Thoughts on a possible "surge" in Iraq

[jcustis]

We need to develop and articulate the end state at the same time that the deploy orders are drafted. The IO campaign on this needed to start yesterday, and it needs to be the Iraqi government’s message as much as it may be ours.

The short-term end state has to be establishing security for the common man. A hat tip to the old hands at the SWC who made the light bulb go on in my brain housing group with regard to this point, and one to Jedburgh for being spot on with every post he's made regarding security. It goes beyond securing the pipelines and oilfields, LOCs and governance centers, and finding caches and VBIED factories. We have to ensure that the child walking to her newly refurbished school can do so in the same relative safety that we want a potential police recruit to have when he queues up at the recruiting center. Operationally, we have spent considerable time conducting operations aimed at setting conditions for elections, secure movement along LOCs, and the development of the Iraqi Security Forces. I’ve been part of many such operations, but it was always a balancing act that left little time for the business of securing the population, and thus denying the insurgent his support.

The long-term end state has to be a sustainable form of government for the Iraqi people as a whole. We thrust the National Assembly, Interim and Transitional Governments, and a Constitution on the country, but if it cannot hold for the next 5 or 10 years because the common man would prefer a Federal construct that is actually rooted within the tribe, other alternatives need to be put on the table now and seriously discussed before we commit even one more brigade. An increase that isn’t tied to an estimate of success in halting a creeping civil war will only mean that we are sending more troops into the meat grinder. I will get it out now and say that I feel only a partitioned Iraq can be sustained over the long haul. I throw out the caveat, however, that all parties need to be in on the deal, because if we decide to go the route of supporting a unified Iraq with strong central government, the lid will be blown off anyway within a few months of our departure. Yugoslavia endured a slow path to break-up and we can see the tea leaves from a simple glance at the wikipedia article. I have yet to see any incentive for the Kurdish north to stay the current course after we have left. I don’t want to have to return to Iraq at the behest of a government that is besieged from three sides, each trying to pull away.

At the risk of cutting against the grain and lopping my head off in the process, much has been made of the push-back from senior commanders about increased troop levels, but have the powers-that-be asked what the battalion and regimental commanders think? Can we be a little honest with ourselves, and email out links to an anonymous poll that every ground combat commander can respond to? I think that the gulf between the senior leadership and guys leaving the wire every day would be enormous. If we are staring at metrics and saying that the force levels around Al Qaim are fine, because there have only been one or two attacks in the past three months, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad guys there who need to be killed or captured. It may simply mean that they are a latent threat, somewhere at the beginning of their attack cycle, or surreptitiously supporting insurgent efforts in the next couple of towns over. We can worry about over-stretched forces after this in done, or else we’ll worsen the long war we are in by several orders of magnitude. Anyone want two-year deployments down the road? I’m hopeful it doesn’t come to that, but we have to tighten the belt for the here and now, or step back and step out.

With a clearly articulated end state in hand, our force laydown cannot be another round of ¼ boots on the ground and ¾ Fobbits. Better to surge every CAG and SF resource as part of the increase, and flesh out CAP initiatives that may have gathered dust the past three years. I’ve slowly become convinced that we cannot win victory FOR THE IRAQI PEOPLE without living among them. To borrow from slapout9, we need to find out where the insurgents are sleeping, and whom they are sleeping with. We cannot do that unless our Iraqi partners and we are out on the streets everyday and every night, and are tapped into the sheiks, clergy, and the guys who sell cigarettes by the side of the road or gas from the trunk of their Caprices. We are already on this path, and have done it for a while, but every large-scale operation or raid takes troops off the task of engaging the population. Perhaps elements of the increased force structure need to be assigned these “high-intensity COIN” tasks, and moved throughout the AOs as required, with the sole focus of applying offensive power when required. Keep them out of the mission of maintaining eyes on the population, and allow the resident forces (working with CAG and SOF elements) to handle that piece with the ISF. The challenge is ensuring that these types of operations don’t become silly turf wars between the commander who knows the ground, and a direct action-type force that comes and goes as required. Integration is not difficult, it just requires imagination and the appropriate level of unity of command. We either move forward this way, or stop emasculating rotational units by carving out the panoply of training/transition teams from the battalions about to enter the breach. That will return critical combat power and leadership to the tip of the spear.

We also need to square away our reconstruction efforts. Small or big project, well or hydro-electric generator, we have got to get the supporting establishment of development agencies in our backfield. Bring law enforcement as well. I’m not talking about CIVPOL trainers, but detectives put on sabbatical and aligned with every battalion commander as his law enforcement advisor. That American advisor needs to have an Iraqi counterpart bunking next to him. The two of them need to get outside the wire, see the ground, and help the intel guys discern the pattern and linkages between the network of smugglers, hijackers and financiers who have allowed the insurgency to remain at a high simmer for the past two years, as well as the local law enforcement folks who may be contributing to the problem. Since terrorist/insurgent action is fueled by crime, we need to obtain and maintain a grasp of the methods of operation we face and focus our interdiction as is appropriate. Will we ever stop it? Saddam couldn’t, and it’s doubtful that we could do more than disrupt the deeper covert activities, but one less trunk of explosives means one less IED.

Although we are stuck with the thorn that is known as Al-Sadr, seeking to neutralize the Mahdi Army or placing Sadr in custody is a recipe for internecine conflict and backlash that would leave us dazed and confused. The time to deal with him with a hammer slipped past us three years ago, and he has become akin to an old thorn we all know too well, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The entire nature of the collective mission in Somalia changed when we decided to put a bounty on his head, and things came to an ignominious end. It doesn’t matter that Al-Sadr doesn't have the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart. It matters that he has become the Robin Hood for a lot of the Shi’a, and the quasi-protector of Sadr City. For those who have patrolled or driven through that neighborhood, they can understand why he holds so much sway. Applying the military might of any additional troops against him will bring us back to the game of whack-a-mole, except it will be in areas south of Baghdad that have enjoyed relative calm. We need to find bigger and sweeter tasting carrots.

A May 2006 DoD report titled "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq", came out concurrent with an American Forces Press Service article where a senior officer on the Joint staff said Saddam Hussein regime loyalists "are becoming a largely irrelevant entity," and that the biggest threats remaining were terrorists and foreign fighters. I’m curious where the statistics come from and often wonder if we really know what type of bad guy we are fighting. Terrorist? Militia thug? Simple criminals brokering IEDs for fast dinars? The Iraq Study Group report clearly states on pg 6 that the violence is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency…C’mon gang, which is it? Oh wait a minute, a couple of years ago, there wasn’t an insurgency right? It was just a handful of Al Qaeda elements and foreign fighters…

Whichever model we borrow from, whether it be Rhodesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, or the Indian Wars, we have got to find a way to empower the Iraqi man on the street to be the renewable resource that defeats the forces trying to rip Iraq apart and boot us out in the process. The catch is that we have to do this under the umbrella of dual-tracking discussions with regional powers and the leadership of the insurgent groups, because they also hold some of the keys to long-term stability. Even if we only sit them down to say, “We need you to restrain yourselves or else you’ll get a Tomahawk” we should use the venue to gauge motives and intentions. They’ll be there long after we are gone.

To borrow a phrase I saw elsewhere, we may have all the guns, but they have all the time.