Vietnam collection (lessons plus)

[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.