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The failings of 'the army you
have'
By Michael
Schwartz
The latest US theory about the
Iraqi resistance
In early February, a
Newsweek team led by Rod Nordland produced a
detailed account of current theorizing among US
and Iraqi officials about the structure of the
Iraqi resistance.
Here, in brief, is what
these officials told Newsweek: The initial United
States assault on Iraq was so successful that
Saddam Hussein's plan for systematic resistance
fell apart almost immediately, leaving a
dispersed, unruly guerrilla movement with little
or no coherent leadership. In the two subsequent
years, however, the Saddamists formed a wealthy
and savvy leadership group in Syria. In the
meantime Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian
terrorist with ties to al-Qaeda, asserted his
domination over the on-the-ground resistance.
Pressure from recent US offensives drove the two
groupings into an increasingly comfortable
alliance. Here is how Newsweek described
developments since last summer, based on an
interview with Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy
prime minister:
"According to Salih, 'The
Ba'athists regrouped and, in the last six or seven
months, reorganized. Plus they had significant
amounts of money, in Iraq and in Syria.' Those
contacts and networks that Saddam's key cronies
began developing months before the invasion now
paid off. An understanding was found with the
Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Ba'athists
appear to have made Syria a protected base of
operations. 'The Iraqi resistance is a monster
with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq' is
the colorful description given by a top Iraqi
police official ... Zarqawi's people supply the
bombers, the Ba'athists provide the money and
strategy."
The current situation was
succinctly summarized for Newsweek by
Brigadier-General Hussein Ali Kamal, the deputy
minister of the interior: "Now between the Zarqawi
group and the Ba'athists there is full cooperation
and coordination."
This portrait has been
further fleshed out in other accounts, including a
New York Times report in which US Commanding
General George W Casey declared that the Ba'ath
Party in Syria was "providing direction and
financing for the insurgency in Iraq".
This new theory about the nature of the
Iraqi resistance helps to illuminate the renewed
US saber-rattling against the Syrians, which began
even before the assassination of the former
Lebanese prime minister. On January 25, for
example, former secretaries of state Henry
Kissinger and George Shultz, writing together for
the first time, made the connection explicit in a
Washington Post op-ed. They asserted that the
administration of President George W Bush must
have a "strategy for eliminating the sanctuaries
in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be
instructed, supplied, and given refuge in time to
regroup". The new theory may also help to explain
why (according to such diverse sources as Newsweek
and former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter) the
US is considering using assassination squads to
eliminate enemies. One whole category of targets
for these squads (if formed) would certainly be
the Syrian-based leadership of the resistance.
And then, at the end of February, came
news of the first fruits of US operations based on
this new insight, the capture in Syria of Sabawi
Ibrahim Hassan, a half-brother and political
lieutenant of Saddam, and one of only 11 of the
original "deck of cards" Saddamist leaders who
still remained at large. The capture vindicated
the saber-rattling as well, since high-level Iraqi
officials told reporters on February 28 that the
"capture was a goodwill gesture by the Syrians to
show that they are cooperating" with the new US
campaign to decapitate the insurgency by removing
its Syrian-based leadership.
Problems
with the new theory
This new portrait of
the Iraqi resistance may be an accurate
description of one aspect of the ongoing war; and
its key new element - a working alliance between
Saddamist exiles and Zarqawi's fighters inside
Iraq - may be an important new development. But
the foundation upon which these descriptions are
built - that these forces now dominate the
resistance, supply its leadership, or provide the
bulk of its resources - is likely to prove
profoundly inaccurate.
This is most easily
seen by consulting - of all sources - the US
Central Intelligence Agency, which issued a
contrary report around the time the Newsweek
article appeared. According to the CIA, the
Zarqawi faction and his Saddamist allies were
"lesser elements" in the resistance, which was
increasingly dominated by "newly radicalized Sunni
Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying
force, and others disenchanted by the economic
turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting".
There is, in fact, a vast body of publicly
available evidence in support of the CIA's
perspective, including, for example, most
first-hand accounts of the resistance in Fallujah
and other cities in the Sunni triangle.
In
the short, dreary history of America's Iraq war,
US leaders have repeatedly acted on gross
misconceptions about whom they were fighting -
sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but
sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate
intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another
instance where they believe their own distortions,
and it is worthwhile attempting to understand the
underlying pattern that produces this almost
predictable error.
One way to characterize
this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is
to see that all the portraits thus far generated
of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the
assumption that it is organized into a familiar
hierarchical form in which the leadership
exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a
pyramid-shaped organization. Such a structure is
described by both military strategists and
organizational sociologists as a "command and
control" structure. After the battle of Fallujah,
US Air Force Lieutenant-General Lance Smith even
used this phrase to characterize Zarqawi's
operation: "Zarqawi ... no doubt ... is able to
maintain some level of command and control over
the disparate operations."
This
command-and-control image applies well to a large
bureaucracy or a conventional army, but invariably
provides a poor picture of a guerrilla army, which
helps explain US military failures in Iraq.
Whether or not Zarqawi maintains command and
control over his forces (who are, as far as we can
tell, not guerrillas) no one exercises such
control over the forces that fought against the
Americans in Fallujah or Sadr City and those that
are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi
and other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent
elections.
Guerrilla wars violate the
command-and-control portrait in two important
ways: local units must, by and large, supply
themselves (since an occupation army would be
likely to interdict any regular shipments of
supplies); and they are likely to have substantial
autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend
themselves well to central decision-making).
This lack of command and control is a
curse and a blessing. On the negative side, lack
of central coordination means that guerrilla
armies are normally doomed to small, disconnected
actions - a severe limitation if the goal is to
drive an enemy out of your country. On the
positive side, they are less vulnerable to attacks
on supply lines and to the targeting of commanding
officers - two key strategies of conventional
warfare.
The resistance in Iraq reflects
this dialectic of guerrilla war. The mujahideen in
Fallujah, for example, seem to have been
notoriously decentralized; even local clerical
leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuous
discipline over the troops. This same lack of
discipline, however, made it impossible for the US
to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the
second battle for the city in November, their
hit-and-run tactics allowed them to hold out for
more than a month against a force with
overwhelming technological and numerical
superiority.
The command-and-control
portrait is not a useful tool when it comes to
analyzing a large component of the Iraqi
resistance, and it is of little use if it is
applied to the movement as a whole.
The
drumbeat of command and
control
Nevertheless, the US military has
assumed such a structure at every juncture in the
war.
In the autumn of 2003, when the
resistance first began to trouble the occupation,
US military strategy was based on the conviction
that the resistance was led by Saddam Hussein and
the "deck of cards" leadership. Here we see
command-and-control logic applied for the first
time.
By mid-December 2003, the occupation
forces had arrested or killed the vast majority of
the men on that deck of cards, while Saddam's sons
Uday and Qusay Hussein had died in a spectacular
gun battle, and Saddam himself had just been
captured in a dirt dugout. Occupation authorities
confidently predicted that the Ba'athist "bitter
enders" were done for and the resistance would
subside, since without its leaders, local fighters
were expected to be rudderless and ineffective.
Instead the disparate parts of the
resistance became stronger, and in April 2004
emerged with a victory in Fallujah - after a siege
of the city, the marines pulled back without
taking it - and a bloody standoff in Najaf. By
then, US intelligence had discovered Abu Massab
al-Zarqawi and declared that he was actually the
linchpin of the resistance.
Once again, a
command-and-control portrait of the enemy remained
dominant, and the second battle of Fallujah was
fought in good part on the basis of that theory:
to disrupt or destroy the Zarqawi leadership
group. But despite the expulsion of the guerrillas
(and just about the entire population of
Fallujans) from the city, the rebellion quickly
spread to other cities and intensified, refuting
the claim that the decapitation of the movement
would be incapacitating.
The
command-and-control theory has, in fact, turned
out to be as resilient as the resistance itself.
US commander Lieutenant-General Thomas F Metz, for
instance, explained the post-Fallujah battle of
Mosul to the New York Times by saying that Zarqawi
and/or his leadership team had moved to that city
and fomented the uprising, ignoring the indigenous
character of the mujahideen who were fighting
there. Later, it would be announced that Zarqawi
had set up a new "nerve center" south of Baghdad
and a major new search-and-destroy operation would
be mounted there.
Even after these actions
failed to quell the fighting, the occupation
forces clung to command-and-control logic. General
Kamal, for example, told Newsweek, "Even if
Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing
al-Kurdi [one of Zarqawi's lieutenants] was a
critical score. It might - just might - eventually
help change the course of this war." Similar
statements were made a month later when Saddam's
half-brother, identified as a key leader and
funder of the insurgency, was captured in Syria.
Evident in all of this is the faith that
US military leaders have in a strategy of
identifying and targeting the supposed leaders of
the insurgency. Despite the direct evidence of an
increasingly ferocious movement, the capture of a
key leader, it has repeatedly been claimed, could
"change the course of the war".
Why the
US military can't abandon 'command and control'
logic
So why does the US military
relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategy
around the idea of decapitating the leadership of
the Iraqi resistance? The answer lies just beneath
the surface of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
now-infamous statement, "You go to war with the
army you have."
This is a comment pregnant
with meaning for organizational sociologists,
because it illustrates a familiar pattern of
organizational problem-solving. If a product is
not selling well, for example, an engineering
organization might conclude that better
engineering of the product was in order; a
manufacturing firm, that more efficient production
technology was needed; and a marketing company,
that better advertising would do the trick. This
sort of organizational idee fixe has led to
some truly horrendous failures in business - and
military - history. For example, when a flood of
automobile buyers began to demand fuel-efficient
cars during the first oil crisis in the early
1970s, the US automobile industry did not have the
capacity to produce such vehicles. Instead of
investing vast resources in developing that
capacity, it tried to use its superior marketing
skills to win Americans back to luxurious
gas-guzzlers. That is, the Big Three auto makers
"went to war with the army they had" and convinced
themselves that they were facing a marketing
problem. The results: a permanent crisis at
General Motors (during which it lost world
leadership in the industry), a fundamental
restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.
Or take the French in World War II. They
knew about the new German tanks that had made
World War I trench warfare obsolete, but the
French army was only equipped to fight in the
trenches. So they "went to war with the army they
had", devising a trench-war strategy that they
managed to convince themselves would contain the
German Panzer divisions. They lost the war in
three weeks.
The US is also fighting with
the army it has. This army is the best equipped in
the world for advanced conventional warfare - with
tanks, artillery, air power, missile power,
battlefield surveillance power, and satellite
imaging to support highly mobile, well-equipped
and superbly trained soldiers. No supply route is
safe from its firepower, and no conventional army
would be likely to hold its ground long against a
US assault. But the most intractable part of the
resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war:
they do not have long supply lines and they rarely
try to hold their ground.
Guerrilla armies
hide by melting into the local population.
(Everyone knows this, including, of course, US
military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force
must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas
who can disappear into the civilian world; and it
must station troops throughout resistance
strongholds in order to pounce upon guerrillas
when they emerge from hiding to mount an attack.
US military strategists know this, too. But these
lessons - painfully drawn from Vietnam - can't be
implemented by the army that Donald Rumsfeld sent
to war.
The Americans, in fact, have
neither of these resources. Anti-guerrilla
intelligence, after all, requires the cooperation
of the local population, which, at least in the
Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, the US has
definitively alienated, largely through its use of
blunt-edged conventional army attacks on
communities that harbor guerrillas. And it cannot
station enough troops in key locations because too
small an occupation force is spread far too thinly
over contested parts of the country. Estimates for
the size of an army needed to pacify Iraq range
upward from General Eric Shinseki's prewar call
for "several hundred thousand" troops.
The
US military simply lacks the tools it needs to
fight the guerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big
Three auto makers lacked the production system
needed to produced fuel-efficient automobiles, and
the French army lacked the technology it needed to
defeat German tanks in 1940. In response, military
leaders are doing exactly what their
organizational forebears did: They continue to
develop theories about how to win the war "with
the army they have". This backward logic leads
inevitably to imagining an enemy that might be far
more susceptible to defeat with the tools at hand;
that is, an opponent with long supply lines (from
Syria, for example) and a command-and-control
leadership (Zarqawi and his Saddamist allies, for
example) capable of being "decapitated". This
portrait of the enemy then justifies a military
strategy that seeks, above all, to kill or capture
the theorized leaders. Such tactics almost always
fail (even when leaders are captured); and in the
process of failing, only alienate further the
Iraqi population, producing an ever larger, more
resourceful enemy.
The newest portrait of
the resistance as a Zarqawi-Saddamist led amalgam
will sooner or later die a lonely death - in all
likelihood to be replaced by yet another
command-and-control portrait of the insurgency
whose features are as yet unknown. As long as the
US continues to fight "with the army it has", it
will also continue to generate - and act on -
distorted (sometimes ludicrous) descriptions of
the nature of the rebellion it faces.
Michael Schwartz, professor of
sociology at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular
protest and insurgency, and on US business and
government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared
on the Internet at numerous sites including
TomDispatch, Asia Times Online, MotherJones, and
ZNet; and in print at Contexts and Z magazine. His
books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure, The Power Structure of American
Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social
Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited,
with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net. This
article first appeared on TomDispatch
and is reposted by permission.
(Copyright 2005 Michael
Schwartz.) |
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