Right army, wrong war (considering this was an "elective" war for us):
The Art of War vs. the Craft of Occupation
By ALEX BERENSON
Published: November 2, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq — In one corner, the United States Army, the deadliest fighting machine in history. In the other, a group of guerrillas and terrorists, feared and disliked by a majority of the local population.
Last week, the guerrillas seemed to be the force on the offensive.
Attacks on United States troops are not only rising, they are becoming more sophisticated. In recent days, guerrillas have destroyed a Black Hawk helicopter and an Abrams tank, two of the most advanced weapons in the United States arsenal. Last week, four car bombs exploded in Baghdad, and rockets hit a hotel where the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was staying.
The American military is truly, even grandly, lethal — trained to obliterate its enemy with overwhelming firepower. But it is not a police force, trained to track down dangerous groups or individuals in heavily populated areas. And so, in the eyes of many Iraqis here, the American soldiers often seem impotent, unable to provide security for them or their families.
For at least a decade, the Army has spent most of its energies making itself more lethal, even though — or, perhaps, because — it has repeatedly been used in peacekeeping operations. Even within the military, that strategy has caused some controversy.
Col. Stephen Kidder, director of warfighting studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., said in a telephone interview that the military's attitude has been, "If we can win the big one, we can win the small one." But Col. John R. Martin, deputy director of strategic studies at the War College, said he believed that the Army did not spend enough time training or equipping soldiers for peacekeeping.
"We've focused on the operational aspects of winning the wars," Colonel Martin said. "I would say we cannot give that up, but we have to focus more on stability operations. It's viewed as a lesser, included, task, and that's obviously not true."
Colonel Martin said that the Army's dislike of peacekeeping operations had deepened over time, because they detracted from the primary mission of defending the United States. But Colonel Martin said the pendulum had now swung too far. "War fighting has gone from being our primary focus to our only focus," he said.
On the streets of Baghdad, and in the angry cities west and north of the capital, the results of that concentration on war are obvious. Without adequate intelligence, the United States has little idea how to isolate the guerrillas who stalk its troops, planting bombs on the roads and launching mortars at its bases.
Too often, the American forces have been operating on the basis of inadequate or bad intelligence, according to a report that was recently released by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, a study group in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
The United States has 69 intelligence teams in Iraq, but they produce about 30 reports a day, about one-quarter as many as they should, the study found. The Army continues to suffer from a severe shortage of interpreters, and many of those it does employ are barely competent, the report says.
At the same time, the Army's efforts to counterattack against the guerrillas have resulted in a rising number of civilian deaths. The problem is most severe around Falluja and Ramadi, cities west of Baghdad, where a rebellious local population has repeatedly clashed with units from the 82nd Airborne Division, which prides itself on its aggressiveness in combat. A recent letter to this reporter from a public affairs officer in the unit begins, "It's no secret that the 82nd Airborne Division is a lethal force."
When Americans do respond, they have sometimes struck in the wrong place and at the wrong people. The anti-American forces here know this, and may be goading the Americans into fighting, hoping that ordinary civilians are killed in the process.
For example, in an operation one night last month, soldiers from the 82nd called in an airstrike at 2 a.m. to bomb a farm outside Falluja, killing three people and wounding three others. The unit's public affairs officer also said in her letter that the dead men were guerrillas who had just attacked an American convoy.
"The men were enemy attackers, and they were purposefully killed with precision fire," the letter said.
The men killed may well have attacked the convoy, but if a visit to the farm a few hours after the attack was any guide, the 82nd has an elastic definition of precision fire. Bomb craters were scattered around the yard, and bullets had punched holes all over the farm.
Two of the three people wounded were children.
To build better intelligence and avoid alienating the local population with civilian casualties, American forces hope to rely more heavily on the Iraqi police. The guerrillas, in response, turned the local police into targets. Three of the four car bombs that exploded in Baghdad on Monday were directed at police stations, and a fourth station narrowly escaped being attacked.
The police are ill trained and badly equipped, and the police officers and the American soldiers who patrol with them admit privately that without the military backing, the Iraqis might be hard-pressed to keep basic order, much less battle guerrillas. Still, the United States has little choice but try to build them into an effective force.
Colonel Martin, who worked in Baghdad from April to August, counts himself as an optimist, suggesting that with strong leadership on the ground the Army can accomplish its mission.
But Lawrence J. Korb, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is much less optimistic. "Pretending things are better than they are, that's what worries me, that they don't seem to face up to it," he said in a telephone interview, referring to the Bush administration. "Before you can deal with the problem, you've got to recognize what the problem is."
Mr. Korb said he would be traveling to Iraq this month as part of a delegation of experts invited by the Pentagon. But the military is too concerned about their safety to allow them to stay overnight in the country, he said. Instead, they will sleep in Kuwait and fly into Iraq each day. |
