The US Army and Arabic Linguists

Crossposted from our new home blog,They gave us a republic...
Ten years ago, I watched soldiers who had spent a year at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) learning Arabic end up getting sent to Hawaii, Korea, and to units that did not permit them to use their Arabic language skills.

I watched skilled, trained linguists who loved their target languages get flushed through a system that didn't care about their language identifier but did care about their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). The broken system that mishandled and assigned them to units where they could not maintain or enhance their critical language skills simply shrugged.

The Army may begin paying a retention bonus of as much as $150,000 to Arabic speaking soldiers in reflection of how critical it has become for the US military to retain native language and cultural know-how in its ranks.

That, my friends, is insane. Had the Army retained just one out of every four of those linguists, there wouldn't be such a dire need right now. I would estimate that 9 out of every 10 Arabic linguists that I met got out after their first tour.

Only one other job in the Army, Special Forces, rates such a super-sized retention bonus. Now, as the military makes a fundamental shift toward rewarding the linguistic expertise it needs the most, it is expanding a program to train and retain native Arabic and other speakers from the same regions in which it is fighting.

"This is a war not only against the US, but against our way of freedom," says Sergeant Madi, a native interpreter and US citizen who asked to be identified only by his surname due to security concerns for him and his family. "We have been fighting for over 16 years against Islamic extremism. It is also my war."

This part is what angers me the most--we knew after the first Gulf War that we needed people in the military who could speak Arabic. Not the flat, formal version--the kind spoken in different countries all throughout the Middle East. We knew in 1998 that we were going to need linguists if we were going to keep Saddam Hussein contained.

After the invasion of Iraq and the insurgency that followed, the US military recognized its dearth of linguistic competence in the country it had just toppled, and it scrambled to identify Arabic and other linguists.

Yes, it is true--a good number have been persecuted out of the ranks for being gay. Many more were simply assigned in ways that cost them their language skills.

The US Army simply isn't serious about training and retaining them. It knew there was a problem a decade ago. In ten years, they could have several thousand linguists in all ranks and with various specialties and dialect experience.

Instead, we have a crisis that they are going to try and throw $150,000 a head at. That's not the answer, either. All you're going to do are keep a handful of people who need the money. The rest know they can get out--and avoid a third or fourth tour in Iraq.

Remember to update your blogrolls and bookmarks with our new domain name, They gave us a republic...

US Base Abandoned After Being Overrun

It must have been worse than we thought:

After suffering significant setbacks in the fight against insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan troops have pulled out of a combat outpost where nine U.S. soldiers were killed in a pitched battle with Taliban fighters Sunday..

U.S. and Afghan soldiers withdrew from the makeshift outpost near the remote village of Wanat as Taliban fighters swarmed the area near the border of the eastern provinces of Nuristan and Kunar, NATO and Afghan officials said Wednesday. An unspecified number of NATO and Afghan troops remain in the remote region near the edge of Pakistan's western border, said Capt. Mike Finney, a spokesman for NATO's mission in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.

The combat outpost in Wanat had only been operational for two or three days before Taliban insurgents launched a sophisticated assault on it Sunday, according to NATO officials. Hundreds of Taliban fighters attacked the outpost with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and gunfire. About 100 to 150 U.S. and Afghan soldiers struggled to repel the early morning attack, firing a fusillade of bullets on insurgents who had taken up positions in a village mosque and several other locations.

In addition to the nine U.S. troops killed, 15 American and at least four Afghan soldiers were wounded after insurgents breached the outer area of the outpost. The attack was the deadliest in Afghanistan since U.S.-led military operations began in the country in 2001.

As I speculated here when the attack happened, no amount of "spin" is going to make us believe this didn't matter. Pulling troops out is significant, but doesn't hand much to the Taliban or tribal fighters. They're not interested in real estate because they can obviously assemble and move in larger numbers than before. They're interested in conducting these larger, overwhelming attacks and then disappearing.

Was the outpost poorly positioned? Did someone select a piece of ground that couldn't be defended? If this was a tactical mistake, easily rectified by moving troops to a place that is more suitable to defend, will there be an assessment done of ALL the outposts?

My belief is that we are going to have to consolidate into company-sized elements for defense, add considerable firepower to allow troops to defend themselves better, and start preparing ourselves for a fight more akin to Korea than anything else. Shortages of troops, of weapons, and the undesirable terrain work against us.

[Yes, we acknowledge--they shouldn't be there, we never should have invaded, the Brits lost a bunch of men there, the Russians were whipped, etc. We get that. We're dealing with the here and now, not the woulda-shoulda-coulda.]

--WS

Why the Military Can't Fix Equipment Fast Enough

According to a GAO report issued on July 8, the amount of equipment being sent to the five military repair depots is causing incredible strain on the system that repairs the equipment our military needs to sustain operations

The five Army depot maintenance activities support combat readiness by providing services necessary to keep Army units operating worldwide. From fiscal year 2004 through fiscal year 2007, the amount of new orders received to perform work increased from approximately $2.6 billion to $5.2 billion—about a 100 percent increase. These orders were to repair and overhaul a wide range of assets, including helicopters, such as the Apache and Blackhawk; combat vehicles such as the Abrams tank; air defense systems, such as the Patriot missile; electronics; and inventory items for the Army, other military services, and foreign governments. Many of these weapons systems are used to support the Army’s current effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. To perform the work needed in support of the Global War on Terrorism, the number of employees at the five depots increased from 12,983 to 15,717—a 21 percent increase—from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2007 and the number of direct labor hours of work increased from about 16.3 million in fiscal year 2004 to 24 million for fiscal year 2007—a 47 percent increase.

The five Army depots operate under the working capital fund concept, where customers are to be charged for the anticipated full cost of goods and services. To the extent that the depots do not complete work at year-end, the funded work will be carried into the next fiscal year. Carryover is the reported dollar value of work that has been ordered and funded (obligated) by customers but not completed by working capital fund activities at the end of the fiscal year.

The dramatic increase in "carryover" is the strain, and because we are running at full speed in Iraq and increasing our operations in Afghanistan, the carryover is only going to increase unless drastic action is taken to reduce that strain. I should also note--what "foreign governments" are putting strain on the system? I hope they need the gear to help us fight.

The following chart shows the growth--and the strain--that the military repair depots are under:



The reasons are pretty stark for this:

Our analysis of fiscal years 2006 and 2007 Army depot reports and discussions with depot officials identified four primary reasons for the significant growth in carryover. While some of these reasons are under the control of other DOD activities, such as customers not sending assets needing repair to the depots as planned, other reasons are within the depots’ control.

•First, the Army depot maintenance budget significantly underestimated the amount of new orders received from customers by about $1.7 billion and $1.5 billion for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, respectively. While the depots performed more work than budgeted during fiscal years 2006 and 2007, they could not keep pace with the increases in new orders.

•Second, the depots accepted new orders late in fiscal years 2006 and 2007 that could not reasonably be completed (and in some cases were not even started) prior to the end of the fiscal year.

•Third, our analysis of depot data and interviews with depot officials found that the depots experienced shortages in parts needed to perform their work in fiscal years 2006 and 2007.

•Fourth, based on our review of selected depot production reports on the status of work and discussions with depot officials, we determined that unserviceable assets (assets requiring repair) were not sent to the depots for repair as planned. Army officials informed us that in some cases the assets remained in-theatre (such as Iraq) for longer periods than planned.

I think it's outrageous that the planning was this bad. Obviously, "no one could have forseen" that we'd be tied down in two wars, one unsustainable and one escalating quickly out of control because of a lack of available US troops.

If one of these facilities is located near you, I would be willing to bet you that they're hiring and looking to expand. As the demand increases, the GAO indicated that these facilities have been adding personnel:

• Anniston performs maintenance on both heavy- and light-tracked combat vehicles and their components, such as the M1 Abrams tank.

•Corpus Christi Army Depot (Corpus Christi) overhauls, repairs, modifies, tests, and modernizes helicopters, engines, and components for all services and foreign military customers.

•Letterkenny Army Depot (Letterkenny) has tactical missile repair capabilities supporting a variety of DOD missile systems including the Patriot and its ground support and radar equipment. In response to the Global War on Terrorism, Letterkenny is rebuilding the High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV) that are returning from theater and is rebuilding them to a configuration that will support add-on armor.

•Red River Army Depot (Red River) performs maintenance, certification, and related support services on ground combat systems, air defense systems, and tactical wheeled vehicles. Systems supported include the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, Multiple Launch Rocket System, Small Emplacement Excavator, 5-ton dump truck, and HMMWVs.

•Tobyhanna uses advanced technologies to ensure the readiness of U.S. armed forces and is a full-service repair, overhaul, and fabrication facility for communications-electronics.

This last part is the part that probably bothers me the most--the lack of spare parts is absolutely killing our ability to repair and refurbish equipment and get it back to the troops. When you hear stories like thisabout how we found ourselves in urban combat with the wrong equipment or simply not enough of it and this story where a soldier complains about waiting months for "a handful of screws" , it indicates to me that we have never properly put this country on a wartime footing and used our manufacturing and industrial capabilities to supply the troops. What's lost in all of this is that if we invested in helping create or sustain a dozen or more companies that could manufacture and upgrade or retool and rehabilitate equipment, it would create jobs. It would be "pork barrel spending" to certain folks but it would be money well spent to sustain our military AND reduce the strain on these depots:

Our analysis of depot data and interviews with depot officials found that the depots experienced shortages of parts needed to perform their repair work in fiscal years 2006 and 2007. Our analysis of data in the critical maintenance repair parts reactive system11 at four depots showed that in 733 and 605 instances, repair parts shortages resulted in work stoppage in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, respectively. DLA and to a lesser extent Army Supply were the sources of supply for most of the repair parts. DLA officials told us that a major difficulty DLA faces as a supplier is forecasting the amount of repair parts needed when the depots’ types and numbers of repairs keep changing. Having a firm requirement (quantity of items to be repaired) early in the process is critical if DLA is to provide the spare parts to the depots when they need them. However, this has not always been the case. For example, as discussed later in this report, in November 2006, Red River accepted an order to overhaul 200 HMMWVs. Over the next 4 months, the order was amended first to decrease the quantity to 106 and then increase the quantity to 344. According to DLA officials, changing requirements, similar to this example, make it extremely difficult to forecast the spare parts needed for repairs. If DLA waits to buy the parts until the depot has a firm requirement, the parts might not be available when the depot needs them. On the other hand, if DLA buys the parts before the requirement is firm, DLA is at risk for excess inventory of parts when requirements for parts are significantly reduced.

Depots Could Not Obtain Parts Needed to Perform Repair Work as Scheduled

In order to perform the required repair work and help minimize the impact of parts shortages on depot operations, the depots have taken a number of actions to obtain parts when they were not available, including using parts from other assets, commonly referred to as robbing parts; fabricating the parts; and obtaining parts through the use of their local procurement authority, including the government purchase card. The following are examples of actions taken by the depots.

In October 2006, Anniston accepted a $5.6 million order financed with fiscal year 2007 operation and maintenance appropriated funds to overhaul 1,200 M2 machine guns. The work was originally scheduled to begin in March 2007. Because of the lack of parts, the work did not begin until July 2007 which resulted in more carryover than originally planned. About $5.4 million of the $5.6 million carried over from fiscal year 2007 into fiscal year 2008.

Because of the Global War on Terrorism and the surge in production of the M2s, Anniston had problems with obtaining parts to overhaul the machine guns since 2004. Because the depot could not get the needed parts from DLA or Army Supply, it used parts from other M2 machine guns. Some of these parts included the barrels, buffer body assemble, bolt, barrel extensions, breech locks, and receivers. Since the depot used parts from these 1,200 machine guns to repair machine guns in previous years, these 1,200 machine guns were missing parts. By the time the depot overhauled the 1,200 M2 machine guns, about half of the M2s had been totally stripped of their parts. An Army official stated that the machine guns going through overhaul were the “worst of the worst.” To perform the work, the depot had to buy new parts and have the Picatinny Arsenal fabricate barrel extensions in order to obtain the parts needed to complete the overhaul. This extra work increased the costs to about $10.4 million and the work was completed in December 2007.

In November 2006, Red River accepted an order totaling approximately $24.8 million to overhaul 200 M1114 up armor HMMWVs from the Army TACOM Life Cycle Management Command. The order was financed with fiscal year 2007 operation and maintenance appropriated funds and was modified twice. In January 2007, the order was reduced to overhaul 106 HMMWVs for about $13.1 million. Two months later in March 2007, the order was increased to 344 HMMWVs for about $56.1 million. In performing this work, the depot encountered two problems. First, the HMMWVs were not always available, resulting in changes to scheduling the performance of work. Second, the depot encountered problems in obtaining the material it needed to perform the repairs. For example, in May 2007, there was a shortage or potential parts shortage of 45 different parts to perform this work. To obtain the parts needed to perform the work, depot officials stated that they used parts from other vehicles at the depot or purchased parts via local procurement, including using government purchase cards. In August 2007, there was a shortage or potential parts shortage of 30 different parts. Since most of the work was not completed in fiscal year 2007, about $37.5 million carried over into fiscal year 2008. As of December 2007, documents showed that the depot anticipated completing work on this order in April 2008.

In discussing the M1114 up armor HMMWV work with Red River officials, they told us that the problems encountered in performing the fiscal year 2007 work also occurred in the previous fiscal year. First, the quantity to be repaired kept changing. Specifically, in January 2006 they accepted an order to repair 37 HMMWVs. In March 2006, the order was amended to 108 HMMWVs. Then in July 2006 the order was amended to repair 58 HMMWVs. Finally, in August, 2006, the order was amended back to 108 HMMWVs. Second, the depot also encountered problems on obtaining parts to perform the work. According to depot officials, because the last amendment increasing the order to 108 HMMWVs occurred in August 2006 and the HMMWVs to be repaired were in poor condition, the carryover amount was high.

Finally, someone who knows what the hell they're supposed to use their government credit card on!

As this problem gets worse, remember--every time a troop doesn't have the equipment that they need in a war zone, their unit suffers, their readiness suffers and they are placed in danger for no good reason.

And that's the real outrage here. No American should ever reach for a weapon or go without a vehicle that isn't there in a war zone.

The History of the Iraq War

The US Army has taken an academic look at the era of the Iraq War that spun the conflict out of control and caused the chain of events which led to the demise of Donald Rumsfeld and the rise of General David Petraeus.

A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.

The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.

The study is worth a look--simply because it is one that actually lists the correct blame. If the military can continue to do these types of studies, there's a better chance the mistakes that were made won't be repeated.

The study can be found at this link.

--WS

Andrew Sullivan Asks a Pretty Good Question

But I don't think it gets to the real heart of the matter.

What I fear is that the Bush administration and many neo-conservatives are claiming one thing, while planning for another; and after the last eight years, the trust level is low. I fear they want a permanent presence in Iraq to reassure Israel; and to pursue the option of war with Iran. I fear the bases are there to detain, contain or attack the regional Shiite power, Iran, and to reassure the regional Sunni powers that the US military will protect them. If this is the agenda, please let us know. Let the American people examine and debate it. Have McCain own this position rather than refer to it as a premise as if we already know what it is.

I'm not going to get into Sullivan-bashing, because what good would that do?

Up front--this is the most critical point--the US Army cannot fight anywhere at full strength right now. The force is exhausted, the equipment is stretched to the breaking point, and the troops are not trained for an invasion; they are seasoned after five years of occupation duty, not invade-and-destroy-another-army duty. It would require at least 5 mechanized (heavy) divisions to attack Iran, or, roughly, at least twenty-five to thirty mechanized brigades at full strength in order to overwhelm the Iranian army sufficiently. You can't do it all by air, and light forces would have to move in and occupy or hold ground behind the heavy units. That's another 15 brigades, along with a massive support infrastructure to supply and maintain an invasion force that would have to travel behind them. The Iranian Army would likely disperse and reform BEHIND or on the flanks of an advancing army. And five divisions is barely enough as it is. In order to invade Iran, anyone who says less than a million men is not being realistic at all if they want to achieve anything. We'd be lucky to field a force of 170,000 men, if that. We would have to abandon most of Iraq.

The problem with the assertion that the US is planning to have 58 permanent bases in Iraq is that there's almost no way for the US military to attack Iran from those bases in Iraq, not by surprise and not without risking military failure. We initially attacked Iraq from bases in Kuwait--and a mechanized army on the attack has to move forces into place, stage them as briefly as possible in long lines or deployed formations, and move to the attack with a large logistics and supply chain behind them.

Iraq already attacked Iran in this way, so the Iranians know every major approach and every area of defense. It is 430 miles from Baghdad to Tehran. The original US invasion that kicked off in 2003 was a movement from Kuwait to Baghdad of roughly 300 miles. The Iranians have rough terrain to defend, not just desert. They can arrange a token defense of their frontier and we will see a brief replay of the stalemated Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. No question--the US Army would overwhelm the Iranian Army, but it would have to move through rough terrain to invade Iran from Iraq.

An uprising by any of the Shia forces in Iraq aligned with Iran--the Badr brigade, for example--would mean that the US Army would move into hostile territory and overwhelm Iran's military in a ground invasion while leaving its bases in Iraq either lightly defended or empty and the massive logistical supply train very vulnerable to attack. Think of IEDs and fuel trucks, trying to move from Iraq into western Iran--and you get the idea.

It's almost impossible to invade a country when you're stuck in a quagmire in the country next door. US troops would have to move hundreds of miles into attack formations and almost certainly would be attacked while doing so by forces seeking to disrupt or delay an invasion of Iran. Iraq would have to be placid and safe--as Kuwait was in 2003--for that to work.

-WS

UPDATED--Former Petraeus Colleague Convicted of Accepting Bribes in Iraq

Sorry to do this, but the lede was buried. I am republishing this story with updated information and some observations--originally, I had planned to call Selph a "little fish in a big pond." It now appears there are some serious questions to be asked of some very senior leaders.

From the New York Times, August 27, 2007:

Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.

The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.

There is no indication that investigators have uncovered any wrongdoing by General Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, who through a spokesman declined comment on any legal proceedings.

[SNIP]

But now, American officials said, part of the criminal investigation is focused on Lt. Col. Levonda Joey Selph, who reported directly to General Petraeus and worked closely with him in setting up the logistics operation for what were then the fledgling Iraqi security forces.

That operation moved everything from AK-47s, armored vehicles and plastic explosives to boots and Army uniforms, according to officials who were involved in it. Her former colleagues recall Colonel Selph as a courageous officer who was willing to take substantial personal risks to carry out her mission and was unfailingly loyal to General Petraeus and his directives to move quickly in setting up the logistics operation.

“She was kind of like the Pony Express of the Iraqi security forces,” said Victoria Wayne, who was then deputy director of logistics for the overall Iraqi reconstruction program.

Still, Colonel Selph also ran into serious problems with a company she oversaw that failed to live up to a contract it had signed to carry out part of that logistics mission.

It is not clear exactly what Colonel Selph is being investigated for. Colonel Selph, reached by telephone twice on Monday, said she would speak to reporters later but did not answer further messages left for her.

Flash forward to today:

A retired U.S. Army colonel pleaded guilty Tuesday to awarding contracts in Iraq to a Kuwait-based firm in exchange for gifts.

Levonda Selph of Virginia admitted accepting $4,000 in cash and a $5,000 vacation to Thailand from the unidentified contractor, which was awarded $12 million in contracts to operate Defense Department warehouses in Iraq. [see below for Selph's link to Thailand]

She pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy. She was secretly indicted on those charges in October; the charges weren't disclosed until her court appearance Tuesday.

Under terms of a plea agreement, Selph could receive up to 33 months in jail. She promised to repay the government $9,000 and to cooperate in an ongoing investigation.

Prosecutors said Selph was a lieutenant colonel at Camp Victory in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 when she led a committee that awarded the warehouse contracts.

The Justice Department said she will be free until her sentencing October 14 but will not be allowed to leave the country.

MISSING from that story is the original link between Selph and Petraeus, of course. Missing is the fact that Colonel Ted Westhusing killed himself over these very issues, according to his suicide note, which mentioned Petraeus by name. Think we'll hear anything about that?

UPDATED 8:50 AM - WS:

Now we know why there was a link to Thailand:

In a phone interview from Bangkok, John Hess, who worked as the assistant director of operations for an American-owned company that helped manage supplies for Iraq, said payments to the companies that supplied arms to Iraq were often delayed because of missing DD-250s. He said he believed that the officers had the right motives but used dangerous methods.

“Once those weapons left normal channels,” Mr. Hess said, “none of us were ever sure where they were really going.”

Several co-workers complained about the unorthodox tactics of the two officers, including an accusation that Major Cox, 38, was stealing weapons, Major Isgrigg said. However, federal officials said the officers were not the targets of an investigation.

Even when they managed to get weapons to the Iraqi military, Major Isgrigg said, it was hard for him and Major Cox to feel triumphant. The Iraqi commanders could barely keep track of their troops, much less stocks of new weapons, he said. He estimated that 30 percent of the equipment he and Major Cox delivered went to Iraqi soldiers who showed up for duty one day, and disappeared the next.
“There were times we would issue a batch of weapons and within 10 days they would show up at the Enemy Weapons Purchase Program,” Major Cox, who is on his second tour in Baghdad, wrote by e-mail, referring to a military effort to buy guns from the streets.

“We didn’t always think we were going about things the right way,” said Major Isgrigg, who left Iraq in July. But he said he believed that his actions were necessary, saying of his commanders: “They rushed it. Their goal was to get those units standing as fast as possible, and then to get out of there. There was no planning for the long term.”

As the American military hurried to train and equip Iraqi security forces in the spring of 2004, the Pentagon turned to contractors to operate warehouses to store equipment and weapons.

Mr. Saffar managed an armory on the grounds of the Baghdad Police Academy, which along with a nearby warehouse was operated by an American-owned company based in Kuwait.

In July, the company, American Logistics Services, which later became Lee Dynamics International, was suspended by the Army from doing future business with the government amid accusations that the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to military contracting officers. The company had won $11 million in contracts to manage five warehouses with arms and other equipment in Iraq.

The company’s armory, a long concrete building divided into two sections in the back, was a logistics hub for the new Iraqi police. Crates of AK-47s and Glock pistols purchased by the Pentagon were trucked to the armory by armed convoys from a large warehouse at Abu Ghraib, and Mr. Saffar issued them to cadets.

----------------
Yes, ALL of the crooks should be punished. But she gets prison while numerous others go free after building shit-encrusted buildings, a US Embassy complex that is an embarrassment to civilized society, setting up showers that electrocute troops, setting up water distribution facilities that distribute filthy water and shooting up Iraqis left and right?

We can send Colonel Selph to prison for pocketing a few grand but we can't even put Blackwater guards who have shot and killed human beings on trial because they have immunity? Is this a case where someone is going to point to her conviction and go, "see, we caught everyone who was stealing money, and we punished them, so the problem is now solved?" This is like claiming you saved America from terrorism by catching a bunch of guys who couldn't even buy combat boots.

Talk about a problem with your values system. Damn.

TPM Muckraker was ALL OVER this last year:

Commenter:
Nancy wrote on August 30, 2007 5:03 PM:
You are wrong about Joey Selph. You are getting half a story. I am assuming that you have never been in the military or have been some place like Iraq, during a war, with limited resources. If you knew Joey, you would know that she is an outstanding officer with superior morals. She would never and I repeat Never, do anything that was unlawful. She is the most patriotic person that I have ever met. I served underneath her and have only the utmost respect for her. When this is all said and done, you will find, that she did nothing wrong. Wait and see.......

As soon as Nancy, was done, some REAL commenting was done:

Jack the Bear wrote on November 11, 2007 2:14 PM:
LTC Selph is a nasty person. She lived in the ALS mansion in the Green Zone with the very contractor she was overseeing...drinking and carousing and having a big time corrupting good soldiers. Shame on you. Perhaps they will find out about the $5M in shipping containers you bought from Basil without authorization.

Jack the Bear wrote on November 12, 2007 9:42 AM:
Jon,
You must not have really worked for her. I too, worked with her. I predicted, sooner or later, she would pay a high price for her greed and avarice. She trampled and corrupted many a good soldier while she was downrange and now she is paying the piper. She laid up with her KBR/PWC boyfriend and crushed anyone in her way. LTC Davis, her cohort, was just as bad, but I didn't know him that well. Just that they were working hard to ensure ALS had all the warehouse business in theatre locked up. Now I know why they were so keen to back a broken company who couldn't execute. Anytime there is an irrational exuberation about any one contractor for no reason, there is something bad going on. She is no hero, just a skanky zero.

The Truth wrote on November 13, 2007 6:04 AM:
The shame of it all is that General Patreaus' good name is ruined by this "skanky zero". LTC Selph worked for COL Hinton and when ever he tried to control her she would go to her CENTCOM buddies and then to Patreaus spewing things like they are hindering the distrobution of weapons. She would obtain and distribute alcoholic beverages to E-5s and below she also had a co-conspirator in CW3 McPheron who left country under the guise of heart trouble only to return back to Iraq within a month working for Basil who was supposed to provide 20 trucks per day but rarely had more than five but was always paid the full amount. When complaints were made again she would run to her CENTCOM buddies. LTC Patreaus did and is keeping his eyes on the big picture and trusted that officer's would do the right thing.

Jack the Bear wrote on November 13, 2007 9:51 AM:
Truth,
You are correct. GEN Petraeus was busy focusing on the big picture and the "Scarecrow" LTC Selph was busy enriching herself and her cronies. There are other names not mentioned and I can't wait to see the next shoe drop. The KO who signed those sweetheart contracts forcing all incoming equipment into the ALS system had to be government. The stinky Taos weapons buys also had to be awarded by a govie. There will be much more uncovered before this is put to bed. Anyone who tried to manage the Scarecrow got stomped. Too bad for Gen Petraeus and COL Hinton. Two great soldiers whose reputations will be sullied by LTC Selph.

So who's going to ask General Petraeus to comment? Anyone?

Think we'll ever hear back?

This was in my original post, but it has been overtaken by events:
It is a good thing that she was caught, tried, and convicted when the evidence against her was weighed. You can't have crooks running around in Iraq if we're going to be there for a hundred years, obviously. And we can't have crooks who aren't smart enough to actually get paid--I mean, come on. You can save nine grand in a year if you ride the bus and use the generic toilet paper. I'm sorry, but nine grand is chump change for a O-5 deployed to a combat zone for a year.

Let's say she was at 18 years time in service, paid as an O-5, and we'll use the current numbers. Her monthly pay is, TAX FREE, $7,212.00. On top of that, she gets 12 months of imminent danger pay ($225 a month) and 12 months of family separation pay ($250 a month) if she has a family. Her income for one year of service in Iraq, just based on those figures, is approximately $92,200--and I'm not counting housing allowances or anything else. That's just her base pay, imminent danger pay and family separation pay. And she took a bribe on top of that for a measly $9,000? And risked her entire career, her retirement, everything for what amounts to a little more than a month of pay?

I don't know if it's better that we caught a crook or that we got one of Jerry's Kids out of uniform.

I'm not saying that she should have been given a free ride because she, quite clearly, did not hold sway over a whole lot of purchasing power while she was at Camp Victory in 2004-05. It looks to me like she was a very small fish in a much larger pond--full of people who were handling vast sums of money--so much so they needed forklifts to move it--and it looks to me like she was involved in some petty crimes.

Relocate These Troops to Fort Gordon

Instead of complaining, we offer a solution today. With regards to this issue at Fort Benning, Georgia:

Across the street from their assigned housing, about 200 yards away, are some of the Army infantry's main firing ranges, and day and night, several days each week, barrages from rifles and machine guns echo around Strickland's building. The noise makes the wounded cringe, startle in their formations, and stay awake and on edge, according to several soldiers interviewed at the barracks last month. The gunfire recently sent one soldier to the emergency room with an anxiety attack, they said.

"You hear a lot of shots, it puts you in a defensive mode," said [Army Sgt. Jonathan]Strickland, who spent a year with an infantry platoon in Baghdad and has since received a diagnosis of [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] PTSD from the military. He now takes medicine for anxiety and insomnia. "My heart starts racing and I get all excited and irritable," he said, adding that the adrenaline surge "puts me back in that mind frame that I am actually there."

Soldiers interviewed said complaints to medical personnel at Fort Benning's Martin Army Community Hospital and officers in their chain of command have brought no relief, prompting one soldier's father to contact The Washington Post. Fort Benning officials said that they were unaware of specific complaints but that decisions about housing and treatment for soldiers with PTSD depend on the severity of each case. They said day and night training must continue as new soldiers arrive and the Army grows.

The solution? MOVE these troops to Fort Gordon, Georgia. Spend the money to relocate them immediately. Determine, regionally, which posts offer the best environment for treating PTSD troops and put them there. Here's a hint--Fort Riley and Fort Hood probably aren't good candidates for this type of unit, either. They can be moved to facilities at Gordon, receive treatment at Eisenhower Medical Center, and there is virtually no way to "hear" the rifle ranges while on the main post at Fort Gordon--they are located miles away.

The Army is not at fault for this--Fort Benning is the home of Infantry training. This is an unfortunate co-mingling of two things. While Fort Gordon is also a TRADOC post in some respects, it is also home to several other units. As stated, the firing ranges at Gordon are NOT co-located where the troops would be housed and cared for. The Army is only at fault if it does nothing.

Contact the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee if you want to advocate on behalf of this issue.

--WS

Obviously, We Intend to Kill Sadr

It's not hard to see where this going:

The U.S. military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad's teeming Sadr City slum on Saturday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

AP Television News footage showed several ambulances destroyed and on fire, thick black smoke rising from them as firefighters worked to put out the flames.

The strike, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant "command-control center," the U.S. military said. The center was located in the heart of the eight-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, though none of them were patients in the hospital.

The U.S. military blamed the militants for using Iraqi civilians as human shields.

"This is a circumstance where these criminal groups are operating directly out of civilian neighborhoods," military spokeswoman Spc. Megan Burmeister told The Associated Press in an e-mail.

Stop--before we get to the good stuff.

"Specialist" Burmeister is now speaking for the US military in Iraq? What the fuck? Are all of the public affairs officers on leave? Whatever happened to that mouthy Colonel who worked for Petraeus? Colonel Who Gives A Shit? [The name is Boylan, but since he obsessively reads progressive blogs for any citation of his name now that he's pretty much gone from somebody to nobody in the space it takes for someone with more rank to blow their stack, all I can say is--who gives a fuck?] They're sending an E-4 straight out of DINFOS to brief the media on what's going on? Kudos to you, Specialist. You're probably a damned sight better than the officers who have probably been taking your work and have been taking credit for it.

Shiite extremists are known to have operated in a building next to the hospital, local reporters said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have waged street battles with Shiite militias since late March in Sadr City, the power base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

The fighting is part of a 5-week-old crackdown by the Iraqi government and U.S. forces on Shiite militia factions. The clashes have brought deep rifts among Iraq's Shiite majority and have pulled U.S. troops into difficult urban combat.

Militia members have been blamed for firing hundreds of rockets or mortars from Sadr City into the Green Zone, the U.S.-protected area housing the American embassy and much of the Iraqi government. In the past month, more than a dozen people - including two American civilians and soldiers - have been killed inside the zone during the attacks.

I'm trying to figure out what they mean by "command and control." Typically, that's not the big room you see in Dr. Strangelove, nor is it the special bunker with the insurgents standing around a big sand table as a dude pushes miniature car bombs and US Army vehicles around with a pool cue. It has to be the kind of place where they used their cellular telephones--always the best bet for uncovering any kind of "command and control."

I don't think the intention was to just shoot up a building where someone was traced by the signal emitted from their phone. I think the intention is to kill Sadr, and we'll be seeing that story soon. I don't think they are hiding it anymore--they want to kill him and keep him from gaining power in the next round of elections. Even if he is a martyr, he's a dead martyr who can't oppose al-Maliki anymore.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Two guys you don't hear anything from anymore--General Lute and Colonel Steve Boylan.



Must have run out of imposters...

Who Cares What You Believe?

How is this even an issue? Oh, that's right. The "God Boys" are running wild in the US Army as well as the US Air Force:

"I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist," Hall said.

It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a firefight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.

"I said, 'No, but I believe in Plexiglas,'" Hall said. "I've never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I'm worm food."

The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall's allegations.

Hall said he had had enough but feared he wouldn't get support from Welborn's superiors. He turned to Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Weinstein is the foundation's president and a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate. He had previously sued the Air Force for acts he said illegally imposed Christianity on students at the academy, though that case was dismissed. He calls Hall a hero.

"The average American doesn't have enough intestinal fortitude to tell someone to shut up if they are talking in a movie theater," Weinstein said. "You know how hard it is to take on your chain of command? This isn't the shift manager at KFC."

Hall was in Qatar when the lawsuit was filed on Sept. 18 in federal court in Kansas City, Kan. Other soldiers learned of it and he feared for his own safety. Once, Hall said, a group of soldiers followed him, harassing him, but no one did anything to make it stop.

The Army told him it couldn't protect him and sent him back to Fort Riley. He resumed duties with a military police battalion. He believes his promotion to sergeant has been blocked because of his lawsuit, but he is a team leader responsible for two junior enlisted soldiers.

Somewhere, there's the stupidest MP battalion ever. And I think Hall is serving in it.

Hall needs to get transferred to a Military Intelligence battalion (certain battalions have MPs to guard secure facilities) and he'll find atheists, Wiccans, Mormons, Episcopalians and worshippers of the alien God Zogart. And he'll just be another dude in BDUs.

No End In Sight For Stop Loss

File this under "duh..."

(AP) It will be more than a year before the Army can end the unpopular practice of forcing soldiers to stay in the service beyond their retirement or re-enlistment dates, a top official said Monday.

Lt. Gen. James D. Thurman, deputy chief of staff for operations, said he hoped that wartime demand for troops will decline enough by around the fall of next year to end "stop-loss." He said there are more than 12,000 currently serving under the practice - an action that critics have called a "backdoor draft."

Thurman also said that as officials continue to increase the size of the Army, it could be possible by the fall of 2011 for troops to be home two years for every year they are deployed.

The two issues of stop-loss and long tours of duty have been among the Pentagon's most disliked practices among troops. Thousands have been forced to stay in the service beyond their contracts since the start of the global war on terrorism. And tours of duty were increased to 15 months from 12 months a year ago so the Army could come up with the extra forces President Bush ordered for the troop buildup in Iraq.

There's no shortage of Young Republicans who have NO deployments to Iraq. And that's really sad. There's no shortage of pro-war fuckheads who need to run off that extra forty pounds they added when "Mountain Dew" added that special line of energy drinks. So this "backdoor draft" isn't going to end any time soon, huh? Well, I guess we should think about ending the war then, right?

The War In Afghanistan Enters an Escalation Phase

Today, we're going to take a look at what's going on in Afghanistan.

Capt. Chris Hammonds expected it. In a mud-brick command center, the 32-year-old Army Ranger pivoted between a radio and a map, tracking reports of approaching Taliban. Several explosions soon ripped through the night as U.S. forces hit the suspected Taliban positions, including a cross-border guided-munitions strike on a compound about a mile inside Pakistan where senior associates of Siraj Haqqani -- considered one of the most dangerous Taliban commanders -- were thought to be meeting.

The U.S. military usually strikes across the border only when taking accurate fire from Pakistan, and standard practice calls for informing the Pakistani military about threats from its side. But Hammonds argued that the Pakistani military checkpoint was "under siege" from the Taliban and that Pakistani officers -- fearful of retaliation -- could tip off the insurgents.

First of all, I'm not going to criticize Captain Hammonds in any way, shape or form. He is on the ground and he is carrying out his orders and he is protecting the lives of his men. Second of all, I am going to criticize the tactics. Third, I'm going to explain why criticizing the tactics DOES NOT mean that I'm finding fault with Captain Hammonds.

The end result of carrying the fight across an International border:

The rare strike averted an imminent Taliban attack, Hammonds said, but across the border a starkly different account emerged. "Two women and two children got killed, so whatever was assessed was not correct," said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Pakistani army. No Taliban were meeting in the family compound, he said. The Pakistani government issued a protest, and demonstrations erupted. "We were never informed about the strike," Abbas said. "This has serious implications for operations."

The March 12 incident highlights how, more than six years into the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, efforts to stabilize the country increasingly focus on the rugged frontier area straddling the border with Pakistan. Over the past 18 months, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have exploited peace deals by Pakistan's government to create an unprecedented haven in the region, U.S. officials said. From there, insurgents have escalated attacks in Pakistan and in eastern Afghanistan, leading the United States last year to double its troop presence along more than 600 miles of frontier.

The short answer--we're escalating the war into Pakistan. Do we need to? If that's where the enemy is, yes. But there's a right way and a wrong way, and the wrong way is to get lazy and rely on airstrikes or long range artillery. This just creates insurgents. I'm sorry, but send the F-16s home and replace them with helicopters that can ferry in supplies and extra troops when there's trouble.

What do leading proponents of effective Counterinsurgency or "COIN" tactics say about these types of incidents?

Indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants and human-rights abuses aid and abet the enemy’s cause. In our globalized world, abuses such as prisoner maltreatment in Abu Ghraib are quickly broadcast around the globe. Our enemies use these accounts and images as part of their propaganda campaign to discredit host-nation governments and distort popular perceptions of our intentions. Such propaganda mobilizes those who were previously friendly or at least neutral to our efforts to bring stability and security.

Now, this was a fairly discriminate attack. This was not a case where there wasn't a good reason to make a move against the Taliban. The motive was clear but the end result was a propaganda victory for the enemy.

Instead of Captain Hammonds and his men being in a position they are forced to defend, why not take Captain Hammonds OUT of his position and put him in a position to succeed. That is, allow him to close with his real enemy and kill that enemy, irregardless of the International boundary? Here's why I think this is a better approach:

Toward that end, the Army should consider abolishing branch distinctions among field-grade officers for most within the operational career field. Under the current model, an officer remains in his basic branch until he retires or is promoted to the rank of general officer. This lifelong branch affiliation narrows an officer’s perspective and limits his familiarity with capabilities outside his branch. The new model for career advancement should terminate branch affiliation for most officers in the operational career field at the rank of captain. A captain who commands with distinction within his basic branch should have the opportunity to command again in another branch. Officers who command successfully in two organizations from two different branches — maneuver and logistics, fires and intelligence, etc. — are those most suited to command battalions and brigades. The pathway to high command should be reserved for officers who demonstrate a facility with a variety of tools, both lethal and nonlethal. While there would still be a significant need for specialized officers, the surest pathway to high command ought to lie open to the adaptive generalist over the narrow specialist.

To win the Long War, the Army must embrace the combined-arms battalion (CAB) as the basic building block for tactical operations and develop a flatter organizational structure. The development of modular brigade combat teams is a step in the right direction but does not go far enough. The current organization is too hierarchical and too specialized to operate most effectively in the Long War.

During the Plains Indian Wars, many of the tribes opposing America’s westward expansion adopted decentralized hit-and-run tactics to terrorize settlers. In response to these threats, the U.S. Cavalry abandoned the large-scale tactics of the Civil War in favor of small-unit operations. Cavalry troops and squadrons conducted area security operations to protect settlers dispersed over wide areas of the frontier. Cavalry squadrons were combined-arms formations that contained intelligence collectors and cultural advisers (then called scouts) as well as maneuver forces and an organic indirect fires capability. This decentralized approach was necessary to ensure that these organizations possessed the tools they needed to bring security to the frontier.

Again, I don't fault Captain Hammonds. I fault a system that puts him in a place at night that is vulnerable. He and his unit should be integrated with an Afghan Army unit that can cross the border with the cooperation of the Pakistani forces and attack and surround any Taliban unit it finds. Whatever cultural differences exist, it's in the best interests of the Afghans and the Pakistanis to set aside their differences and work together. If it starts with a dozen of each at a time, fair enough. But we should be constructing small, rapid movement units that take parts of each entity and fuses them into something that we haven't seen yet. This force should be capable of fighting and sustaining itself for short periods of time and it should be able to break contact and move where it needs to move. It should feature a creative implementation of fast movement and ambush tactics. It should be a force large enough to be effective but small enough to emplace itself anywhere it wants and catch any insurgent Taliban movements off guard.

Instead of reliable Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Captain Hammonds deals with a shortage of US troops, an Afghan Army mutiny, and Pakistani corruption:

In the latest operation, in the Kowchun Valley just north of Paktika, Hammonds's company staked out a position above a narrow streambed that snakes through a gorge into North Waziristan, the scene of dozens of firefights between U.S. troops and the Taliban. From his base, Hammonds can see for miles into Pakistan. Haqqani "is extremely upset and can't get anything through," said Fenzel, citing U.S. intelligence.

But because of a shortage of U.S. troops, Hammonds's company can stay in the area only for several weeks. He doubts that Afghan and Pakistani soldiers will be able to control the route once he leaves.

"You're in the middle of an ANA mutiny," Hammonds said one afternoon, referring to the Afghan National Army, as Afghan soldiers from the 203rd Battalion piled into pickup trucks and quit the camp. The Afghans left after learning that the operation, originally to last nine days, would continue for weeks. The exodus underscored Hammonds's belief that Afghan army units cannot guard the border because they rotate every three to six months and they lack enough local knowledge. "The key to securing the border is to remove the ANA completely," he said.

Instead, Hammonds favors the Afghan border police, but eastern Paktika now has only 66 percent of its 857 authorized border police officers and, until December, they were led by a corrupt commander who colluded with the Taliban.

A greater frustration, he and other U.S. troops said, is that they cannot trust their Pakistani counterparts. "The Pakistan military is corrupt and lets people come through," Hammonds said. Pakistani forces reportedly told insurgents the location of his observation post, and when U.S. troops in a firefight call the Pakistani military for help, he said, "they never answer the phone."

Criticizing the situation that this officer is put into means I'm criticizing the strategic lack of vision and not what this officer goes through on the ground. These men are tired, cold, hungry for good food and doing work that most Americans--myself included--couldn't do and wouldn't do for all of the money in the world. These are far better people than we realize and deserve way more than we're capable of giving them. They don't want yellow ribbon magnets, lapel pin wearing loudmouths, or platitudes. Shut the fuck up and appreciate what they do.

Captain Hammonds should be paired up with an Afghan Army officer and loyal troops who can fight, a Pakistani Army officer and troops that can also fight, and they should combine their efforts to effectively identify, track, chase and kill any Taliban that enter their area of control. If it takes US money to get quality troops, pay it. If it takes concessions, make them. Out of the chaos, use whatever means necessary to solve the fucking problems instead of tolerating indifference, corruption and neglect.

Instead of Captain Hammonds sitting in a bunker waiting for an attack, Captain Hammonds should be waiting in ambush for the Taliban, for as long as necessary, safe in the knowledge that a quick-reaction force can come in with enough firepower to help them out. That doesn't mean parking B-52s overhead. It means his unit is rotating in and out with other units that know what he's going through. When the Taliban cannot move in that area for fear of being ambushed by a combined American/Afghan/Pakistani force that cannot be located or tracked, only then will you take the initiative away from the enemy.

And when they're not doing that, Captain Hammonds should sleep at night in peace and security, in an area protected from Taliban attack. And how do they do that? By making sure the population around them are giving them good intel and alerting them if they see Taliban elements appear in the vicinity.

That's how you make the long war a shorter war.

Read the whole thing...

Yeah, I know. I should have excised some points and been a blogger. Fuck that. Read the whole thing:

By John Rogers
Sunday, March 16, 2008; Page B01

I'm a captain in the U.S. Army, an institution I love and respect, and one that has made me a better man. The Army has taught me how to relate to people of various ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic classes. It has taught me how to stay calm under fire and in other stressful situations (an especially handy lesson as my fiancee and I plan our wedding). It has taught me how to exact discipline and how to approach people with different personalities in different ways.

All these lessons will, I'm convinced, make me a better friend, a better husband and, one day, a better father.

But after four years, I've decided to resign my commission and leave the Army.

This isn't what I envisioned when I joined up in 2004 as a 24-year-old college graduate. I hoped to spend at least eight years in the service, maybe more. I wanted to lead troops in combating terrorism and making our home front safe. I wanted to command a company, something you can achieve in about six to eight years. Instead, come April 1, I'll take off my uniform for good and become a civilian again.

And I'm not alone. Many other captains I know are making the same decision, or considering it. Let me be clear: I'm not a spokesman for some mythical "United Bureau of Captains Leaving the Army." But as I've talked with other captains, attended conferences with superiors on this issue and listened to my peers' reactions to what I've written here, I've heard a collective echo arising from the ranks of captains who are leaving. My reasons for this decision strike a chord with many of them.

Those reasons are threefold: First, I'm about to get married, and I want a family. Second, I can earn as much or more in the civilian world as I do in the Army. And finally, my experience with war has left me feeling angry, frustrated and mismanaged.

I've lost confidence that I can serve both a wife and the Army. It's not that my fiancee is putting demands on me; this is a conclusion I've reached on my own. Staying in would mean six months of Army schooling in the Captain Career Course. We'd have to move from Seattle to Georgia or Kentucky. My wife would have to quit her job to be with me. Then I'd move again to a deploying unit or become an adviser to the Iraqi army for another 12 to 15 months. My wife would be uprooted and replanted in a place where she'd be alone, knowing no one, and without the job she loves. She'd be unable to pursue her goals or use her talents. That's no recipe for marital bliss.

Also, soldiers need to train, so I'd spend a lot of time away in the field -- at weapons ranges or training centers, or fighting simulated battles. A marriage needs time to blossom. But a captain's career path, whether he's deployed or at home, can bulldoze it before it blooms. And deploying every other year raises certain obvious challenges to starting a family.

As it happens, I have (a very beautiful) someone. But not all soldiers do, and many of them would like that to change. Where staying in for me means not having the time to develop a relationship, for others it means not having the time to find one. Then there are situations like that of one captain I know who has a son who's nearly 4. He missed the baby's birth and has been present in his boy's life for a total of one year. I hope you can see why I, and others like me, feel that we have to choose: family or Army. Each person's situation may be different, but we're all in the same shoes . . . and they stink.

Second, I feel no financial pressure to "stay Army." I'm confident that I'll be able to land a job that pays enough to cover a mortgage and put food on the table. Placement firms such as Cameron-Brooks, Lucas Group and Orion have good records in helping former officers find positions in the corporate world. Most captains have college degrees and know that they can get a job outside the Army and begin a new profession. We find phrases such as "stock options," "incentives" or "no firearms permitted in the building" enticing. We like the idea of promotion based on merit, not a timeline. Some want to work for the FBI or the CIA, agencies they believe are more effective in the fight against terrorism.

An initial drop in salary won't hurt me, even if I have to pay for medical coverage. Besides, money isn't my motivation for serving -- which is why I find no incentive in the Army's $25,000 to $35,000 bonus for staying in.

Finally, I'm frustrated by the war and how I was managed and blocked in doing my job in Iraq. Take the following incident. It's not the only one I could hang my hat on, but it's the most pointed.

My mission as a platoon leader was to clean up police corruption and reintegrate the Iraqi police into the security structure of Ghazaliyah, a district in western Baghdad. Over time, my platoon built a relationship of trust with Iraqi policemen, who gave us leads on insurgents. On one patrol, we detained a Sunni whom our battalion's intelligence officer confirmed as a genuine criminal. This man had threatened local residents, preventing them from participating in a clinic we had restarted.

A search of his home yielded illegal weapons, sniper bullets, insurgent propaganda, gobs of money and lists of Iraqi political and military officials' addresses. When we learned that he was the leading Sunni insurgent in Ghazaliyah, our platoon felt like world-beaters. Morale surged. Finding this man validated counterinsurgency theory -- empowering indigenous forces, patiently letting them take the lead, and collecting intelligence through local and national networks that know the "human terrain" better than foreign armies. It taught my men to be patient with it, and gave them pride.

Moreover, a change came over our counterparts in the Iraqi police. You could see their hope awakening. They began to feel safe in giving us the names of corrupt policemen and police car numbers. We secretly built a case against their leader (which this very newspaper inadvertently exposed in late 2006 when it published the full name of my Iraqi confidante, creating even more stress for my troops.)

So, good grab, right? Wrong. We later had to release the detainee. Somehow the evidence to hold him was lacking -- even though he had discussed his role in sectarian violence under questioning by our intelligence officers. At the detention facility, I learned that most of the evidence we had collected against him had never been analyzed. I was told that a high-ranking official (I don't know whether it was a diplomat or someone from the CIA or the Army) had called the facility, incredulous that the man was being detained. Later, I found out that our detainee was politically well-connected, which supposedly played a role in his release. But we lost credibility with the Iraqi police. And we were ticked off at the waste of our time and our unnecessary exposure to danger.

It's possible that there was some great rationale for releasing this man. But my men and I will never know why he was really let go. We knew that he was contributing to sectarian violence. Could someone at least tell my men that everything they did counted for something? What did I risk their lives for?

In the Army, junior captains and lieutenants, mainly as platoon leaders, as well as senior captains who are company commanders, are the primary group of officers manning the trenches and facing battle alongside enlisted soldiers (sergeants and privates). When a soldier dies, we feel it more than generals and colonels do. Along with the sergeants, we're the ones who explain to young enlisted men why a 23 percent interest rate on a car loan is not the best idea. Or that while a soldier may qualify for a loan to buy a Lexus (to attract girls), he also needs gas and insurance. And that stripper poles don't equal marriage altars. In short, we help raise them.

During war, we're the ones who are there when the bomb goes off or an enemy's bullet meets its mark. On one occasion, one of my fellow captains had to deal with a firefight even as he tried to calm a soldier whose genitals had been blasted with shrapnel slivers.

I'm not indicting generals and colonels. The point is that the experience of lower-ranking officers on the front lines creates a gap between us and other officers, and it makes us want to catch our breath before deploying again.

Older captains and higher-ranking officers can get jobs in the Army and "hit pause" before redeploying. They might, for instance, become ROTC instructors or go to graduate school. I tried for an ROTC job at a university and got a good reaction. Awesome, I thought -- my fiancee would get to keep her job, and I would use my experience to prepare future officers for combat, returning to command matured and refocused. Another captain was accepted into a graduate program starting in 2011. But the Army requires both of us first to attend the Career Course and deploy again as commanders -- and see our fiancees/wives two years later. The other captain wants to stay in, but he's wavering.

After experiencing the front lines, we'd stay in if we had a chance to take a break. We'd get family life right, mature, dissipate the frustrations and refocus. But Army career management policy doesn't allow it.

I love a lot about the Army and I don't want anyone to think that it's an evil institution. It's not. But I can't stay in any longer. It will be too long before I've achieved enough rank to work to change it. That's for generals and colonels, which is 16 years away for me, assuming that I'd keep getting promoted. My desire to start a family, the possibility of other jobs and my frustrations have combined to usher me into a new season of life earlier than I had planned.

john.rogersiii@us.army.mil

Another "fake soldier" risks being smeared by the right-wing hate machine and tells it like it is. How did this war slide off the front page, anyway?

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Yes, I do realize this twenty-something Captain sounds a little self-centered. Well, show me a 20 something that ain't and we'll agree we've found ourselves a zombie.

From my Home State, Rep Michele Bachmann assures us (via think progress):

On Saturday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) spoke to a group of Minnesota GOP. During that speech, reports the West Sherburne Tribune, Bachmann highlighted the progress in Iraq, stating that God is on the side of America in the war:

What our service men and women have accomplished over there has been nothing short of astounding. Though you never hear about it in the media. God has not abandoned us.

Bachmann also said that global warming is “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”

Well, God may not have abandoned us, but all of the officers and NCOs are certainly abandoning the cause in Iraq.

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.

"Bad Rabbit" asks a good question

Commenter Bad Rabbit asks, in the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) thread below:

How do the MRAP vehicles (as there are several under-review or for sale) fit into a Counter-Insurgency strategy?

I'm not trying to deprive US troops effective protection, but if we're officially in a counter-insurgency operation you can't use this kind of vehicle.

And that gives us a great opportunity to talk about tactics and strategy.

The mere fact that we have had to react to the tactic of using IEDs to blow up the vehicles that transport our troops means that we're giving up the initiative to the enemy. The enemy in Iraq has the initiative because they are dictating how we move on the battlefield. If you ascribe to the theory that we shouldn't be there in the first place, we should never let the enemy dictate our tactics, and we shouldn't fight a counter-insurgency war with the wrong kind of equipment, then it's hard to justify supporting the administration. And yet, there is no shortage of wingnuts who think we're winning in Iraq. Winning isn't the issue. Winning isn't the goal of the insurgency. Simply bleeding our forces white is their goal.

Consider the vast number of articles written over the past five years. There's no shortage of examples of how to figure out what's going on. I'll pick one at random, and work my way down to an examination of how counterinsurgency is supposed to work.

Here's a nice piece from Lawyers, Guns and Money:

...Matt makes what I think is an important qualification: The history of liberal democracies waging successful counterinsurgency campaigns of the sort suggested by the Field Manual is very poor. Right, but that's part of the point. For the modern military organization, nationalist insurgency is a relatively new problem. It's important to recognize that insurgency and guerilla warfare are not the same thing; the former often (but not always) employs the latter, and the latter can exist without the former. In Iraq, the Saddam Fedayeen that the US encountered early in the war quite clearly employed guerilla tactics, but were not insurgents. European military organizations of the 19th century were accustomed to dominating huge colonial tracts with extremely low troop density. If we accept that the tools that make a military good at counter-insurgency are not the tools that make an organization good at conventional continental warfare, then it becomes apparent that even during the period in which nationalist insurgencies could be expected, many organizations had better things to do. Whereas keeping the colonies down was important, defending the border was usually viewed as the more compelling mission in most military organizations. Simply put, armies haven't had that much incentive to either theorize about counter-insurgency or become proficient at executing it. The two conclusions that follow from this are first that the number of democracies executing these tactics in a competent manner has been quite small, but second that there is no very compelling evidence to think that military organizations cannot improve their counter-insurgency tactics over time. Indeed, we'd even expect it as the incentives for fighting counter-insurgency well increase. Training and doctine matter, and both can be improved over time. It is certainly well known that organizations vary in their capacity to execute counter-insurgency or peacekeeping operations; colonially experienced European military organizations (France, UK) tend to do better than continentally oriented ones (US, Germany, Russia). Finally, we can do a bit of process tracing and point to situations in which well-executed tactics worked better than poorly executed ones (see, of course, Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam, which points out how much more successful Marine operations were than Army, despite employing less firepower).

Treating insurgency as an intractable problem opens up other difficulties. Not all insurgencies are the same; some are weak, some strong, some have a large popular base, others don't, and so forth. Even if we were to accept that defeating the Iraqi insurgency was impossible from the start (a proposition I regard as unproven) this hardly means that no insurgency can be beaten with civilized tactics. Moreover, simply suggesting that we should discard the project of improving our counter-insurgency capabilities because it's too hard disregards the possibility that the US may be required to engage in difficult counter-insurgency operations. In the case of Iraq, I can think of half a dozen different scenarios in which the US would have come into conflict with an insurgency for entirely legitimate reasons. If Hussein had openly allied himself with Bin Laden, or attacked Kuwait again, or if the state had begun to collapse, US intervention would have been both justified and necessary. It's quite possible that an insurgency would have developed anyway, and the US military would have needed to develop the tools to fight it.

Another piece from Tomdispatch:

On the April day in 2003 when American troops first pushed into Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young noted a strange phenomenon. In a single rush, the Vietnam War vocabulary had returned to our media. She promptly dubbed Iraq, "Vietnam on crack cocaine."

It's true that, for a while, the administration played an eerie opposites game, spending much of its PR time avoiding any whiff of Vietnam terminology. "Body bags" were renamed (and the homecoming dead hidden from the cameras); "body counts" were excised from the official military vocabulary -- or as General Tommy Franks, commander of our Afghan War, put it in 2002: "I don't believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered… You know we don't do body counts" (except privately, of course).

But that was then, this is now. Here we are, well into the second term of Bush's Vietnam-on-crack-cocaine, Global-War-on-Terror policies. Significantly more time has passed, as Newsweek's Michael Hirsh recently pointed out, than it took the U.S. to win World War II in the Pacific:

"We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it."

And, as if giving up in its titanic struggle against the undead of our Vietnam experience, the Bush administration is now openly recycling in ever more chaotic, violent, and disastrous Iraq ancient, failed Vietnam-era policies. It's enough to give old-timers that Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome feeling, as Vietnam-era war correspondent Judith Coburn explains vividly below.

Of course, we all know that Iraq is not Vietnam -- and not just because of the lack of jungle or the different language. But here's one difference between the two eras that is perhaps worth a little more attention:

In Vietnam, the U.S. military, the mightiest force then on the planet, was fought to a draw and defeated politically by a remarkably unified Vietnamese national resistance movement led by North Vietnamese communists, but with a powerful southern guerrilla element. The guerrillas in the south were backed by the North Vietnamese (and, as the war went on, by enormous chunks of the North Vietnamese military); North Vietnam was supplied with weaponry and massive support by a superpower, the Soviet Union, and a regional power, emerging Communist China.

Now consider Iraq. The U.S. military -- even more now than then the mightiest force on the planet -- has been fought to something like a stalemate by perhaps 20,000 relatively underarmed (compared to the Vietnamese) insurgents in a rag-tag minority rebellion, lacking a unified political party or program, or support from any major state power. Now consider Lebanon, where the mightiest regional military in the Middle East, the Israeli Army, which in 1982 made it to Beirut in a flash before bogging down for 18 years, has in the last three weeks not managed to secure several miles on the other side of its own border against another relatively isolated minority guerrilla movement. This perhaps tells us something about the way, in this new millennium, we are not in the Vietnam era, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that from the Bush administration's recent policies.

What's so grimly fascinating, as Coburn indicates below, is that our old counterinsurgency policies, which didn't work in Vietnam, have now proved utterly bankrupt against vastly weaker forces. On guerrilla war, our leaders, political and military, are evidently nothing short of brain-dead. Now, consider Coburn's striking piece on two failed wars, two disastrous eras of U.S. military policy abroad, and wonder whether we aren't really in Hell.

And the article referenced above says:

When General George William Casey, Jr. -- whose father, a major general, died in Vietnam in July 1970 -- announced in June 2006 that the Pentagon might soon begin the first American troop withdrawals from Iraq, I couldn't help wondering where the Iraqi version of that sign might eventually go up. In the desert? On the Iranian or the Syrian border? (The "withdrawals" were, however, rescinded before even being put into effect in the face of an all-out civil war in Baghdad.)

However it feels to anyone else, it's distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.



While brooding about Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A.J. Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970], well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in ruins, and we're talking about Vietnamization as though the Vietnamese weren't already bearing the brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G. Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War, Patriots. "It was one of those words that gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was really insulting."

As you, the reader, start to digest all of that, let's go to this account from the Washington Post, and consider the tactics applied by Colonel H. R. McMaster in Iraq early in the war:



Colonel H. R. McMaster

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.

Understanding that the key to counterinsurgency is focusing on the people, not the enemy, he said he changed the standing orders of the regiment to state that in the future all soldiers would "treat detainees professionally." During the unit's previous tour, a detainee was beaten to death during questioning and a unit commander carried a baseball bat that he called his "Iraqi beater."

"Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," McMaster said he told every soldier in his command. He ordered his soldiers to stop using the term hajji as a slang term for all Iraqis, because he saw it as inaccurate and disrespectful. (It actually means someone who has made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.)

One out of every 10 soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges with Iraqis. McMaster, who holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina and is an expert on the Vietnam War, distributed a lengthy reading list to his officers that included studies of Arab and Iraqi history and most of the classic texts on counterinsurgency. He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who didn't seem to understand that such changes were necessary.

When the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment moved into northwest Iraq last May, it faced a mess. Just as Fallujah had become a major staging point for attacks into Baghdad, Tall Afar was being used as a base to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles east into Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq.

Instead of staging a major raid into the city for suspects and then moving back to operating bases, McMaster said he took a sharply different tack, spending months making preparatory moves before attacking the entrenched insurgents in Tall Afar. That indirect approach demonstrated tactical patience, a key to effectively battling an insurgency and a skill that doesn't come easily to the U.S. military.

McMaster had his unit bolster the security operation along the Syrian border, in an effort to cut off support and reinforcements coming into Iraq. He also sought to eliminate havens in the desert, beginning in June with a move against the remote desert town of Biaj, which had become a way station and training and outfitting post for fighters infiltrating from Syria. As he made the move, he brought Iraqi troops with him.

Immediately after taking Biaj, Iraqi forces set up a small patrol base there for U.S. troops. "This was the first 'clear and hold,' " McMaster recalled in an interview in his plywood office just southwest of Tall Afar. State Department officials heard about this move and briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A month later, she mentioned it in her congressional testimony.

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat prisoners well. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment polled all detainees on how they were treated and interviewed some about their political views.

"The best way to find out about your own detainee facility is to ask the 'customer,' " said Maj. Jay Gallivan, the regiment's operations officer. Some Iraqis told the Americans why they were angry with the U.S. military presence. None of the soldiers from the unit have been charged with abuse during the regiment's current tour in Iraq, McMaster said.

In late summer, McMaster started receiving greater cooperation from Sunni leaders who had been sympathetic to the insurgency. One reason, according to U.S. military intelligence analysts, was that some insurgents were unhappy with foreign allies who seemed determined to start a civil war.

Another was that McMaster was willing to admit that U.S. forces have made mistakes in Iraq. "We understand why you fight," McMaster recalled telling Sunni Arab leaders with ties to the insurgency.

"When the Americans first came, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china," he said. "But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." The concession helped break down barriers of communication, he said, and made Iraqis willing to listen to his belief that the time for resistance had ended.

With the insurgency's support infrastructure weakened in outlying areas, McMaster moved on the city. But even then he didn't attack it. First, following the suggestion of his Iraqi allies, he ringed the city with dirt berm nine feet high and 12 miles long, leaving checkpoints from which all movement could be observed. This was a nod to the counterinsurgency principle of being able to control and follow the movement of the population.

Building on that idea, U.S. military intelligence had traced the kinship lines of different tribes, enabling the unit to track fighters traveling to likely destinations just outside the city. About 120 fighters were then rounded up from among those fleeing the impending attack.

Next, McMaster and his subordinates recalled, civilians were pressured to leave the city for a camp prepared for them just to the south. Some more insurgents were caught trying to sneak out with them.

In September, after four months of preparatory moves, McMaster launched the attack. By that point, there were remarkably few insurgents left in the city. Many had fled or been caught. They seem to have expected a swift U.S. raid that they would counter with scores of roadside bombs. Instead, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies moved slowly, clearing each block of the city and calling in artillery strikes as they spotted enemy fighters or explosives.

McMaster had a clear plan in hand for his next step. He also knew how he wanted to measure his success: Would Iraqis -- especially Sunni Arabs -- be willing to join the local police force? Would they "participate in their own security," as he put it?

The first step in this phase was to establish 29 patrol bases across the city. That, along with steady patrolling, gave the American military and its Iraqi allies a view of every major stretch of road in the compact city, which measures about three square miles. And that amount of observation made it extremely difficult for insurgents to plant bombs.

"It gives us great agility," said Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, a 1982 graduate of Chantilly High School in Virginia, who commands the U.S. troop contingent in the city. Hickey said that he can order an attack to come from two or three of the patrol bases instead of predictably rolling out the front gate of his base.

Hickey also has spent months living in the city, perched in the Ottoman-era ramparts that dominate it. He slept at the base only rarely. From his position downtown, he said, "I hear every gunshot in the city." His conclusion: "Living among the people works, if you treat them with respect." When the electricity goes out for Iraqis, he noted, it does for him too, even though he has a generator for military communications.

Hickey also moved a U.S. firing range out of earshot of the city. "I like quiet," he said.

Ultimately, 1,400 police officers were recruited, about 60 percent of whom were Sunni Arabs, many of them from elsewhere in Iraq. In addition, the city has about 2,000 Iraqi troops, and a working city council and an activist mayor. A few feet from where the city council meets is a new Joint Operations Center, set up to collect intelligence tips and act on them. The Army officer running the center, Lt. Saythala Phonexayphoua, said he has been surprised by the amount of "actionable intelligence" troops receive.

Phonexayphoua noted: "We get cell phone calls -- 'There's an insurgent planting an IED.' "

Last summer, there were about six insurgent attacks in the area each day. Now there is about one, according to U.S. military intelligence.

Even now, McMaster said, he understands that his success is "fragile." The city's mayor, Najim Abdullah Jabouri, is unhappy that McMaster and his unit are leaving Iraq this month. "A surgeon doesn't leave in the middle of the operation!" the mayor said intently to McMaster over a recent lunch of lamb kabobs and bread. He waved his finger under the colonel's nose. "The doctor should finish the job he started."

Here's why all of this matters--despite all of the academic research, despite all of the rhetoric, we aren't learning any lessons in Iraq. We're stuck using MRAPs and giving up the initiative to the enemy.

Oh, and Colonel McMaster? His career is essentially over because he "criticized" his superiors. He's been passed over twice for his star. Now if a man can successfully command an ACR in Iraq, and understand the future of counterinsurgency warfare, and then write about it--you can be rest assured that the US military will reject him out of hand and stop him in his tracks.

That inability to learn from our mistakes and accept criticism dooms us to a world where we have to build better and better MRAPs because we don't understand that the correct path is to never put our troops in a position where they need to have an MRAP in the first place.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Case in point:

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

Until recently, each major command of the Air Force had some control over what sites their troops could visit, the Air Force Times reports. Then the Air Force Network Operations Center, under the service's new "Cyber Command," took over.

The best way to make sure no one is exposed to the kinds of radical things I write about here and that countless other people write about much better than I could is to block access and put your head in the sand. What better way to make sure no one gets exposed to Colonel McMaster?