has taken a shot at in "Fiasco," which is his take on Phase IV of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Phase III, the military defeat and removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, effectively ended on April 9, 2003. Phase IV, Stability and Security Operations in military parlance, goes on today. Mr. Ricks' look at the situation is a hard and unsparing one.

Although the book is primarily about Phase IV, Mr. Ricks briefly surveys the conflict's first three phases to include the road to war. The chapter that deals with the sometimes personal conflict between retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is particularly illuminating...

Mr. Ricks believes the war to have been mismanaged at both the strategic and tactical level, and he identifies culprits. He clearly believes that the incompetence and arrogance of Douglas Feith, the former Pentagon policy czar, and Paul Bremer, the American proconsul for the first year of the war, were major causes of the flawed implementation of the occupation...

Mr. Ricks flatly accuses Gen. Tommy Franks of abrogating his command responsibilities following the fall of Baghdad by concentrating on his transition to retirement at a time when strong guidance was sorely needed...

At the operational level, Mr. Ricks does not let senior military leaders off the hook for ineptitude in conducting counterinsurgency operations. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander during the first year of the war, gets poor grades for micromanaging tactics without giving his subordinates clear commander's intent statements regarding the strategic and operational objectives.

Maj. Gen. (now Lt. Gen.) Ray Odierno comes under very harsh criticism for creating more insurgents than he killed through his division's iron-fisted handling of the civilian population. It was Maj. Gen. Odierno's troops who captured Saddam, and Mr. Ricks credits him for that. The author is also harsh with the military system as a whole, which refused to prepare for counter-insurgency in the wake of Vietnam, a war that the system chose to forget rather than to learn from.

The book does have heroes, however. Lt. Gens. Jim Mattis, Dave Patraeus and Marty Dempsey get high marks for mentally adapting to the insurgency. Because all three are still involved, he has some optimism that they can lead to better operations in the future.

Mr. Ricks sees the individual soldiers and marines as real heroes and generally writes off many tactical problems to lack of proper leadership from their seniors. He clearly believes that they have been more adaptive than the senior Pentagon leadership and many of their generals...

[SWJED]

New York Times - From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/books/25kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

Editor and Publisher - Tom Ricks of 'Wash Post' Explores Iraq 'Fiasco' in Book, Articles (http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002878323)

[Steve Blair]

What I find interesting about much of this discussion is how many people seem to be surprised by this (I'm not referring to board members, obviously). Even a casual student of history would have noticed the services, especially the Army, ran very quickly away from the counterinsurgency lessons they could have learned from Vietnam. Franks' conduct during Operation Anaconda was also questionable, a trend he carried over into Iraq it seems. Working with the Air Force, I even see them saying that they can "win" a counterinsurgency from the air!

Given the nature of the organizations, I suppose it's inevitable. The Army was very heavily imprinted with the business school and mass production mentality of its senior leaders during World War II and after, and the Air Force has always been possessed by a need to proclaim itself capable of winning, on its own, ANY war it happens to face. This doesn't apply to all members of either service, but there is an organizational culture and identity that encourages these views and approaches. What is to me the most disappointing aspect of it is that our forces currently contain some of the brightest recruits they've ever had. These people are ready and willing to do the job, and for the most part quickly adapt to changing situations if they're given proper background and some guidance. That they could be let down so seriously by their senior commanders is very depressing.

[Jones_RE]

I think senior army commanders have largely avoided counterinsurgency for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's largely the province of the Special Forces or the Marines with their banana wars experience. Second, is the main stress placed on maneuver war.

In the early to mid 1970's, the Army was reborn after Vietnam. The officers at that time woke up and saw just how powerful Warsaw Pact forces had become. Maneuver warfare offered the only doctrine capable of standing off such a large army. Previously, the Army had gotten by on mass, especially massed firepower. This worked great until they noticed the much greater mass just to the east.

With a focus on defeating a massed threat that was always considered to be practically superior, and with literally the fate of the world hanging in the balance, is it any wonder that the army dropped its study of everything else? We talk about the focus on high intensity warfare in western Europe as if it were some kind of grand strategic mistake. Yet given the level of threat posed by Warsaw Pact ground and nuclear forces, how can you blame them? The Soviets might have seen all this small wars preparation and light infantry stuff and decided we were pushovers. The United States is a great power because of our focus on big wars - the defining feature of a great military power is the ability to fight that kind of war, after all. That US forces remained ignorant in the twenty first century is a matter of simple negligence - that they wilfully turned all of their attention to thousands of Soviet tanks thirty years ago was a matter of accomplishing their mission.

[SWJED]

Here is the transcript of Tom Ricks on Meet the Press (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13904922/page/5/) this past Sunday. (scroll down to pick up where Ricks is interviewed).


MR. RUSSERT: And we are back, talking to Tom Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.

“Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.” That sounds like a very harsh assessment. Who did you talk to? What documents did you see?

MR. THOMAS E. RICKS: I talked to over 100 senior military officers and, and soldiers of all ranks, from private to four-star general for the book. I did five reporting trips in Iraq and also talked to a lot of people back here. I read 37,000 pages of documents. Enormous amounts of information are available. And guys at the end of interviews would say, “Here’s a CD-ROM with every e-mail I sent to Paul Bremer when I was out there.” So there’s an amazing amount of information available.

MR. RUSSERT: Here is the summary, early on in your book. “This book’s subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that the U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation. None of this was inevitable. It was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously ‘worst-casing’ the threat presented by Iraq while ‘best-casing’ the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.”

Let’s talk about the intelligence first. And, you write about the national intelligence estimate. And this is how you described it. “In September of ‘02 the U.S. intelligence prepared a comprehensive summary, called the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, of what it knew about ‘Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ ... It was prepared at the request of members of Congress who expected to vote on going to war with Iraq and wanted something on which to base their vote. ... As a political document that made the case for war the NIE of October ‘02 succeeded brilliantly. As a professional intelligence product it was shameful. But it did its job, which wasn’t really to assess Iraqi weapons programs but to sell a war. There was only one way to disprove its assertions: invade Iraq, which is what the Bush administration wanted to do.”

You’re suggesting the intelligence community was an accomplice in providing information to Congress that wasn’t accurate?

MR. RICKS: Yes. That document did not accurately reflect the information available inside the intelligence community. But you had a process of narrowing; as the information moved its way upward, doubts were stripped away. And so what you finally had in that document was something very different from what the experts actually thought. And it kind of just all veered off in one direction. It wasn’t like all the doubts were, were stripped off, it was all the doubts that said, “This may be wrong, they may not have WMD.”

MR. RUSSERT: There were some caveats in the NIE.

MR. RICKS: There were, but they tended to be ignored, especially in the summaries, which is what officials actually had. And you wound up with a situation where Colin Powell basically sacrificed his credibility and gave a speech at the U.N. based on that NIE that was utterly false, as he now admits.

MR. RUSSERT: General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, you write in his book, he was “worried by the possibility of ‘a major influx of Islamic fighters’ from elsewhere to the Middle East ... concluded that it would be necessary ‘to size the postwar force bigger than the wartime force.’ [Shinseki] prepared carefully for the Capitol Hill appearance at which he would unveil that thought and effectively go into public opposition against the war plan being devised under Rumsfeld’s supervision.”

That was the famous testimony where Shinseki said it may take a couple hundred thousand troops in order to success—be successful in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy Pentagon chief said that he was wildly off the mark.

MR. RICKS: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: And that Shinseki really was stampeded into answering that question. You found something else?

MR. RICKS: That was one of the surprises to me in reporting the book, that Shinseki had had his staff go and talk to historians, looked at other occupations and come up with a very concrete estimate based on historical precedent of how many troops might be needed. And he concluded several hundred thousand. The Bush administration saw that as an attempt to actually stop the invasion because they really came to distrust the Army because the Army was coming up with all these objections and doubts and saying things like this is not really—or invading Iraq would not be part of the war on terror. And ultimately, the joint chiefs of staff sent out an order saying you will consider an invasion of Iraq part, part of the war on terror.

MR. RUSSERT: You said that General Tommy Franks, who was in head of the initial invasion of the war, used the phrase “speed kills” in terms of supporting a lower force than Shinseki had talked about. Talk about Franks, what he recommended, and the effectiveness of that initial invasion as opposed to the occupation.

MR. RICKS: Another surprise to me in writing this was that I think this probably was one of the worst war plans in American history. When you talked to people who had to implement it, they said it didn’t speak to the basic problem. All the energy went to how you get to Baghdad, which was the easy part of it. Very little thought went to what do you do after you get there. So they spent 90 percent of their time on 10 percent of the problem. And they had a war plan that was effectively a kind of a banana republic coup d’etats: decapitate the Iraqi regime. When actually the plan that they were supposed to do was supposed to change Iraq and change the Middle East. So the war plan really didn’t speak to what top authorities, the president, had asked them to do.

MR. RUSSERT: Donald Rumsfeld, when the first looting was shown on the TV screens criticized the media for showing the pictures over and over again. He said that, “Stuff happens.” That sometimes these things are untidy—freedom’s untidy. And then there was a debate between Rumsfeld and the press corps as to whether we were involved in a guerilla warfare. You said that Secretary Rumsfeld was paralyzed when the looting began. Talk about that.

MR. RICKS: This would have been, I think, the time when Rumsfeld’s forceful personality really could’ve helped if he’d come in in this late spring and early summer of 2003 and said, “This is different from what we thought it was going to be.” But what I heard from officials who were at the CPA, the American Occupation Authority, was there was kind of a paralysis at the top, that they couldn’t get Rumsfeld to change, couldn’t get him to adjust, couldn’t even get him to say yes, we are fighting a war. And so for about eight weeks, a crucial time early in the occupation, June and July, you really have the U.S. military frozen in place because it’s a hierarchical institution. And the guy at the top was not adjusting to changed circumstances.

MR. RUSSERT: You end the book by saying that history will determine whether the president was correct in saying that the invasion will make our country more secure. Right now you have doubts.

MR. RICKS: I have real doubts because while there’s a small chance, I think, that Iraq ultimately will become a stable pro-American democracy, I think there’s a much larger chance that it won’t. And I think it’s an extremely worrisome situation. We kind of have a low-level civil war there. If it becomes a more intensible war, it easily could spill over its own borders and across the Middle East and we’d have a regional war on our hands.

MR. RUSSERT: But you do not think American troops should withdraw immediately.

MR. RICKS: I think it would be irresponsible to go in there and do what we’ve done and then walk away from it. There’s a lot of Iraqis out there who have committed their lives to helping the Americans do something there. And to abandon those people, I think, would be absolutely shameful as well.

MR. RUSSERT: How long do you think we’ll be there?

MR. RICKS: Ten to 15 years, at least.

MR. RUSSERT: At what size force?

MR. RICKS: I think they’ll probably get it down to maybe 110,000 by the end of this year, and probably 50,000 by the end of next year. And then you could have a steady stay for five or 10 years, even 15 years, but I think it’s going to be a long, hard struggle.

MR. RUSSERT: Tom Ricks. The book, “Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq.” We thank you for sharing your views.

MR. RICKS: Thank you.

[Steve Blair]

I think senior army commanders have largely avoided counterinsurgency for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's largely the province of the Special Forces or the Marines with their banana wars experience. Second, is the main stress placed on maneuver war.

In the early to mid 1970's, the Army was reborn after Vietnam. The officers at that time woke up and saw just how powerful Warsaw Pact forces had become. Maneuver warfare offered the only doctrine capable of standing off such a large army. Previously, the Army had gotten by on mass, especially massed firepower. This worked great until they noticed the much greater mass just to the east.

With a focus on defeating a massed threat that was always considered to be practically superior, and with literally the fate of the world hanging in the balance, is it any wonder that the army dropped its study of everything else? We talk about the focus on high intensity warfare in western Europe as if it were some kind of grand strategic mistake. Yet given the level of threat posed by Warsaw Pact ground and nuclear forces, how can you blame them? The Soviets might have seen all this small wars preparation and light infantry stuff and decided we were pushovers. The United States is a great power because of our focus on big wars - the defining feature of a great military power is the ability to fight that kind of war, after all. That US forces remained ignorant in the twenty first century is a matter of simple negligence - that they wilfully turned all of their attention to thousands of Soviet tanks thirty years ago was a matter of accomplishing their mission.

Obviously the Army needed to devote the majority of its attention to Central Europe, but did they have to neglect virtually every other possible conflict? That's more the question, I think. The large push into maneuver warfare actually originated with the Marine Corps, not the Army, if memory serves. And I would propose that another feature of a great military power is flexibility. Now I also believe that the Army is getting there, and perhaps making strides quicker than many of its critics felt was possible. The Army is also to a degree a victim of its history following World War II. We are still paying the price for some of the leadership by management ideas that came in during that time, and saw perhaps their ultimate expression during Vietnam.

[SWJED]

Obviously the Army needed to devote the majority of its attention to Central Europe, but did they have to neglect virtually every other possible conflict? That's more the question, I think. The large push into maneuver warfare actually originated with the Marine Corps, not the Army, if memory serves. And I would propose that another feature of a great military power is flexibility. Now I also believe that the Army is getting there, and perhaps making strides quicker than many of its critics felt was possible. The Army is also to a degree a victim of its history following World War II. We are still paying the price for some of the leadership by management ideas that came in during that time, and saw perhaps their ultimate expression during Vietnam.

I had the opportunity to observe the Army while working for the Marine Corps from 1997 to the present. Even got invited to be part of a CALL collection team on a MOUT-focused rotation at the JRTC, as well as other opportunities… This was during the time that Maneuver Warfare and Air-Land Battle were being flushed out and incorporated and my particular area - urban operations - were getting a serious look as a harbinger of our future.

Without over-simplifying the crux of the issue - the Army had many, many individuals and organizations that "got it". Unfortunately, these same individuals and organizations were buried within the combat branches which led to a sum-of-the-parts does not equal the whole scenario. The Army is huge and branch turf battles were on par with service battles within the Pentagon. At least that was this outsider’s humble opinion.

Sometimes I think that we as Marines forget that our size, organization and the power / influence of the Commandant make for a relatively more rapid "sea change" when it comes to concepts, doctrine and organizational issues.

The Army is huge, had a lot of Cold War baggage to overcome and had to deal with branches that were hell-bent on not losing their place in the future operational environment.

In the last decade I have met as many Army officers, SNCOs and NCOs that “got it” as I did Marines. The Marine Corps’ future thinkers had the luxury of being a big fish in a small pond whilst our Army counterparts were the proverbial little fish in a big pond.

[Merv Benson]

I raise some questions about the new approach in Iraq at PrairiePundit (http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2006/07/is-hug-insurgent-strategy-working.html).


Much has been made recently of a new approach to counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq that has been dubbed "hug and insurgent." Thomas Ricks' new book Fiasco implies that the US old appraoch in Iraq caused the insurgency, but the new hug an insurgent approach may be a winner.

It is my observation that we looked more like we were winning under the old approach than under the new approach. The new approach has put the troops in more danger and has hurt morale. A recent story quoted a troop as saying they were just going around waiting to be blown up. That does seem to be what the hug an insurgent approach requires.

If you read stories from Ramadi that describe the action, they are mainly about Marines or soldiers in defensevie positions who are dodging snipers and waiting to be attacked, while occassionally going on patrols through neighborhoods. Even the aggressivenes is reactionary. Here is an example of the new approach. There are some who are optimistic about the new approach.

It is certainly hard to say that the approach is working in Baghdad where more troops are being brought in to try the ink blot approach to neighborhood policing. Right now the Fallujah and Tal Afar approach certainly give more immediate signs of success, The metrics of the hug an insurgent approach appear to be much mushier at this point.

I think that one of the problems with this change in strategy is its false premise that the old approach was driving people to the insurgents. This certainly seems to be one of the themes of Ricks' Fiasco.

This may be the most unpopular insurgency in history. It is making war on the people of Iraq instead of the US and the Iraqi government. Classic insurgents attack the governemnt in hopes that it will lash back and alienate the people. In Iraq the insurgents are making war on non combatants and only fight government and US forces in defensive actions when attacked.

...

I am sure there are many who may disagree with this take, but I think it is worth discussing the premise of "driving people to the insurgents" in Iraq as well as the effect of the new approach on morale. When you consider that the insurgence is composed of three primary elements, al Qaeda, former regime elements, and Iraqi rejectionist, it is pretty clear to me that the first two are the biggest problem and also the least likely to have been motivated by how the US approached Phase IV operations of the Iraq war plan. Al Qaeda is primarily motivated by religious bigotry that has nothing to do with any approach to counterinsurgency warfare. The former regime elements are just continuing to do what they did when Saddam was in power, only now they have people shooting back at them. The Iraqi rejectionist are the hardest to define, but perhaps they may have been motivated by a reaction to the troops, but they also could have been motivated by native tribalism that would react to any outsider no matter what the treatment.

[SWJED]

I raise some questions about the new approach in Iraq at PrairiePundit (http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2006/07/is-hug-insurgent-strategy-working.html).

I am sure there are many who may disagree with this take, but I think it is worth discussing the premise of "driving people to the insurgents" in Iraq as well as the effect of the new approach on morale. When you consider that the insurgence is composed of three primary elements, al Qaeda, former regime elements, and Iraqi rejectionist, it is pretty clear to me that the first two are the biggest problem and also the least likely to have been motivated by how the US approached Phase IV operations of the Iraq war plan. Al Qaeda is primarily motivated by religious bigotry that has nothing to do with any approach to counterinsurgency warfare. The former regime elements are just continuing to do what they did when Saddam was in power, only now they have people shooting back at them. The Iraqi rejectionist are the hardest to define, but perhaps they may have been motivated by a reaction to the troops, but they also could have been motivated by native tribalism that would react to any outsider no matter what the treatment.

Merv,

Longer response later as time permits. I have read American Soldier, Plan of Attack, My Year in Iraq, No True Glory, Cobra II and Fiasco.

Moreover, I know or am at least acquainted with the authors and many, many of the primary sources of the later three books. To be sure - I work on these issues in my "day job".

The Franks and Bremer books are basically single-sourced autobiographies - whose authors have a vested interest in their "legacy", while West, Trainor, Gordon and Ricks relied on multiple (read hundreds) of primary first-hand sources.

The bottom-line here is that we efed up – especially Phase IV planning and execution (and the shaping that should have been resident in Phases I - III) – and need to learn the lessons of that ef up to insure we do not repeat the same ef ups we seem to relearn (more like do not learn) time and time again. By efing up Phase IV planning we indeed created an insurgency that was not "pre-ordained."

S/F

Dave

[Merv Benson]

Dave,

I look forward to your longer response. I still do not think we created al Qaeda or the former regime elements. I think a case can be made for the suggestion that the Iraqi rejectionist may have been reactions to our actions. I am not arguing that we did not make mistakes. I am still waiting for some author to take on the small footprint, large footprint debate that effected troop levels. I think the early belief that we needed better intelligence instead of more troops led to many of the problems, by encouraging large roundups of suspects and engaging in aggressive interrigation. Certainly the intelligence got better as more Iraqi troops came on line and improved the force to space ratio at the same time. A better force to space ratio should and did result in better intelligence.

However, the situations in Fallujah or Tal Afar could not have been resolved by being nicer to the terrorist. I think the reactive approach at Ramadi has resulted in not just slower progress, but may result in greater casualites and lower morale. Cobra II is still a deeply flawed book in my opinion. I look forward to reading Fiasco even if I don't care for the title.

My point about the insurgents making war against the people rather than the government or the US still argues against the hug an insurgent approach.

[SWJED]

...on PBS - An hour with Tom Ricks (video) (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4926293608118312619&q=tvshow%3ACharlie_Rose) - 27 July 2006.

[slapout9]

What is your day job? I know you are a consultant but can you elaborate some or is SS? secret stuff?

[SWJED]

What is your day job? I know you are a consultant but can you elaborate some or is SS? secret stuff?

Consultant - urban operations and Small Wars issues for the Marine Corps at Quantico. Lead Marine Action Officer for the USMC - JFCOM Joint Urban Warrior Program as well as many Emerald Express (Insights and Observations) seminars that addressed OIF to include MCO (Phase III), SASO, COIN and Interagency Operations. Producer of the new USMC documentary - New Challenges for Military Operations in the 21st Century: Emerald Express Insights and Observations from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

[SWJED]

... Cobra II (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=624).

[SWJED]

Taking It to the Streets (http://beta.slate.com/id/2146797) by Michael O'Hanlon.


It is not an exaggeration, or at least not much of one, to say that with his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks has changed the debate over Iraq. Others have criticized much of the decision-making of the Bush administration—on going to war in the first place, on hyping Saddam's purported links to al-Qaida and his progress in pursuing nuclear weapons, and most of all on the shoddy, cavalier preparation for the post-Saddam stabilization of Iraq. But almost all these previous critiques focused on President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other civilian leaders of the Bush administration.

Ricks hardly spares the war's civilian architects, but his is the first major book to take on the U.S. military as well. Ricks critiques its acquiescence in the development of the war plan that paid little heed to "Phase IV," the postinvasion activities needed to rebuild a shattered state, with a particular focus on CENTCOM Commander Gen. Tommy Franks. And he goes well beyond that, also severely scrutinizing the performance of U.S. armed forces on the streets of Iraq in the period since April 2003 when Saddam was deposed—until now a neglected, if not largely taboo, subject. That is what makes his book different, and important.

To be sure, Ricks is precise and selective in his criticisms of the military. He goes out of his way to say that most individual soldiers and Marines worked very hard, endured great sacrifice, and displayed remarkable courage during their deployments to Iraq. (Though he occasionally criticizes the mega-bases that provided cheeseburgers and CNN and workout rooms in true American style, saying that they kept GIs too far from the indigenous populations they should have been working to protect.) And there are numerous individual military heroes in Ricks' historical account—Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, as well as Army Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis (I am using their ranks at the time of their original service in Iraq).

Yet the chief contribution of the book is to stoke a debate over the performance of the American military. In this vein, Ricks focuses his sights most intensively on four uniformed officers: CENTCOM Cmdr. Tommy Franks, 4th Infantry Division Cmdr. Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno (who ran operations around Tikrit and other areas north of Baghdad in 2003-2004), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, and America's top commander in Iraq in the early going, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

The main lesson the military took from Vietnam, according to Ricks, was not to improve counterinsurgency techniques, training, and doctrine, but simply to avoid that style of warfare in the future. Ricks has a fairly convincing body of evidence to substantiate this allegation, including the testimonies of several important Army leaders and intellectuals who confirm that field manuals and other doctrine have not placed any real focus on counterinsurgency in the 30 years since Vietnam ended. As a student of the military myself, I would concur with this judgment. Peacekeeping of the type done in the Balkans in the 1990s was hardly the same thing, so our recent experiences there did little to alleviate the problem (except to the extent they may have influenced the education of the Petraeuses of the world at the individual level).

The substantive heart of Ricks' critique is that Franks, Odierno, Myers, and Sanchez failed to understand counterinsurgency warfare; repeated many of the mistakes made in Vietnam, including the overuse of destructive force; and put America as well as its coalition partners on a path that may well lead to defeat...

How does Ricks prove his case? It is here that the book reaches its limits, not through any fault of Ricks' so much as the difficult nature of his enterprise. By necessity, most of Ricks' evidence comes by way of anecdote from individual soldiers and Marines and quotations from well-placed military officers and other officials. In this pursuit, Ricks is doggedly thorough; there are many anecdotes and many quotations, including some from Anthony Zinni, former Pentagon official Dov Zakheim, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

But in the end, testimony from soldiers, no matter how compelling, is not proof that the problems Ricks describes were as pervasive as he alleges, nor proof that the misapplication of American military power was the defining characteristic of the mission. Ricks' thesis is summarized by his subtitle "The American Military Adventure in Iraq." (If there were any doubt, he clarifies on the book's opening page that "this book's subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that the U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation.") Having read this and many other books about Iraq, I say that I found his thesis more persuasive than I might have expected. But Ricks deliberately dwells on the negative. There is much more on Abu Ghraib and Fallujah than on Mosul or the Shiite heartland or Basra, for example, and more citations in the book's index about someone like Odierno than about Petraeus and Chiarelli combined...

[SWJED]

Washington Post - The March of Folly (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072700958.html) by Daniel Byman.


... As the title implies, Fiasco pulls no punches. Sure enough, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith come off badly in Ricks's account. But so do most Democratic members of Congress (whom Ricks labels not doves but "lambs" for their failure to oversee the executive branch) and the media, particularly the New York Times, which failed miserably to probe the Bush administration's war justifications and postwar planning. Ricks is also particularly scathing toward L. Paul Bremer, who led the civilian occupation authority in Iraq in 2003-04. Ricks quotes one colonel who described the efforts of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

Troubling as these failures are, they are by now reasonably familiar; what's far less well-known is the bungling of the senior military leadership. With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein's fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, "flunks strategy," Ricks writes; the war's commanding general designed "perhaps the worst war plan in American history." Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who's since been promoted to take Myers's old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration's political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

As a result of the lapses of the top brass and the haughtiness of Rumsfeld's men, the U.S. military came into Iraq inadequately prepared -- and hard-pressed to adapt. From the start, it failed to recognize that ensuring public order was the key to postwar success. As one general puts it, "I was on a street corner in Baghdad, smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by -- and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back."

As the insurgency deepened, the Pentagon's military and civilian leaders first ignored it, then worsened it by using wrongheaded tactics. By emphasizing killing the enemy rather than winning over the people, the U.S. military made new enemies more quickly than it eliminated existing foes. Mass arrests and other attempts to intimidate Iraqis backfired, swelling the insurgents' ranks. U.S. units and troops deployed to Iraq turned over quickly, shuttling in and out of the country with little attempt to build a coherent intelligence picture of the situation on the ground or to sustain hard-won relationships with the local Iraqi officials trying to make their country work. Cities such as Mosul and Fallujah were liberated from insurgents and then abandoned; inevitably, the insurgents took over again. Such mistakes are depressing but not entirely surprising: The U.S. military has forgotten many of the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare that it learned bitterly in Vietnam and elsewhere. Having neglected counterinsurgency in the military's training and education programs, we should not be shocked that we are ill-equipped to wage it.

Indeed, the picture Ricks paints is so damning that it is, at times, too charitable to say that the military and civilian leadership failed. Fiasco portrays several commanders as misguided but trying their best, but others -- particularly the hapless Franks -- appear not to have tried at all. Worse, the overall war and occupation effort lacked the high-level White House coordination essential to victory, allowing Bremer to operate on his own, making major decisions without consulting the Pentagon or the National Security Council, let alone his counterparts on the military side of the occupation.

These failures feel particularly raw given the sacrifices, grit and determination of the heroes of Ricks's book: the junior and noncommissioned officers risking their lives in Iraq's streets, as well as the few innovative senior officers, such as Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who have shrewdly tried (as the New Yorker's George Packer has put it) to win "over the civilian population by encouraging economic reconstruction and local government." Whether getting supply convoys past insurgent strongholds, identifying ways to defeat the rebels' dreaded IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or deciding whether to cow or charm local leaders, creative officers often invented new tactics and strategy on the spot...

[aughie]

My uncle flew supplies in to Father Hoa and he also flew him into Saigon for meetings. He gave my uncle a swallow pin. It was during his 61 or 63 tour.

This report states F. Hoa settled in Taipei:

http://www.uneeknet.com/fam/dad/072399C.htm

Sorry I don't have any solid info for you.

-a

[Culpeper]

Taking out the surprise of an insurgency developing after Saddam fell I find a lot of similarity in America's tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan as described by David Galula. Overall, I would think we didn't apply good counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam from a civil perspective (we did cream the opposition militarily, which didn't win the conflict). The opposite is true in Iraq. Based on my observations I can see the 80% civil and 20% military formula for a successful counterinsurgency has been unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is more ironic is that Mr. Galula's book was published in 1964. I find no reference to it as source of information as well as the USMC Small Wars Manual during the Vietnam period, though both are very popular today within the military. It seems we have radically changed our tactics from those of the Vietnam period and to good measure. As for a civil war breaking out in Iraq? An insurgency is a civil war. No one should be surprised of the sectarian violence that is occurring. Iraq has been in a civil war basically since the Baathist Fascist Party gained controlling power decades ago. And our military has always had a history of going into military action ill prepared and adapted and improvised from there. From starving our Continental Army, to the Union's winter campaign at Fredericksburg, to the Spanish Flu epidemic of the Expeditionary Forces, to the hedgerows of Normandy, to the ill equipped military to hold back the North Koreans when they stormed the south, to Operation Anaconda, to playing catch up on civil affairs in the "wild west" of Iraq. And as tragic as casualties are by this time in Vietnam, as well as Korea, our military suffered over 30,000 KIA in each conflict. I credit our low in comparison casualty rate at the present time to a change in tactics. I think we have learned from mistakes in the past and American lives have been saved in the process. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a well oiled counterinsurgency, whether it is being successful or not, because the enemy gets a vote as well. And with the counterinsurgency having a indigenous government in place that controls the propaganda I would bet the counterinsurgency is going better than most would think. For crying out loud, they blow up a recruitment line, they clean up the mess, and get right back in line.

[SWJED]

Bing West e-mailed his review of Tom Rick's book Fiasco. This review will appear in the 11 September issue of National Review. Here is an excerpt:


(Mr. West, who served in the Marine infantry in Vietnam and later as assistant secretary of defense, is the award-winning author of several military histories, including The Village: A Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam and No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. He has been to Iraq nine times, accompanying over 20 battalions on operations.)

... Ricks builds a devastating case, with a focus exclusively upon the military aspects of Iraq. He portrays systemic failures of political-military leadership, of a kind not seen since World War I. The scale is vastly different, of course, but there are undeniable similarities—both in the initial unwillingness to adapt and in the unswerving loyalty accorded to self-assured incompetents. At the end of 2004, President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to Gen. Tommy Franks and Amb. L. Paul Bremer. Ricks does not mince words about his opinion of those three men: “The U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly (Bush), with a flawed plan for war (Franks) and a worse approach to occupation (Bremer).”

Ricks’s premise is that invading Iraq turned into a military mess that could have been avoided...

... a portrayal of Franks, then head of Central Command, as abusive and impatient, “a cunning man, but not a deep thinker,” who “ran an extremely unhappy headquarters.” Franks, according to the author, had no plan for the occupation, and no intention of remaining the commander responsible for implementing it.

In the middle section of the book, Ricks explains in detail how the U.S. military, once confronted with an insurgency, responded in 2003 and 2004 with sweeps, raids, and arrests that only inflamed the opposition. He lays the blame on three factors. The first was the appointment of Paul Bremer as the president’s proconsul. Bremer wielded his wide-ranging powers decisively but not judiciously. His key failure was to disband the Iraqi army, an error the American military did not appeal to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld to overturn. The second mistake was the appointment by Central Command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. Sanchez was out of his depth, at loggerheads with Bremer, and incapable of developing a comprehensive campaign plan. This led to the third error: unilateral American offensive operations...

... Gen. Tony Zinni is quoted time and again, damning the civilians for geopolitical naïveté, but Ricks does not let the generals escape criticism: He points out that it was not Rumsfeld but rather the Joint Chiefs and Central Command who dismissed Zinni’s operational plans as half-baked...

Iraq marked a sea change in the American way of war. “Force Protection” meant minimizing casualties—so that over three years, there were fewer fatalities than in that one awful day of 9/11. Mess halls morphed into “dining facilities” offering salad bars, pizza bars, fast-food counters, Middle East cuisine, or good, old-fashioned steak and lobster, followed by ice cream, at a cost of about $34 a meal. Soldiers slept in air-conditioned rooms, chatted on the Internet, and played video games. We chose to fight a war that a veteran of Vietnam would not recognize. (Thrown into the cauldron of Fallujah, though, U.S. soldiers and Marines displayed courage and aggressiveness equal to any American generation.)

Somewhere between 1966 and 2006, the conditions of war and the acceptability of misery and friendly casualties had changed. We didn’t have enough troops in Iraq partly because of how we chose to fight the war; Ricks blames this on shortcomings in military doctrine, but it may be equally attributable to the current mores of American society...

Secretary Rumsfeld has said repeatedly that the U.S. military does not do nation-building. He is mistaken. In Iraq, building a nation is exactly what Gen. Casey and his subordinates are trying to do. It is the only way to succeed. The U.S. military has undertaken that staggering task because the rest of the U.S. government did not show up for this war.

If, in the end, Iraq emerges intact and moderate, it will not be because of its political leaders. It will be because the Iraqi army, modeling its behavior to live up to the standards of the American army, is able to defeat both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militia. Of course there will be all kinds of political deals; and underlying each of them will be the cold calculus of who will prevail in a fight. The Iraqi Army - not its national assembly or its police or its religious and political personages - is the last, best hope for Iraq.

While acknowledging that the U.S. military is beginning to get it right, Ricks concludes by asking whether it is too late to head off a low-level civil war that will result in a fragmentation of Iraq equivalent to that of Lebanon in the mid-1980s (or perhaps today). Ricks’s pessimism rests on his doubt that America will sustain its effort. That happened in Vietnam after the Tet offensive in 1968; although battlefield conditions markedly improved over the next two years, attitudes had hardened against the war and against our South Vietnamese allies...

With the critique offered in Fiasco, Ricks makes a solid contribution to our shared understanding.

Bing has much more to say - be sure to check out the entire review in the National Review. I will give a heads up when it goes online.

[SWJED]

Fiasco reviews:

Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/502qhxej.asp) by Max Boot


This is a good book with a bad title. Anyone picking up a volume called Fiasco, with a snarky subtitle referring to "The American Military Adventure in Iraq," might expect another tome from the Michael Moore School of Policy Studies, with its level of analysis restricted to bumper-sticker slogans like "Bush Lied, People Died."

In fact, this is a carefully researched account of the Iraq war by one of America's premier defense correspondents--Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post. His findings of pervasive high-level ineptitude, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, will be much harder for reflexive defenders of the Bush administration to dismiss than the usual farrago of ideologically motivated accusations from political adversaries.

Los Angeles Times / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06225/712605-148.stm) by Tony Perry


His book is not a screed but a well-researched, strongly written account of the miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had access to top officers and their planning as well as "after-action" documents. More important, he was accorded candor.

Much of the mess, he concludes, began with the Army and the Pentagon bureaucracy, their institutional rigidity, a lack of planning for combating an insurgency and poor personnel choices.

[SWJED]

Marine Corps Gazette book review - Iraq Postmortem (http://www.mca-marines.org/Gazette/0906hoffmanBR.html) by LtCol Frank Hoffman, USMCR. Reposted here with permission of the MCG.


FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. By Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Books, New York, 2006, ISBN 159420103X, 481 pp., $27.95. (Member $25.15)

This is an autopsy, not a book. In Fiasco, veteran Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks painstakingly dissects the American planning for and conduct of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). This forensic examination is dispassionately professional and excruciatingly detailed. Many will disagree with this reviewer’s assessment of America’s Iraq policy and operations as moribund. But after reading this book, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the patient, the administration’s aspirations for the Middle East, has died due to a combination of incompetent diagnosis and malpractice on the operating table. At best the current coalition posture in Iraq is little more than a life support system, and when we pull the plug, the patient will flat line. One cannot overlook the innumerable acts of great valor demonstrated for a noble cause, but the patient is just beyond saving.

Tom Ricks’ written work is well known among Marines. His stints at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post cover more than two decades of insightful defense reporting. He has been a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting. Both of his books, Making the Corps (Scribner, 1997) and A Soldier’s Duty (Random House, 2001), reflect his deep understanding of the culture of America’s Armed Forces. The former captured the incredible transformation of Marine enlistees at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, while also raising concerns about the growing rift between our society and the U.S. military. Fiasco will further extend Ricks’ reputation due to his balanced and carefully crafted prose and his ability to exploit the collective observations of a vast network of Pentagon contacts and national security experts.

Fiasco traces the development and conduct of current U.S. policy in Iraq from its roots in the messy endgame of Operation DESERT STORM in 1991 to the present postconflict situation. You do not have to cut through layers of history to get to the author’s thesis. On the very first page the author summarizes his conclusions. The U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation.

The front portion of the book makes it very clear that the civilian policymakers were incompetent and arrogant in the extreme and that the current situation in Iraq can be laid at the feet of America’s highest officials. Several other books have already assessed prewar policy lapses and intelligence shortfalls. But the bulk of this book is oriented on delving much deeper into the subject’s vital organs, including the:

. . . leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counter-productive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare.

The policy debacle is attributed to the many senior civilian and military officials responsible for intelligently assessing the nature of the Iraqi threat, and for devising an appropriate strategy. Ricks provides a number of concise vignettes in which the personality flaws of the characters in this American tragedy are pithily summarized. The serial exercise in self-deception and maldeployment of American military might that comes from this collection of personal interactions produces a grim toxicology report. It now seems more likely that history’s judgment will be that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory. Its incompleteness helped create the conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.

Marine readers will find much to agree with, including Ricks’ characterization of many Marine leaders. Both retired Gen Anthony C. Zinni’s and retired LtGen Gregory S. Newbold’s well-founded reservations about U.S. policy before the war are chronicled. So too is the impressive combat performance of I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) in 2003 led by LtGen James T. Conway, then-MajGen James N. Mattis, and then-MajGen James F. “Tamer” Amos. The performance of the California-based Marines in the tenuous postconflict phases is not given its due, but the planning and execution in both fights for Fallujah in April and November of 2004 are well covered.

One interesting portion of the book deals with the different styles and operating methods used by the Army and the Marine Corps during the postconflict phases. This difference bubbled up from time to time in the media in late 2003 as I MEF was preparing to return to Iraq and is very evident in Fiasco. Those Marines who made the first deployment to Iraq believed that the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) they employed in their 4-month extended postconflict period proved the merits of a more constrained and comprehensive approach. These TTP reflect an ethos that is derived from the Marines’ classic Small Wars Manual and from ideas absorbed from British counterinsurgency experts. Lessons learned from OIF emphasized the need to transition to more culture-sensitive and less firepower-oriented tactics in order to swing the neutral portion of the population toward the coalition and the fledgling Iraqi Government.

Members of the U.S. Army resented the implications of the so-called “velvet glove” approach when it appeared in the media in mid- to late 2003. The impression that the Marines were better prepared for complex contingencies was seen as a bit unseemly, especially since the Marines had previously worked largely in Shi’ite areas, and in the Army’s view may not have had a perfect picture on the volatile nature of Al Anbar Province. By the time Mattis’ team arrived in theater in March 2004, with the assistance of the 82d Airborne Division, the Marines had realized the true nature of the adversary in Iraq’s “wild west.”

Ricks lauds the overall approach of a population-centric and kinetically disciplined style that was successfully implemented by then-MG David H. Petraeus, USA in Mosul in 2003 and in Tall Afar by the 3d Armored Combat Regiment later in 2005. Ironically, abetted by a small cadre of institutional insurgents within the U.S. Army, LTG Petraeus has now incorporated the velvet glove approach into the Army’s latest doctrine. While a bit harsh with the Army early in the book, later Ricks shows that the Army is substantially overhauling its education system to better cope with the nature of unconventional conflict.

There is little doubt that the planning failures and heavy-handed transition period through the end of 2003 contributed to the growth of a nascent insurgency. Large unit sweeps by American forces and mass detentions helped elements of the former regime to recruit, arm, and train the underemployed youth and disaffected elements of Iraq for a protracted insurgency. However, Ricks’ depiction of the insurgency as a monolithic entity has limits. Likewise, his endorsement of classical counterinsurgency principles and insights from Mao-inspired rural insurgencies begs for amplification about the more complex mosaic in Iraq. The direct extrapolation of David Galula’s observations from Algeria in the 1960s, or lessons learned from El Salvador in the 1980s, should be applied with some judgment regarding the peculiar nature of this war.

While Ricks is absolutely correct in his assessment that the enduring principles of effective counterinsurgency were not applied, further exploration of the discontinuities is warranted. There is a need for what Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calls “ruthless objectivity” when studying past cases of counterinsurgency for key lessons or models. As stated in the Small Wars Manual, “to a greater degree is each small war somewhat different from anything which has preceded it.” Thanks to globalization, the Internet, and Islam’s internal divisions, this conflict is certainly different in many respects. How different is a wonderful subject for a historian—or in this case, perhaps a pathologist.

This book is a well-documented postmortem, not a compelling operational history. Contrary to the publisher’s dust jacket, “gripping accounts of battle” are not this book’s real strength. Ultimately, Fiasco relentlessly documents a badly flawed policy decision, inappropriate operational planning, and counterproductive tactics. Most Marines will be more comfortable with Bing West and MajGen Ray L. Smith’s The March Up (Bantam, 2003) and its riveting narrative about I MEF’s blitzkrieg in Mesopotamia. Fiasco will appeal primarily to military professionals and students of national security affairs who want to look past the battles and see how these are matched to policy aims and desired effects. Look elsewhere for what military force actually achieved under heroic conditions. If you want to find out how senior policymakers deluded themselves with an inexplicable paradox of worst-case threat scenarios and best-case planning assumptions, delve deeply into this remarkable book.

LtCol Hoffman, a frequent contributor to MCG, is a Research Fellow, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, Quantico.

[Tc2642]

Dave,

I look forward to your longer response. I still do not think we created al Qaeda or the former regime elements. I think a case can be made for the suggestion that the Iraqi rejectionist may have been reactions to our actions.

In regards to your quote above, I was wondering who would be mainly to blame for creating Al Quaeda in Iraq, since before the war they did not exist within that country?

[Uboat509]

In regards to your quote above, I was wondering who would be mainly to blame for creating Al Quaeda in Iraq, since before the war they did not exist within that country?


Says who?

SFC W

[Tc2642]

Says who?

SFC W

Well, They didn't, Saddam's political machine would not allow such elements which could undermine his own authority to be in his country. Please understand that I am not saying that there may have been 'elements' of the radical jihadist's operating within Iraq, but they were on a cause to nowhere, Saddam would have stamped them out as soon as he found them. My point is that the efficent, well funded and deadly organisation known as Al Qaeda in the Land of two rivers did not exist before the invasion. That it is mainly made up of foreign fighters seeking Jihaad against america. Think about it, it opened up a whole new place which they could blow up and shoot at Americans.

[RTK]

Well, They didn't, Saddam's political machine would not allow such elements which could undermine his own authority to be in his country. Please understand that I am not saying that there may have been 'elements' of the radical jihadist's operating within Iraq, but they were on a cause to nowhere, Saddam would have stamped them out as soon as he found them.

You mean like he did with the MEK? Oh, wait...he didn't.....

[Tc2642]

You mean like he did with the MEK? Oh, wait...he didn't.....

That may be, but I can find no evidence of Al quaeda operating in Iraq before 2003, if you have information to the contary then please send me some links.

[RTK]

That may be, but I can find no evidence of Al quaeda operating in Iraq before 2003, if you have information to the contary then please send me some links.

1.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HF13Ak02.html

Look about halfway down the page. Masri entered Iraq in 2002 and began a cell. Al Qaeda in the Middle East is like Walmart in the mid-west.

2.
http://zfacts.com/p/653.html

Zarqawi was fingered in early 2002 in NE Iraq and named a high payoff target.

3.
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=3732&only

Blog from August 2002 talking about PUK's fighting with Ansar Al Islam, a group closely affiliated with AQIZ

4.
http://www.rense.com/general28/alaq.htm

Even Tariq Aziz mentioned they were in Iraq in August of 2002, but that they were in NE Iraq near Sulamaniyah fighting the Kurds.

[Tc2642]

Thanks for the links, I have read through them, interesting but I will still state that they were not a major threat before 2003 and grew to be so, (implied by the fact they were setting up a cell in 2002), I am not sure what to make of the littlegreenfootballs article since it states its validity is in question and I am always wary of articles trying to link Saddam to 9/11, this to my mind is a fallacy, as for the last article I will admit that I did not know that they were fighting in the Kurdish controlled part of Iraq in 2002 but again I stand by my point that they were not the deadly organisation that they have transformed into after 2003.

May I also add this from today's news links, scroll down to about halfway,

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060902-101913-4688r.htm

[marct]

... but again I stand by my point that they were not the deadly organisation that they have transformed into after 2003.

I think that there is a bit of a semantics problem here. Al Qaeda is not, primarily, a military force in the "classic" sense of the term. In many ways, it is closer to the SF model - primarily a training network (and a loosely-coupled network at that). As such, they have been a "deadly organization" since the 1980's.

The fact that they were setting up cells in Iraq in 2002 shouldn't be surprising - anyone who watched CNN could pretty much figure out that the US was going to get involved in Iraq. As such, setting up cells is really just the first step in establishing a base for local operations including local recruitment. Furthermore, given the speed with which the Bush government rammed through the invasion, the lack of general international support, and the local socio-cultural conditions in Iraq, it was a tailor made opportunity for al Qaeda.


May I also add this from today's news links, scroll down to about halfway,

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060902-101913-4688r.htm

I just finished reading the article and I have to say that while the title is certainly correct - "Wrong 'ism', wrong history" - I suspect that the "corrected solution" offered in the article is totally wrong as well. For example,


Al Qaeda today is a global politico-religious, ideological and spiritual movement that has far more in common with global communism than the European fascism of the 1930s and '40s. What Mr. Bush calls the global war on terror is an ideological struggle, punctuated by acts of terrorism, a fundamental clash of civilizations between democratic freedom and totalitarian religious regimentation, that is likely to endure at least as long as the almost half-century Cold War.

While there are some overt similarities between al Qeada and the Commintern of the 20's and 30's, these are mainly organizational rather than symbolic or historical. Organizationally, this is quite understandable given the dominance of Lenin, Mao, Trotsky and Gueverra in the literature. At the symbolic level, it would be better to look at the early time of expansion for Islam - say the first 20 years. I think this was made pretty evident over the past little while with the criticism of bin Laden's breach of the Islamic rules of war and the recent calls for conversion.

On the historical level, control of Iraq is central to control of one of the major seats of the Caliphate. Again, symbolically, the model that is being used by al Qaeda is closer to that of a re-establishment of the Caliphate than it is to Commintern. The movement is of the general form of what A.E. 'Pete' Hallowell called a "Revitalization Movement" - hearkening back to a Golden Age that may, or may not, have ever existed. Regardless of its actual historical existence, it exists symbolically within Islamic culture and, co-incidentally, is a major flashpoint between Sunni's and Shias.

The only similar example that I can think of where the American military has any experience with how to deal with the type of symbolic change necessary isn't the WWII European/German reconstruction but, rather, the occupation of Japan. I think we have all seen how effective the de-NAZIfication, oops, sorry, de-Baathification program was. Again, a tailor made recruitment opportunity for al Qeada based on Bremmers' complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Marc

[SWJED]

SWC member Merv Benson's review of Fiasco on Prairie Pundit (http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/ricks-fiasco-review.html).


Thomas Ricks take on the Iraq war focuses on the post major combat operations phase of the war up to early 2006. Unlike many critics of the war, his judgment is not impaired by a desire to see the US lose in Iraq, nor does he try to push an agenda against the political leadership. While he attempts to focus on the military response to the enemies attempt to recover from the loss in the major combat operations phase of the war, he does not always hit the mark.

He is very unfair to Tommy Franks and Rifle DeLong whose staff came up with the original war plane. He is much too generous to Tony Zinni whose plan was not used. Ricks is least plausible when describing the war plan as the worst plan in history. That is quite a statement for a plan that succeeded in toppling Saddam in record time.

Unlike the authors of Cobra II Ricks does not speculate that the Fedayeen that were encountered on the way to Baghdad became the insurgency. No, Ricks is persuaded that the US created them. He seems enamored by those in the military who believe that being nice to the enemy will win friends. He uses anecdotal evidence drawn from the military equivalent of a police blotter to highlight cases of alleged abuse of Iraqis. Many of the anecdotes lack perspective. They are like the snapshot that captures a reaction without the context of what prompted the reaction. They also lack the perspective of how they fit in the overall context of the war...

Much more at the link...

[Tom Odom]

He seems enamored by those in the military who believe that being nice to the enemy will win friends.

really Merv

this is counterspin that I would characterize as a 10 second sound bite analysis of an extremely complex issue. Do you adhere to the Attilla the Hun school of thought, kill 'em all and let God sort it out? I mean that sounds snappy and cool to some folks but unless you really get them all, you are not going to win. And even if you could, please tell me how to fit that into the 21st Century and the US role in the world. The center plank of COIN is winning the support of the population. I suggest you look seriously at history and doctrine on COIN.


Tom

[marct]

Hmmmmm,

Okay, I just read your review, Merv. Honestly, I'd love to sit down for a few beers and talk with you about it but, since that's not an option, I'll stay away from a long post and just make a few comments.


In fact, he makes little to no mention of the enemy's substantial violations of the Geneva Conventions while at the same time devoting too much time to the yo-yos of Abu Ghraid.

Al-Queda hasn't signed the Geneva Conventions, nor are they likely to. Why should they play by our rules?

Leaving that aside for a sec., their whole goal is political, not military victory. Anything that they can do to show that the coalition forces cannot provide security and a stable, livable environment helps them meet that goal. The more that they can show the "immoral" nature of the "occupation by crusading forces", the better they are able to sell their "story" to the Muslim world. And who is going to disagree with that story when disagreement means death?


really Merv

this is counterspin that I would characterize as a 10 second sound bite analysis of an extremely complex issue. Do you adhere to the Attilla the Hun school of thought, kill 'em all and let God sort it out?

Arghhhh!!!!! Tom, I expected better historical accuracy :). That wasn't Attila, that was the Papal Nuncio at the siege of Carcassone. :D

Marc

[Tom Odom]

Charlie Beckwith (founded Delta) reportedly had that on his desk name plate

Another candidate would be King Richard the Lionheart

I felt that way myself (honestly) so many times in Rwanda that I understand the appeal

best

Tom

[marct]

I felt that way myself (honestly) so many times in Rwanda that I understand the appeal

I can certainly understand that! <wry grin>. Sometimes, I feel that way with my students...

I first came across that quote maybe 30 years ago when I was studying the Crusades in Europe - mainly the Albigensian Crusade - and it just stuck in my mind. Maybe I've spent too much time studying the histories of religions, but sometimes I'm tempted to just apply it to all of them :rolleyes:

Marc

[CaptCav_CoVan]

Back to "Lessons Learned" from Vietnam, I suggest reading (if you have not already done so) The Army in Vietnam by my good friend Andy Krepinevich, who carefully builds a case for the Army's obsession with the "Concept" of fighting another 3 GW on the plains of Europe, or Russia, or China. As we ignored, in Vietnam, the adage "organize and train to fight the enemy you face" rather than facing the enemy wishing he will fight the way you are organized and trained, we completely ignored the lessons of Vietnam and COIN doctrine from 1968 to 2003. Another worthwhile read is David Galula's 500 pages of notes from his tour in Algeria from 1956 to 1958 as a French Marine Captain fighting the Algerian insurgency. I think this is where McNamara got the idea for the fence across the DMZ.

[Steve Blair]

McNamara's fence idea came from the JASON Group, which may in turn have gotten it from the notes you mentioned. It was yet another example of a classic American desire to rely on technology even when it's not appropriate.

[Jedburgh]

...I think this is where McNamara got the idea for the fence across the DMZ.
McNamara's fence idea came from the JASON Group, which may in turn have gotten it from the notes you mentioned. It was yet another example of a classic American desire to rely on technology even when it's not appropriate.
The Story Behind the "McNamara Line" (http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pbmcnamara.html)

...In 1966, Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor interested in arms control, submitted a proposal to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton that would deal with infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and across the DMZ. Fisher's proposal was to block these routes "with a high tech barrier." Fisher's timing was perfect; McNaughton and McNamara were shopping around for a better way to reduce infiltration. In April, 1966, McNamara turned the proposal over to the Jason Division, a group formed in 1959 by the Institute for Defense Analyses and composed of about 45 of the nation's top academic scientists .

Fisher's proposal was essentially a duplication of the technological concepts used to construct the Morice Line in Algeria. It would have depended on existing technology in the form of mines, pits, barbed wire and other physical devices. The task given to the Jasons, as modified by McNaughton and McNamara, was to develop a plan for the installation of a barrier laden with state-of-the art electronic devices. In June 1966, representatives from the US military, CIA, White House, and State Department met with the Jasons at a preparatory school for girls in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The Jasons spent most of the summer developing a report on their assigned task, delivering it in person to Secretary McNamara on August 30...
Newsweek, 18 Sep '67: Barring the Way: McNamara's Line (http://star.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?n2qPvksd.gm.@7tqgmtK69iEjTmcvkSDQOOA lNsDDNCWnSWhaMpPzfZ1Y3jzpMfutrCl6qpCawNrv@AIQpub1G Ubz2l9PoXw4V0TPO3qEXs/2250111050.pdf)

[Merv Benson]

Roger Fisher was a specialist in conflict resolution through negotiation. One of his concepts was to look at both sides BATNA--best alternative to a negotiated agreement. McNaughton was his guy in the DOD. They were in large part responsible for the Johnson administration's strategy in Vietnam, which boiled down to showing the communist that they could not win. That is one reason why the "barrier" concept appealed to them.

The sensors that were to be used actually worked to the US advantage at the battle for the Khe Sanh combat base during the Tet offensive. However they were obviously not effective at cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail because they ultimately relied on transitory power to effect an interdiction that required combat persisting force. One of the many weird rationales in the Vietnam war was the administrations position that it could use air power and small raiding forces in Laos to degrade the enemy's logistic train, but it would not permit a more effective use of force to stop the logistic train. The reason the sensor were effective in the Khe Sanh battle is that combat troops were in a position to stop the enemy's movement to contact in a combined arms effort.

[Tom Odom]

The McNamara line was heavily dependent on unattended ground sensors that I inherited in my 1st platoon (one of 2 and a half) in the Army in 1977. The Marines had the same systems. Phase III 'sids as we called them offered certain advantages if used correctly and a laundry list of disadvantages if misused.

advantages:
we could confirm targets in the sense of determining size, location, direction/speed of movement, and identity (using acoustic mikes and magnetic confirmers)

disadvantages
unless you dropped by air--and that required specially trained crews with large amounts of guts because the drop parameters required very trackable flight parameters--you had to emplace by hand. Much of the McNamara wall stuff was air dropped. In our case, hand emplacement worked if we anticipated kill zones correctly or we could plan on retrograde (active defense).

regardless of emplacement technique, you still really needed eyes on target to determine whether you really had a target you wanted to shoot, with certain exceptions as in when an acoustic actually picked up voices or track noises. See Merv's comments on why sensors at Khe Sanh worked.

monitoring remained more or less human; no automation at the time to give you an alert that your sensors string was active. mobile monitoring capability was a survival necessity; we were adapting sids that were designed to be monitored from fixed base locations or aerial platforms. as we were in an airborne division, even tent based ops hardly fit the bill. we actually took M151s and modified them so our teams could operate with BN scouts.

Still the sids were more effective than ground surveillance radar and were certainly more survivable. GSR was really a form of suicide for an operator facing a Warsaw pact opponent; switching on was essentially asking for a dose of hot steel.

best
Tom

[CaptCav_CoVan]

Man, I love this site! To be among knowledgable, intelligent, experienced warriors who have walked the walk makes me feel right at home. Thanks for all the sharing of knowledge and sources. I'd go into a hot LZ with you guys any time! Ooorrraaahhh!

[SWJED]

14 October Washington Times commentary - Pseudo-Histories of the Iraq War (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20061013-085320-6651r.htm) by Victor Davis Hanson.


Three recent books about the "fiasco" in Iraq -- "Cobra II" by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward and just plain "Fiasco" by Tom Ricks -- have attracted a lot of attention, and sales. All three well-written exposes repeat the now well-known argument that our government's incompetence and arrogance have nearly ensured U.S. failure in birthing democracy in Iraq.

It's worth noting, though, that many of the authors' critical portraits rely on private conversations and anonymous sources. The most damning informants in these books are never identified, and so can't be questioned.

The authors, as journalists, are well aware that after the New York Times' problems with Jayson Blair and other high-profile media scandals, the public no longer necessarily accepts as gospel what reporters write. That perhaps explains their and others' apparent adaptation of scholarly methods. Often these days journalists mimic the footnoting of historians -- giving the impression their reporting is history documented by verifiable primary and secondary sources also available to the reader.

Indeed, the verifiability of source material is what distinguishes history from hearsay -- and what distinguishes the genre from journalism or first-person recollections. Since the time of the historian Thucydides -- who not only recorded what speakers said, but, more controversially, made them voice what he thought they might or ought to have said -- historians have developed protocols to ensure credibility. Whether or not historians use footnotes or citations, they at least now agree to draw on information that can be checked by others, who will determine how skillfully, honestly or completely such sources were employed...

[Steve Blair]

I'm reading Ricks now, and find that I am in agreement with the pseudo-history critique. For me, perhaps the most interesting comparison is between Ricks and Naylor, who did a very good job of following historical procedures when writing his history of Operation Anaconda. Naylor worked with anonymous sources as well, but he at least gives them partial names and makes it clear in his endnotes that he retained the proper level of documentation. He also doesn't structure his entire narrative around unnamed sources, which I am finding is all too common with Ricks.

Does this mean that Ricks is without value? No, but it does leave me questioning how he "spins" his sources much more than Naylor did. The more I have to do that, the less overall value I find in a source from a historical standpoint and the more it becomes a sort of IO exercise for me.

[kaur]

The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century

http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/SepOct06/kipp.pdf

[SWJED]

18 October Wall Street Journal (Paid subscription required) - Problems Afflict U.S. Army Program To Advise Iraqis (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116113605252296021.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone) by Greg Jaffe.


One of the biggest shocks for Lt. Col. Nick Demas and his troops came before they even deployed to Iraq.

The colonel's soldiers, most of them inexperienced reservists from Maryland, had been tapped to serve as advisers to the Iraqi army. Their job was to live with, train and mentor an Iraqi force buffeted by poor morale, desertions and corruption.

President Bush has touted such advisory teams as key to the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq and bringing American troops home. So Col. Demas and his troops expected some of the best instruction the Army had to offer. What they got was a "phenomenal waste of time," the colonel wrote from Iraq last fall, in a report to his superiors.

"In my 28 years of military service I have never seen such an appalling approach to training," he wrote. "Nowhere else in the Army system would this have been acceptable." His soldiers received only a few hours of instruction in Arabic language, Iraqi culture and advising foreign forces, says Col. Demas, who had previously served in Special Forces units...

Senior U.S. military officers in Iraq and the Pentagon say their primary focus is getting Iraqi forces to take over more of the fighting as quickly as possible so U.S. forces can pull back. The 10- to 12-man advisory teams are central to that effort.

In recent weeks, Army officials overseeing the advisory program have begun to acknowledge the gap between the Army's words and deeds. This summer, after two years of biting reviews, the Army rushed to revamp the training advisers receive. It also has begun to assign more experienced troops to advisory teams. "I think we are going to be doing it much, much better than what you have seen in the past," says Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff.

Internal Army reviews and interviews with dozens of advisers show that, thus far, the Army hasn't treated the advisory program as a priority. The job has often fallen to the military's less seasoned second team: reservists, guardsmen and retirees called back to active duty. A 48-page Army study, finished in May and marked "For Official Use Only," concluded that 10- to 12-man advisory teams are too small and "do not have the experience to advise in the various areas they are assigned."...

To date, the U.S. has trained and equipped about 307,800 Iraqi army and police forces, up from 196,600 a year ago. But three years into the war, these Iraqi forces don't seem to be improving fast enough to curb surging violence. Daily attacks in Iraq have risen to record levels, and attrition among Iraqi forces remains high. In areas like the restive al Anbar Province, Iraqi units have, on average, only 55% of the soldiers they are supposed to, senior U.S. military officials say.

Other factors, of course, are also contributing to the violence. Centuries-old sectarian grudges and political turmoil are feeding unrest. Both must be addressed through some form of reconciliation, military officials say.

For many advisers, the growing turmoil has been frustrating. "I know we've made a difference. But the insurgency has also become better, more lethal and more capable in my time here," wrote Capt. Phillip Carter, who advised Iraqi police, in an email last month as he prepared to return home. "In theory things should get better with the development of capable Iraqi Army and police units. That's not happening."...

Top Army officials also are trying to change a culture that discourages good officers from taking advisory posts. Over the past decade, the path to success has been through conventional combat jobs in big brigades. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's top officer, uses a track analogy to describe the problem. The Army, he says, is full of specialists, or "single-event people." To prevail in today's wars, he says, he needs "pentathletes" with a broader range of experiences.

Last month Gen. Schoomaker's vice chief of staff stressed in a memo to Army officers that serving on an advisory team was "the Army's No. 1 personnel priority" and was exactly the kind of broadening experience the Army chief had been touting.

To fix the advisory program, some military officials say sweeping institutional change is needed. "When there is a limited pool of people for both kinds of jobs -- combat and advisory -- it's clear where the best people will go," says Dale Andrade, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Army's Center of Military History. "The military will always keep its best and brightest in traditionally important combat jobs. Only when forced will this change."

One option under consideration is to double the number of advisers to about 7,000, from about 3,500, by tearing apart some traditional combat brigades and assigning officers and senior soldiers to advisory teams. That would ensure that some of the Army's best officers would take advisory jobs. It would also allow Army officials to double the size of the teams -- which the officials say are too small -- to about 20 troops each.

But doing so would require a change in mind-set for the Army, where training centers and personnel systems are built almost entirely around the 4,000-soldier brigades. It would also be risky. As the number of big U.S. combat brigades decreased, Iraqi units and their advisers would have to pick up the security slack...

Much more at the link for those who have a paid WSJ subscription or access to DoD's Current News Service (Early Bird)...

[marct]

The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century

http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/SepOct06/kipp.pdf

Kaur, it's a *very* interesting article. My gut feeling, at the moment, is that the proposed HTS is wonderfully designed to sell politically to Washington, and will be an unmitigated disaster during implementation. Here's why


The core building block of the system will be a five-person Human Terrain Team (HTT) that will be embedded in each forward-deployed brigade or regimental staff. The HTT will provide the commander with experienced officers, NCOs, and civilian social scientists trained and skilled in cultural data research and analysis.

Two points are obvious in this statement. First, where are they going to get the trained analysts? They are listed as MA/PhD in Cultural Anthropology or Sociology with "Priority selection will go to those who have published, studied, lived, and taught in the region." This is going to spark off all sorts of anger and reaction in the academic community about spying. If we go back to the time of Vietnam, which is where they seem to be coming from, the riots on the campuses then will seem mild in comparison.

The second point is operational. The HTS will be embedded at the Brigade level. This will, IMHO, give some brigade commanders a feeling that they have met their "warm and fuzzy" requirements, but I don't see it actually doing that much. Honestly, if I was designing he system, I would have a brigade level co-ordination team, but I would also have people either embedded in or cross-trained at the company level - battalion at the least. I think that this second point ties in to one of their core claims:


At the same time, to overcome the kinds of problems now typically encountered when in-place units attempt to transfer knowledge about their area of operations upon relief in place, HTS will provide for the complete transfer of HTT personnel together with the HTT database to the incoming commander upon transfer of authority. This will give the incoming commander and unit immediate “institutional memory” about the people and culture of its area of operations.

Again, on the surface this sounds good but, if you look a little deeper, it is a piece of techno-babble. Five people at teh brigade level will maintain institutional memory? Get real!

Again, the basic concept is good, but the operationalization is designed for failure. First off, as many here have noted, information flows through personal relationships, not a relationship between an Iraqi or an Afghan and a database. This *might* be overcome if the program was operationalized at battalion or company level where, as part of the training / deployment cycle, units who are about to take over can access the information on "their" area several months in advance, follow it up regularly, and establish personal relationships while out of the field.

One final point I want to make about the program as discussed in that article, comes from one of the authors' suggestions for what to do with the database:


Data will cover such subjects as key regional personalities, social structures, links between clans and families, economic issues, public communications, agricultural production, and the like.....

Other U.S. Government agencies will also have access to the central database. And finally, to facilitate economic development and security, the compiled databases will eventually be turned over to the new governments of Iraq and Afghanistan to enable them to more fully exercise sovereignty over their territory and to assist with economic development.
[emphasis added]

Great! What disciple of Stalin thought this up? Did they even consider the effects on the supposed target populations (Iraq and Afghanistan) of the existence of a database that lists every act of "collaboration" with coalition forces?!? Haven't these people even heard of hackers? Have they considered the "home front" reaction to creating such a database?

I will freely admit that I am taking the worst possible reaction to this idea. After all, I always thought that it was best to be ready with a GoTH plan if necessary :D

Okay, one final, nasty, comment and I'll leave it alone.


The HTT’s tool kit is Mapping Human Terrain (MAP-HT) software, an automated database and presentation tool that allows teams to gather, store, manipulate, and provide cultural data from hundreds of categories.

Two quotes (actually paraphrases) come to mind - "Mirror, mirror on the wall" is the first. This concept is, when all is said and done, being sold as a magic bullet solution. The second is - "They may have won all the wars, but we had all the good PowerPoints". If this goes ahead as planned, I may just have to filk a version of this (with apologies to Tom Lehrer).

Marc

[CaptCav_CoVan]

Marc:
I have downloaded and read the same article. I think this is an academic frosting as a solution. Perhaps we should adapt some of the tactics of the French, well documented in Dave Galula's "Pacification in Algeria: 1956 to 1958" , which can be downloaded from the RAND website, and other lessons of Vietnam cirula 1951. The French put French officers and NCO in charge of Vietnamese units, but unfortuately did not carry through with succession planning. As a result, there were few capable Vietnamese officers when the French left. Maybe this is worth a try in Iraq since the level of the Iraqi units is far below the technical proficency we experienced with the Vietnamese Marine in 1967. If you would like first-hand description of experiences of those of us who were COVANs in Vietnam, take a look at “Communion in Conflict: The Marine Advisor Vietnam 1954-1973” (Fairfax, VA: USMC Advisor Publications, 2006) Volume III by Thomas D. Affourit, especially the narrative by Colonel Croizant, the first Marine advisor. This harks back to the constabulary efforts in Nicaragua, Cuba , and the Banana Wars. It may be worth a look...

[Steve Blair]

I agree with your critique of this article, Marc. Teams like this should be down at the company level, with perhaps a coordinating team at brigade level to give them some staff clout. The company teams should be at least five people strong, with twice that at brigade level so that there are enough experienced "boots on the ground" at that level to keep their concerns in front of the commander. I'm also not sure if the proposed composition of the HTT (and would those being "studied" really want to be known as "Human Terrain?" That's maybe another question for another post...;) ) would give it enough credibility within the brigade to make it effective. Two fuzzy civilian types and mid-grade officers or enlisted led by a major or LtCol from any available branch? May not go over well with the more enthused combat arms types.

As an aside, I found some of the historical assertions interesting. When they say
it is hard to argue with statistics from that era when referring to CORDS in Vietnam, those same statistics are the subject of debate among historians. Some assert that CORDS only worked where it would naturally work, and didn't work in areas where it was needed.

[CaptCav_CoVan]

One of the adavntages of CORD, which was really coming togther in 1968 under General Abrahms, was the whole issue of unity of command of all of the pieces (military, economic, political, NGO, CIA and gaggle of organizations). I had just finished my third tour and had left Vietnam so I did not have an opportunity to observe this first hand. I do know that when I was a COVAN there were all kinds of people in different dress and uniform with their own agendas running around in Saigon, and sometime in the field,bumping into each other, which made accomplishing the mission difficult.

[marct]

Marc:
I have downloaded and read the same article. I think this is an academic frosting as a solution.

Honestly, I was really and truly mad after reading that article. Outside of the fact that, IMHO, it just won't work, it also breaches every code of academic ethics (we can always argue later whether or not that is an oxymoron :)) and, while it may sell in Washington, it will just make matters much worse on the political home front.

Sorry about the rant, but sometimes I just feel like performing some radical surgery on some people to remove unused portions of their anatomy - in this case, their brains! (Sheesh, I really am steamed about this! Time to chill)


Perhaps we should adapt some of the tactics of the Frech, well dpocumented in in Dave Galula's "Pacification in Algeria: 1956 to 1958" , which can be downloaded from the RAND website and other lessons of Vietnam cirula 1951. The Frech put French officers and NCO in charge of Vietnamese units, but unfortuately did not carry through with succession planning. As a result, there were few capable Vietnamese officers when the French left. If you would like first-hand description of experiences of those of us who were COVANs in Vietnam, take a look at “Communion in Conflict: The Marine Advisor Vietnam 1954-1973” (Fairfax, VA: USMC Advisor Publications, 2006) Volume III by Thomas D. Affourit, especially the narrative by Colonel Croizant, the first Marine advisor. This harks back to the constabulary efforts in Nicaragua, Cuba , and the Banana Wars. It may be worth a look...

I'll try and track down a copy and read it.

Steve, you raise a really good point about whether or not people would like to be reffered to as "Human Terrain". I would seriously doubt it :). And when you say


Two fuzzy civilian types and mid-grade officers or enlisted led by a major or LtCol from any available branch? May not go over well with the more enthused combat arms types.

I think you are right on the money. Let's face it - most of us academic types (Selil obviously excepted) just don't have the training and, frequently, the mind-set to handle combat situations. Hey, our idea of an intense firefight is a cocktail party at the faculty club. Man, they are rough ;)

Marc

[Steve Blair]

I would have expected something better from Grau, honestly. The database idea is especially horrible, since as Marc pointed out it raises all sorts of security and later use questions that don't seem to have been thought through. Even if you toss out the home front issue, the operational impact of what happens when (not if) that database falls into the wrong hands is stunning. Remember the whole VA fiasco? "Uh...sorry, sir...but one of our translators took the entire HTT database home on his laptop and someone stole it."

Set at the company level, with the same level of support and NO comprehensive database (as these often turn into solutions in and of themselves instead of tools), and with a better name, this might work. But as currently structured it's not looking too promising.

[marct]

Set at the company level, with the same level of support and NO comprehensive database (as these often turn into solutions in and of themselves instead of tools), and with a better name, this might work. But as currently structured it's not looking too promising.

I've got to agree with that. I was talking with a friend of mine last night who is one of the top DB people in Canada about some of the problems with databases. He raised a really interesting point - databases don't actually correlate "knowledge", just preconceptions. Jim (my DB friend) has been working on and off on developing semantic DB structures which actually do correlate information. This could, actually, be very useful, especially for reconstruction activities and, if it doesn't have personal information in it, might be a good tool.

Honestly, the idea of a socio-cultural DB isn't too bad - again with no private information in it. As a resource, I suspect it could be very useful. Still, that doesn't address the issue of people on the ground who have to deal with people. Honestly, I think the best way to handle that would be to have a good company level team, good grass roots cross training, and "personal" introductions by the unit leaving of their counterparts coming in.

Besides, if the "more enthused combat arms types" (thanks, Steve) actually own the process there will be more buy-in and a more pragmatic approach.

Marc

[selil]

I find this kind of interesting.


HTS will have reach back connectivity to a network of subject-matter experts now being assembled from throughout the department of Defense, the interagency domain, and academia.

I can’t imagine that the population of social scientists has suddenly increased substantially within academia. Considering the number of individuals choosing the hard road of social science, those with an interest to work within DOD, those who won’t be considered foreign nationals and thus not suitable, those who speak the language fluently, and the number who “can” work with DOD all three that are left are going to be busy working on other projects.

I’m imagining a faculty member explaining to the human studies board that his current research/activity is in the employ of the department of defense providing observational and strategic analysis, and tactical information, for the subjugation and manipulation of an indigent foreign population.


The analyst will be a qualified cultural anthropologist or sociologist competent with geographical imaging software and fluent enough in the local language to perform field research

Are there are a lot of anthropologists working with GIS?

Am I wrong in thinking that these are going to be forward deployed individuals? The people filling these billets are going to be forward of the line of departure, and in fact the “focus groups” held by the academic will be direct parts of enculturation and in contact with the population and likely in the environment? If this is the case how is a non-uniformed individual deriving intelligence within a combat zone being viewed by the Geneva Convention?

In asymmetrical combat environments we already see a significant issue with civilian employees and dealing with the fall out of these non-combatants (who aid and supply the military) getting snatched. How many grey beard pacifist professors getting snatched will it take before the effort of protection overwhelms the value of the intelligence gathering and dissemination?


Let's face it - most of us academic types (Selil obviously excepted) just don't have the training and, frequently, the mind-set to handle combat situations. Hey, our idea of an intense firefight is a cocktail party at the faculty club. Man, they are rough

I’m quite allergic to violence and find that getting fatter, older, and balder to be a worthy life long goal. I told a certain flag officer I was to old, fat, and out of shape to ever be in the service again. He told me they (the Marines) could fix two of those three problems easily and I wouldn’t be getting any younger.

[marct]

I can’t imagine that the population of social scientists has suddenly increased substantially within academia. Considering the number of individuals choosing the hard road of social science, those with an interest to work within DOD, those who won’t be considered foreign nationals and thus not suitable, those who speak the language fluently, and the number who “can” work with DOD all three that are left are going to be busy working on other projects.

Of course, the concept of "foreign national" does create some interesting problems in a coalition, doesn't it? So, would that mean that I, as a Canadian, would be considered on in Iraq, but not Afghanistan?:cool:


I’m imagining a faculty member explaining to the human studies board that his current research/activity is in the employ of the department of defense providing observational and strategic analysis, and tactical information, for the subjugation and manipulation of an indigent foreign population.

Especially since "secret research" is specifically prohibited by the American Anthropology Association's code of ethics. So, hmm, lets see .... Okay, I've got the sales pitch right now "Can't find a job in the Academy? No problems! Join HTT and you will NEVER work in academia again! (some exceptions apply, contact your local recruiter for further information)"


Are there are a lot of anthropologists working with GIS?

Nope. There are some, mainly in urban anthropology, and a fair number of archaeologists who use GIS, but not many Cultural Anthropologists. Too much like math for most of us <shudder>. We tend to prefer a more "traditional", hermeneutics-based approach which allows us to discover all of the multifold ways in which the poor oppressed people we are studying have been systematically destroyed by Capitalist, Imperialist, neo-Colonial state actors and their armoured myrmidons for the advantage of the sinister and heartless multi-national corporations (Okay, so my tounge is frimly planted in my cheek).


Am I wrong in thinking that these are going to be forward deployed individuals? The people filling these billets are going to be forward of the line of departure, and in fact the “focus groups” held by the academic will be direct parts of enculturation and in contact with the population and likely in the environment? If this is the case how is a non-uniformed individual deriving intelligence within a combat zone being viewed by the Geneva Convention?

That's a good point. I must admit, the temptation to suggest a commission to Major for PhDs, along with the concommitant question of what they would be (a MAJOR pain the the ____) is great, but I will restrain myself.


In asymmetrical combat environments we already see a significant issue with civilian employees and dealing with the fall out of these non-combatants (who aid and supply the military) getting snatched. How many grey beard pacifist professors getting snatched will it take before the effort of protection overwhelms the value of the intelligence gathering and dissemination?

Not too many! We already have that as something of a problem in some areas of the world with archaeologists and anthropologists being shot - and they weren't even working as spies or analysts then. Even someone in good shape without proper training would be a liability.

Marc

[marct]

Hi Folks, this appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement (http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2033290).


Life-risking 'spy' plan pulled

Phil Baty
Published: 20 October 2006


Academic protests have forced the Foreign Office to delay an anti-terror project. Phil Baty reports

Two research councils put plans to enlist academics in the War on Terror on hold this week after they were accused of risking the lives of British researchers in Muslim countries.

The Times Higher learnt that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been inviting selected academics to bid for funding under a £1.3 million project called "Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalisation". The project is focused on countries identified by MI5's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre.

The FCO project, run in partnership with the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, provoked a furious response from academics who claimed it was tantamount to asking researchers to act as spies for British intelligence.

Critics claimed the move endangered the lives of researchers, particularly social scientists and their sources in Muslim countries, whether working on the project or not.

The ESRC this week delayed the project to enable further consultation as a result of serious concerns raised by academics through The Times Higher.

Details of the project emerged as The Times Higher obtained a new version of controversial government guidance on combating extremism on UK campuses.

This suggests that university staff are trained by Special Branch officers to spot and report extremist behaviour.

According to documents seen by The Times Higher, the FCO project will examine six regions - Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa and the Gulf and six specific countries, including Turkey, Jordan and Sudan.

Academics would be asked to "scope the growth in influence and membership of extremist Islamist groups in the past 20 years", "name key figures and key groups" and "understand the use of theological legitimisation for violence".

"Key topics" include "radicalisation drivers and counterstrategies in each of the countries studied" and "future trends likely to increase/decrease radicalisation".

James Fairhead, an anthropology professor at Sussex University who sits on both the ESRC's strategic research board and international committee, has written to ESRC governors expressing concern that the project has had "input" from MI5.

In a letter written last week, he said he was "appalled" that the project has not been considered formally by either of the ESRC boards he sits on and brought the independence of the ESRC into question.

He said that the project "might endanger British social scientists overseas". He told The Times Higher that he was "deeply worried" that academics would be expected to name extremists.

John Gledhill, chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists, said:

"This raises fundamental ethical issues. People feel that it smacks of the Cold War use of academics in counter-insurgency activities - essentially using academics as spies."

In a letter to members, he said that the issue was part of the "war against terror's increasing influence on academic life".

Martha Mundy, reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics, circulated a letter to members of the anthropology association warning of the physical danger to academics and wider concerns about independence of research. She says the programme entailed a series of specific "intelligence-driven" questions that "start from the premise of a link between Islamism, radicalisation (nowhere defined) and terrorism".

"Such a programme should be neither funded by, nor administered through, the AHRC and the ESRC, as it violates the principles of transparent competition, " Dr Mundy writes.

Philip Esler, AHRC chief executive, said: "It is appropriate that the AHRC enables the powerful intellectual resources in the UK to focus on particular public policy issues."

A spokeswoman for the ESRC said the charge that the project was driven by intelligence was "wholly inaccurate".

"This is academic-driven research with an academic basis," she said. "This is crucial for our integrity." She also confirmed that it would be open to full competition.

Adrian Alsop, director of research at the ESRC, said that while the projects would involve some "limited" fieldwork, all would be subject to rigorous ethical approval to ensure researchers' safety.

He said the process had been "transparent and open", with 100 academics attending three seminars on the subject. An FCO spokesman said that the office was working with the research councils to ensure that the work was independent, transparent, academically sound and properly peer-reviewed.

Marc

[SWJED]

Finally getting caught up in updating the SWJ Library (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/reference.htm). Tonight's additions include two Vietnam War-Era (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/ref/vietnam.htm) handbooks. Hat tip to Council member Jedburgh for sending these in to the SWJ! Many thanks...

Military Assistance and Training Advisory Course (MATA) Handbook for Vietnam (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/matahandbook.pdf) - US Army Special Warfare School Handbook, January 1966. Reference material for the military advisor in Vietnam. Reflects doctrine as taught at the Special Warfare School in the 1960's and early '70's. The handbook was prepared for use in the MATA courses of instruction and served as a ready reference for advisors in Vietnam.

Handbook for Military Support of Pacification (http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/militarysupporthandbook.pdf) - US Military Assistance Command Vietnam handbook, February 1968. Developed as a basic reference document. Designed for use by US, RVN and other other coalition military personnel.

[SWJED]

26 November NY Times editorial - Learning From Iraq (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/opinion/26sun1.html).


While politicians from both parties spin out their versions of Iraqs that should have been, could have been and just maybe still might be, the Army has taken on a far more useful project: figuring out why the Bush administration’s military plans worked out so badly and drawing lessons for future conflicts.

That effort is a welcome sign that despite six years of ideologically driven dictates from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Army leaders remain usefully focused on the real world, where actual soldiers daily put their lives on the line for their country and where the quality of military planning goes a long way toward determining whether their sacrifices help achieve America’s national purposes.

Two hopeful examples are the latest draft of a new Army field manual that will be taught to officers at all levels beginning next year and a series of oral history interviews conducted with Iraqi and American officers involved in the disappointing efforts to establish and train Iraqi security forces. Last week, The Los Angeles Times published details of some of the major changes being incorporated into the new field manual, while The Washington Post reported on some of the lessons learned in the Iraqi training programs.

The field manual, the Army’s basic guidebook for war, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, quietly jettisons the single most disastrous innovation of the Rumsfeld era. That is the misconceived notion that the size and composition of an American intervention force should be based only on what is needed to defeat the organized armed forces of an enemy government, instead of also taking into account the needs of providing security and stability for the civilian population for which the United States will then be responsible...

[CaptCav_CoVan]

There is a pretty good site that has a number of excellent early (Vietnam-era) articles on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. Forgive me if this has been posted previously.

Moise's Bibliography (http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/limited.html)

[Jedburgh]

The Kit Carson Scout Program 1966-1968 (http://star.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?YfBkePbDanPUsq.My0RDnyq6BcD4QVbzqJKK U6VabdIgmK19Uoai9ve8fPIZpKjlrhM7wOaGNAtUHRg6N9Nvzw .wmiAPxBX@aO3wWY6d4Aw/15250107005.pdf), prepared by the Chieu Hoi Division of MACCORDS on 18 Jan 68

Unfortunately, the pdf file is missing page 2 of the original document.

[Steve Blair]

Very nice!

[jcustis]

Kit Carson Scouts by Captain William Cowan, USMC. Marine Corps Gazette, October 1969.

The same Bill Cowan who shows up as a commentator on Fox News every now and then?

[Jedburgh]

JFQ, 4th Qtr 07: The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Warfare (http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i47/33.pdf)

In the mid-1990s, the Phoenix program (http://star.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?i6PqqX6Fr8IbRaud1OHYsDN2cGruy@t5.bpo tDcl6mWfFuS0AqnwtXGoUtEaEXr.M0Hh1bfjMKO.HNnHhWNhlt p0i8VMggftXbhWKM6Eh2Y/1370406001.pdf) was considered an artifact of historical interest but with little relevance to the contemporary world. I therefore analyzed the program primarily from a historian’s perspective in the first edition of Phoenix and the Birds of Prey (http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Birds-Prey-Counterinsurgency-Counterterrorism/dp/0803216025/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-7701786-7715668?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194011407&sr=1-1), making few references to the present or future. Readers interested in future applicability were left to draw their own conclusions from the history. A decade later, Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the study of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism back into fashion. For this reason, the new edition contains this additional chapter summarizing the principal lessons.....

[Jedburgh]

RAND, 14 Jul 09: The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency (http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf)

One of the principal requirements of counterinsurgency is the ability to disrupt or destroy not just the insurgency’s military capabilities but also the infrastructure that supports the insurgent forces. This infrastructure provides, among other things, the critical intelligence, recruiting, and logistics functions that enable insurgents to contend with counterinsurgent forces that are often much more capable in a purely military sense. During the Vietnam War, one of the main efforts to attack the insurgent infrastructure was known as the Phoenix Program. Phoenix has subsequently become highly controversial, and its lessons for contemporary counterinsurgency can be overdrawn. However, a careful assessment of Phoenix does provide some suggestions for improving current efforts against insurgent infrastructure.

[davidbfpo]

Just in case the subject re-appears: an article on SWJ Blog: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=7927 and from a Canadian journal 'The Theoretical Aspect of Targeted Killings: The Phoenix Program as a Case Study': http://digitization.ucalgary.ca/jmss/index.php/jmss/article/viewFile/57/67

davidbfpo

[jmm99]

The articles linked above are all worthwhile and deserve DLing for future reference. However, they look at CORDS-Phoenix from a non-Vietnamese viewpoint. For example, the 2009 Canadian article (cited by David) does not cite Tran's "Pacification".

The story of the GVN's pacification programs (including CORDS-Phoenix) was told by Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification (http://www.counterinsurgency.org/Tran/Tran.htm) (1977; one of the Indochina Monographs - 7mb DL), who was a key player in the programs. All being said, "pacification" had to be laregly a South Vietnamese effort - the problem was their "insurgency" or "guerrilla war"; not ours. Tran tells the story of that effort - the good, the bad and the ugly.

One can classify the "Viet Cong" activities in the South in more than one way, legally and militarily. The articles linked above call it an "insurgency" - as do many books written on Vietnam (those that elect not to treat it as a "conventional" war). The Vietnamese Communists looked at it differently.

Their view was that the successful August 1945 Insurrection (ending their Revolutionary War) led to a unified Vietnam (as a nation-state), with Ho's government its recognized government (agreements with the French, 1945-1946). The French then reneged and attacked the Viet Minh (their view). The French and their Vietnamese puppets then occupied most of the country.

Thus, the following First Indochina War was in Viet Minh terms a Resistence War (with their guerrilla forces, North and South, being akin to the French Resistence of WWII). DPB and the Geneva Accords gave validity to North Vietnam, but a unified Vietnam (not Two Vietnams) was the North's goal. The formation of the RVN under Diem, and growing US involvement, was simply regarded as the same thing as the French occupation under its puppets.

The result by the early 1960s was a mixture of conventional and unconventional warfare (as defined in FM 31-21 from that time). Thus, from the first 2006 article linked above:


In Vietnam, the U.S. military faced arguably the most complex, effective, lethal insurgency in history. The enemy was no rag-tag band lurking in the jungle, but rather a combination of guerrillas, political cadre, and modern main-force units capable of standing toe to toe with the U.S. military. Any one of these would have been significant, but in combination they presented a formidable threat.

When U.S. ground forces intervened in South Vietnam in 1965, estimates of enemy guerrilla and Communist Party front strength stood at more than 300,000. In addition, Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese main forces numbered almost 230,000—and that number grew to 685,000 by the time of the Communist victory in 1975. These main forces were organized into regiments and divisions, and between 1965 and 1968 the enemy emphasized main-force war rather than insurgency.[1] During the war the Communists launched three conventional offensives: the 1968 Tet Offensive, the 1972 Easter Offensive, and the final offensive in 1975. All were major campaigns by any standard. Clearly, the insurgency and the enemy main forces had to be dealt with simultaneously.

1. Thomas C. Thayer, How to Analyze a War Without Fronts: Vietnam, 1965-72 (Washington, DC: Defense Research Projects Agency, 1975), 788-89.

The end result was a juncture of conventional and unconventional forces (made up of guerrilla and auxilliary forces and underground cadres) - as called for by our own doctrine in FM 31-21. Thus, the Vietnam War did not involve an insurgency (as opposed to the situations in Malaya and the Philippines, which were true insurgencies). Rather, Vietnam was more akin to Indonesia - also where a successful Revolutionary War ended in 1945, followed by a foreign occupation and Resistence War. Fortunately for us (the US), the Indonesia Revolution was largely bourgeois nationalistic (albeit anti-Western). That feature led to the eradication of Indonesian Communism in 1965-1966; and to formation of ASEAN, which changed the SE Asian picture by 1968.

I'll take a better look at the Canadian article re: its Targeted Killings thesis - which issue, I believe, is covered in other threads.

[John T. Fishel]

said... but it was also an insurgency. The winners have their myth - based on their perception of truth - but it remains the victors myth. We have our own myths... As some of us quipped at the time, the VN war was not one war 12 years long but rather 12 wars, each one year long (for the US, that is). Actually, there is another set of dimensions that need to be considered. It was a different war in each of the 6 military regions, in the air, and at sea. At some point, however, adding dimensions simply become counterproductive. In the end, I would argue that what we look at should depend on the question we are asking, remembering the complexity all the while.

Cheers

JohnT

[jmm99]

I wouldn't disagree with you that US authors classify the Viet Cong as an "insurgency". That view is not new (soup was eaten off a knife long before Nagl) - because it fit the US political posture. That was that SVN was an independent nation state with legitimate governace over all of the population in SVN. Thus, any citizen of SVN who took up arms against the RVN was an "insurgent".

E.g., a brief Wilfian definition of insurgency (here (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showpost.php?p=79883&postcount=41)):


They become an insurgency when they try to replace the existing government as that which exercises authority over them, and use violent means to secure that policy.

There were at least two problems with the US-GVN approach. One (more minor) is that it gave credence to the NLF (National Liberation Front) as as a South Vietnamese group, independent of the DRV government and the Lao Dong (CP of Vietnam). We know that was nonsense, but it led to bi-furcated thinking - an "insurgency" threat in the South and a conventional threat from the North.

The second was the VietComs did not look at the war in that manner. In their view, the "existing government" in the South (RVN) was not "that which exercised authority over them". "Them" being the Viet Cong. Their government was the government of Hanoi, ruling over a unified Vietnam (albeit half-occupied by the US and its SV puppets). In essence, their argument was the same as that of the French Resistence - their government was the Free French in exile; the Vichy government being a puppet of the Germans.

What followed from these two very different positions was even more critical. The VietCom effort (a combined PAVN and NLF effort, which was FM 31-21 in effect) had Unity of Command - Hanoi's control over the NLF was exercised through COSVN. Our (US and RVN) efforts (counterinsurgency vs NLF; conventional vs PAVN/NVA; and bombing of NV) had no unity - in effect, three separate wars (further divided by your annual iterations - another of our defaults).

Fortunately for us, the other events in SE Asia of the 60s and 70s turned out well for us (US) - so, we clearly won in SE Asia as a whole region. But, SVN was lost (I don't concede that was due to US failures alone - see this post (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showpost.php?p=68589&postcount=16)) to what I perceive as being a superior concept of that armed conflict by the VietComs on a strategic level.

Dwell on my iconoclastic suggestions for a bit. E.g., that we should have treated the NLF and Viet Cong as an unconventional force (it using concepts similar to FM 31-21), as opposed to treating it as an "insurgency".

Best regards

Mike

[John T. Fishel]

to the extent that you argue for a totally unified effort by the DRV that included the NLF and VC as controlled agents. One problem that the Lao Dong party had was that its southern (and to a lesser degree central) VN affiliates - essentially the NLF - was too independent. This also held for the VC. Tet 68 had the positive effect for the DRV (and PAVN) of getting rid of a troublesome ally/agent that could not be completely trusted. The other part of the story is that when the PAVN seized all of SVN in 1975 one of the first acts of the new govt was to purge the NLF. At the same time, we should not make too much of the divisions w/in the VietComs...

Ah, well, time for a beer...

Cheers

JohnT

[jmm99]

no real disagreement on several of your points.


[1] One problem that the Lao Dong party had was that its southern (and to a lesser degree central) VN affiliates - essentially the NLF - was too independent. This also held for the VC. [2] Tet 68 had the positive effect for the DRV (and PAVN) of getting rid of a troublesome ally/agent that could not be completely trusted. [3] The other part of the story is that when the PAVN seized all of SVN in 1975 one of the first acts of the new govt was to purge the NLF.

1. Agreed - the NLF included many Vietnamese nationalists (e.g., Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden, 1985, had some of them tell their stories).

2. Agreed - Tet 68 saved the LD hit squads a lot of future work.

3. Agreed - The Victory Parade story (Santoli, pp.18-19) of Truong Nhu Tang (Minister of Justice, NLF 1960-1976) proves your point. He noticed no PRG or NLF flags or uniforms (2 weeks after Saigon's fall). In reply to Truong's question, GEN Van Tien Dung (CO of the NVA) replied coldly that "the armed forces are now unified". The parade was followed by people disappearing or forced into "re-education".

Note that I said that Hanoi had Unity of Command over its conventional and unconventional forces. I did not say that the members of those forces were monoliths and unified on every point, especially political. As the Zhivago commisar said: "As the military struggle winds down, the political struggle intensifies."

I also am not claiming some secret recipe which would have saved South Vietnam, had we looked at the conflict as involving a combined conventional and unconventional effort by Hanoi.

Bob Jones has at times mentioned counter-unconventional warfare (or words to that effect). I don't know whether he (and the other SF folks here) see a substantial difference between counter-unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency.

I do know that unconventional warfare has been very successful for the guerrillas (Spain 1808, Russia 1812, Russia & Yugoslavia in WWII; but, I suppose, those can be explained because of the successes of their allied conventional forces - as also Vietnam). There must be examples of successful counter-unconventional warfare - but not in my brain-dead state tonite.

Any input on counter-unconventional warfare is welcome - I'm already out on a limb. :)

Cheers with your beers - have a virtual one on me.

Mike

Addendum: One comment by COL Jones is here (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showpost.php?p=61643&postcount=44):


One mission set that does not exist that I believe is helpful is that of "counter unconventional warfare." This would be the entire family of engagement that one would employ to stop an outside entitiy from waging UW in a given state/populace. It would include the full DIME, CT, etc. I beleive this is more helpful than just labeling a state as "rogue" or an organization as "terrorist" At the end of the day do we need to "defeat" AQ, or do we simply need to neutralize them? In fact there are many that think that AQ is fading due to its overreliance on violent ways, and failure to adapt more political wings like the IRA and Hezbollah. If this is true, I think instead of cheering the demise, we need to be very concerned about what replaces them. The conditions that gave rise to AQ still exist in spades. Here I agree with Gentile, there is no victory. By changing our campaign to a more holistic counterUW campaign aimed at neutralizing AQ by rendering them irrelevant to the populaces they seek to influence we have a better chance of not giving rise to a second, more sophisticated generation of non-state actor that comes in behind them to continue the mission. Counter UW works for states also. Clearly we do not want to "defeat" Iran to prevent them from waging UW in Iraq, or Lebannon, but we do need to devise a sophisticated, holistic scheme of engagement to counter this UW effort and it destabilizing effects that are counter to our national interests.

He also has mentioned "counter-unconventional warfare" in connection with counter-irregular warfare, here (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showpost.php?p=68565&postcount=30).


SOF could profit from developing "Counter unconventional warfare" as a tool in our kitbag

[SWJ Blog]

Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/05/defense-by-defoliation-the-nec/)

Entry Excerpt:

Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam
by Heather M. Brown

Download the Full Article: Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/766-brown.pdf)

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Americans became increasingly concerned with the strategic decision-making of U.S. leaders regarding the military’s presence in Vietnam. One of the most controversial decisions of the era was ratified on 7 January 1962, when the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army were given authorization under Operation RANCH HAND, to deploy the herbicides 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetate (2,4,5-T) and 2,4-dicholorophenoxyacetate (2,4-D), commonly known by its code name, Agent Orange, on South Vietnam. Operation RANCH HAND directed the herbicide spraying project from U.S. Air Force C-123 twin-engine aircraft, U.S. Army helicopters and infantry hand sprayers.

Download the Full Article: Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/766-brown.pdf)

Heather Marie Brown received her undergraduate degree from Texas State University-San Marcos in December 2010 as a double-major in History and Political Science.



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[SWJ Blog]

Vietnam Postmortem: A Senseless Strategy (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/07/vietnam-postmortem-a-senseless/)

Entry Excerpt:

The latest posted issue of Parameters (Winter of 2010-2011 (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/)) is probably well worth reading because we most likely have not learned well our lessons from the past (What did Cohen and Gooch say about military failures in their book Military Misfortune (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KE47DK?ie=UTF8&tag=smallwarsjour-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002KE47DK) – all military failures can be attributed for failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate).

Note the authors are a "who's who" of some of our great thinkers, generals, theorists, practitioners, and historians (well I guess Ambrose has had his issues!). Given the recent comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam I recommend one article in particular by the eminent strategist and mentor to so many of us, Colonel (Ret) John Collins' article from 1978 - Vietnam Postmortem: A Senseless Strategy (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/2010winter/Collins.pdf). COL Collins' article should probably be mandatory reading for decision makers before we embark on any future Afghanistans or Iraqs so we do not have a failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate again (a dream of fantasy I know!).



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[SWJ Blog]

The War Over the Vietnam War (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/the-war-over-the-vietnam-war)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

History: Vietnam in HD (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/history-vietnam-in-hd)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

New Hampshire and Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/new-hampshire-and-vietnam)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

How Could Vietnam Happen? (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/how-could-vietnam-happen)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

Assessing Pacification in Vietnam: We Won the Counterinsurgency War! (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/assessing-pacification-in-vietnam-we-won-the-counterinsurgency-war)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/westmoreland-the-general-who-lost-vietnam)

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[SWJ Blog]

Military Advisors Reflect on Vietnam War Experiences (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/military-advisors-reflect-on-vietnam-war-experiences)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

Viewpoint: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/viewpoint-counterinsurgency-lessons-from-vietnam)

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[SWJ Blog]

Book Review: Marigold: The Last Chance for Peace in Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/book-review-marigold-the-last-chance-for-peace-in-vietnam)

Entry Excerpt:



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[SWJ Blog]

Why the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/why-the-us-lost-the-vietnam-war)

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[SWJ Blog]

Village Stability Operations: An Historical Perspective from Vietnam to Afghanistan (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/village-stability-operations-an-historical-perspective-from-vietnam-to-afghanistan)

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[SWJ Blog]

Preventing the Barbarization of Warfare: The USMC CAP Program in Vietnam (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/preventing-the-barbarization-of-warfare-the-usmc-cap-program-in-vietnam)

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[SWJ Blog]

The Haunting Rhymes of America’s Wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan: Why Metrics Still Matter (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-haunting-rhymes-of-america%E2%80%99s-wars-in-vietnam-and-afghanistan-why-metrics-still-matter)

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Read the full post (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-haunting-rhymes-of-america%E2%80%99s-wars-in-vietnam-and-afghanistan-why-metrics-still-matter) and make any comments at the SWJ Blog (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog).
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