A few of you may recall my objection to the small number of MPs that were available when we started into Iraq. Here is a good piece on that problem, and why Infantry cannot be used to do the same job easily.
WSJ: Army needs more MPs to do its job
Most of the defense community agrees that we need more "nation building" troops these days than ever before -- especially Military Police and Civil Affairs soldiers. Unfortunately, the Army has too few of these specialties to go around, particularly in its active force. Christopher Cooper writes in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about this very problem, and the difficulties the Army is facing as it tries to develop more MPs for missions like the one going on today in Iraq.
Out of a total fighting force of about 490,000, the U.S. has only around 37,000 military police -- a figure that hasn't changed much in decades. The MP, a specialist soldier with the kind of training and equipment needed to enforce order on urban areas, is the closest the U.S. has to a peacekeeping soldier. Almost half of them -- 15,000 -- are active-duty troops, with the balance in the Army reserve or the National Guard. There are about 12,000 MPs currently assigned to Iraq.
In the past, with fewer hot spots demanding attention, reserve forces weren't needed as much and less than 20% of them were called up at any given time. But today, the Army has nearly 200,000 reservists on active duty, including 90% of its MPs. Some 5,000 of these reservists are bumping up against their two-year service limit, which hasn't happened since the Vietnam War.
On Tuesday, U.S. military police worked alongside infantry troops in Baghdad hauling the dead and wounded out of the U.N. compound. MPs set up a security perimeter around the rescue-and-recovery operation. They detained witnesses for questioning.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and two wars that removed standing regimes, MPs have never been more in demand. With many bases now closed to the public, they man checkpoints at installations in the U.S. and around the world. They act as guards at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and they continue to keep order in the Balkans. And thousands of them are helping to control the restive citizenry in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One reason MPs are in such demand is their versatility. Just as infantry and armor troops receive a smattering of peacekeeper training, MP troops are trained for combat and are issued rifles. In Army talk, MP troops are considered "force multipliers" -- they are sprinkled in with combat troops to provide perimeter and supply-line security and to deal with prisoners of war and refugees. They also set up roadblocks on dangerous highways and contain civilian protests. In combat, "it's kill, kill, kill," says Sgt. Joshua Griffith, an MP drill instructor at the Army's only military-police school, in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
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If the Army needs more MPs, the solution might seem to be simply adding them -- but that is more complex than it sounds. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is opposed to increasing the size of the Army, which would require congressional approval, anyway. So adding MPs means decreasing another class of soldier. The Pentagon already is attempting to free up MPs by tapping infantry troops to staff the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Brig. Gen. Stephen Curry, who is studying how to reduce the Army's reliance on reserves, hints that infantry may have to shoulder even more of the mundane work that traditionally falls to MPs. "It doesn't take an MP to check an ID card" at the entrance to a U.S. military base, he says.
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One idea being floated in the Pentagon calls for shifting reserve units that are operating overseas into the active military and moving infantry units into the reserves. But such a plan would take years to implement and would probably meet resistance, both in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. In a variation of this idea, commanders have begun looking at reprogramming reserve infantry units as MPs or other specialists.Note 1: This isn't just about MPs -- it's about all of the specialties necessary to execute missions along the spectrum of operations from peace to war. America's military doesn't just need tanks and infantry to execute high-intensity combat operations; it needs Special Forces to conduct low-intensity combat operations, MPs to manage peacekeeping/peace enforcement operations, and other specialties too. Inside the Pentagon (subscription required) had a great piece today that argued we needed more Special Forces in Iraq to conduct the stealthy, secretive combat ops necessary to undermine the Iraqi insurgency -- essentially to "out-guerilla the guerillas". It's an interesting idea, but one that we can't execute now because we don't have enough SF on active duty for that kind of commitment.
Note 2 : So why not just build more MP, Civil Affairs and SF units? Because the true value in these units is not their hardware or their organizational setup -- it's their people. What makes an MP unit so special is its experience in dealing with law enforcement and peacekeeping situations -- experience which is earned through decades of collective work on those missions. You can't build an MP sergeant overnight, just as you couldn't create a civilian police sergeant overnight. It takes years to build the kind of "street smarts" and professional maturity that is necessary for troops in Iraq. So even if you reclassify infantrymen and scouts and tankers as MPs, they will take time to develop the necessary experience levels. There are alternatives, such as cross-assigning personnel to put a critical mass of old MPs in new units. But it still takes time.
In the special operations community, this is even more true. SF operators can't just jump out of an airplane five times, go through Ranger School, and then deploy to Afghanistan and expect to succeed. The strength of America's Green Berets lies in its people, their experience, and the synergies they develop by training and working together over long periods of time. The special operations community has really embraced Col. John Boyd's mantra of "People, Ideas, Hardware -- in that order!" You can't create quality SF soldiers overnight, and you certainly can't create quality SF teams overnight.
Note 3 : A well-informed reader wrote to remind me of the detrimental effect on infantry units when they're used for MP missions -- especially lousy ones like guarding prisoners or checking IDs. (See BG Curry's quote above: "It doesn't take an MP to check an ID card.") BG Curry's implication is that MPs are scarce, therefore we should use less scarce resources, like National Guard infantry, to do mundane tasks like this. I think that's a little short-sighted too. Recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the need for trained, lethal, effective infantry -- especially light infantry. The National Guard contains an awful lot of these units, and though they don't train as much as their active-duty brethren, they have seen combat in Iraq. Had these units been used as MP-retreads, I don't think they would've been ready for combat in Iraq as infantrymen.
There are a finite number of training days available -- even for the active force -- and you have to choose where you focus your training time and training resources. Army doctrine specifies that all units will focus their training on their "Mission Essential Task List " ("METL") in order to get as much bang for their buck as possible. Changing the METL of infantry units to incorporate more MP functions may make them less effective as infantry. That's a very risky proposition, and one that I think is unwise. If we have mundane tasks that can be done by untrained soldiers, I think those are things we ought to think hard about contracting out. To add a variation on BG Curry's words: It doesn't take a soldier, who we've spent thousand of dollars and man hours to train, to check an ID at the main gate of Fort Hood.
What this comes down to is a choice between 2nd Generation Warfare and 4th Generation Warfare . Napoleon developed 2nd Generation Warfare, fueled conscription which was termed the "levee en masse". It was an industrial, conscription-based, grinding, casualty-heavy form of warfare where nations threw legions of men against one another and assessed victory as a function of casualties taken and terrain seized. 4th Generation Warfare, on the other hand, is what our enemies wage against us today. They reject conventional norms and rules of warfare and fight with asymmetric means. The goal in 4GW is to find the enemy's strategic, operational and tactical center of gravity -- and attack it. The goal is to seize the moral high ground, and to win the battle of public opinion.
To the extend that we now face a 4GW conflict, we can't simply throw men and materiel at the war as we did in WWII. We must deploy trained, effective, cohesive, lethal units who can conduct operations at any point on the spectrum from peace to war. Numbers alone won't do the job.
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