Sassaman Interview

[AlexJohnson]

I heard an interview with LTC Nathan Sassaman on NPR (you can hear the interview here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=90950478 it is about 9 minutes in) about his new book. He seemed completely unapologetic and justified his decision to cover up the actions of his subordinates by saying that the environment was very stressful environment and he was forced to make very difficult decisions. He seems to also blame a zero defects culture in the Army. But his main defense in terms of the cover up of the bridge incident is that he did not believe that their actions were criminal and he believed it was his responsibility to protect his men.
All of these arguments seem like cop-outs to me. Yes, being a battalion commander in Iraq is a very stressful job, but if you do not want to be responsible for your actions in that environment, don't become a battalion commander. I'm sure LTC Sassaman knew going into the job that it would be stressful and he would be forced to make tough decisions and so this is not a defense. He is right in saying that it is unrealistic to expect no mistakes to be made. Tactical, technical, and strategic mistakes are an inevitable part of war, but moral mistakes are inexcusable. And covering up morally wrong actions is not part of protecting subordinates.
I am curious to hear other people's thoughts on the interview. I would also be very interested to hear from anyone who reads the book: http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-King-B...2342833&sr=8-1.

[RTK]

Thanks for the post, Please introduce yourself here and fill out your profile.

Abu Muqawama had a good review on the book the other day.

I know quite a few people who were in his BN and BDE. I know quite a few from 1-66AR. None have anything good to say about him.

Once upon a time CPT Nate Sassaman was the representative for my area for West Point while I was being recruited for soccer. He was the one that told me I wasn't good enough for West Point because, after all, "West Point is, has been, and always will be a football school."

That year was their last winning season. I though he was an @sshole when I was a senior in high school, and I don't feel any different 13 years later.

[Ken White]

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.

[datroy]

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?

[datroy]

(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.

[Ken White]

Why not go here (LINK)and tell us a little about yourself. You can scroll up to get a feel for what others have said.

For your consideration, I'd submit that Sassaman's experiences relate to one point in time under one Brigade Commander. There have been dozens of Brigade Commanders there in the six iterations of OIF. Each of those iterations has differed markedly from the others for a number of reasons. Those facts are just offered as a generic thought and have no bearing on your comment which pertain to Sassaman and his point in time.

[RTK]

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... Nevertheless, we discount what he has to say to our own detriment.

Your snide comment didn't go unnoticed. Your inability and failure to introduce yourself in the proper place despite a 1000 word post didn't either. You've had 6 months. Good time to get to it.

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.

As for the rest of your post, Sassaman writes of 2003 issues with the hindsight of 2008. Ask Nate Sassaman what he did to get the resources he felt he needed to conduct his third key task. If BG Rudesheim was CMO centric, wouldn't that have been easy? In his book he talks about the importance of COPs and living among the people.

I know the NCOs and Officers in question in that incident. I know 1-8 IN very well - I OC'd that unit. I was stationed at Carson for 6 years while 1-8IN was in the same footprint. I'll tell you this: I had access to the 1-8 IN AAR after their deployment - it said nothing about anything he talks about in his book as being vital. All it talked about was kinetics and the importance of kicking people in the teeth.

As for his criticism of 1-66AR, I got this from a close friend of mine who was a commander in that unit. "Sassaman continually demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of counterinsurgency operations, in fact demonstrating in the process that he was a part of the problem as opposed to the solution in the early part of the conflict. He encouraged wonton violence by his soldiers, that was completely unfocused in any way. While some of his criticisms may be accurate or well placed (i.e. BN CDR's not being aggressive enough, or going out with the units on mission), his underlying premise that we "failed" is dead wrong, because the forces allocated to the tasks were wrong. We had two tank companies plus two infantry platoons for a city of 180K. How would the good LTC suggest we go about conducting COIN ops with two heavy companies and 10 M114's between them??"

My opinion of him as a man and officer has less to do with what he said to me long ago than it has to do with the Army values, ethics, morals, and a commander's responsibility to do what is right, all of the time, even when no one (or everyone) is looking. He didn't tell the truth until his own ass was on the line. Additionally he believed that there were acceptable levels of collateral damage.

I have my students read "Fall of the Warrior King" from the New York Times in 2005. and tell me whether he did the right thing or not. 99.9% of brand new LTs I've tasked with this over a 19 month period believe Nate Sassaman should be incarcerated right now. The only one who though Sassaman did the right thing got chaptered for an unrelated personality disorder.

He's an unethical POS. Sassaman got off easy and should be in jail, right next to Jack Saville.

[datroy]

RTK - my point was, and is, that whether you liked Sassaman as a person or not doesn't matter. Whether he was a nice guy or not is irrelevant. And yes - maybe his actions on that night in question (and subsequently) disgraced the Army. I'm not trying to restore Sassaman's reputation. I'm not trying to be buddies with him. I've never in my life met the man, and never expect to. I make no apologies for what he did. Read the last two paragraphs of what I wrote and you'll see that I agree with you that what he writes now in 2008 is not necessarily what he followed in 2003. And read the first paragraph of what I wrote and you'll see that I am fully aware that the point of memoirs are to blame everyone else for what happened.

Here's my point though - what he writes in 2008 might, in and of itself, have some value - not because it exculpates Sassaman, but because it is a reasonable analysis of what we've done wrong in Iraq. The fact that there have been some incredibly silly - and unproductive - attempts to "win hearts and minds" handed down by senior officers and policymakers at the expense of conducting sound COIN operations is in no way Sassaman-specific. The fact that we stunk at coordinating the real "hearts and minds" operations - again, oftentimes at the expense of sound COIN efforts is not something only Sassaman encountered. 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. 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.

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. If you can get past personal experiences with Sassaman (of which I have none, and therefore cannot comment) then there is a great deal of valuable insight in this book - even if it is written with 2008 hindsight and was the complete opposite of everything Sassaman did while in Iraq.

[Abu Suleyman]

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.

[michiganvic]

Sassaman was a GREAT leader and was trying to protect us and I admire him for it. However Major Gwinner was his weak link who was a terrible leader and he should have went to prison for all the misdeeds he did while serving. Maybe you can classify his statements as cover ups, but protecting his soldiers is what he did. PERIOD. Absolutely the greatest officer I have ever had the honor of serving under. He kept our morale up and let us know he was there for us and would be the first one to enter and the last one out.