Chris Wilson: How the U.S. Military is Changing Its Hierarchical Model of Its Enemies
Traffic had slowed to a crawl in Baghdad's Azamiyah district as drivers stopped to ogle the president. It was April 2003, and Saddam Hussein cheerily greeted his subjects as a few bodyguards tried to keep the crowd at bay. Someone handed Saddam a bewildered baby, which he hoisted up in the air a few times and handed back. When he reached a white sedan, Saddam climbed onto the hood to survey the sea of loyalists.
Not long after—possibly that same day, just a few miles away from where Saddam went on his celebratory walk—U.S. Marines in Baghdad tore down a 40-foot-tall bronze statue of the Iraqi dictator. At the time, American intelligence officers didn't know whether Saddam had survived a hailstorm of 2,000-pound bombs and Tomahawk missiles fired at the beginning of the war. When grainy footage of the Butcher of Baghdad's last promenade surfaced 10 days later, most analysts were preoccupied with determining whether it was authentic. Nobody was particularly worried about the guy next to the dictator, a heavyset man in a brown striped shirt and sunglasses. He wasn't anyone on the deck of playing cards depicting the regime's 55 most-wanted members, and the coalition troops had much bigger priorities than hunting down bodyguards....
Saddam's personal secretary Saddam's personal secretaryThe deck of cards didn't help in the hunt of Saddam, very simply, because the cards had many of the wrong people on them. Virtually every single person in the deck, which was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a member of Saddam's regime. Many of the men on the lower-numbered cards were essentially middle managers, like the deputy head of the tribal affairs office (Nine of Clubs) and the trade minister (Six of Hearts). While it was reasonable for these men, as government officials and members of the Baath party, to be on a wanted list, capturing them was neither going to cripple the budding insurgency or lead the American-led coalition to their former boss. Their power vanished the moment the regime collapsed and Iraq was once again governed by tribal networks. An extended catalog of hundreds more targets, known as the Black List, had similar inadequacies. While there were some valuable targets near the bottom of the list—men like the "Fat Man" who would prove central to the post-invasion insurgency—they were mixed in with people who were misidentified, completely innocent, or both.
So, why weren't Saddam's post-war cronies in the deck of cards? The war's architects had failed to account for the fact that Iraqi society functions completely differently than our own. Saddam's regime had been built on top of the country's ancient tribal traditions—a heritage that he either suppressed or tried to co-opt, depending on how much he needed the backing of the sheikhs at the moment. (As the New York Times wrote in a cautionary note two months before the invasion, tribes are the "ultimate swing voters in the brutal politics of the Middle East.") When Baghdad fell, the institutions of Saddam's regime fell along with it. Suddenly, the Baath Party regional chairmen—the guys that populated the bottom of the deck—lost any connection they once had to Saddam (unless they happened to be related to him)....
Diagnosing the insurgency in these early stages proved close to impossible. While the 1st BCT's intelligence shop had gathered a great deal of information about individual bad guys, nobody had put it together into a coherent picture. [Colonel James] Hickey wasn't pleased. What he needed, the colonel told his intelligence officer, Maj. Stan Murphy, was a chart that showed the personal relationships of everyone they captured or wanted to capture.
This chart would become a social network diagram of the bad guys in Tikrit. The lines connecting their faces delineated who belonged to which of several influential families, how those families were intertwined by marriage, and who among them connected directly to Saddam Hussein. As Desert Scorpion continued over the next several months, the diagrams ballooned into sprawling networks. They showed no explicit hierarchy since none existed. Unlike in a traditional organizational chart, The Butcher of Baghdad was not at the top of this diagram. He was at the center, a yellow dot labeled "Saddam Hussein."
This shift in thinking about how the enemy organized itself was a long time coming in the Army. Through World War II, the U.S. military was accustomed to fighting an enemy structured like we are, making combat a clash of egos between generals. Prof. David Segal, an expert on military sociology at the University of Maryland, recalls the scene in Patton when the general, having beaten back a Panzer division, reacts angrily when he is informed that his archrival Erwin Rommel was not present due to "severe nasal diphtheria." While that brand of warfare might be 65 years old, Segal maintains that the American military perpetually refights "the last war we liked." In that model, the enemy is always organized in a hierarchy...
Modes of warfare have evolved since 1945, of course, but the vertical image of the enemy has persisted. Part of the trouble is that, until very recently, soldiers received very little exposure to sociology—a subject that views a group of people more like a blob or a network than a totem pole. As Joint Forces Quarterly laid out in a 2005 article (PDF), the military had almost none of this in its curriculum at the time of the Iraq invasion. Most of the soldiers I spoke with said they had little or no formal training in network theory—they built their social networks by instinct, moving around the faces when intelligence revealed an unknown connection. (It didn't hurt, though, that one influential officer—Maj. Brian Reed, who we'll meet in the second part of the series tomorrow—had a masters degree in sociology.)...