War's Risks Include Toll on Training Values

[GorTex6]

New York Times

Military experts say that the first principle of counterinsurgency warfare, and its greatest difficulty, is to separate enemy fighters from the local population from which they draw strength. But as details emerge about the killings of Iraqi civilians in Haditha and Hamandiyah, it seems increasingly clear that some American troops have come to see the population itself as the enemy.

"In cases where you fail to defeat the insurgency, you sometimes adopt out of frustration increasingly ruthless methods to try to defeat the insurgents," said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army officer and a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group that studies military issues.

Sometimes that frustration can manifest not in sheer brutality, but in the troops operating on a hair trigger, as seemed to happen last week in Kabul. American soldiers reportedly fired shots into an angry crowd and killed four people after an American military vehicle crashed into civilian cars, prompting protests.

Separate those who refuse to "get it" from the warriors and assign permanent FOBBIT duties, like watching the ice point, checking IDs at the DEFAC/PX, or riding shotgun in the poop sucker truck. They can apply that same level of "enthusiam" on the next CSM that forgot his/her ID