The Conventional, SOF Debate in OIF.

[SSG Rock]

I have been involved in several debates concerning OIF. The latest involved a retired SF Captain (USAR) who is of the opinion that we could have conducted the war in Iraq, from phase 1 forward with fewer troops. He seems to be of the opinion that conventional forces get in the way of the special forces in this kind of war. When I point out the obvious to him, he pulls rank on me and states, what would an NCO know about campaign planning? I'm no campaign planner, but I'm not stupid either and I have had the good fortune to work with people who are experts in campaign planning and well versed in special forces too. Allow me to paste his comments from another discussion board here and please, do comment.

"Through the seizure of Baghdad and for a month or two following that? Mostly yes (except for introducing the entire 5th SFG into the landscape). Beyond that? Nope. As mentioned, I would have introduced the 5th SFG into the AO and they would have stayed there. Working with locals, building Iraqi defense forces, snapping up terrorists and Hussein cronies.. not through overwelming presence, but smarts, guile and working with the locals. I would have reduced conventional forces to two or three Brigades (UAs as rapidly as possible). One from the 101st with lots of helo capability, one a Stryker Brigade with a heavy battalion along. There job would be to be a reaction force to bring the hammer if the SOF assets or Iraqi forces needed assistance. CA and Psyop battalions also deployed. Air assets in Kuwait and Qatar. No non-helo assets permanently in Iraq until their security forces are sufficient to defend those assets.

Now, what the heck do I know. I'm trained to run UW, I know what it takes to do it effectively, and what it takes to stop it. And it isn't a lot of troops that are needed to stop it. It's getting the fish to deny the sea."


Granted that UW is the bread and butter of SF, but this war is too big for SF to tackle alone isn't it? With the luxury of hindsight, it seems to me that had we deployed more troops in the outset commanders would have been able to control key terrain and built up areas rather than fighting through or bypassing them. My epiphany came the evening I turned on the TV and saw the looting in Baghdad. Thousands of giddy Iraqis in an orgy of pillaging and looting, skittering back and forth in right before the eyes of seemingly overwhelmed and bewilderd Soldiers. As an NCO, I know what a confused Soldier looks like and our troops appeared to me to look like Soldiers who realized there was something wrong with this picture, but lacked guidance. Perhaps they were told to do nothing? In a press conference when asked about the looting I saw Mr. Rumsfeld shrug his shoulders when asked about the looting. I think that was the day we began to lose the initiative and we experienced quite a free fall there for awhile. I feel that we are winning the war, but I can't help but wonder if we could not have done it smarter. Would more conventional troops have been a good thing or not?

Your comments?

[jcustis]

QUOTE: One from the 101st with lots of helo capability, one a Stryker Brigade with a heavy battalion along. There job would be to be a reaction force to bring the hammer if the SOF assets or Iraqi forces needed assistance.

It seems he may be thinking the the Afghanistan model would have transplanted equally to the Iraq area of operations. We will never know for sure, but I tend to agree with some of the smart folks who have asserted that the fabric of Afghani society made for good SF operations, but Iraq was/is a completely different proposition.

I do agree that more agile forces should have been employed, but the requirement to gain and hold key terrain required a certain footprint. A handful of brigades does not meet that requirement. The quote also leads me to believe that he never set foot in the nasty expanse that is western Al-Anbar Province.

[SSG Rock]

I don't know for certain. But this person currently lives in Thailand and since he seems hesitant to discuss his personal experiences I have deduced that he was on active duty last from the 1980-84 time frame and that his operational experience was predominently in Central America. I do not beleive that he has ever been to Southwest Asia.

[jcustis]

Then I would have to respectfully have to say that he doesn't know what he is talking about, regardless of whether he was trained to run UW.

[SSG Rock]

There does come a point when you have to cut bait. But I'd sure like to some good points in before I abandon the discussion.

[jcustis]

A couple of points I'll throw out:

1. SF forces are great for developing the capablities of an indigenous military force, and that comes at the point of picking sides. What sides would have been chosed had internecine fighting broken out immediately between the Shi'a, Sunnah, and Kurds. Three brigades would have been hard pressed, and it takes like a division (-) to manage Baghdad alone right now?

2. Could we have sustained the employment of SF forces for the almost three years we have been in Iraq, taking into consideration the demands in Afghanistan? It's a simple matter of looking at troops to task. I don't know the composition of 5th Group, but we are not talking about an inexhaustible supply of teams to continue engagement with the populace for an indefinite period of time. At some point the big green machine, as cumbersome as it may be, has to assume some of the responsibilities inherent in re-building a country. SF simply can not do it alone, in my opinion.

3. An SF element went into the town of Ar-Rutbah near the Syrian/Jordan border and executed probably a classic mission to make contacts, organize local governance and basic services, but it was before the insurgency built up its steam. By the time my unit arrived (two rotations after the 82nd Airborne) the town had slid into a nest of low-level insurgents who would kill the mayor just as easily as they would have killed a Marine. Without a sustainable Iraqi Security Force structure (which by the way DID GO AWAY once Saddam fled), I think it's highly improbable that any number of SF personnel could have maintained security for long. If your discussion partner had his way, the result may have been a hodgepodge of reaction forces tied down everywhere, and getting absolutely nothing accomplished.

[SSG Rock]

Thank you for taking the time to offer some comments.

Some of the points that I have used in the discussion thus far, and please correct me if I say anything that makes no sense.

1. A fundemental tenant of invading a country to change its form of government seems to me to be the ability to control terrain. In my view, we didn't have enough troops to occupy any of the towns in the run up country. The mission was to get to Baghdad, our troops did that in stunning fashion and broke just about every record in military history. But in hindsight, had we been able to control the towns would we not have limited the insurgents freedom of movement, at least, made it hazordous to his health?

2. Yes, the Iraqis must pick up the mission of providing for their own defense, but if we had deployed more troops at the outset, we could have provided more effective security, allowing SOF the luxury of conducting more classic SOF tasks like training the natives, snatch and grab ops, etc, while the conventional forces picked up tasks like patrolling, providing security, rebuilding infastructure, advising local governments etc? With more conventional troops to provide security, SASO would have been somewhat easier?

3. The mission in Iraq is simply too big for SOF to handle alone. The deployment of more conventional forces does not amount to offering the insurgents more targets. These are Soldiers we are talking about, with the capability of protecting themselves, indeed conducting offensive operations if necessary.

4. The transformation effort currently underway, began under the guidance of General Shinsecki, not Mr. Rumsfeld.

5. This transformation plan in my opinion is the most audacious the modern Army has undertaken. My opponent, no fan of General Shinsecki, says no this is not true. He claims that more audacious transformations include, the change for a corps to division based force and the transformation from a draft to volunteer force. I don't think the two issues he mentioned even qualify as official Army transformation efforts.

[jcustis]

This transformation plan in my opinion is the most audacious the modern Army has undertaken. My opponent, no fan of General Shinsecki, says no this is not true. He claims that more audacious transformations include, the change for a corps to division based force and the transformation from a draft to volunteer force. I don't think the two issues he mentioned even qualify as official Army transformation efforts.

Concur wholeheartedly...

[SSG Rock]

Seems to me that part of the recipe for accomplishing the mission in Iraq is doing something we have been unable to do effectively and that is to integrate conventional, SF units. Clearly, there is a huge difference in missions, capabilities and "mindset"

The question that I am pondering is what is an effective role for conventional forces in a UW environment such as Iraq?

[jcustis]

Conventional forces are in an effective role right now...we're still learning and adapting to be more fluid and properly task oriented, but on the whole, are getting along pretty well.

When you look at the successive number of times we have gone into a certain area and conducted cordons/cache sweeps, it's a function of not having enough footprint. Until the IA can manage the will to get out there and do those ops on their own (consistently), conventional forces are required. Sure, there are a wide range of TTPs that can be improved upon and adjusted as the enemy adjusts theirs, but I think we are doing just fine at the tactical level (company and platoon). Effectively synthesizing CA, IO, and PSYOP non-kinetic fires into our operations is where the most improvement is needed, I think. Doing so also requires synchronization of the appropriate funds, DoS/Iraqi governance actions so we are working the right project to maximize the effects of the money spent. To some degree, the massive FOBs and attendant contractor support may be drawing resources to the wrong place.

[Jones_RE]

Perhaps the best role for our unconventional forces in this conflict is advising and training ourconventional forces as well as the Iraqis.

We had a situation where soldiers and officers don't or didn't know the rules of this kind of fight, had no knowledge of local customs and little understanding of the kinds of missions they had to undertake.

I recall reading once about an army SOF team in Vietnam: 12 Americans leading and training some 600 local soldiers. By custom, an "A" detachment is headed by a full captain - a guy with enough rank and experience that a battalion commander would probably listen to him, especially when there was no other guidance as to what to do. The remaining sergeants could easily parcel themselves out to company and even platoon level and put the unit straight pretty quickly.

The counter argument to this integration is that we're wasting SOF's limited resources on a mission that the conventional guys should already have figured out. Also, SOF had missions considered extremely important at the time - nabbing high level regime figures and securing potential nuclear/chemical/biological materials.

[zenpundit]

If a civilian may interject a comment into this very interesting intra-mil discussion.

It may be the case that Special forces, the Peshmerga and EBO attacks alone could have brought down Saddam's regime. Given the speed with which Iraq's regular military forces disintegrated it seems the argument is technically plausible, at least in the sense of using fewest troops possible.

BUT...

This kind of a plan would have to be approved at the very highest civilian levels who would lack the after-the-fact information about Iraq that the Rock's debating partner presumes. Too many a priori unknowns about Iraqi capabilities for such a politically high risk venture. No president wants another Bay of Pigs or Desert One debacle to have to be explained and endlessly examined on national television and before Congressional committee hearings. I doubt that the military leadership would willingly pass up such a barebones version of an operational plan to the NSC unless the intention was a covert operation instead of a war.

Even the Bush administration, possibly the least risk-averse administration on military matters since FDR, ultimately erred on the side of caution in setting invasion force numbers. Any other administration would have been more cautious.

[SSG Rock]

Yes, zenpundit, I agree with your post. It is too easy to criticize the campaign plan utilized to prosecute the overthrow of the Hussein regime with the luxury of hindsight. Too easy.

Who was able to forecast that the Iraqi Army would abandon their equipment and fade melt into the population in the numbers they did? We had to be prepared to fight a conventional battle, at least during the run up country. My opponent claims that a 12 man A team is capable of destroying an armor battalion and that our conventional commanders don't like that fact. That conventional commanders have an institutionalized bias against the SF/SOF community. I'm no expert, but I have never heard of an ODA defeating a battalion of conventional forces with the exception of the Roughnecks at Debekka Pass and even then they did not destroy it, and I beleive they had a significant number of Peshmerga with them didn't they? But I admit, I could be wrong.

Rehashing the campaign plan isn't of much use now though. I'm interested in the integration of SF/SOF/conventional forces for future contingencies. And how that is best accomplished. Understand the negative in straining the SF/SOF community with this task. But maybe the way to address this is the creation of SF/SOF MTTs to travel CONUS Army Post to train conventional personnel tapped for deployment before they depart? This would not affect SF/SOF units in Iraq. While it would most assuredly be considerd undesirable duty by SF personnel at first, the temporary pain might be soon forgotten once the program was funded, they had a few training cycles under their belt and see the benefit in Iraq. Naturally, this could be seen as a threat by some in the SF community. I would submit that there are certain tasks that conventional forces could take from the SF plate that would make the conventional forces more effective and that would free SF units for the more important tasks such as snatch and grabs, training the natives etc.

[jcustis]

The Marine Corps seems to be, in some measure, heading down that path with the Foreign Military Training Unit.

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn20...6?opendocument

I agree about the SOF MTT piece, or at least an effort to send coalition personnel to the JFK school to get at least an intro to the matters of nation-building and foreign military training. It likely happened to a certain degree, but I'm thinking more about a full court press.

[Bill Moore]

SSG Rock your questions are important for all of us as we evolve (transform if you will). Unfortunately you ran into one of our less professional brothers who obviously has little experience in war, so from the SF community I apologize for his degrading remarks concerning our outstanding conventional forces.

Special Forces could not have won this war using guerrilla warfare for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important is the fact that Iraq's neighbors would not have supported a Kurdish insurgency, and only Iran would have supported a Shi'a insurgency. Turkey, Saudi, Jordan, etc. would have been terrified and it would have destabilized the entire region. The retired SF CPT who claimed to be an expert on campaign planning should have took notes when you spoke to him. While this war plan had a lot of shortcommings, there was still a lot of smart folks who considered a variety of courses of action to include supporting an insurrection and it didn't pass muster.

Now at the risk of appearing two faced I will add there is much room for improvement on how our conventional forces operate in this environment, and they are improving rapidly. I think GEN Casey's campaign plan is on target, but I'm not sure he is getting sufficient buy in from some of his subordinate commanders in the field. Some of our conventional forces are doing an outstanding job of working with and helping develop the Iraqi Army, while others are simply giving it lip service. From the military aspect of DIME developing a capable Iraqi Army and police force is key to long term stability (assuming we can obtain stability) in the country.

Conventional forces have a vital role and we can't win this war without them. Special Forces couldn't operate in Iraq the way they do without the security and logistics provided by our conventional brothers period. This truly is an example of the one team, one fight concept and those who have been there understand that.

SF didn't win the war in Afghanistan, but they were hugely successful in using guerrilla warfare and joint fires to defeat the ragtag Taliban Army. That wasn't the war though, that was a battle within the war. Now the conventional forces and SF compliment one another in maintaining security and developing a professional Afghan Army.

What's obviously missing in both Iraq and Afghanistan is a capable State Department and other government agencies (such as commerce). While there are heroes in all these organizations, they need additional funding and restructuring to enable them to do their jobs. In short our job (military) is to set the conditions for them to succeed. If they're not capable of succeeding we're going to be on the two way range for a long time.

[SSG Rock]

Bill, improving the conventional force in UW is one of the things I'm trying to bring out in this thread; is it important? If so, how do we go about it? What is the SF/SOF role?

If Iraq is an accurate barometer of the kinds of wars we will be fighting in the future, conventional forces must become proficient in a UW environment in order to compliment and in some cases releive SF/SOF. The SF gung ho attitude displayed by my opponent while highly commendable is unrealistic. There has to be a conventional/SF integration it's happening and will continue to evlove despite his apparent distaste for it. We have to find the right mix. To top it all off, our conventional force also has to maintain efficiency in fighting a classic conventional wars as well, with North Korea, and China looming on the horizon. Quite a puzzle isnt' it?

An interesting thing happend in OIF that I'm not sure has occured before. Conventional forces were actually subordinated to an SF command. 173d ABN Brigade was under JSOTF-N control I beleive. This is the kind of exposure that I think would be of great benefit to conventional Soldiers in learning about UW through OJT.

[Merv Benson]

Special Ops, working with local fighters, was a potent force in Afghanistan when combined with precision bombing. In Iraq, outside of Kurdish areas there were no local fighters until the US started training them after Saddam's overthrow. My own belief is that Special Ops is an important part of a combined arms conventional attack in conventional warfare, as well as being an effective force in special situations. Tom Clancy and Gen. Carl Stiner give several examples of the impact of SF in the conventional attacks of Desert Storm in their book Shadow Warriors. They also give examples of their terrific work in saving the Kurds after that war.

Those that argue that Saddam could have been overthrown by an insurgency I think are wrong. But even if it were possible, it could not have been done in three weeks and the casualties on all sides would have been far greater.

[Xenophon]

I think it's obvious that we need to improve our UW capabilities at all levels. Conventional forces creating the environment for Special Forces to operate is a good way to put it in my opinion (granted it's a boot lieutenant's opinion). Therefore, conventional forces need to be better able to create that environment. So I think we're on track in that regard.

As for how, that's a whole different discussion. If you've seen my few posts on this site you know I'm a proponent of Distributed Operations and that belief was reinforced when I actually got an official USMC brief on the concept last week rather than going off my own research.

[SSG Rock]

I think it's obvious that we need to improve our UW capabilities at all levels. Conventional forces creating the environment for Special Forces to operate is a good way to put it in my opinion (granted it's a boot lieutenant's opinion). Therefore, conventional forces need to be better able to create that environment. So I think we're on track in that regard. Well said, I agree.

As for how, that's a whole different discussion. If you've seen my few posts on this site you know I'm a proponent of Distributed Operations and that belief was reinforced when I actually got an official USMC brief on the concept last week rather than going off my own research.

MTTs are mobile training teams that consist of a cadre of instructors that travel from post to post to give blocks of instruction to Soldiers. IMO, this is the most cost effective way to get subject matter experts where they are needed. Sending the units to the JFK is cost prohibitive, and training the trainer usually results in a degree of degredation in the lessons. I would suggest that we form a couple of MTTs consisting of real Green Berets who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan to fill this role. Fly them to train units that will be deploying to get them up to snuff on what they can do to set the table for SF/SOF. To create the environment as you so well stated. The feedback that the instructors get back from the conventional troops will filter back into the SF/SOF community and hopefully make this transition to more integrated operations less painful, seamless if you will.

[GS]

Perhaps the best role for our unconventional forces in this conflict is advising and training ourconventional forces as well as the Iraqis.

We had a situation where soldiers and officers don't or didn't know the rules of this kind of fight, had no knowledge of local customs and little understanding of the kinds of missions they had to undertake.

I recall reading once about an army SOF team in Vietnam: 12 Americans leading and training some 600 local soldiers. By custom, an "A" detachment is headed by a full captain - a guy with enough rank and experience that a battalion commander would probably listen to him, especially when there was no other guidance as to what to do. The remaining sergeants could easily parcel themselves out to company and even platoon level and put the unit straight pretty quickly.

The counter argument to this integration is that we're wasting SOF's limited resources on a mission that the conventional guys should already have figured out. Also, SOF had missions considered extremely important at the time - nabbing high level regime figures and securing potential nuclear/chemical/biological materials.

That is what AWG was set up to do...