Ready or Not
With the first elections behind them, the real test for Iraqis now will be taking responsibility for security
BAGHDAD--The euphoria over the elections, in so many different corners of Iraq, was almost palpable. Braced for a national bloodbath at the ballot boxes, many Iraqis seem to have surprised even themselves, temporizing over whether to defy the threats of insurgents, then deciding that the historic opportunity to begin to shape their own fate after so many years of tyranny and terrorism was simply one they could not pass up.
Heartening as it was--and when was the last time anyone saw Iraqis dancing with American GIs?--the generals directing the American-led effort in Iraq are under few illusions about the difficulty of the challenges that lie ahead. Even before Iraqis justly applauded themselves for having defied the cynics and naysayers with last week's vote, the American commanders had been deeply engaged in a thorough re-examination of their Iraq strategy. In interviews with senior military officials and a retired general dispatched by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to advise them, U.S. News learned details of the emerging plan. The generals have decided to make a fundamental shift from combat operations to a more widespread and aggressive advisory effort to try to bring the Iraqi forces up to speed quickly so they take more responsibility for the insurgent-led violence that continues to convulse much of the country. Starting this week, as many as 4,000 soldiers will be cut away from their units and assigned to Iraqi divisions, battalions, and companies as military advisory teams, or MAT s. Other troops rotating into Iraq over the next few weeks and months will be assigned as advisers from the outset. In addition, 10-man police advisory teams, or PAT s, will be assigned to work with the troubled Iraqi police force in four cities in a pilot project. The plan, the largest such effort since Vietnam, envisions up to 70 U.S. advisers per battalion. Their role will be twofold: to train the Iraqis and to provide a link for U.S. airstrikes, medical evacuation, and logistical support.
Relearning lessons. The change in course is designed to put the Iraqis out front and to signal loud and clear that the United States wants to take a back seat to the new government. This was what the U.S.-led coalition hoped to do last summer after the occupation authority was dissolved and sovereignty was restored. But the fledgling Iraqi security forces were unable to stand up to the onslaught of violence that has tested even the most well-trained U.S. forces there. Whether this new attempt will fare any better depends on many factors, starting with how much progress the U.S. advisers can make with their Iraqi colleagues and how quickly. If the effort does succeed, the hope is that U.S. troop levels can be reduced substantially by this time next year.
The U.S. military is relearning, sometimes painfully, many of the lessons of counterinsurgency that it hoped to forget after Vietnam. Among them, based on detailed conversations with key commanders, three stand out. The first is that perceptions matter: These wars are a contest of wills played out in the arena of public opinion. Second is that everything is connected: perceptions, security, politics, economics--right down to the level of hamlets and tribes. Third is that you can kill insurgents until the cows come home and still lose the war.
The conundrum of Iraq is that the violence has been so bad that U.S. forces have been unable to protect a newborn government still too weak to defend itself. Armed with reams of data and PowerPoint slides, U.S. officials have been scratching their heads over the stubbornly high level of violence. It did not abate after the transfer of sovereignty last June or the conquest of safe havens like Fallujah, though some respite may result from recent captures of senior lieutenants of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the foreign jihadist who claims responsibility for the most lethal car bombings and ghoulish beheadings. Analyzing the statistics of the past year, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the U.S. commander of daily military operations in Iraq, told U.S. News, "The insurgency has the capacity to maintain in the neighborhood of 350 to 400 attacks a week." The capture or killing of some 6,000 insurgents late last year made no appreciable dent in the trend, Metz said, and attacks on Iraqis have steadily increased. Metz's conclusion? The U.S.-led forces can keep cutting off the tail of the snake, only to see it regenerate, unless the head--part of which lies in Syria--is cut off.
In November, Gen. George Casey, the four-star who sits atop the pyramid of generals in Iraq, began evaluating his campaign strategy, which was written back in July. "Where is my counter-insurgency expert?" he asked his staff. Finding none, he imported one from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. By December, Casey had received a proposal to embed U.S. advisers throughout the Iraqi security forces. In January, Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed that retired Gen. Gary Luck travel to Iraq to confer with Casey, Metz, and other commanders there.
A figure of enormous stature within the Army's general officer corps, Luck has been in the wings giving advice more or less constantly since the United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001. A classmate of Myers's at Kansas State University, Luck is the most senior of the senior mentors at the Joint Forces Warfighting Center in Suffolk, Va. He has visited Iraq and Afghanistan a dozen times to advise commanders in both countries and was secretly embedded as an adviser to Gen. Tommy Franks during the combat phase of both wars. Luck retired in 1996 after a career that included command of both special operations and conventional forces, in Desert Storm and as head of U.S. forces in Korea. His low-key, good-old-boy routine and casual ball-cap attire mask one of the military's sharpest minds. Luck has a Ph.D. in operations research and has been grooming the "thought patterns" of younger military leaders for years, according to Metz. "We're all his children," he says.
After Luck choppered around the country, he put together a briefing and shared it with Casey and Metz, who are friends from their early years as lieutenants in Germany, Italy, and the Army Officers Advanced Course, as well as Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the three-star general who is in charge of training and equipping the new Iraqi security forces. After leaving Iraq on January 20, Luck gave his briefing to Gen. John Abizaid, four-star general in charge of the U.S. Central Command who is the regional commander for the Middle East, and then to Myers and Rumsfeld.
Helpers--not occupiers. Luck's key recommendation is that the commanders move quickly to shift the perception of the American role in Iraq. "We have to change the perception of us from being occupiers to being advisers and helpers," Luck told U.S. News . To that end, he argued that the advisory plan be expanded and accelerated. Luck said he believes that similarly aggressive support must be given to the police and the nonmilitary parts of the government--but these are still weak parts of the plan. "We've just got to understand," he explains, "occupation in an Arab land can't be a long-term strategy." The retired general believes that the United States has a limited window of opportunity, and the evidence appears to back that conclusion: Poll results released by the U.S. coalition just before the election show that only 18 percent of Iraqis in Baghdad and areas nearby support the U.S. presence.
The challenge is huge, but commanders in Iraq believe it can be met. "If we find the right unit leaders, we have every reason to believe that the Iraqis will fight," says Metz's chief of staff, Brig. Gen. William Troy. "We have seen that in many effective Iraqi units, but perhaps the best evidence we have of that is looking at the special ops guys, because they've been very successful." The Special Forces helped create two elite Iraqi units that now make up the Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade and have fought with them in every major battle since Fallujah last spring (story, Page 26). Some U.S. conventional units have also placed advisers in National Guard battalions assigned to them.
It remains to be seen how fast the fledgling Iraqi forces will be able to shoulder the security burden. "There is a real danger," says one general, "that we could push them too hard too fast." Acrimonious debate has erupted over how many Iraqi soldiers and policemen exist and just how much training they have received. According to Petraeus's staff, there are some 130,000 security forces (including 52,281 Army, 55,020 police, and an assortment of border and other units). The goal is to turn out 272,000.
A general on Casey's staff says, "We are near having sufficient numbers fielded to make a significant and positive impact," yet a Pentagon official told U.S. News that only 5,000 troops could be considered combat ready, having received the necessary training as a unit, and that 20,000 troops have received some unit training.
The problem is that most of the troops have gone straight into battle from basic training in individual infantry skills. Thrown into the fire, thousands of brand-new soldiers went AWOL during combat. A few units have done well, however, including some National Guard battalions in Baghdad and northern Iraq that have been mentored by the 1st Cavalry and 1st Infantry divisions. Some brigades of the Iraqi Intervention Force, formed last summer, fought in the November Fallujah offensive. The IIF, part of the Army, has received an extra month of urban combat training beyond the basic eight-week course. The Special Operations Forces Brigade has seen the most action, and U.S. special operations forces are working with another two dozen units, including battalions in the troubled cities of Samarra and Baquba and a SWAT team in Hilla.
Luck views the overall state of the Iraqi forces this way: "They have received basic training. Now they need collective training, as a unit, and that is what the advisers will help provide." Petraeus has been furnishing advisers at the higher echelons, but he has not had sufficient manpower to do more. The new effort aims to reach the grass-roots level, where the critical work of counterinsurgency, nation building, and institution building must occur. After two tours in Iraq with the Special Forces, Maj. Jim Gavrilis believes that the United States must also be prepared to get more, not less, involved in local governance. "We have to help show them the details of democracy," he says.
The singular disaster of the coalition effort is the police force. The 55,020-man force includes 13,000 former police who received a three-week transition course and 15,000 recruits who went through an eight-week course. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are drawing police paychecks but not working, and the entire force needs to be revetted, U.S. officials say.
According to the textbook counterinsurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines, policing is essential to success, but in Iraq it has fallen between the cracks. "Division commanders will tell you they can take the city away from the insurgents, but to keep it out of their hands, you've got to have an effective police force," says Troy. "It's the police that's the hard part," agrees Metz, his boss. "It is a huge undertaking to grow the police force that will defeat this insurgency, because that's the level at which it will be defeated. That's where we have got to put our energy."
"A thinking man's war." That's not to say that U.S. soldiers haven't attempted to fulfill whatever mission is thrown at them. The soldiers of the 256th Brigade have adapted radically to take on a counterinsurgency role in a huge 80-by-40-kilometer swath west of Baghdad. Most of them were tankers used to Bradley fighting vehicles and the massive Abrams tanks, but at the National Training Center in California last summer they became infantrymen in humvees. Today they guard a police station, hand out chickens, and hunt for Iraqis launching mortars and rockets at the Baghdad airport. "We have never asked our soldiers to do so much," says the brigade commander, Brig. Gen. John Basilica. "This is a thinking man's war."
It is also a lethal one. The brigade patrols the narrow streets and dirt roads, beating the bushes for insurgents. It's a job that exposes the soldiers to constant danger. Since arriving in November, Basilica has lost 17 men, 14 to improvised bombs. One was powerful enough to flip a Bradley. He waves a stapled handout containing the Army's latest suggestions on how to outwit this greatest killer and maimer of the war. "The enemy uses standoff tactics," Basilica says. "That's how he wants to fight us."
A first sergeant in the 256th understands why the Iraqis, especially in the Sunni heartland, do not support the Americans. "Their lives are worse off than when we came," he says. "They ask why they have less kahraba (electricity) and why gas costs more." Despite $4.3 billion in construction projects, the state of government services is nearly as bad as the police corruption and the constant violence. There is less electricity than before the war, even though the coalition has added 2,000 megawatts to the national grid. Iraqis are getting nine to 10 hours of power daily, about 3,600 megawatts, compared with 4,400 before the war.
If local governance and services are vital parts of a successful counter-insurgency, it is also axiomatic that intelligence is the key to counterguerrilla operations--i.e., hunting the insurgents. Casey identified intelligence as another weak point in his five-month review of his strategy. One problem is that some elite U.S. units that were targeting insurgents have been redirected by division commanders in the past six months--a situation that Casey intends to reverse, according to a U.S. official. Another reason for the shortage of U.S. intelligence, the source says, is the past decades' gutting of the Central Intelligence Agency's human spy capacity.
Indigenous intel. Most important for the long haul, the plan to create an indigenous Iraqi intelligence apparatus has proceeded slowly. "After the transfer of sovereignty last summer," Metz says, "I envisioned our operations going gangbusters because those inside the culture would be able to give us the intelligence. That has not happened, not to the degree I would've liked it to happen." To remedy this, U.S. special operations forces will focus this year on creating scout and reconnaissance teams in the battalions.
There is a great deal to accomplish in 2005, which is the window that the United States seems to have left, according to various calculations. For one thing, a general on Casey's staff points out, the United Nations mandate authorizing the coalition presence expires in December. Iraqis' tolerance is deeply frayed. There is also a stark practical reason. Keeping present troop levels into 2006 would place enormous strain on the already stressed U.S. military. It would require units to return before the sacrosanct year's leave or to deploy from Germany and Korea.
That is why, in the words of one official, "there is a rush to get it right, not to get out." For all the talk of exit strategies, the U.S. military is intent upon finding a victory strategy. Metz, for one, remains a believer. "Victory is so important to the free world and the future of the Middle East," he says, "that we have to have the will to win. We can't get weak-kneed a couple years into this battle."
Not ready?
Of the Iraqi National Guard and Army troops, only 5,000 are considered "combat ready" and just 20,000 have received some unit training, according to a Pentagon source.
MINISTRY OF INTERIOR FORCES: 77,200
Police 55,020
Other (Civil Intervention, Emergency Response, Border Enforcement, Highway Patrol, and Dignitary Protection) 22,180
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE FORCES: 53,675
Iraq National Guard 36,827
Army 15,454
Other (Air Force and Coastal Defense Forces) 1,394
Source: MNSTC-I
Persistent violence
Attacks on U.S. coalition forces have averaged between 350 and 400 weekly since the April 2004 uprisings. Attacks on civilians and Iraqi security forces increased during the latter part of 2004.
[Chart data are not available.]
[Chart labels]
Weekly attacks
Iraqi security forces
Civilians
Multinational force
April uprisings in Fallujah and Shiite areas (Najaf, Kut, Sadr City)
August uprisings in Fallujah and Shiite areas (Najaf, Kut, Sadr City)
November offensive in Fallujah by U.S. coalition forces
Jan. 2004
Feb. March April May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.
Jan. 2005
Source: Coalition statistics
Graphic by Rod Little-- USN&WR
This story appears in the February 14, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.