“What Have You Done for the People of Iraq Today?”
A brief history of U.S. military counter-insurgency preparedness, lack thereof and adaptation in Iraq by LTC John Nagl, excerpted from pages xiii to xx of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual at Small Wars Journal:
Although there were lonely voices arguing that the Army needed to focus on counterinsurgency in the wake of the Cold War—Dan Bolger, Eliot Cohen, and Steve Metz chief among them—the sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another conventional army; indeed, it had no peer in that arena. It was, however, unprepared for an enemy who understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. Army on a conventional battlefield, and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows.
The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army’s unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam. Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Schoomaker has written that in Vietnam, “The U.S. Army, predisposed to fight a conventional enemy that fought using conventional tactics, overpowered innovative ideas from within the Army and from outside it. As a result, the U.S. Army was not as effective at learning as it should have been, and its failures in Vietnam had grave implications for both the Army and the nation.”
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Belatedly recognizing the problem as the insurgency in Iraq developed, the Army hurriedly set out to remedy the situation. The Doctrine Division of the Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, produced an interim Counterinsurgency Field Manual on October 1, 2004, designated Field Manual (Interim) 3-07.22. Work on a replacement manual began immediately but did not catch fire until October 2005, when Lieutenant General David Petraeus returned from his second tour in Iraq to assume command of CAC and take responsibility for all doctrinal development in the United States Army.
Petraeus is an atypical general officer, holding a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University in addition to his Airborne Ranger qualifications. He commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, taking responsibility for governing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a firm but open hand. Petraeus focused on the economic and political development of his sector of Iraq, inspiring his command with the question, “What have you done for the people of Iraq today?”
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Population security is the first requirement of success in counterinsurgency, but it is not sufficient. Economic development, good governance, and the provision of essential services, all occurring within a matrix of effective information operations, must all improve simultaneously and steadily over a long period of time if America’s determined insurgent enemies are to be defeated. All elements of the United States government—and those of her allies in this Long War that has been well described as a “Global Counterinsurgency” campaign—must be integrated into the effort to build stable and secure societies that can secure their own borders and do not provide safe haven for terrorists.
Read the whole thing here. Mandatory reading along with this for anyone who wants to abandon Iraq. Also, for people who just want to understand what is happening and find the daily news unhelpful.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:54 am on Thursday, June 28, 2007
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