"...Indeed, Bravo Company had by now more or less melted into the landscape, becoming in effect the most powerful of the area's tribes. This much was evident at a gathering of 20 local elders, where a young captain named Palmer Phillips cajoled and corralled sheiks three times his age. "Hey," Phillips admonished the feuding tribal leaders, "There can't be anymore of this Dulaimi versus Assawi action going on." Over the years, I've watched the same scene unfold at mosques and homes in western and southern Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, Sinjar, and Tal Afar. Absent a functioning government, the U.S Army administers nearly every visible facet of the state, above all the role of honest broker.
Not unlike the Americans in Vietnam and in the Philippines a century ago, the U.S. Army in Iraq has even acquired the flavor of its surroundings. This is not the army that resides in the city-states otherwise known as forward operating bases, with their Pizza Huts, traffic cops, and morgues. Officers in the Grand Army of the Tigris, as one of its senior officers calls the American force, dine with local elders at "goat grabs," greet them with "man-kisses," and routinely punctuate their own conversations with the casual "insha'allah." The vernacular has even followed the Army home: In the halls of the Pentagon, where nearly every Army officer has served at least two tours in Iraq, officers ask whether this or that official has "wasta"—Iraqi shorthand for "influence" or "pull," though with a slightly more corrupt tinge.
The Army has immersed itself so thoroughly in Iraq that senior officers back in the United States worry that the force has become "out of balance," as Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey put it, too fixated on counterinsurgency. But there is another way to view this: Just as the U.S. Army that punched through Germany in 1945 bore slight resemblance to the amateurish force routed in North Africa three years before, the hardened units that America fields in Iraq today know the terrain in a way the Army of 2003 and 2004 never did.
Whether measured in terms of tactics and techniques improved, operational schemes perfected, or the clan loyalties of every house on every street cataloged and memorized, the accumulation of experience counts for everything in this war. In Iraq, roughly half of all casualties tend to be suffered during the first three months of a unit's 15-month deployment. When I last visited Bravo Company, it was getting hit by IEDs twice a day and mortared routinely. "The whole area was a meat grinder," Sgt. Johnson recalled, pointing to the canals and dikes that order the surrounding "triangle of death" into neat grids. But engagement with local tribes, intelligence tips, and targeted raids had quieted the area to the point where the company hadn't been hit by a single IED strike in four months. Similarly, the brigade as a whole had lost more than 50 soldiers during its first eight months in Iraq, but only one during the last four months.
What is true in microcosm is also true writ large. In a war where it's nearly impossible to detect intellectual coherence, the Army's learning curve tells a clear story. In 2005, with other brigades either bulldozing through towns or hunkering down on their outskirts, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment literally "went native," fanning out across the city of Tal Afar and planting itself in the midst of a once-hostile population center. In 2006, the First Armored Division's First Brigade Combat Team borrowed and improved the template by establishing its own outposts across the brutal city of Ramadi and "flipping" the local tribes. The 10th Mountain Division then purposefully applied the examples of both cities to southern Baghdad. Perhaps too late for the home front, but Petraeus has enshrined the lessons of these places in a theater-wide strategy that is generating obvious results..."
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