"INTEL DUMP"
A spring offensive in Iraq?
Could the rotation of units be more than just a rotation?
The New York Times reports today on the "logistical ballet" that will take place over the next several months in Iraq, as 125,000 soldiers rotate home and 110,000 soldiers rotate into Iraq to replace them. There will be overlap between the two sets of units. Primarily, such overlap is intended to let the new units learn from the old ones, such that the new units will not hit the ground blind and without a clue. The overlap is also intended to make the logistical effort easier. Ostensibly, we can use the same ships that take new units over there to bring the old units home. (Doing it in reverse would require 2 round trips, a very expensive proposition.) But there's something else -- something much more operational in nature -- and Eric Schmitt alludes to it in his article:
During this rotation, about 110,000 fresh troops will flow into Iraq to replace 125,000 who have been there for about a year. The first 200 returning soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division arrived home this week in Fort Campbell, Ky. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were also heading home, to Fort Bragg, N.C.
At the peak period of overlapping forces, commanders will be able to capitalize on having as many as 200,000 troops in Iraq. But the rotation also poses new risks as American officials say they fully expect guerrillas to try to exploit the transition to new, less experienced troops.
"The shifting focus of their attacks is relentless," said Maj. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, the senior Army officer here overseeing the troop rotation. "But this will not be a period of vulnerability."
Analysis: I'm not the first to key in on this fact. Several of my colleagues at JOForum, including Mark Lewis and Michael Noonan, noticed it before I did. But I think it deserves mention again, because it's an issue that has not been reported by the major media in any depth. Could this spike in U.S. troop strength be intended to facilitate a spring offensive against the Iraqi insurgency?
The answer is probably yes, with a couple of reservations. To date, we still have not imposed the kind of police presence we had in either Bosnia or Kosovo in Iraq -- we just haven't had the troops on the ground to put that kind of per-capita manpower on the street. There are some areas of Iraq, such as Samarra and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle, where even reporters dare not go these days. I conceptualize these areas like South Central L.A. -- bad areas in need of substantial patrolling in order to make them safe. Having an extra 100,000 troops on the ground will enable us to do the kind of security operations we've always wanted to do, and to focus large amounts of manpower on discrete areas in order to destroy any nascent insurgencies in those locations.
While I don't think we're going to see a full-scale, high-intensity offensive this spring, I do think we will see a redoubled "law enforcement"/"order maintenance" (hat tip to my undergraduate thesis adviser James Q. Wilson and his Broken Windows thesis) offensive in Iraq. The task/purpose will be to conduct security patrols of the country in order to pacify those areas which have remained unruly since the regime's demise in April 2003. The intended goal will be to facilitate the transfer of power to the infant Iraqi Governing Council in June/July, and to increasingly hand more of the security mission over to the Iraqis.
Now, here's the reservations. First, as MAJ John Nagl describes in today's Sunday NYT Magazine, the key challenge in counter-insurgency warfare is to calibrate your level of force to kill the enemy without losing the population. It will get tougher to do that when we have all these extra soldiers on the ground, particularly soldiers without combat experience or recent experience in Iraq. Second, there's a fine line between the kind of aggressive law enforcement tactics I describe and looking like an occupying force. (I know, that's what we are, but there are reasons why it's good not to look that way.) The Marines seem to be getting this right, insofar as they're adopting a number of TTPs which will help them interface with the population, gather intelligence, and work with the Iraqi population to secure them. In a sense, it's a blend of dismounted patrolling and community policing -- with a whole lot of firepower to back you up.
It's also the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. The challenge in Iraq is not to kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible -- it's to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi citizenry. The "key terrain" is in those hearts and minds, and our tactics must be calibrated to seize that key terrain and hold it. Matt Rustler recently passed me this piece by William Lind, and here are a couple of bullet point observation he makes about 4GW in Iraq:
- How U.S. forces conduct themselves after the battle may be as important in 4GW as how they fight the battle.
- What the Marine Corps calls "cultural intelligence" is of vital importance in 4GW, and it must go down to the lowest rank. In Iraq, the Marines seemed to grasp this much better than the U.S. Army.
* * *
- Unfortunately, the American doctrine of "force protection" works against integration and generally hurts us badly. Here's a quote from the minutes of the seminar:
There are two ways to deal with the issue of force protection. One way is the way we are currently doing it, which is to separate ourselves from the population and to intimidate them with our firepower. A more viable alternative might be to take the opposite approach and integrate with the community. That way you find out more of what is going on and the population protects you. The British approach of getting the helmets off as soon as possible may actually be saving lives.
- What "wins" at the tactical and physical levels may lose at the operational, strategic, mental and moral levels, where 4GW is decided. Martin van Creveld argues that one reason the British have not lost in Northern Ireland is that the British Army has taken more casualties than it has inflicted. This is something the Second Generation American military has great trouble grasping, because it defines success in terms of comparative attrition rates.
- We must recognize that in 4GW situations, we are the weaker, not the stronger party, despite all our firepower and technology.
- What can the U.S. military learn from cops? Our reserve and National Guard units include lots of cops; are we taking advantage of what they know?
Lind goes onto make a lot of other interesting points. But he says at one point that 4GW is not new, and he's right. It's an evolution in warfare, but it builds on a number of ideas that date back to Sun Tzu and then some. More importantly, this should not seem new to the United States either. We learned about the importance of law enforcement operations (then called "constabulary" operations in post-WWII Germany and Japan). We also learned about these issues during the 1990s, in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. (See this book by James Dobbins and this article for more on how America learned and forgot the lessons of nation building from the 20th Century.)
In Summary: Thousands of troops have already started moving to training bases to prepare for Iraq, or to Iraq itself. The largest unit movement since WWII is now underway (although that was a 1-way move so it was simpler in many respects.) At the peak of this move, American commanders will have nearly 250,000 pairs of boots on the ground in Iraq. American commanders continue to fight a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, against a force they estimate in the low thousands. Even today, some areas in Iraq remain lawless, and in need of pacification. If you were one of those commanders, and you were about to get 100,000 more troops for a while, what would you do?
posted by Phillip at 08:33
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