While there have been many obvious problems with the Iraq campaign thus far, as any observer of this site has known for quite some time, is the effort doomed to failure? Is there nothing the government and people of the United States can do to achieve a stable Iraq before we leave? And if this conflict is too far down the road of disaster, how can we learn from this and better prepare for the next counterinsurgency our country will face? With the appointment of General David Petraeus as overall commander of our Iraq forces, I believe the army has taken a step in the right direction.
First off, I have always thought that "victory" in Iraq (depending on how you define the term) is achievable, as long as we were willing to spend the time and money necessary to implement a sustained counterinsurgency campaign. The problem arises when the length and costs of a successful counterinsurgency are considered. Army counterinsurgency doctrine, some of which has slowly been accepted and implemented by the commanders in Iraq, and has been updated by Gen Petraeus, calls for a much larger number of soldiers than we currently have in country at the moment. However, an increase in troop levels would should not be used to simply conduct more raids, arrests, or high profile combat operations. Rather, an increase in the number of available forces should allow us to fan out across the cities, towns, and countryside, to become a much more omnipresent part of people's daily lives. This would also require an increase in competent interpreters. Instead of using vehicle mounted patrols to the exclusion of foot patrols, American forces should establish small outposts through the various areas of operations and assume the stance more of a policeman on his beat than of an anynomous soldier behind the shield of armor and sunglasses.
I came to many of these conclusions from first hand observations as a civil affairs soldier at my outpost in Anbar Province, before I read much of anything about counterinsugency theory. I was stationed for about five months on a base in a rural area of Anbar. I was focused on one town and its hinterlands, but I also had knowledge and experience throughout the infantry battalion's area of operations. When I started my assignment, our forces were concentrated on bases on the outskirts of the main towns. The problem, as I saw it, was a lack of integration with the town. The first unit I worked did a lot of the right things, in my eyes, but we were confined to our little bases on the outskirts of the towns instead of having a permenant presence inside them. Soon after I got there, I wondered why we didn't have squad sized elements implanted in every neighborhood. Instead, we patrolled for a few hours, dismounted and mounted, then returned to the base. As the months went on, we did spread out our presence, but just when we were taking a permanent position in town, my team was moved to another area of operations in another part of the country. I have since been without a mission for a couple months, but that will be changing soon.
The appointment of Gen Petraeus means that the leader of coalition forces in Iraq will bring many of the issues I identified to the entire mission. There are many places in Iraq were we have enough troops to implement this sort of blanket coverage. Since they aren't in Baghdad, it will be interesting to see these ideas are actually put in place and what the results are if it does. If they work in smaller cities and towns, then a large number of soldiers will be necessary to repeat the process in Baghdad.
Of course, as with any approach to anything, there are drawbacks. First of all, soldiers will be more exposed to attacks if forces are decentralized. Our whole approach thus far has relied on driving around in heavily protected vehicles when we aren't garrisoned behind walls and concertina wire. Living in town will give insurgents easier positions to attack and more patrols to harass. Standards of living for soldiers will also decrease in many ways. Instead of having a big KBR dining hall to eat four meals a day, soldiers will have to rely on MREs and their own cooking skills to subsist. Gyms, rec centers, personal space, and all the comforts of the FOBs be lost.
A bigger obstacle is the institution of the army of itself. Officers have to be trained in the principles of counterinsurgency, something that is easy to do in a schoolhouse, but difficult to make work on the ground. Infantry, cavarly, and artillery officers need to adopt tactics that are essentially antithetical to the bulk of their training as combat arms officers. I have seen many such officers at the company grade level pick up on these ideas with varying degrees of success, but most of them retained more of the combat mentality than I thought was necessary. Of course that's easy for me to say, the lives of thirty, hundred twenty, or more men and women are not in my hands.
Civil affairs, my branch of the military, should be taking a lead role in the whole mission country wide. However, the vast majority of civil affairs units are in the reserves. Since almost all the CA units have been mobilized since the invasion of Afghanistan (not to mention Bosnia, Haiti, ect), all of the experienced CA soldiers and officers cannot be compelled to deploy under current army rules, although the five year window will start opening again this coming rotation. Unfortunately, many of the soldiers who were previously deployed and would now be able to be tapped again have left the service. My battalion, for example, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 (I think, I wasn't in the military yet) and even though we were deployed again for this rotation in Iraq, we only brought about fifteen enlisted soldiers (out of about 100) and the unit flag with us. We did not have a single officer from our actual unit that deployed. They were all pulled out of the IRR or retirement or other units and given a truncated class on civil affairs and thrown into the fray. We also had a number of sailors and airmen brought in to fill support roles. That means that all of the leaders in my battalion are making it up as they go along and the same goes for the majority of the senior enlisted. Since the infantry officers we are attached to aren't really sure what civil affairs is supposed to do and our officers aren't either, we end up following the lead of the infantry units instead of taking the initiative and helping them to formulate a plan that builds up Iraqi infrastructure and institutions.
The biggest change I would implement is the nature of the deployment rotation. I've seen four Relief in Place/Transfer of Authorities (RIP/TOAs), one from the inside when my unit came into theatre, and three when the units we support were moved out of the AO we worked in or redeployed the the US. In all cases, the unit leaving was anxious to get out of there and the incoming unit had the attitude of "These guys are idiots, we know how to do it better." Branch and unit rivarly is an ever present force in the military, to the detriment of cooperation and information sharing. In addition, since units are deployed as brigade sized elements, huge amounts of knowledge are lost because a RIP/TOA only lasts a couple weeks. Instead, I would make deployments by company or even platoon. That way a new unit can integrate into a much smaller, more manageable area of operations within an already existing framework and evolve and grow within it instead of trying to get an entire brigade to assume control for four provinces at one time. If deployments were to overlap in this way, new units would have all kinds of folks around that have at least a passing knowledge of the areas they are working in. Having been on a four man team that has welcomed entire battalions into an AO, I have seen several times how our knowledge (or the knowledge of those who are no longer there) can add to the new unit's understanding of the battlespace. Making a change this large is probably unlikely in Iraq, but coming out of this conflict the army should give it some serious consideration.
The most obvious obstacle, one that has been talked about ad nauseum here, is the size of the armed forces. We simply don't have the personel to maintain (at this point we probably couldn't even implement this sort of program) these sort of operations at an Iraq wide level. The size of the army and the forces in Iraq would have to be increased by much more than the numbers being thrown around in the media reports I see. If America as a whole thought this war was worth the mobilization necessary to make this plan work, we could succeed in Iraq in five to ten years, success being a stable democratic nation. But I think we all know that Americans, starting with most who read and write on this board, are not ready to make that sacrifice in time, money, and national service, at least not for this cause.