The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and Fog (2)
Last September, American and Iraqi troops swept through the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing and capturing insurgents in a strike launched under the name"Operation Restoring Rights." It was the most successful attack on the insurgency in that city, USA Todayreported, since"American forces ran insurgents out of Tal Afar a year ago." Before the month was over, a female suicide bomber had launched another attack in Tal Afar, killing six men at an Iraqi Army recruiting center. More recently, insurgents fired mortars at polling stations in Tal Afar during the December elections.
You can tell that story in other Iraqi cities; in a much-quoted op-ed piece in the Washington Post early this month, Paul Schroeder noted that his son, a marine, had died in a familiar town:"Augie was killed on his fifth mission to clear Haditha." A few days before, the news pages of that same paper reported that American soldiers were preparing to hand over the city of Samarra to Iraqi police -- for the third time in three years. American military leaders quoted in the piece were urgently hoping the hand-over would stick the third time.
The unblinking cheerleaders for the war in Iraq like to make comparisons
to WWII: Imagine if we'd left Europe before Hitler's army had been defeated. To which I say, imagine if nine landings at Normandy had led to four liberations of Paris, followed by a series of as-yet-unfinished marches on Berlin.
Why can't the U.S. military -- unquestionably the most powerful in the world -- clear insurgents out of Iraqi towns for good? Because (troop levels aside) the structure and direction of American military force does little to address the structure and direction of the insurgency, a problem that was decades in the making. We went to war with the army we had, and it was the wrong army. To illustrate the point, or begin to, I'm going to try to develop and compare two sets of images.
First, the insurgency. On his blog, Global Guerillas, security consultant and former Air Force officer John Robb has discussed the importance of systems disruption in Iraq and elsewhere. In December, Robb noted that Iraq -- with the world's second-largest oil reserves -- was"importing $200 million a month in gasoline," as insurgents targeted petroleum infrastructure in that country [emphasis added]. Successful attacks on Iraq's ability to tap and distribute its own oil have not been the product of the kind of force-on-force attacks of a typical military campaign. Rather, the December disruptions were built around two things: First, the destruction of remote and unguarded sections of pipeline, and, second, the use of threatening letters directed to oil truck drivers. Robb concludes:"Cost of the attack (letters and potentially phone calls) = $0 (another example of global guerrilla efficiency)."
And so, in this and other insurgent efforts, a campaign of"infrastructure disruption," implemented without direct exposure to the firepower of U.S. military forces,"has kept Iraq in continuous economic failure." Economic failure generates and perpetutates political crisis, as the state appears to be unable to provide order; for the American occupation, the peristent failure of oil, water, sewage, and electrical infrastructure in Iraq leads Iraqis to ask the question so often noted by Anthony Shadid in his book on the war: If this is a superpower, why can't they keep the lights on? (There's much more to say about Robb's view of emerging forms of warfare, and it's well worth the time to click through a sampling of posts at his blog.)
War by infrastructure attacks and systems disruption, which cause substantial harm to a military enemy without engaging the enemy militarily, have significant roots in recent thinking about war. In 1999, for an example I've previously noted elsewhere, two colonels in the People's Liberation Army published a book, Unrestricted Warfare, describing potential avenues for waging war against a militarily superior United States. Such a war could be waged, they suggested, by at least some means that wouldn't look like military means:
"...[W]hatever provides benefits to mankind can also be turned around to be a weapon to harm mankind. That is to say that there is nothing in the world that cannot become a weapon. This smashes our conception of just what a weapon is. Just as technology is multiplying the number of different kinds of weapons, new thinking breaks down the distinction between weapon and non-weapon. To our way of thinking, a planned stock market crash, a computer virus attack, making the currency exchange rate of an enemy country erratic, and spreading rumors on the Internet about the leaders of an enemy country can all be thought of as new concept weapons. This new way of thinking puts weapons into the daily lives of civilians. New concept weapons can make of war something that even military professionals will find hard to imagine. Both soldiers and civilians will be disturbed to see items in their everyday lives become weapons that can attack and kill.
So there's the first image: War that doesn't look like war, that isn't fought by soldiers, that possibly involves"weapons" that aren't weapons, that centers on systems disruption and targets the political legitimacy of the enemy through social and economic disruptions. (A note, however: Some tactics of Iraqi insurgents are not so new. As Bernard Fall noted in Street Without Joy, the French Army in Indochina lost 398 armored vehicles to roadside bombs between 1952 and 1954. Of course, the fact that a tactic is old and well-known doesn't mean that the military leaders of a superpower can't still be strangely surprised by its reemergence, as we have seen in the last few years.)
For the second image, I turn to two personal experiences. The first took place at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where the Army trains reserve and National Guard troops for deployment to Iraq and Kuwait. I was assigned to the tactical operations center (TOC) of an infantry battalion, at the time, and so was sent to a three-day class on a piece of software designed to allow battle staff to track events in combat. The class opened with a videotaped introduction: Uniformed actors in a make-believe TOC gathered around a set of video monitors, frantically tracking developments on a nearby battlefield. A narrator broke down the events as they happened, showing how easily the commander overseeing the battle was able to track the fight. The video cut back and forth between the TOC and the battlefield as enemy tanks and helicopter gunships raced toward American forces, were spotted and tracked, and died in the face of American firepower. After the video ended, we spent the rest of the class sessions making neat templates showing the locations of friendly and enemy assets: Air assets here, air defense assets here, armor assets here, infantry battalions massed here, here, and here for the attack. After one of the classes, I turned in the general direction of the major sitting next to me and mumbled,"Well, sir, at least we'll always know where the insurgency's fighter planes are." He sighed, shook his head, and spit Skoal into his old water bottle.
A few months later, I stood on a forward operating base in Kuwait and watched as a heavy division loaded up to move north into Iraq. (I hasten to mention that this is a long-completed movement, and so no longer of use to anyone hoping to attack a U.S. convoy. I am mindful of operational security rules, and of the general idea that information carelessly placed online can be used to kill American troops.) In one convoy after another, long lines of armored HETs stacked up along the staging area, loaded with Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks and Paladin self-propelled howitzers.
It was particularly striking to watch all of the Paladins lining up; as the manufacturer notes, the Paladin's features"include an Automatic Fire Control System with onboard ballistic computation and automatic weapon pointing, an integrated inertial navigation system with embedded GPS processing, NBC protection with climate control, hydraulics system segregation, and secure voice and digital communications." It is a massively sophisticated, spectacularly powerful piece of weaponry, firing an enormous 155 mm. shell at targets up to 30 kilometers away. And all of these Paladins, loaded onto the backs of the still-more-massive HETs -- all to be managed under the control of operations centers staffed with highly educated military professionals, working with exceptionally complicated systems of software and hardware -- were headed to a war where they would face insurgents who mix with the civilian population, attacking with anonymous letters, dead-of-night infrastructure sabotage, and hidden bombs snuck out onto the roadside, dodging the Army's massive assaults against their hiding places by slipping out of town as American forces slowly mass for the attack.
The image I have is that of a man being bled slowly to death by thousands of biting flies. He's well armed, and he's sure he can stop the swarm from biting him, so he raises his shotgun again -- the flies flitting away from the slow-moving barrel -- and fires another load of buckshot. And then is being swarmed and bitten again, and chambers another shell to put a stop to it. Because how can a fly hope to stand up to a shotgun?
And those are the competing force structures: Heavy and powerful versus small, distributed, quick, and swarming. This is a much-discussed -- much-discussed -- dynamic, but not one that has yet apparently penetrated the operational consciousness of the fighting Army.
Finally, a brief discussion about the decisionmaking structure of U.S. land forces. The most remarkable examination of this topic is Sean Naylor's recent book on Operation Anaconda, an American effort in 2002 to trap and destroy a force of hundreds of al Qaeda warriors in a valley in Afghanistan. Naylor's book, Not a Good Day to Die, is far too detailed to come close to summarizing here. But two themes reappear throughout Naylor's narrative.
First, the American military has grown higher headquarters like weeds in rich soil. Meetings over Operation Anaconda, a single operation planned for three days and thought to be aimed against 200 enemy, involved absurd numbers of competing organizations -- and, therefore, competing operational styles and agendas. Here's a typical laundry list for a single meeting:"Representatives from K-Bar, the CIA, Task Force 11, CFLCC, the Coalition and Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, and Task Force Rakkasan had been invited." And this list is hardly a complete reflection of all the different headquarters involved in Anaconda. As Naylor summarizes:"For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops -- less than a brigade's worth -- in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations." Each piece of that stew had its own leadership, with its own agenda and intent. A critical American military effort had become wildly and pointlessly complicated. Four-star generals reviewed plans down to the platoon level.
Second, the coordination of those many different elements and agendas meant that painfully negotiated plans became locked into place simply because they were painfully negotiated. After members of a Delta Force team pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of walking up the side of a mountain in the Afghan winter to get a firsthand look at the valley, operation leaders received reports that there were somewhere around 1000 enemy, not the 200 the American plans had called for -- and then they learned further that the enemy was not in the valley, where the plans put them, but were instead on the high ground around it. Leaders of the battle decided to go ahead with the plan as written, reluctant to throw out weeks of hard-fought staff work on the word of Lt. Col. Peter Blaber's Delta operators. The plans trumped reality, because the plans had come with political and institutional costs.
Finally, one of the ways that Army officers managed the problem of ignoring the Delta Force intelligence showing 1000 enemy on the high ground was to regard the special operators who delivered that intelligence as out-of-control and untrustworthy. Leaders ridiculed the Delta team reports, and"mocked the independent role that Blaber had carved out by calling him 'Peter the Great' and 'Colonel Kurtz.'" The enforcement of institutional orthodoxy allowed leaders to ignore realistic bad news. Today's U.S. Army in a nutshell, right there.
There's much more to Naylor's book, which is so far one of the very few critical pieces of insight into the current American wars. (The battle, by the way, went poorly.)
To summarize, then -- sorry about that -- a too-hierarchical, too-orthodox U.S. Army, and U.S. military in general, leans heavily on lumbering equipment, high technology, and major ground offensives against an enemy that relies on tactics that are often not even conventionally military in nature; we mass artillery against threatening letters and infrastructure sabotage. In equipment, doctrine, tactics, and leadership structure, we're organized for the wrong enemy, in ways that can't be easily or quickly changed.
I recognize that this is a scattered narrative -- and it was written on my bunk, so cut me a break -- but I hope it makes sense. I'll try to bring everything together in a final post at the end. Meanwhile, tomorrow or the day after, I'll have a post on the American effort to measure progress against the insurgency in Iraq. A final post (I think) will cover uses of history in framing the war, and then a final final post will summarize and synthesize. And I say again what I hope I've made clear elsewhere: I'm a sergeant in Kuwait. My perspective is enormously limited. I'm aware of it. The point is that I'm trying to work through the events I'm involved in, at least peripherally; the point is not for me to issue Grand Pronouncements. This is how the war looks to me from where I sit. It's not a great seat.
The obligatory disclaimer: This essay presents my own views alone, and does not represent the views of the Army or the Department of Defense.