The Conventional, SOF Debate in OIF.
I have been involved in several debates concerning OIF. The latest involved a retired SF Captain (USAR) who is of the opinion that we could have conducted the war in Iraq, from phase 1 forward with fewer troops. He seems to be of the opinion that conventional forces get in the way of the special forces in this kind of war. When I point out the obvious to him, he pulls rank on me and states, what would an NCO know about campaign planning? I'm no campaign planner, but I'm not stupid either and I have had the good fortune to work with people who are experts in campaign planning and well versed in special forces too. Allow me to paste his comments from another discussion board here and please, do comment.
"Through the seizure of Baghdad and for a month or two following that? Mostly yes (except for introducing the entire 5th SFG into the landscape). Beyond that? Nope. As mentioned, I would have introduced the 5th SFG into the AO and they would have stayed there. Working with locals, building Iraqi defense forces, snapping up terrorists and Hussein cronies.. not through overwelming presence, but smarts, guile and working with the locals. I would have reduced conventional forces to two or three Brigades (UAs as rapidly as possible). One from the 101st with lots of helo capability, one a Stryker Brigade with a heavy battalion along. There job would be to be a reaction force to bring the hammer if the SOF assets or Iraqi forces needed assistance. CA and Psyop battalions also deployed. Air assets in Kuwait and Qatar. No non-helo assets permanently in Iraq until their security forces are sufficient to defend those assets.
Now, what the heck do I know. I'm trained to run UW, I know what it takes to do it effectively, and what it takes to stop it. And it isn't a lot of troops that are needed to stop it. It's getting the fish to deny the sea."
Granted that UW is the bread and butter of SF, but this war is too big for SF to tackle alone isn't it? With the luxury of hindsight, it seems to me that had we deployed more troops in the outset commanders would have been able to control key terrain and built up areas rather than fighting through or bypassing them. My epiphany came the evening I turned on the TV and saw the looting in Baghdad. Thousands of giddy Iraqis in an orgy of pillaging and looting, skittering back and forth in right before the eyes of seemingly overwhelmed and bewilderd Soldiers. As an NCO, I know what a confused Soldier looks like and our troops appeared to me to look like Soldiers who realized there was something wrong with this picture, but lacked guidance. Perhaps they were told to do nothing? In a press conference when asked about the looting I saw Mr. Rumsfeld shrug his shoulders when asked about the looting. I think that was the day we began to lose the initiative and we experienced quite a free fall there for awhile. I feel that we are winning the war, but I can't help but wonder if we could not have done it smarter. Would more conventional troops have been a good thing or not?
Your comments?
Afghanistan and Iraq do not the same look
QUOTE: One from the 101st with lots of helo capability, one a Stryker Brigade with a heavy battalion along. There job would be to be a reaction force to bring the hammer if the SOF assets or Iraqi forces needed assistance.
It seems he may be thinking the the Afghanistan model would have transplanted equally to the Iraq area of operations. We will never know for sure, but I tend to agree with some of the smart folks who have asserted that the fabric of Afghani society made for good SF operations, but Iraq was/is a completely different proposition.
I do agree that more agile forces should have been employed, but the requirement to gain and hold key terrain required a certain footprint. A handful of brigades does not meet that requirement. The quote also leads me to believe that he never set foot in the nasty expanse that is western Al-Anbar Province.
Conventional/SF mix and integration
Seems to me that part of the recipe for accomplishing the mission in Iraq is doing something we have been unable to do effectively and that is to integrate conventional, SF units. Clearly, there is a huge difference in missions, capabilities and "mindset"
The question that I am pondering is what is an effective role for conventional forces in a UW environment such as Iraq?
Conventional/Unconventional Integration
Perhaps the best role for our unconventional forces in this conflict is advising and training ourconventional forces as well as the Iraqis.
We had a situation where soldiers and officers don't or didn't know the rules of this kind of fight, had no knowledge of local customs and little understanding of the kinds of missions they had to undertake.
I recall reading once about an army SOF team in Vietnam: 12 Americans leading and training some 600 local soldiers. By custom, an "A" detachment is headed by a full captain - a guy with enough rank and experience that a battalion commander would probably listen to him, especially when there was no other guidance as to what to do. The remaining sergeants could easily parcel themselves out to company and even platoon level and put the unit straight pretty quickly.
The counter argument to this integration is that we're wasting SOF's limited resources on a mission that the conventional guys should already have figured out. Also, SOF had missions considered extremely important at the time - nabbing high level regime figures and securing potential nuclear/chemical/biological materials.
Further integration a necessity?
Yes, zenpundit, I agree with your post. It is too easy to criticize the campaign plan utilized to prosecute the overthrow of the Hussein regime with the luxury of hindsight. Too easy.
Who was able to forecast that the Iraqi Army would abandon their equipment and fade melt into the population in the numbers they did? We had to be prepared to fight a conventional battle, at least during the run up country. My opponent claims that a 12 man A team is capable of destroying an armor battalion and that our conventional commanders don't like that fact. That conventional commanders have an institutionalized bias against the SF/SOF community. I'm no expert, but I have never heard of an ODA defeating a battalion of conventional forces with the exception of the Roughnecks at Debekka Pass and even then they did not destroy it, and I beleive they had a significant number of Peshmerga with them didn't they? But I admit, I could be wrong.
Rehashing the campaign plan isn't of much use now though. I'm interested in the integration of SF/SOF/conventional forces for future contingencies. And how that is best accomplished. Understand the negative in straining the SF/SOF community with this task. But maybe the way to address this is the creation of SF/SOF MTTs to travel CONUS Army Post to train conventional personnel tapped for deployment before they depart? This would not affect SF/SOF units in Iraq. While it would most assuredly be considerd undesirable duty by SF personnel at first, the temporary pain might be soon forgotten once the program was funded, they had a few training cycles under their belt and see the benefit in Iraq. Naturally, this could be seen as a threat by some in the SF community. I would submit that there are certain tasks that conventional forces could take from the SF plate that would make the conventional forces more effective and that would free SF units for the more important tasks such as snatch and grabs, training the natives etc.
Improving the conventional force in UW
Bill, improving the conventional force in UW is one of the things I'm trying to bring out in this thread; is it important? If so, how do we go about it? What is the SF/SOF role?
If Iraq is an accurate barometer of the kinds of wars we will be fighting in the future, conventional forces must become proficient in a UW environment in order to compliment and in some cases releive SF/SOF. The SF gung ho attitude displayed by my opponent while highly commendable is unrealistic. There has to be a conventional/SF integration it's happening and will continue to evlove despite his apparent distaste for it. We have to find the right mix. To top it all off, our conventional force also has to maintain efficiency in fighting a classic conventional wars as well, with North Korea, and China looming on the horizon. Quite a puzzle isnt' it?
An interesting thing happend in OIF that I'm not sure has occured before. Conventional forces were actually subordinated to an SF command. 173d ABN Brigade was under JSOTF-N control I beleive. This is the kind of exposure that I think would be of great benefit to conventional Soldiers in learning about UW through OJT.
SOF as a force multiplier
Special Ops, working with local fighters, was a potent force in Afghanistan when combined with precision bombing. In Iraq, outside of Kurdish areas there were no local fighters until the US started training them after Saddam's overthrow. My own belief is that Special Ops is an important part of a combined arms conventional attack in conventional warfare, as well as being an effective force in special situations. Tom Clancy and Gen. Carl Stiner give several examples of the impact of SF in the conventional attacks of Desert Storm in their book Shadow Warriors. They also give examples of their terrific work in saving the Kurds after that war.
Those that argue that Saddam could have been overthrown by an insurgency I think are wrong. But even if it were possible, it could not have been done in three weeks and the casualties on all sides would have been far greater.