Some wag once said "Morals are what others want you to do."
Lot of truth in that, morality is very much an individual construct so it seems to me I can comment on my own morality but cannot really do so in regard to others. On another plane, a war may necessary or even for a good purpose but that doesn't change the fact that war is essentially in and of itself immoral and a stupid human endeavor so I'm not sure that any talk of morality in warfare is of much use. All that's just my take...
Allowing for the facts that it's entirely too easy for us to pass judgment on incidents in war even though we know that information flow can be spotty, that reports after the fact are invariably skewed by commission or omission both purposely and inadvertently (and that is particularly true of after action investigations), it really behooves us to be careful in making assessments if we weren't there.
That, however, does not mean that given reasonable and lengthy coverage of an incident one cannot make some judgments; one can and should -- that's how we learn and avoid future mistakes of our own. Thus, it seems to me that his decisions were really bad from a leadership and from a tactical perspective and so I can and do fault him on those grounds. I can also understand RTKs comment and agree based on the fact that after making dumb decisions, Sassaman tries to justify 'em with public whining. No morality involved.
An important book, part 1
This will be two parts, because apparently it is too long for one post
I know, with this posted in the "Social Sciences, Moral and Religious" folder the focus should be on the morality and ethics of Sassaman's decisions. Nevertheless, after reading 2/3 of the book, Sassaman does raise a number of important points - which can't be cast away because he later made a bad decision or b/c he was mean to you once 20 years ago. Like most memoirs, Sassaman's does a fair amount of pinning the blame for what went wrong on other people - his brigade commander COL (now BG) Fred Rudesheim gets the overwhelming majority of it. Nevertheless, we discount what he has to say to our own detriment.
1) It occurs to me from reading this book that one of the biggest hurdles in the counterinsurgency debate is our inability to achieve a common understanding of what we mean when we use key terms. For example, what do we mean by the term “winning hearts and minds?” It’s almost become a throwaway term in the current political environment, to the point where we don’t even realize what we mean when we say it. It is no different with Sassaman. On page three, he argues, “Winning hearts and minds, and that sort of thing…had little or nothing to do with the root of the mission, or at least the mission as I saw it. The real mission was this: secure and stabilize the region.” One hundred pages later, however, on page 104, he lays out his battalion’s “game plan” of sorts:
a) Establish legitimate authority to secure and stabilize the province.
b) Train the local Iraqi community police forces and Iraqi Security Forces through the use of joint US-Iraqi patrols
c) Form credible Iraqi institutions of security, politics, economics, law, education, religion and speech
d) Transfer security and institutions to the total control of the Iraqis
While discussing the third step, Sassaman writes of the work of his battalion in building and rebuilding hospitals, fire stations, police stations, schools, electrical power distribution systems, roads, bridges, recreation areas and mosques. He criticizes the administration, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon, the CPA, etc. for not adequately planning and resourcing this critical phase of the war. He argues, “If we had been serious about winning this war and taking care of Iraq, we would have put the resources in place to rapidly develop and rebuild this war-torn nation…It’s just not acceptable in the twenty-first century to invade other nations on the premise of eliminating a dictator without first demonstrating a commitment to putting the nation back on its feet.”
If this isn't a desire to “win hearts and minds,” then what is? Furthermore, isn’t the simple act of being able to provide security and stability for a region “winning hearts and minds” in itself? As Bing West noted, during the recent political and military gains in Anbar, “The tribes chose to align with our soldiers because, as one sheik told me, ‘Marines are the strongest tribe.’” But it is interesting to note the examples Sassaman provides that he considered misguided attempts at winning hearts and minds: “It’s…sobering to have one of your men lose a foot to an improvised explosive device because, again, your senior commander decided that driving down the middle of the road backed up traffic for the Iraqis.”
He raises an interesting point here, and one I think is a major part of our problem, not only in creating the divides in the counterinsurgency debate, but with our national strategic communication plan as well. All too often we’ve decided that we’re going to become popular among Iraqis – or Arab society in general – for things like not causing a traffic jam. Another example is how we as a polity have fretted over the last seven years about the use of the phrase “War on Terror.” The phrase has gone through a number of iterations, including just this week when a high-level official suggested that we ban the phrase so as not to offend. Another example is the recent suggestion that we end the use of the term “jihadists” for Islamic extremists because it may offend moderates and cause them to join the extremists.
When initiatives like this get so much play in the news as examples of our attempts to “win hearts and minds,” it’s no surprise that some people then view the “winning hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency with incredulity. I would argue that it is safe to say that an Iraqi who was not already hostile to our presence is unlikely to join an extremist group simply because the Americans caused a traffic jam. If this were ever to happen, you would have to wonder if that person wasn’t already looking for any excuse to join the insurgents. Likewise, it seems unlikely to me that calling extremists “extremists” is then going to offend moderates so much that they would then actually join those extremists.
Don’t get me wrong – strategic communication is important – and an area in which there is vast room for improvement. But an effective strategic communication plan is not built top-down with silly initiatives like those mentioned above. They waste time, effort, manpower and resources. When we say we want to “win hearts and minds,” what we should mean are all of those projects Sassaman attempted to initiate in Salah-ad-Din – and others have tried to implement elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. They need to start at the local level where the locals can see commitment put to action. It’s important to note that for all the time we’ve spent trying not to offend Muslims, they’ve had little to no effect on opinion of the United States in the Arab world. Instead, Muslim opinion of the US and the US military skyrocketed in 2004-2005 following the tsunami in Indonesia and in 2005 following the earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir – when the military and other organizations were on the ground engaged in full-scale rescue and relief operations.
Another example Sassaman gives as to why he thought "winning hearts and minds" was bunk was the 2003 Ramadan ceasefire, and the decision that the US would stop patrolling cities in Iraq, limit patrols to the city outskirts and primary travel routes and halt all offensive operations. As he tells it, "this was a spectacularly disastrous military policy decision - the only way to defeat an insurgency is to live in the city...not only did you lose control, but you also lost the pulse of the overall situation" where the cells were operating, which cities seemed to present the most danger, and what individual targets to attack next...without access to the intelligence gleaned through routine patrols, we had no way of knowing what the enemy was planning." Sassaman also notes that this ceasefire was based on the ever-present (and still present) fantasy that we could turn over control of the counterinsurgency to the Iraqis. In other words, some misguided attempt from Washington, or from the generals, to "win hearts and minds" directly contributed to our inability to conduct sound COIN operations. And if I were to ask just how many hearts and minds we won with the Ramadan cease-fire, what would the answer be?
An important book, part 2
(Cont'd)
2) Sassaman talks about the lack of any coordination between security and reconstruction. The instructions came down to "spend money," but there was no effort to coordinate the work between the civil affairs and combat battalions. Money was given to local officials in league with the insurgents, thereby circumventing any attempt by the combat battalions to use money as a carrot for reining in the insurgents.
This was reminiscent of the Philippines, 1899-1902. In his book on that war, Brian Linn explains how the initial strategy in the First District, Department of Northern Luzon was, like in Iraq, to "spend money." After a while, however,they discovered that the civil governments were actually controlled by the insurgents, and that the money was supporting the insurgency. Only after months of subsidizing the insurgency did the Army realize security had to be established first, and that money would have to be used as a carrot to get the civic officials to take responsibility for the actions of their townspeople.
Sassaman argues that in Iraq, we were never serious about security. He repeatedly details how his brigade commander told him that if he never patrolled, his men would not get killed or injured, and would all be able to go home at the end of their tour. This argument, which Sassaman found widely prevalent in Salah ad-Din province, was based on the two arguments that we could win the support of the Iraqis by throwing money at problems, and that we could quickly turn responsibility for the whole mess over to Iraqi security forces/police. As in the Philippines, not only was the money often going right into insurgent coffers - or at least convincing local officials that we weren't really serious about cracking down on support for the insurgents and would send in piles of money either way - but our plan to turn over control of the counterinsurgency to the Iraqis proved to be a disaster too.
Even though this was part of Sassaman's 4 point strategy that I outlined above, the detail of his experience concedes that it was a failure, (even if he doesn't admit as much). He argues, "The vast majority of the police were dishonest, imcompetent and undisciplined...even with our supervision, the Iraqi police situation improved only modestly, and changes came in fits and starts." He continues, "Over the course of a year, we ultimately replaced the entire police force, but the transformation came at a high cost. It was simply too vast a problem for us to train, educate and motivate new Iraqi police officers while fighting an insurgency amid a simultaneous rebuilding effort. The Iraqi police problem will exist until at least the next generation because the majority of law enforcement officers are motivated by selfishness, greed and fear rather than public service." The ISF, he continues, "suffers from sectarian divisions." He goes on to talk about the bond that was established between those from the ISF and the American soldiers, but has nothing to say about the efficacy of the ISF. Full transfer of security to the Iraqis, he argues, could take twenty-five years or more.
A major theme I've noticed during the book is how what he says and his experience detailed in the book don't always logically coincide. The confusion over what is meant by "hearts and minds" is one example. His detailed account of the failure of our strategy to turn over control of the counterinsurgency to the Iraqis, yet his claim that such a strategy is necessary to win, is another. Another example is his claim that, above all else, he wanted to show the Iraqis that “we could provide for their security against outside raiding parties.” Some of the ways in which he tried to demonstrate this, however, don’t really seem relevant – and could arguably have increased hostility against the American forces. For example, when teenage boys gave American soldiers the finger, they would be arrested and held until their parents came to get them out of jail. It is unclear, to me at least, how this contributes to the perception that the Americans could protect the people from the insurgents.
In other words, it seems that where Sassaman is due for criticism, his actions directly contradicted the the counterinsurgency strategy he and his men had laid out for the battalion – or at least the strategy he now says they laid out for the battalion. Of course, theoretical constructs don't always translate cleanly into action on the battlefield. Nevertheless, it is ironic that the theory Sassaman puts forth in the book probably wouldn’t meet with all that much opposition. His own accounts of the battles he fought, and the tactical and operational decisions he made, however, do not always seem to adhere to the strategy. That seemed, to me in reading the book at least, to be his biggest undoing.
More interesting points...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
datroy
...The argument that it is counterproductive to wed ourselves to the idea that only indigenous forces can conduct COIN - and if they don't exist, by god we'll create them out of thin air so we can hand over control to them - is not discounted because Sassaman disgraced himself.
Does this mean that you believe indigenous forces are not necessary?
Quote:
Finally, the argument that we were slow to combat the growing insurgency (or even admitting it was an insurgency) in 2003-2004, in part b/c we figured there was little that Americans could do about it, and we had to wait until the Iraqis were ready to fight it themselves, is still relevant, even if Sassaman is a POS.
Does this contradict the implication in the statement I quoted at the top of this post?
Quote:
There have been great strides made in COIN theory and practice since the early days of this war, but there still remains a great deal of conventional wisdom that often goes unchallenged.
One presumes you have some basis and possibly some examples for that comment? What, specifically, do you have in mind?
Might I also suggest that there have been virtually no strides in COIN theory in the last six years; admittedly the practice has changed but only by adapting and using principles that pre date our entry into Iraq and that were not followed initially not because they weren't known but due to the fact the Army as a deliberate policy choice had purposely ignored those principles in doctrine and training for almost 30 years.
Again, let me suggest -- as RTK also did -- you go [urll=http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showpost.php?p=48798&postcount=624] here (LINK)[/url] and introduce yourself.
It's easy to pick on someone in cyberspace
Quote:
I don't need two posts to say this: Nathan Sassaman is a professional embarrassment to the officer community and the United States Army because he advocated the murder of the very people he was tasked to secure.
This is my third try at a post, and hopefully my least emotional. Thank goodness for delete keys.
I knew Nate Sassaman, and was in his battalion, although not during the deployment.
He has been unfairly characterized. His quotes, as he conveyed them, have been manipulated by those who opposed the war to portray a man who was full of hatred for Iraqi's, and from there generalize to all soldiers, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was unwittingly complicit in this, aided by his sense of the dramatic (he liked to talk in absolutes), and his personal story. (The quarterback who went on to be the warrior, etc.)
He is probably the most quoted and filmed battalion commander of the whole war, and that bears remembering when passing judgement on the whole battalion. If we filmed any battalion as much as that one, and then parsed it down to a few clips I bet we could make them all out to be a bunch of hate mongers, too. Nate had great relationships with the majority of the Iraqi's he worked with. With a few notable exeptions, when we returned to the same AO a year and a half later, all the leadership asked after him, and some were even writing him in the States. What no report I have ever seen mentions is that in the City of Balad there is a monument that the Iraqi's built to him and his battalion. Another thing no report mentions is that the Samarra incident occured in an out of sector mission, where his relationships with the locals and many of the factors of COIN were not in play. Basically, Sassaman's battalion was called in to help another battalion who had been kicked out of Samarra by the insurgency, and the city was almost completely uncontrolled.
I haven't read his memoirs yet. Time does not permit, and I have already heard the story from his perspective anyway. However, he understood the way that Iraqi's worked better than anyone I knew. He read voraciously about the Middle East, with a fondness for Thomas Friedman. Moreover, as was stated earlier, war is a fundamentally stupid, and basically immoral action, even when waged for a greater higher purpose, and Nate understood that. He tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone. Indeed, his 'crime' was that he was trying to mitigate the effects of a poor decision on the part of Jack Saville. (Also worth noting, even in Iraq it was widely believed, but especially by Nate and his staff, that neither of the two men died. Also, at the time 'alternate deterence' was preferable to detention in enforcing curfew. So that from Nate's perspective he wasn't covering a crime, he was just trying to keep Jack from being punished for overzealous, and frankly poor, implementation of a division policy.) He equally tried to mitigate the effects on the Iraqi's by instituting expansive reconstruction projects, and, frankly establishing security as quickly as possible. He believed firmly in short term pain for long term gain, which in retrospect, was the right thing to do.
It is popular to read accounts from NYT Magazine and pass judgement. But much as they would like to believe to the contrary NYT is not a reliable, nor neutral arbiter, much less the magazine. Also, knowing the players as I do, I read the account, and percieve it totally differently. The words of friends ring true, and carry different meaning to me, I guess.
My last word is this: Don't hasten to judge. Many have been unfairly tried in the court of public opinion only to be acquited by the halls of justice. If a full and true accounting is ever to be given (which is unlikely) I have no doubt that Nate Sassaman will be remembered not as a villain, but as a tragic figure who overestimated his own abilities and was caught in the machine of war. Not all of the casualties are physical.
I have just read Abu Muquwama's review (I know I should have read it first), and I have to add this bit: It seems that Nate has become a bit more strident in his views. I don't know that I would agree with him. Nevertheless, I agree with Abu Muquwama that this is a tone that one saw a great deal from officers in post-Vietnam, and more so (though less current) in post-U.S. Civil War and Gemany post-WWI. I hope that he hasn't personally engaged on the slide that destroyed Johnstons life.
Agree in part, dissent in part.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Shek
I think most folks are fully willing to underwrite mistakes, provided that the person learns from them. However, I think there are two reasons that people don't have much empathy for his actions. First, it involves a moral-ethical choice, not a tactical choice. After 19 years in the Army, one should have inculcated and fully understood the values of the Army - if that's not enough time, then there shouldn't be a place for you in the Army. Secondly, LTC Sassaman appears not to have learned from the mistake - while he accepts responsibility, he appears unapologetic about the decision, even stating at one point in his memoirs that if he had known that there was an ongoing criminal investigation that his actions to cover up the incident would have been different.
That's not the statement of someone doing the right thing, essentially, "if I had known that I couldn't have covered it up, I wouldn't have tried."
You can contrast this behavior to LTC West...
First, I understand the part about his different actions in the part of the coverup to mean that he wouldn't have covered anything up if he thought there was an investigation (i.e. it would have been a crime). I really like the example of LTC West, because I think he owned his mistakes better than anyone else. I also agree that Nate doesn't seem to view his actions as a mistake. I am forced to wonder, though, how much of that is because he is untrainable, and how much of it is because the die is cast.
Nate is not alone in deriving much of his self esteem and personal image from his service in the army, but that is all gone. Not only can he not take back what happened, he only got one shot. He has no chance to redeem himself from the past. His only chance to maintain that self image is to justify his position in the past. As mentioned before we saw a lot of this following WWI, Vietnam, and the Civil War. I think specifically of LTG Johnston, and how he spent the majority of the remainder of his life after the Civil War trying to convince everyone that Lee was a fool who lost Gettysburg.
I realize that debating over tactics is different fundamentally from ethical concerns from a normative perspective, but it is not from a psycological one. Something I often say is that self-awareness is rare. Few people who look around themselves and dislike their situation are willing to admit that wittingly or not, their situation is largely a product of their own choices. The hardass in me wants to say that is tough, and come down on them just the same. But I am self aware enough to know that I too require a little bit of denial to get through the day.
Again, and as a final word, the only way that Nate will ever end up in the 22-100 is as an example of what not to do, or perhaps how a career can go tragically awry. Even that I doubt, given the far more spectacular examples of just that which have arisen throughout the course of this war. I am not even so sure that Nate is the exception, or that he didn't acclimatize perfectly to the military culture has produced given the constant revelations of abuse of detainees. That said, we should always elevate our goals a little, so that we always strive to be better. All I am asking is to cut the guy a little slack, and let him be the tragedy that he so obviously is.
