The Title should be "Reflections of an Iraq War Veteran--On the Need for a New Breed of Politically Astute and Culturally Sensitive Warrior." This is the tactical component of a planned two part series analysis of tactics and strategies of the Overseas Contingency Operation. This series is probably the only writing I will ever do about my experiences in war.
In the U.S. Army enlisted infantry are judged by their mobility and marksmanship. "Shoot, move, communicate" is the phrase used to summarize the job of the infantryman, but the focus is clearly on the first two action verbs. PT (physical training), a soldier's movement skill, and BRM (basic rifle marksmanship), a soldier's shooting skill, are the primary determinants of an infantry Soldier's (apparently Soldiers is supposed to be capitalized now, I once saw a whole set of evaluation reports returned for revision because the word "Soldier" wasn't capitalized) professional success earlier in his enlisted career. Army leaders, many of whom were athletes who couldn't make it to the pros, like to focus on a junior Soldier's physical abilities (perhaps they envision themselves as coaches at training camp).
Today the American infantryman in Iraq is tasked with changing the Iraqi form of government and extinguishing the flames of Arab animus by "winning the hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people so that members of the Pan-Arab Islamic community are less likely to conduct terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its assets abroad. The former task is political in nature, while the second is cultural. Clearly an infantryman's ability to communicate is the central skill in his skill set for this task and an infantryman needs the ability to communicate more than just battle commands. He needs to understand his actions in the larger context of globalization--tradition vis a vis modernity, religion vis a vis materialism, Eastern culture vis a vis Western culture, and the government vis a vis the corporation--and how these sets of contraries are being and can continue to be reconciled, if possible. He also needs to understand the historical roots of the sectarian conflict, class conflict, and ethnic conflict going on in West Asia.
Cultural and political knowledge and understanding are essential skills for the success of the frontline warrior in battle. Warriors need not only be technically proficient in battle tasks and drills but also need a humanistic education sufficient for solving open-ended problems which are not clearly defined and cannot be treated by replicable procedures. As Rudyard Kipling noted many years ago in talking about the British empire, the point of execution for the imperial enterprise is at the edges of the empire and there the success of the empire hinges upon the actions of ordinary men thrust into extraordinary roles; roles they are sometimes not equipped to handle (a fact evidenced by the pivotal moment in the moral component of the Global War on Terror known as the Abu Ghraib incident, where a few immature, improperly trained and supervised enlisted Soldiers and contractors caused an international incident with their brutality). The British confronted Islamic fundamentalism in occupied India, and since then there has been a growing anti-imperialist consciousness in the members of the community of Muslim fanatics and ordinary Muslims alike. They have developed an understanding of our civilization and we have to develop an understanding of theirs.
The Islamic societies were once highly civilized and progressive for their time. They made major advances in arts and sciences especially in mathematics, particularly arithmetic with the Arabic numeral system and the concept of zero which allowed for the calculation of compound interest, one of the bases for the modern Western economy, though Sharia law is a bit more restrictive of usury than Protestanism and Islamic banks have been unable to capitalize on the full benefit of this technology. However fundamentalism has largely diverted Islamic attention from secular arts and sciences to the extensive study of the Qu'ran. This practice of devoting study to religion rather than science and industry, two disciplines which have a more readily observable track record of improving the conditions of human lives than religion, has been paralleled in the West and has a real impact on both societies. This impact has to be understood if the West is to confront an enemy motivated by the central organizing principle of Muslim fundamentalism.
I served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and I carried some sociological awareness with me when I was deployed, particularly my own class consciousness which is a product of growing up spending the weekdays with my indigent mother and the weekends with my well-to-do grandparents. It seemed to me from my admittedly limited experience that when we did presence patrols in urban areas we would operate differently depending on the type of neighborhood. In the upper class neighborhoods, those with large, gated two- and three-story estates with massive satellite dishes and sizable yards surrounded by large walls which made them look like mini-forts, we rode around in our LMTVs and HMMVs, never getting out to search houses or even for foot patrols. While there we would meet up with the Iraqi civilian police units, who were stationed in the upper class communities probably in order to protect the rich. Security forces are often very class conscious and this practice is not endemic to Iraq.
The odd thing about this is that those who were wealthy and established in Iraq were the most likely to be Sunnis and loyal enough to Saddam to have succeeded in Iraqi society while he was in power. I still cannot understand why so much protection was available for the class of Iraqis most likely to boast among their ranks the remnants of the Hussein loyalists. Allowing the Iraqi upper class to maintain their privilege afforded them the time and resources to potentially undermine the fragile budding Iraqi government. Although I want to be clear that all major classes and sects of Iraqi society have turned out to be antagonists of the occupiers in some capacity.
When we were in lower class neighborhoods, where many houses have elaborately patterned tapestries for front doors and are thus far from sheltered from the vicissitudes and inclemencies of the seasons, we would often stop at a tactically significant point, a central location in the road or market square which provided some cover, dismount and display our weapons to the respectful and deferent locals. There was no SOP that I was aware of for how to move in our ad hoc formations when we dismount. Mostly I mimicked what I saw, and relied upon some behaviors which were instilled in me during basic training--moving to cover, taking a knee to make myself a smaller target, and keeping my weapon at the high ready. After a brief stay we would quickly and un-tactically return to our vehicles and continue on to the next locale.
Yet when we were in middle class communities we performed extensive foot patrols and did thorough searches of houses. Iraq does appear to have a sizable middle class, though middle class here is relative because their property and privilege pale in comparison to the beleaguered American middle class.
When we stopped in these residential areas we would send our platoon's weapons squad to set up the 240Bs (large 7.62mm machine guns often referred to in infantry jargon as "guns") on balconies. Iraqi architecture provided plentiful opportunities to set up fighting positions with lots of upper-story flat spaces like roofs and balconies. This of course also made us vulnerable to snipers. Every natural advantage on the battlefield is a two-edged sword.
The rifle squads, to one of which I was a young member, would then go perform door-to-door searches. We definitely didn't do searches the way I had done in training. We didn't "stack, kick, and clear" the way I had been taught. Instead we were quite civil (and casual to a degree military trainers would have us believe was suicidally dangerous), we simply knocked and the door was opened to us. The Iraqis were very nonchalant about having foreign troops rummage through their meager possessions. Their family dwellings were quite nice, in an exotic sort of way, but seemed to have a Spartan barrenness to a possession-hording American like myself. This of course made searching them easier. They received us and our less than graceful intrusion with a polite disinterestedness which was shocking to the American rugged individualist, don't-tread-on-me-King George III, libertarian spirit. I hoped Americans would never come to the point where occupiers foreign or domestic could trample all over our civil liberties without an impassioned scrap. Time will reveal whether or not this hope is well-founded, because although culture influences the person, cultures can change just like people.
In order to better communicate with the Iraqis I bought an Arabic travel dictionary at an airport en route to Iraq and tried to learn some Arabic in order to communicate with the public I encountered (turns out the dictionary contained the Egyptian dialect of Arabic which did fortunately have some words in common with the Iraqi dialect). I said "ahlan" to a good-looking teenage boy with a glimmer of intelligence in his eye in passing. He responded with an impeccably American sounding "hello" in a strikingly calm and confident voice that I still remember today. None of the other Soldiers in the group I was walking with seemed to find it at all unusual that the Iraqi boy spoke English well. Apparently many average, everyday Iraqis speak the American dialect of English quite well, which they learn through instruments of American culture such as movies and music (50 Cent was very popular at the time). I wondered if I were air dropped in an Iraqi city without anything but the clothes and shoes I was wearing how long it would take me to find a de facto English-speaking tour guide.
This narrative of my experience in Iraq serves as an example of a Soldier having a partial set of the political and cultural skills and understanding that I believe are requisite of the modern warrior. One of the the most significant reflections I can offer, is how little our sophisticated military technology helped in these operations and how human capabilities were central to success or failure in these endeavors. The American military establishment, often called the military-industrial complex, is closely aligned with advanced technology industry and the American way of war is highly capital-centric. However success in counter-insurgency operations in Iraq has much more to do with the brain power of the individual, decision-making Soldier than the brain power of some academic at the Rand Corporation or engineer at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or for that matter some general at the Pentagon. The first Iraq War was won with superior offensive technology and superior tactics for highly mobile units in maneuver warfare. But now we are trying to deal with a labor-intensive problem with a capital-centric military organization. The second Iraq War can only be won by politically astute and culturally sensitive warriors. We need to be Counter-Insurgency Champions. In order to do so we must confront the realities of war in totality of circumstances and adjust our tactics accordingly.
I believe the major flaw in U.S. tactics is the use of presence patrols. U.S. forces conduct patrol operations in order to show their presence while performing recon in search of tactical intelligence. However, since the counter insurgents are members of the domestic populace they are camoflauged amongst the public. Coalition forces basically try to bait the enemy with presence patrols in order to draw them out. But this means that the insurgents decide when and where engagements will occur. To allow the enemy to gain control of the time and place of battle is to allow the enemy to control the battlefield. So the situation on the ground is that a large military force with superior firepower is allowing a small unconventional opponent which consists of a poly-centric network of operational cells to control the battlefield. This is no way to win the war in Iraq or in AfPak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) for that matter.
The other problem with presence patrols is the fact that they are imposing in such a way that may further inflame Arab resentment toward occupying imperial forces. The key to acheiving the United States government's strategic objectives in Iraq and in the Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) is to acheive a moral victory. By definition acheiving moral victory implies getting a sufficient number of both Iraqis and Americans to support the U.S. government's strategic objectives so that they are realized. It appears to me that the best tactical innovations to make in order to accomplish this are to rely upon civil affairs and other special operations forces to be the primary operatives, and to only commit major conventional forces to the battlefield once actionable intelligence clearly warrants the directed and efficient use of them and thus justifies the exposure to insurgent attack. Until those conditions are satisified conventional forces should be maintained in well-secured holding areas.
The primary interactions that conventional forces should have with the Iraqis is humanitarian as they should be employed in civil operations where special operations forces don't have sufficient numbers. It is in these interactions that social skills be they cultural or political will be the most useful asset the warfighter has. It is in this way that Coalition forces' tactical operations will be most clearly in support of the strategic objective of winning the moral victory with the Iraqi people. The social skills will be useful to ensure that communications with the Iraqis inspire a favorable impression of the U.S.--its agents and interests--in the minds of the Iraqi people.
In closing, I have to confess that I have ambivalent personal attitudes about the war in Iraq. On the one hand, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and activities conducted in support of the invasion probably constitute a criminal violation of international law, convention, and propriety, specifically Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, and by some reasonable standards of morality can be said to be fundamentally wrong. On the other hand the prosperity that I and my family enjoy is due to the petrodollar system and the implications it carries for the purchasing power that our income gives us. That petrodollar system is contingent upon the U.S. maintaining control of a sufficient amount of the world's petroleum resources. While I abhor the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died and potentially millions more have been displaced I also care deeply about the material circumstances of my family's life and am convinced that we would be much worse off if the U.S. dollar was no longer the world's reserve currency.
I have come to the realization that in life there exist overlapping moral imperatives which may be either partially or totally mutually-exclusive. Part of becoming a mature adult is learning to deal with this sad fact about the cruel world in which we live. It is my hope that there will be a time when the quality of life that is enjoyed by the people I care about will not come at the tradeoff of having to engage in imperial adventures overseas. The way to accomplish that seems to be to restructure the national economy to be based on production and saving rather than mindless consumption of fashionable materials in conjuction with an energy policy focused on self-sufficiency, like that enjoyed by the Brazilians. Self-sufficiency carries its own tradeoffs, as it may come at the opportunity cost of less international cooperation and interdependence which could prove deterimental in the future if some vital resource was to become scare and a source of contention.
I bring this up because I think that it is germane and because I want to illustrate my point that American warriors need to acheive a degree of political astuteness such that they are able to see how not only international but also domestic politics relates to our national security objectives. Strategic objectives which are in the interests of various groups and individuals within a nation are ultimately political in nature. Often these objectives can be accomplished in a number of ways with military solutions being only a member of that set of methods. If possible, it is usually more efficient to try to accomplish strategic objectives without fighting and the interests of the nation broadly construed are better served by winning without fighting. But since we are presently engaged in battle for at least the short-term, it is my hope that both tactics and strategies will be changed to a state such that they approach those necessary to gain optimal outcomes as closely as possible. I hope with this writing I have contributed to this endeavor.