[Rhodes22-list] War - Last Reading Assignment

[Brad Haslett]

OK, boys and girls, time for me to make the donuts.  Here is a good read on
the new plan.  Ironically, last night I was reading about Schwarzkopf's two
tours in Vietnam and his observations about the differences between 1965 and
1969.  His complaint was that we quit fighting alongside the South
Vietnamese and instead took the war upon ourselves, isolating our troops
inside our own bases.  This is not unlike what we've done inside the Green
Zone.  The learning curve may be a little flat and changes a bit late, but
we are learning. Funny how during the run-up to the election last year the
battle cry was "we need more troops, we need more troops!"  Now that they're
coming, the cry is "we won't fund them!"  Strange and curious stuff politics
is.

Brad

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January 12, 2007 Overdue Beginning for Counterinsurgency*By* *Daniel
Henninger*<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/daniel_henninger/>

<http://www.opinionjournal.com/>Immediately after the president's speech,
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, "I heard nothing new." Nothing? When
Gen. David Petraeus takes command of U.S. forces in Iraq, it will mark the
start of an historic turn in military strategy in Iraq and perhaps in U.S.
war-fighting doctrine.

The U.S.'s primary problem in Iraq, manifest across 2006, has been an urban
insurgency in a 30-mile radius around Baghdad and in Anbar province. The
Petraeus command is the overdue beginning of the counterinsurgency.

This isn't a one-off effort as at Fallujah, but counterinsurgency as daily
U.S. military policy. It is the product of an enormous amount of
self-criticism and analysis done by military and civilian analysts in and
out of government. It does not mean, as often suggested the past 24 hours,
that 20,000 U.S. troops are now going to run out and look for gun battles
with insurgents in back alleys.

In broadest outline, the plan divides Baghdad into nine districts,
essentially neighborhoods. The job of providing daily security in each
district will be undertaken by an Iraqi army brigade of several thousand
soldiers, a U.S. support battalion of up to 1,000 troops, and most
importantly, about 20 U.S. military "embeds" or advisers.

Some of us predicted late last year that advisory embeds would be part of
the new Bush strategy on reading National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's
November memo of advice to the president in the *New York Times*. After a
late November trip to Iraq, Mr. Hadley said four times in the memo that the
U.S. should embed coalition forces with Iraq's army and dysfunctional
police.

The source of this idea, in part, was a successful Marine experiment in
Anbar province. Rather than attach just a single U.S. military adviser to an
Iraqi commander at the division level, the Marines put advisers alongside
Iraqi units down to the NCO level. They stayed with and fought with their
Iraqi counterparts 24/7. And the Marines reported that the Iraqis fought
with more confidence and effect, a k a spine-stiffening.

In 2004, a similar but broader effort at integration between U.S. and Iraqi
forces was planned in Anbar province by Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis. The
Mattis plan is summarized in the middle of the Army's new Counterinsurgency
Manual, released just last month. The manual's drafting was overseen by Gen.
David Petraeus, who will now direct the U.S. military effort in the
neighborhoods of Baghdad. It's not a coincidence. The manual describes in
detail the purpose, theory, tactics and problems (including spikes in
violence and casualties) likely to emerge during the new counterinsurgency
strategy.

At the end of the manual there is a bibliography of books, studies and
articles on fighting insurgency. It includes classics, such as Alistair
Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," but what's interesting is how many of them
were published since 2003, amid the Iraq war. Out of this effort has emerged
a "best practices" for the U.S. when fighting an insurgency, as now.

Whether the U.S. should have done this back when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and
his foreign suicide bombers emerged is a legitimate question. The point is
this: The Iraq violence has not been running like an untended open hydrant.
Some of our best and brightest have been thinking hard about how to shut the
valve. Last month AEI released a plan reflecting similar counterinsurgency
ideas by military specialist Fred Kagan and the Army's former vice chief of
staff, Gen. Jack Keane.

In November, the Bush administration joined the rethinking. The participants
in that process looked at the whole range of criticisms and formal critiques
of what the U.S. had been doing in Iraq to that point. They concluded the
one thing that wouldn't change is the goal, mainly establishing a democratic
government in Iraq. What would change, heretofore a nonsubject, were the
strategic concept and the level of resources.

Some of this came out of Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual, some from
U.S. commanders in the field and some from the military think tanks.
Suggestions that had gotten a "no" before, now got a "yes."

Is it all a day late and a dollar short? Maybe. Some 20,000 more troops may
be insufficient. The inevitable front-page casualty reports and blood-soaked
photos may still drain the will of domestic pundits. But what we are seeing
in the Petraeus command is the kind of step back that the military sometimes
excels at. This the U.S. military at its potential best--remaking itself, as
it did with the transition to training a volunteer army after Vietnam.

It is not the least bit obvious that this counterinsurgency plan will fail,
and only the most churlishly neurotic Bush hater would want it to. The
stakes for the region and the war on terror have been described many times.
There is another reason: How this ends will have an important effect on the
morale of our officer corps, the people who must summon the gumption to
protect us. They deserve a final chance to succeed. This is the chance.

An idea one finds in the counterinsurgency literature, crucial to the
success of any such strategy, is known as "unity of effort." Basically, it
means all oars pulling in the same direction. The Iraqi government, for
instance, has told the U.S. it will stop interfering in the military's rules
of engagement. Tuesday's victorious 10-hour battle on Baghdad's Haifa
Street, by a combined U.S.-Iraqi force, looked like a successful test of
unified effort. It remains to discover whether anything resembling unity of
effort can be achieved along Constitution Avenue.

Nothing would more raise the tenor of this debate than if some member of the
Democratic Party would take ownership of the subject of military doctrine in
Iraq. On the evidence of their statements the past 24 hours, barely a
Democrat exists with has a clue of what Gen. Petraeus is about to do or why.

Sen. Barack Obama, presidential second-runner, said, "We are not going to
babysit a civil war." Democrats will get a chance soon at Senate
confirmation hearings to question Gen. Petraeus. Babysitter is not the word
he brings to mind. His appointment is the result of a ferment in American
military thinking on Iraq that goes well past George Bush "alone." They
should hear him out before deciding whether to support this effort, or
remain in the opposition.
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
page.