Changing Course in Iraq

While the debate in Washington has been oversimplified to "stay the course" or "leave," strategic realities in Iraq offer a compelling case for a shift in coalition strategy.

Consider how the environment in Iraq has changed in the past 3.5 years.

Early post-Saddam Iraq environment featured:
- a power vacuum as the broad state security, governance, and political power of Saddam's Baathist government was swept away. Coalition forces are the only clearly identifiable alternative power source and their role and credibility remain undefined in the post-Saddam era.
- broad uncertainty about the future among all Iraqis, including on political and economic shape of the new Iraq and their personal communities, jobs, families, and lives.
- a sense of momentum and respect for the Coalition forces power and authority both by Iraqis and coalition personnel

This period offered an opportunity for stabilization. The coalition forces had the opportunity to build credibility, shape the security and political environment, prevent emergence of civil violence or insurgency, and build stability while drawing down the force. That window has closed.

Three and a half years later, the strategic environment has substantially changed. Features include:
- a clearly identifiable sectarian and sub-sectarian power centers
- a return of governance, security, economic activity, and community routine for large parts of Iraq
- a semi-functioning central government, including more than 300k police and armed forces
- well defined political and security challenges (power sharing, intense if localized sectarian violence, vulnerable central government, oil revenues, etc.)
- a fatigued coalition force that is as much lightningrod for violence and obscurant of Iraqi issues as provider of security.

The current environment is more appropriate for a pol-mil assistance strategy than a stabilization strategy.

The pol-mil assistance strategy should hand over local control and governing responsibility (de-facto but not official partition) for most of the country under a mandated agreement with the Iraqi Federal government. While the Iraqi national government would retain dejure authority over the whole country, they would empower local governors to provide government services for an indefinite period. Kurds would look after the Kurdish areas (need some international presence to quel Turkish concerns), Shites would be responsible for Shite areas (may have several Shia blocks here), and Sunnis after Sunni areas. The Iraqi government would limit its initial direct responsibility to Baghdad, key Federal infrastructure and facilities (oil), working with local governors as needed. The Federal government would continue to build the national security infrastructure.

The coalition military mission would shift to facilitate this transition, turn over the security mission to local authorities, and support (with airpower, SOF, train and equip) both the Federal authorities and cooperative governors. The pol-mil strategy would work to sustain the growth and maturity of the Iraqi Federal government, enabling it to take on more responsibilities only when it was able. The pol-mil strategy would also engage governors and seek to leverage their cooperation with the transition effort and the stabilization of Iraq. Political emphasis would be pragmatic: respect boundries and lines of authority between local-federal and local-local control, eliminate or minimize insurgent activity in local areas of responsibility, avoid policies or actions that undermine security or Federalism.

Coalition military assistance, aid, direct military support would go to those supporting the strategy. The coalition military mission would move its center of operations to neighboring states (Kuwait) and reduce its in country presence to intermittant ops (tacair sorties, limited incursions), SOF, and training/advising. Overall, US force levels inside Iraq would fall to perhaps 50,000 troops within 6 months and below 10,000 SOF/advisors/trainers within 12 months.

Iraq reconstruction efforts would continue, but with a greater emphasis on local direction and non-US participation. Reconstruction projects depend on security provided by Iraqi forces, both Federal and provincial. Reconstruction efforts would be a political lever for positive transition of Iraq.

While far from recipe for sure victory, this transition would enable a continuation of coalition efforts to achive our goals in Iraq, transition governing burdens and political challenges to Iraqis themselves, end the occupation as a source of violence and political power, and represent a dramatic reduction in the risk, cost, optempo, and burden on coalition forces.

A key political challenge will be for publics and political entities to see this as a transition and continuing coalition engagement and not as giving up or retreat. This is essential to preserve leverage and resources in the pol-mil assistance strategy and long term credibility.

Fiasco

WaPos Thom Ricks new book Fiasco hits the usual suspects (Rumsfeld, Bremer) in his scathing review of US occupation of Iraq. But he also lays plenty of (deserving?) blame on the professional military, particularly the Army.

As one Army officer (and Georgetown SSP grad) noted to me, this is the beginning of finger pointing at and within the Army about what went wrong.

There is no doubt that failures OIF Phase IV go well beyond the mistakes of the Bush/Rumsfeld civilian leadership. Despite all the Army learned in Vietnam about counter-insurgency (COIN), the primary lesson the Army took was “we don’t do small wars.” And so it stopped training in them and thinking about them. This approach continued even in the wake of Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The primary Army delusion (endorsed by the Clinton Administration by the way), was that the big war was the tougher mission so if you prepared for that, you could handle the low intensity mission.

That mistake was sorely exposed in Iraq.



But it is encouraging how far the Army has come in recognizing its own shortcomings and the need to transform to meet the new environment.

The post-Vietnam delusion that the US Army could avoid messy low intensity guerrilla wars has finally been discarded and the Army is addressing its shortcomings in bold ways. You have to give credit for this to Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomacher and the SOF mindset he brought to the Army. Schoomacher also ensured that the key intellectual and training centers of the Army were led by the more innovative senior officers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Gen Wallace in TRADOC, GEN Petraeus at the Combined Arms Center or BG Cone at the National Training Center. The results have been the most transformational shift in the military in the Rumsfeld era (ironic given RumsfeldÂ’s promotion of the concept with no regard for the low intensity environment).

Schoomacher created a series of task forces to examine stability and reconstruction operations and the irregular challenges of these environments. He tasked these groups to come up with actionable recommendations on how to build Army capability in STABOPS and COIN. The recommendations were not shy, with a controversial consensus forming that the Army needed to dramatically alter training and education to put greater focus on cultural awareness, language, public affairs/psyops, and civil affairs in addition to existing military skills. In addition the recommendations suggested that the Army develop the capability to conduct all aspects of stability operations for an initial period including traditional civilian missions such as reconstruction, economic assistance, humanitarian aid, and civil society building.

Is the Army better at SARO/COIN than they were only a couple years ago? Most definitely. Part of it is the new initiatives by Schoomacher. Part of it is the effect of multiple tours in SW Asia by most officers. Of course the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting tougher too.

Key questions ahead: How do we distill the complexity of the irregular environment into digestible training programs for field commanders and soldiers? Getting smart at the headquarters and school houses isn't enough. We need to figure out how to effectively train it at the unit level. Should SARO/COIN be a dominant part of US Army training for years in the future or should we return to a focus on conventional major combat operations? Are Iraq and Afghanistan models for future warfare or anomalies?