The Army is rethinking how to fight the next war—and win the current one
At that point, a trainer intervenes to talk to Thomas. Before the changes at the training center, these observer-controllers would stand back and take notes. But now, when they see a soldier do something wrong, they step in immediately to correct the behavior. Later that morning, the observer-controllers conduct an after-action review, to discuss how the unit handled the rally. On a whiteboard mounted on the side of his humvee, Staff Sgt. Adrian Tennant lists crowd control among the skills the platoon needs to improve before it ships out to Iraq. "How are you going to fix the problem?" Tennant asks the platoon.
"The key is not to get frustrated," suggests Staff Sgt. Jon Hilliard, one of the platoon's squad leaders.
"Do you really want to point your weapon at the crowd?" asks Tennant. "How would you feel if it was pointed at you?"
"You don't want to incite a riot if there is no reason to," Hilliard answers.
Today, most American military officers in Iraq argue that making sure the population comes to support their efforts, or at least does not actively support the insurgency, is one of the most important parts of their job. To some, that is what "winning hearts and minds" means. But Lt. Col. Charles Eassa, an Army information operation officer at Fort Leavenworth, argues that winning hearts and minds is an "intangible phrase" and may be an impossible goal. "I don't need you to like me," Eassa says. "I need you to trust that I will do what I said." The idea is that if Iraqis have confidence that American forces will fulfill their promises, they will feel more secure and put their faith in their government, not the insurgency.
Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, the commander of the National Training Center, has devised a novel way to test how well his troops are building "trust and confidence." The observer-controllers record every promise a unit in training makes to the Iraqi-American role-players—and they count how many are broken. To discourage commanders from mak-ing promises they cannot keep, the opposition force puts them to a test. If a commander promises to keep a town secure, the insurgents try to attack it.
Cultural terrain. Winning the hearts and minds, or establishing trust and confidence, requires understanding the Iraqis. Military units are good at sharing knowledge of the physical landscape. But they are not so good when it comes to sharing knowledge about such things as the allegiances of local subtribes and the reliability of various local leaders, and much is lost when a unit rotates out. "We used to just focus on the military terrain," Petraeus says. "Now we have to focus on the cultural terrain."
One idea to fix the problem is to create maps or databases of this human terrain. Don Smith, a strategic consultant with Fort Leavenworth's Foreign Military Studies Office, is working on creating ways for Army units to record and share the cultural knowledge they gain. Smith says a human terrain map could also help measure where America is winning the war and where it is losing.
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