Winning With Body Counts

It sounds like an impressive number, but boasting about how many insurgents you've killed isn't an ideal way to practice Counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics.

A U.S. Marines commander said Wednesday his troops have killed 400 insurgents in southern Afghanistan since late April.

Col. Peter Petronzio, the commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said the figure came from the governor of the southern Helmand province, where his troops have been deployed since late April.

Some 2,200 U.S. Marines moved into the town of Garmser in Helmand province to clean the area of insurgents.

Helmand province is the world's largest opium poppy growing region, the main ingredient in heroin. It is also the area with the highest level of insurgent activity in the country.

After months of fighting around Garmser, Petronzio said the area is not yet secure but is more stable.

"The Taliban proved they wanted to fight for Garmser and we took the fight to them," he told a news conference in Kabul.

Really, do we have to keep hearing about airstrikes, body counts and "last throes?"

...a body count tells you little, because you usually can’t know how many insurgents there were to start with, how many moved into the area, how many transferred from supporter to combatant status, or how many new fighters the conflict has created.

Some good news on the anti-terrorism front

Over the last three years, the most lethal terrorist groups in southeast Asia have been dealt significant blows. Aggressive policing and improved intelligence have been the largest factors, but judicious use of military operations and an undermining of popular support have also been key factors as well.

It has been three years since the last major attacks in the region - three suicide bombers set themselves off in Bali restaurants, killing themselves and 19 innocents - and in that time Indonesian police have taken over 200 Jemaah Islamiyah militants into custody, and the group has seen al Qaeda withdraw financial and logistical support for their efforts.

In the Philippines the Abu Sayyaf Group, an Islamic extremist organization with links to the aforementioned Jemaah Islamiyah, has been beaten back to a few enclaves on a handful of southern islands.

Indonesia and the Philippines have long been viewed by the intelligence community as the most vulnerable nations in the region to terrorist attack and influence. Both nations have been successful in diminishing the terrorist threat, at least in the near term, but of interest to other states that are working toward that same end, there are lessons learned from both of the disparate approaches to the problem.


The Philippines has been successful militarily, but Abu Sayyef is an armed insurrection, that launched military style attacks and engaged the Philippine military, challenging them on their own turf. The United States has funded and trained the Philippine military in COIN process, but has stayed out of the actual fight.

Indonesia has relied on a law enforcement approach to neutralizing the problem. Terrorist suspects are treated well and encouraged to defect or to share information.

Indonesia explains that its friendly handling of detainees will make its government seem less of an enemy of Islam. The Indonesian police are skillful interrogators, their Western counterparts say, and there have been no credible reports of torture being used in Indonesia to break the rings or win the prosecutions. Convictions have resulted in long prison sentences. As terrorists are successfully neutered without major disruptions to the lives of the citizenry, sympathy and local support evaporate.

Senior American officials, government authorities in the region and counterterrorism specialists say that the most serious threats are on the wane — in contrast to American intelligence assessments that Al Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal areas is resurgent and that regional affiliates like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are gaining strength.

"The governments out here take it very seriously and, in my opinion, seem to be doing a very good job individually and working together to deal with that terrorist threat," Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former director of central intelligence, told reporters on June 1 at a regional security conference here.

Senior American intelligence officials began noting progress earlier this year. "Southeast Asia continues to be a concern, although not nearly that which we might have envisioned two or three years ago," Michael Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech in Washington in February.

The United States and Australia, in particular, have played major roles in helping Southeast Asian countries combat terrorist threats in the region.

Remember what I said about lessons learned? That is actually an operations term in my former life. You don't leave every tech and analyst in the world to reinvent the wheel. In my training, I had an actual training module called "Lessons Learned" - this ain't new stuff.

What it is, is basic. Not sexy, not flashy, not high-profile. Just basic, fundamental analysis. Looking at the job ahead and then looking in the toolbox and selecting the right tool for the job. Brains rather than brawn. You know, frivolous shit like actually engaging the thought process rather than reflexively just blowing shit up.

What knocks my hat in the creek is the fact that the United States seems to have the sense to apply lessons learned and back disparate approaches when it comes to helping other countries battle the terrorist threat, while at home they act like all we have is a hammer (the military) and the whole world is a nail.

Mindboggling.

Spencer Ackerman Shows Sadr in a New Light

Rather than dismiss him as a fool and call him "Mookie" like the idiot warbloggers do, Spencer Ackerman comes up with a sobering assessment of Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr.

In Iraq, Moqtada Sadr is perhaps the most powerful single political actor. But in the United States, he is treated with derision and contempt by both officials and commentators. During a visit to Baghdad last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all but called Sadr a coward, saying he was "sitting in Iran" while promising "all-out war for anybody but him." In the right-wing blogosphere, Sadr is commonly called "Mookie." Yet while the political fortunes of all other Iraqi Arab political figures have waxed and waned, only Sadr has consistently gained strength. That raises the question: Why?

My guess is that he is one of the few young Iraqis to actually have faced both Saddam and the United States. He is NOT a military man. He is NOT a leader in the way that we understand--hence, when it's not easy to pigeonhole him, the lesser minds of the right wing go ballistic because they cannot see past their own ideas of what war, insurgency and leadership are supposed to be.

One common explanation is that Sadr is the heir to a distinguished Shiite clerical line that offered the most potent and authentic resistance to Saddam Hussein. A complementary theory holds that Sadr's anti-occupation demagoguery provides all the adherent force he needs.

But a different interpretation -- not exclusive of the other two -- might hold the key to Sadr's continued success. Sadr is an insurgent figure who adopts key principles of counterinsurgency. His military strategy is complemented by an appealing political and economic strategy for securing the loyalties of the population. That would help explain why the counterinsurgents battling Sadr in Baghdad have consistently lost.

"While other individuals and parties sought U.S. support and bickered over the high-profile government ministries," A.J. Rossmiller, who spent 2005 in Baghdad as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote an e-mail, "Sadrists quietly sought the three things most valuable in a political system: popular legitimacy, a patronage network and the ability to provide for the basic needs of citizens."

And that's why they can't understand him--he's not so much a military figure as he is a nationalist. And, at no time in the history of this country, have we ever been able to grasp what it is that motivates a true nationalist, whether we're talking Castro, Ho Chi Minh, or Milosevic. It's also the reason why we cannot understand Hamas or Hezbollah.

Some counterinsurgents believe that Sadr's own dexterity with counterinsurgency principles, combined with his deep political support in Iraq, make accommodation the only sensible strategy. "The best solution now," said longtime counterinsurgency advocate and former Army officer Terrence Daly, "is to try to coopt Sadr's forces." Defeating him, in other words, is beyond the U.S.'s capabilities.

The principles of counterinsurgency are diverse, but they could be summed up as methods of warfare used to draw a civilian population's political and personal allegiance away from a guerrilla force. A counterinsurgent force seeks to coordinate military and civilian methods to offer both material and ideological incentives to a population so it will support a government and reject that government's enemies.

Currently, the U.S. military and its civilian associates have launched a "population protection" strategy to defend Baghdad residents against sectarian and criminal gangs; to promote competent and responsible governance at the provincial as well as national levels; to jump start commerce; and to provide social services like education health care and sanitation.

But in the areas under his control, Sadr provides all these things -- and does so better than the Iraqi government.

No disagreement there--that's the best reading of this that I've seen.

It is true that Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, has been implicated in scores of sectarian murders of Sunni Iraqis, thereby expediting and deepening Iraq's civil war. But the Mahdi Army has also stood as a bulwark for Shiites against Sunni aggression or reprisal, patrolling neighborhoods when no other force was willing or able to protect inhabitants from violence. While Iraq's legal system has remained paralyzed since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Sadr established courts within months that -- while dealing out an illiberal brand of Islamic justice that has little respect for women's or minority rights -- adjudicated people's disputes. In 2004, when Sunni Iraqis in Fallujah were locked in a stand-off with U.S. Marines, Sadr organized a blood drive in Baghdad even as his own forces battled U.S. troops.

How many times have you heard it said in the media--In 2004, when Sunni Iraqis in Fallujah were locked in a stand-off with U.S. Marines, Sadr organized a blood drive in Baghdad even as his own forces battled U.S. troops. We're talking four years ago, obviously, but how much goodwill has Sadr been able to reap since then? Well, for starters, he ain't dead.

A new report from Refugees International, released Apr. 15, assessed that Sadr "provides shelter, food and non-food items to hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites in Iraq," making it "the main service provider in the country." Among Sadr's more recent efforts has been the active resettlement some of the two million Iraqis internally displaced by the continuing conflict. Refugees International found that while Maliki's efforts have been lacking, Sadr provides not just cost-free housing but also food and a modest income stipend. In other words, according to the report, Sadr provides better governance than the Iraqi government.

It is as if Sadr has read the Army and Marine Corps' 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency. Spearheaded by such respected counterinsurgents as Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the manual's central insight is that political and economic measures, and not simply military ones, are what defeats insurgencies. "Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate," the manual states. "Long-term success in COIN [counterinsurgency] depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government’s rule. Achieving this condition requires the government to eliminate as many causes of the insurgency as feasible."

But Sadr's appeal is not strictly material. Even if he did not deliver the services he provides, he would still have two potent assets that no other Iraqi political figure jointly possesses. First is his uncompromising anti-occupation stance. Last year, his deputies in Parliament led an effort to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops that won a parliamentary majority -- only to be ignored by Maliki.

I'd say he practices the manual. The US is pretending to practice it in Iraq. Every time there's a massive airstrike, it's one more nail in the coffin for COIN strategy in Iraq. We've said that here as often as it can be said.

More fundamentally, Sadr's family led the religious resistance to Saddam Hussein, with both his father and his uncle becoming high-profile victims of the regime. The Sadrist Current that he helms is a movement in Iraq with roots far deeper than any other organized political entity.

Sadr has also managed to overcome the few challenges to his religious authority. Iraq's supreme Shiite authority, the Najaf-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is the only cleric whose religious-political influence outshines Sadr's. While Sistani has receded from Iraqi politics since 2005, the Shiite parties still look to him to grant his imprimatur on controversial political moves. As a result, Sadr has sought to co-opt Sistani, even as Sistani has sought to co-opt Sadr. "The relationship is mutually opportunistic, but also pragmatic, since the two clerics have not been able to ignore each other," observed Babak Rahimi of the Jamestown Foundation in a widely-read analysis last year. He noted that the alliance of convenience "is bound to reshape Iraqi Shiite politics in the years to come." Additionally, Sadr is getting ecclesiastical training in the Iranian city of Qom, a vital step for bolstering his own religious prestige.

When faced with a powerful enemy who enjoys significant popular support, one approach counterinsurgents sometimes advise is co-optation. In 2007, with Robert Gates at the helm of the Pentagon and Petraeus at the helm of the Iraq war, there was a significant effort to signal that the U.S. had no real problem with Sadr.

In June 2007, Petraeus gave an interview to USA Today that conspicuously praised the cleric. "Actually, first of all I'd like to say that Muqtada al-Sadr issued a very constructive statement today in the wake of the Samarra attack calling for mourning for several days and calling for restraint," Petraeus said. "That continues the line of messages that he has put out since his return from Iran a couple weeks ago, in which he has ordered his followers not to attack Sunnis (or) other Iraqis, not to attack mosques and shrines."

Yeah, you don't hear warbloggers condemning Petraeus for trying to accomodate Sadr.

Who's really practicing COIN in Iraq? Who's the nationalist? And who's survived longer than anyone else? No one has been a player in Iraq longer than Sadr, at least at his level. Sanchez, Casey, Bremer, and all the rest have moved on. al-Maliki came afterwards. And Petraeus got where he is by failing upward.

Excellent article, and proof someone is at least thinking critically these days.

Are We Ready To Fight The Next War?

And what if the next war is in Colombia?

Can we "over learn" what is going on in Iraq? As Spencer Ackerman reports, The debate has already started in the "COIN" or counterinsurgency community in the US Army and continues:

In the spring of 2007, as the first wave of new combat brigades arrived in Baghdad to execute President George W. Bush’s troop surge, an Army lieutenant colonel named Paul Yingling booted up his computer at Ft. Hood, Tex. He received an email accusing him of moral cowardice. It was from Yingling’s friend, a fellow Iraq veteran and Army lieutenant colonel named Gian Gentile.

Gentile was concerned about a highly influential article that Yingling had written for the magazine Armed Forces Journal titled "A Failure In Generalship." The piece was incendiary. Yingling, barely 40 and an Iraq veteran twice over, had issued a j’accuse to the entire general officer corps for failing, over the previous 15 years, to anticipate low-intensity conflicts with insurgents and prepare U.S. troops accordingly. He further contended that the generals failed to deliver their best military advice to the Bush administration about the true costs of the war in Iraq, preferring not to challenge the White House’s optimistic fantasies. "Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence," Yingling had written, "but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character." The people he criticized have the power to end his career.

But to Gentile, Yingling was the lapsed officer. In his email, and then in a volley of op-eds and blog posts over the next year, Gentile derided Yingling for failing to call any general out by name. Worse yet, Gentile now contends that blaming the generals represents a myopia on the part of Yingling’s fellow counterinsurgency enthusiasts—until recently, he counted himself one—to accept the U.S. failure in Iraq. "By not naming names," Gentile, now a history professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said in a phone interview, "he has left it open for the generals themselves to interpret who’s in the Yingling-screw-up crowd. The way that comes out, until the early months of the surge, he doesn’t want to say who but he really means [former Iraq commander and now Army Chief of Staff Gen. George] Casey, only a few units got it right and finally, maybe, we’re on the right track with Gen. Petraeus and the surge." Both Yingling and Gentile claim to have received heaps of supportive email from soldiers.

I think it's great that two eminent thinkers are having this debate in public, but what purpose does it serve to debate the surge in Iraq when the answer is right in front of you? And the question, in my mind, has always been, do you really think it was wise to occupy Iraq for as long as we have without forcing the Iraqi government to adhere to a strict timetable of political reconcilliation with the withdrawal of US forces as the ultimate goal? By my reckoning, US troops have handed the Iraqi government enough time for them to get the job done. Now that we see that they cannot accomplish reconcilliation, what does it serve our long-term interests to keep rewarding their failure with our blood and treasure?

That's my definition of victory--can we pull our troops out and leave behind a stable country? If not, then quit pretending our troops should be bled dry to kick the can down the road. We put them there, they gave the Iraqi government all the time it needed to mature, grow up, and decide its own fate. No amount of propping up the current Iraqi government is going to prevent an eventual collapse. And not one US soldier's life is worth propping up a failed government. Not one.

The chances of the next war looking like the Iraq war are what, exactly? If we're smart, we'll never get into another war like the Iraq War. Therefore, what good is a fundamental shift to COIN going to do us? We'll have a military outfitted to fight insurgents with the wrong gear and the wrong vehicles for a different kind of fight.

What if that next conflict is to be found in the region between Colombia and Venezuela? What if the flashpoint for the next war is a border fight for the bridges and crossing points in the city of Arauca? Does the US military have a plan to fight a war in the jungles of Southern Colombia or in the river country of Northeastern Colombia? You can find many distinct types of terrain in Colombia--and if we internalize an ability to fight in deserts or in urban areas, are we going to be ready to fight along rivers in jungles? What if we need US troops to cross numerous streams and rivers on foot--do they have the right boots? Who would we turn to when it came time to ramp up fast? We know that US troops have been going back and forth to Colombia for years. There are Special Forces advisors who have a lot of experience there. Will they be tapped to train others quickly enough if there is a conflict? Or will they be ignored because we are hell-bent on fighting the new war the way we fought the last war? What if most of those men are being snapped up by Blackwater to fight as Uribe's personal bodyguards?

What if they're all still in Iraq?

Say we spend the next few years reorganizing the military into smaller brigades equipped with Stryker vehicles. Say we build several divisions worth of these troops into a battle-ready force that can deploy quickly.

Well, what if the next challenge for America is to head off disaster in Colombia? Say, for example, that the larger. US-backed Colombian military is caught fighting a two-front war against Ecuador and Venezuela. And the outcome is a victory over Ecuador but a stalemate with Venezuela. I would speculate that a drawn-out, costly fight with Venezuela could deplete Colombia's Army just enough to force the population of Colombia to turn on the Uribe government. Now add in the possibility that Hugo Chavez would up the ante by ordering his troops to assist the FARC in their campaign against Uribe all throughout the country, timed with an offensive by Venezuelan troops against the border crossings on the frontier between the two countries.

The FARC are a completely different animal from what we fight in Iraq. They are made up of seasoned fighters who have fought in terrible terrain for decades. They are closer in zeal to what we fought in Vietnam than what we're fighting now in Iraq. A COIN mindset would probably help us if we were forced to intercede and help Colombia defeat the FARC.

But what good would it do if the Colombian Army collapsed and we had to drive back the convetionally-equipped Venezuelan Army? What if the only forces available to send were 82nd Airborne [light infantry] as opposed to troops more suited to fight in that terrain [air cav or the 101st Airborne]. What if neither were available, and we had to send a mixed bag of heavy and light combat units from different posts and different divisions? What if we had to send the 7th Special Forces Group and a patchwork of Guard units to support them?

Would there be a fundamental examination of what went wrong if we screwed up and sent the wrong troops? Who would be held accountable? If Yingling can't speak up (and this goes for Colonel H.R. McMaster and a few others as well) without fear of recrimination, when are we going to learn anything?

Let me pause and go back to the Ackerman article:

Gentile considers the counterinsurgents’ sense of beseigement to be ludicrous. To him, the military is undergoing a titanic shift in favor of counterinsurgency with little debate over the implications. "I worry about a hyper-emphasis on COIN and irregular warfare," he said in a phone interview, with "less mechanization, less protection and more infantry on the ground walking and talking with the people. It’s a potential recipe for disaster if our enemies fight the way Hezbollah did against the Israelis in the summer of ‘06."

He continued, "Petraeus sat on the promotion board. Do we really think H.R. won’t have a star on his shoulder? They’re the ones in control. I don’t see how they can think otherwise. They’re almost like the minority party that finally becomes the majority party and can’t get over the fact they’re the majority!"

Gentile even has a term for the counterinsurgents’ view of their place in the Army: he calls it The Matrix, after the mind-controlling Baudrillardian machine that alters the perception of reality in the eponymous Wachowski Brothers films.

There was a time when he would have swallowed the blue pill. Gentile served two tours in Iraq, first in Tikrit in 2003 under Odierno and then in western Baghdad in 2006, commanding an armored cavalry squadron. Despite what he calls a counterinsurgents’ "master narrative," whereby counterinsurgency arrives in Iraq first in Tal Afar with McMaster and then in Baghdad with Petraeus, Gentile said that units—including his own—applied COIN practices throughout the war. "Clearly, there are examples of units not getting it," he said. "But I believe that at the tactical level—infantry scouts, platoons, companies and battalions—performed [counterinsurgency operations] by the book even before FM 3-24." Yet, Gentile observed, conditions in Iraq got worse, not better.

That realization turned Gentile from a COIN practitioner to a COIN skeptic. Essentially, he swallowed the red pill to escape the Matrix during the triumphalism surrounding the troop surge in 2007. Counterinsurgency, he now believes, has a role in a modern military, but an excessive focus on it serves as an alibi to avoid recognizing that the U.S. military is not omnipotent. "I think Andrew Bacevich, at the policy-strategy level, has basically nailed it," Gentile said, referring to the retired Army colonel who contends that Iraq is an irredeemable strategic mistake. "He points out the limits of what American military power can accomplish."

Yingling finds his friend’s argument to be, at the least, premature. To him, there are too many vestiges of an improperly-footed military encumbering counterinsurgency to conclude that it has been fully tested and found wanting. "Why are our acquisition priorities the same as before 9/11?" he said from Ft. Hood, where he commands the 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery. "My field artillery battalion, we’ve got a multi-launch rocket system to guard detainees. We built the wrong Army in the 1990s and now we’re breaking it apart to fight the war we’ve got." He continued, "The notion that America’s power as a nation is somehow at its limits today as we spend four percent of our GDP on defense and have an active-duty Army of half a million just doesn’t square with history."

Nor can he accept Gentile’s argument that "A Failure In Generalship" needed to name names. "The failures of our general officer corps, through Vietnam and Iraq, occur independently of a single individual," said Yingling, who learned counterinsurgency while soldiering for McMaster in Tal Afar. "To focus on individual culpability misses the point. There’s a structural problem with how the armed forces develop senior leaders. And until we address it, we’ll keep getting the same result."

Just as Gentile believes there’s a place for counterinsurgency in the military, neither does Yingling adopt a zero-sum approach to conventional warfare. "The high-intensity [side of things], I certainly don’t want to abandon it," he said. "There’s a good debate to be had about what that balance should be."

We should always strive to have the right troops to send to the right kind of fight. We should NEVER be in a position to send "whoever's available" to fight in a harsh climate with the wrong gear. Anyone remember the Korean War, and how we sent National Guardsmen from the Dakotas and over-pampered occupation troops from Japan with the wrong uniforms and with outdated equipment without any training for the geography that they were expected to fight in? It would be criminally incompetent to send US troops to a South American conflict with the wrong uniforms and the wrong gear. We should have a ready force to send--not a mixed bag of troops from several different commands who were unlucky enough to be on alert when the shit hit the fan.

Has the US military addressed the fundamental problem of air lifting large formations to the battlefield? Virtually every military operation in Colombia requires navigating terrain that isn't suited to vehicles and is much better suited for the use of helicopters--so do we have enough helicopters to send? Or do we rely on the Osprey-equipped Marines? And isn't it time to focus on what we should be using the Marines for? Do we have a big enough Navy to secure transport of a heavy unit to Colombia? Do we take control of the Panama Canal to prevent half of our forces from being separated from the other half if Venezuela decides to move on Panama? Relations between the two have been chilly for years.

It's all well and good to internalize COIN. But what good will it do us if the next war has a fundamentally different set of goals and situations that have nothing to do with scenarios taught by officers who have embraced COIN as their central organizing principle?

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

The next thing I should do is explain why I think this:

"If you organize the military to fight a Counterinsurgency War, then the civilians who control the military are probably going to involve the military in a Counterinsurgency War."

Organizing yourself to get into another strategic blunder probably isn't the smartest way to effectively prepare our troops to defend American interests.