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SWJED
05-31-2006, 04:22 PM
Latest from Bing West in Slate - Handing Off a War, Dispatches From Iraq (http://www.slate.com/id/2142009/).


The Council on Foreign Relations recently published a piece that accused the American military of not adapting in Iraq. That was true in 2003 and midway through 2004, but no reasonable person can walk the streets with a Winski, Davenport, Weston, or Barela and argue that the U.S. military is hidebound today.

The American way of war has historically been to seek out and defeat the enemy army, not to assist a foundering ally. Following in that tradition, through mid-2004 most American units in Iraq were focused on offensive operations to crush an insurgency recruiting from among a million military-age Sunni males. Beginning in 2005, it was Gen. George W. Casey, the Multi-National Force commander, who identified this strategy as shoveling against the tide and redirected the military effort toward training an Iraqi security force. Calm and thoughtful, Casey eschewed the press and met with every infantry battalion to explain the new strategy. The first time I saw Casey was in Ramadi, huddled in a corner with a company commander and a squad leader fresh from a heavy firefight...

In 2006, the American military is not trying to subdue the insurgency by the force of its arms. Iraq is being handed over to the Iraqis. And in a bemused but real sense, the Americans have become the ombudsman for the Sunnis...

At this stage, no one can predict how Iraq will turn out. American leadership is not the determining factor. The criticism of the secretary of defense from six retired generals had scant impact among the battalions and training teams I visited. Soldiers on the front lines have more important things to think about and little time to gossip about matters far removed from them.

The problem is the lack of Iraqi leadership. The singular intelligence failure was not the missing weapons of mass destruction; it was not understanding that 30 years of dependency enforced by murder had eradicated both trust and initiative.

Yet the three critical tasks demand Iraqi, rather than American, leadership. First, the government in Baghdad must drive a wedge between Shiite extremists and the Shiite militias and similarly split al-Qaida and the religious extremists from the Sunni "mainstream" insurgents. Second, the ministries in Baghdad must support their police and army forces in the field. As matters stand, U.S. advisers and commanders have to apply pressure repeatedly before Baghdad will respond. At all levels in the Iraqi system, there is an instinct to hoard—and too often to steal and skim—that deprives the fighting units of basic commodities. Third, the police must be reformed. How Sunni police can be effective and not be assassinated in their own cities is still unclear. Conversely, the Shiite police in Baghdad have lost all credibility and trust among the Sunnis.

On the positive side of the ledger, three major hurdles were cleared during the last 12 months. First, elections were held and a government was chosen. Second, an Iraqi army at the battalion fighting level emerged. Third, Iraq weathered the sectarian strife in February without a political collapse...

Tom Odom
06-01-2006, 01:16 PM
The problem is the lack of Iraqi leadership. The singular intelligence failure was not the missing weapons of mass destruction; it was not understanding that 30 years of dependency enforced by murder had eradicated both trust and initiative.

When reality is ignored, it is not an intel failure. We--the intelligence community across the board--briefed this fact repeatedly in 1990-1991. We discussed it in NIEs. And it was a central fact in our concerns that a full blown assault into Iraq would leave us holding a country whose elites were built on terror, crime, and mafia-like tribal linkages. These concerns drove our assessments and indeed affected operational and strategic plans. At one stage, the concerns over regional collapse voiced by State, CIA, and even DIA, nearly tied the hands of operational planners. Army intel put a marker on the table at the Military Intel Board that Saddam's forces were exposed in Kuwait and that we could cut them off and kill them. The other service intel chiefs accepted that as did DIA; it then acted as push back against other agencies who cautioned against going into Kuwait.

In the interim betweem 1991 and 2003, the status of Iraqi leadership capabilities certainly did not improve. Again, intel failures did happen in the arena of WMD; on the other hand, assessments of the reality of Iraq seem to have been accurate.


Best
Tom

Jedburgh
06-01-2006, 01:31 PM
In the interim betweem 1991 and 2003, the status of Iraqi leadership capabilities certainly did not improve. Again, intel failures did happen in the arena of WMD; on the other hand, assessments of the reality of Iraq seem to have been accurate.
Accurate - and ignored or dismissed by policy-makers who had their minds already fixed on an objective and a pre-determined way to go about achieving it.

This gap between information provided by the intelligence community, and what is selectively used to justify or drive decision/policy making at the national level is certainly nothing new.

What I consider to be an Intelligence bookshelf essential is Knowing One’s Enemies – Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars, Edited by Ernest R. May

This was first published by Princeton University Press in 1986. The book goes far beyond being merely a professional, scholarly analysis of the past and is easy to see as a deliberately constructed set of case-studies with important lessons for both intelligence profefssionals and policy makers.

The book consists of sixteen essays that describe in detail intelligence collection, analysis and decision making at the national level in various countries at critical junctures in their history (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain and Italy before WWI and Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the US before WWII).

In many ways, the essays clearly warn that even when a nation is in possession of sufficient intelligence of a quality to make effective policy decisions, it can all come to disaster due to the inherent biases, proclivities and abilities of key policy makers. The harmful effects of internal disputes within intelligence agencies, and turf battles between competing agencies, are also laid out in careful detail. The past is not so different from the present.

Tom Odom
06-01-2006, 02:36 PM
The central core reality in intel is that it is a human endeavor and is therefore subject to all the foibles attached to being human. At the risk of flogging my own book, I tried to get at this human element in my epilogue by relating repeated experiences I had along the way where I or my associates presented clear (and that assessment is very much a personal view) warnings and estimates that proved correct but were disregared by the target audiences. I use the term agenda to describe the mental framework which either makes someone willing to listen or not willing to listen. The same framework applies to organizations; agendas influence how information (intelligence) is used or not used. Friction is inevitable.

In some ways though that friction acts as a safety net; when there is no dissenting opinion, something is wrong. Intel is never 100% correct; for that matter no commander ever knows 100% of what he needs to know about his own units. The art of intel then emerges like the art of command; those who can synthesize an 80% correct or better picture are at the artist level. Being 50% correct is nothing but guessing; too many "int" folks operate at this level, largely because they have never had the opportunity to develop as analysts. All too often, "50%" analysts select an option and stick with it, regardless of how the situation changes; how they pick a position is often driven by the agenda they are following.

best
Tom