More, From Captain's Journal
There are Lessons Learned and then
there are Lessons Available - most of the time we default to the latter -no matter where in the spectrum of operations we find ourselves. That might be good in some ways since few situations are the same, bad in others since it means we might sometimes still be looking around for the right tool or applicable experience.
From what I've seen, the learning curve has flattened out some and the war we find on the ground in Iraq is closer to the one we envision as the unit conducts its train up and deploys - this is not always true, but in the aggregate I think it is. This is important because it means units gain their footing faster and take the initiative away from AIF (from AQIZ, to JAM, to Organized Crime, to corrupt officials, to the significance of propane shortages or unemployment). I think units have learned that no matter where or when they were last time, somethings are going to be different and that means they are going to have to recognize those changes and be prepared to accept and where possible exploit them toward task and purpose - be it along a lethal line of operation or non-lethal line of effort. They have learned how to deal with people and how to solve a host of problems.
Having doctrine (of any flavor) and implementing it is not the same - however we've gotten pretty good at building in mechanisms to prepare soldiers and leaders (and I include all the services) to operate along the lethal line and transition as needed. You could be talking about changing doctrine (BTW new FM 3-0 Full Spectrum Ops is out in final DRAG), you could be talking about the way the CTCs have shifted, you could be talking about the COIN Academy in Taji, you could be talking about the individual learning that has occurred through deployments. All effect performance and like I said - we're getting pretty good at being "full spectrum" at the tactical level.
While I'm glad we have addressed some doctrinal shortfalls - be it 3-24 or 3-0 (and I hear there are some doctrinal reviews going on at JFCOM as well?), I give the credit to the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen on the ground who are applying what works, modifying to suit the problem, and where required disregarding what is not applicable for an appropriate solution. Good doctrine enables soldiers and leaders to make good choices - and reflects the value of thinking individuals.
Best, Rob
A personal oppinion based on observation
Quote:
Would you be inclined to say that that, having undergone a sometimes difficult apprenticeship so to speak, the Army on the ground has now hit its stride and is at least a full journeyman, if not quite a master, of the COIN trade in Iraq?
I'd rather say we've gotten better at recognizing what needs to be done faster, and have figured out how to do it with less friction - and perhaps without undoing other things that we did not want to in the process. Sorry if that sounds like I'm qualifying it, but I think it deserves more then a yes or no.
Quote:
That, generally speaking, from top to bottom, from private to Petraeus, the Army knows what it wants to do, how to do it, and is slowly but surely defeating the insurgency?
I think in the aggregate of units in Iraq the answer is yes (there is no way to account for evry guy or even every squad or platoon). This is due to MNFI-s leadership in terms of articulating CDR's intent, considering the reports from the lower echelons and making the best decisions it can with regards to campaign goals. I think we've got a much better loop going between units on the ground and those readying for deployment with what is going on in Iraq then we've ever had before. I think if you consider it in terms of AIF, I'd say yes, but if you extend it to the conditions which breed insurgency, make it a viable political recourse for Iraqis - we only have so much say, so much influence and limited resources - so if you extend it along those lines - the only folks who can finally defeat the insurgency are the Iraqis - I think they are starting to want security and stability at more then just one level. This would be a good thing.
I'm not willing to put forward an opinion on the rest of the Army - for various reasons there is still a considerable portion of the Army (in terms of those in Institutional and support positions) that have not deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan yet - until we can afford them that opportunity I don't think we will be at our best. Thee are in many cases valid reasons why these folks have not deployed yet - you can't take for granted all the things that built the Army, prepare it and sustain it - it takes a very large support system.
Quote:
Is it accurate to say that the Army (and Marines) are succeeding in laying, from the bottom-up, a basis for something like an orderly and organized civil society (subject of course to matter beyond the Army's control)?
From what I see and saw, I think we are helping to provide the increased security for that process to take place (along with ISF and tribal allegiances) - but the basis has to be political in some sense - again, Iraqis have to buy into that at various levels. Iraqis have to take it and sustain it.
Quote:
Or is the situation in Iraq still too tenuous or unclear to comfortably make such observations?
I think what has to be noted and accepted is that things change all the time - MNFI saw a success in Al-Anbar and was able to use that as something of a model to engage political buy in in other provinces - there are all kinds of internal and external things that can probably effect that. It could be from Turkey or Iran, it could be internal - If it were an assured thing we would not say we're going to be there for some time to come in some capacity or another.
These are my thoughts on it - but I'd say folks have to make up their own minds on what they see and hear. Overall, I think the folks on the ground have made significant strides forward in Iraq over the last 6 months - I noticed it in early 2007 - some things just take time to work out, and I think by then we were starting to understand things on larger scale.
Best Regards, Rob
The Colonels and 'The Matrix'
The Colonels and 'The Matrix' (SWJ link).
In what is billed as the First in a Series: The Rise of the Counterinsurgents, Spencer Ackerman of Washington Independent profiles the current debate concerning COIN in The Colonels and 'The Matrix'. The 'colonels' are LTC's Gian Gentile and Paul Yingling...
Quote:
... Ultimately, the answer to that question will probably be endlessly debated. But the counterinsurgency community—they call it "COIN"—has perhaps the most organized answer. Counterinsurgency is a much-disputed concept, but it refers to methods of warfare used to divide a civilian population’s political and sentimental allegiance away from a guerrilla force. From the start of the Iraq war, a cadre of warrior-thinkers in the military has questioned the use of tactics that focus more on killing enemies than giving the Iraqi population reasons not to support terrorists, insurgents and militias. "We don’t just talk about the enemy, we talk about the environment," explained Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, until two weeks ago the corps commander in Iraq, in a lecture Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation. Not all of them assert that the early use of a counterinsurgency strategy could have won the war. But most contend, after the decline in violence in Iraq during the last half of 2007, that a counterinsurgency strategy would have allowed the war to have been less deadly than it is.
This small but dedicated group includes, most prominently, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. Other luminaries are Petraeus COIN braintrusters like David Kilcullen, a gregarious former Australian Army officer and State Department adviser; Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who will soon teach military history at the Ohio State University; and Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped craft Petraeus and Mattis’ much-praised Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a seminal text for the COIN community known as FM 3-24.
Less visible but highly influential members—many are lieutenants, captains and enlisted soldiers and Marines who came of age in Iraq and Afghanistan—include Janine Davidson, who works in the Pentagon’s directorate of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict; cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate; Harvard human-rights expert Sarah Sewall (an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign); and Marine Corps University Professor Erin M. Simpson. The Democratic-aligned Center for a New American Security think tank plays host to many emerging counterinsurgency figures, like Colin Kahl, Nate Fick, Roger Carstens, Shawn Brimley, and, starting in the fall, Nagl. During moments of downtime, the community obsessively reads and comments on the Small Wars Journal and Abu Muqawama blogs...
...the next major debate over U.S. defense policy can be gleaned. Yingling speaks for an ascending cadre of young defense intellectuals, most of whom are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who assert that the U.S. military must embrace principles of counterinsurgency if it is to triumph in the multifaceted fight against global terrorism. Gentile, formerly one of those theorist-practitioners, believes the military has already moved too far in the direction of counterinsurgency, which he contends allows analysts to ignore the limits of U.S. military power. Both arguments represent an attempt to answer a searing question: What are the lessons of Iraq?
Charlie at Abu Muqawama has more commentary on The Colonels and 'The Matrix'.
Also see Gian's latest op-ed, Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army's Conventional Capabilities, at World Politics Review.
A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects
A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects - LTC Gian Gentile, World Affairs.
Quote:
The U.S. Army’s new strategy in Iraq—launched in February 2007, along with a surge of 25,000 additional American troops—qualifies neither as particularly new nor even as a strategy. Better to call it, instead, an enhanced reliance on tactics and operational concepts previously in use. Or, put less charitably, an over-hyped shift in emphasis that, on the one hand, will not necessarily yield an American victory in Iraq but, on the other, might well leave the United States Army crippled in future wars.
Properly understood, the surge narrative is really not about Iraq at all. It is about the past and future of the U.S. Army. It resurrects dubious battlefield lessons from the past—Vietnam, principally—applies them to Iraq, and extrapolates from there into an unknown future. On all three counts—past, present, and future—the narrative suffers from numerous and irreparable defects. Its reading of the past, grounded in the cliché that General Creighton Abrams’s “hearts and minds” program “won” the war in Vietnam, is a self-serving fiction. Its version of the more recent past and even the present is contrived and largely fanciful, relying on a distorted version of both to tell a tale in which U.S. forces triumphed in Iraq in 2007 and did so despite the misguided efforts of their predecessors even a year before. More than anything else, the surge narrative stakes a claim on the future, instructing us that its methods of counterinsurgency will be uniquely suited to the next war and to the one after that.
From the surge, its most fervent advocates have extracted a single maxim: that they and only they have uncovered the secret to defeating insurgencies. Prior to the surge, in this telling, only a few exceptional units were engaged in proper counterinsurgent operations...
Much more at the link.
Gian is about to turn into that one
trick pony people go on about.
Having agreed with him that the force is out of balance -- but disagreed on how far and how dangerous that is at this time; having agreed with him that good units in Iraq were doing the right things prior to the surge -- but disagreed on how many were doing it well; having agreed with him that conventional warfare and major combat operations are really the graduate level of war -- but disagreed that COIN is totally unimportant; having agreed, I thought, that we must have a balanced force with some elements able to excel at each of the spectrums of warfare, I've said about all I have to say on the topic (as I hear Gian breathe a sigh of relief... :D ).
I did note his final words in that well written article:
Quote:
More than that, Iraq bids to transform the entire force into a “dead army walking.” We who believe this to be the case may be in error on some counts. Preparing to fight the last war will not be one of them.
Those words cause me to note what I believe is an astounding lack of faith in the Army and to ask; then those who believe that to be the case are preparing for precisely what?
Abrams choice had little or nothing to do with it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
patmc
...
From the article:
"Critics of this decision ought to ask themselves: If Abrams had chosen otherwise, would the ground phase of the 1991 Gulf War have been completed in four days? Would the 2003 drive to Baghdad have been accomplished in three weeks?"
Just some Monday morning quarterbacking, and in no way an insult to any of those Soldiers who fought in the invasion, but would we now trade a longer invasion for a shorter occupation? If Abrams had chosen otherwise, would there have been a plan B for after capturing Baghdad?
Abrams made the logical decision to put the main effort into ability to deter a peer competitor as he should have done. He did not take COIN or FID off the table; that was done later by Donn Starry at TRADOC and affirmed by Bernie Rogers as CofSA. The Army kept some semblance of effort at LIC until John Wickham left the job. Then it got almost totally wiped out by a series of Artillerymen and Tankers with a lot of European experience.
To put the principal effort into Europe post Viet Nam made all the sense in the world. To downplay COIN and FID made sense. That was true in 1972 and it remained true until the late 80s. However, to later eliminate anything to do with LIC, particularly after 1991 was simply wrong. Still, even that and the foolish Weinberger and Powell doctrines -- abrogation of which by both Clinton and Bush 43 prove that DoD cannot influence US Foreign policy to the extent they'd like to believe -- were not the real problem.
The problem that created the lack of planning for the post attack phase was poor training; specifically BCTP. In that training regimen, the war was played by the Generals and Colonels, active on one side and retired on the other and it was good solid and very effective training. However, it had a flaw. After the last big US attack, the victory was won -- then they turned off the computers and the lights and left the room...
The problem in Iraq was no one had trained on what to do so they effectively did nothing for a year and a half. That's been fixed. The even better news is that BCTP has also been fixed in current iterations.
What is worrying is that Eurocentricity still seems to be with us... :rolleyes:
That's not the last war, it was three wars ago... :D
An Alternative title for this piece might have
been Attack of the strawman. I think that even a casual review of posting history on this site reveals that Gian has several deeply entrenched positions on this issue. Nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of us who have similarly strongly held views on a wide range of issues.
The problem I perceive with some of the argument presented is that a false dilemma is being postulated . No one - from Secretary Gates through to Nagl is on record as advocating abandonment of US conventional abilities and the US' obvious superiority in this field. You only have to look at where the rubber hits the road in terms of planned expenditure on capital equipment and systems over the next decades to find further proof of this point. And yet, it only takes one or two (or a dozen...) folks to speculate openly and in an logical fashion about the last five years of 'unconventionality' 'might mean' and the cry goes up that the conventional sky is falling in.
Of course, there is no doubt that that some skills, conventional or otherwise, may have perished through lack of use whilst the US Defense force has been preoccupied with its tasks in Iraq and Afgahnistan. Realistically, that is to be expected. It has happened in every war before these ones and will no doubt happen during the next one as well. This is why we have the Services and Service Chiefs and charge them with 'raise, train and sustain (and reconstitute)' functions. This 'loss' of skills is really only an issue if you do not trust in either the Services or the Service Chief's abilities in this regard - but that is a different argument to the 'be aware of the COIN Bogeyman' one.
Regarding Gian's recycled point (from other posts) that folks prior to the surge were doing COIN as well - I do not detect any real disagreement from anyone who actually is in the 'know' about this point. The point (that has been stated previously) is that it (the COIN practice) was just not necessarily as coherent or effective as what has developed since. Such an observation is neither a personal attack nor a slight on the hard fought and valiant efforts of any serviceman or servicewoman (or unit) pre- surge, it is simply a statement of fact.
The point I will conclude with is that the 'dilemma' that Gian presents is not a zero sum game. National Security planning never has been - it is about the art of balancing finite resources against a world of possibilities and trying to strike an appropriate balance. Picking winners in such a game is never easy - but picking turkeys is - they stand out by a mile. And for my money, either an 'all conventional force' or an 'all COIN force' approach (or variations on similar themes) are both turkeys. Picking a 'winning approach' is not served by creating false dilemmas.