Page 2 of 3 SPEAKING
FREELY Why 21,500 wrongs won't make it
right By Julian Delasantellis
amount of force and who wields it for any
operation. An operation that kills five insurgents
is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to
the recruitment of 50 more insurgents."
In
other words, go cold on the mosquito, even if you
have target lock and your weapons are hot.
Illustrative of just how much this is a
departure from current
operational practice is this
incident from early December, given the usual
cursory coverage in the US media, fuller coverage
in foreign news outlets.
US ground forces,
on patrol in Salahuddin province, came under
small-arms fire. They called in an air strike. The
version of the story produced by the US military,
and which made it unchallenged into the US media,
was that 18 insurgents and two civilian women were
killed. Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera said
they possessed photographs indicating that 17
civilians, including six children and eight women,
were killed in the raid. Local officials,
including the police, reported 32 deaths.
Who is right? Who knows? One thing is
certain, only the armchair civilian field marshals
of US neo-conservatism would postulate that with
the powerful high-explosive ordnance dropped from
US warplanes, non-collateral-damage-producing air
strikes are regular occurrences, or even possible,
in modern warfare. Also, something in the
prosecution of this war must have happened that
now 60% of Iraqis, with majority support in both
the Shi'ite and Sunni communities, back attacks on
US forces.
But that's all in the past,
right? With the new counterinsurgency doctrine,
and Petraeus' assumption of command in Iraq, all
those applications of disproportionately excessive
force that have fueled the insurgency will be
ended, the US military will recognize and
understand the paradoxes of counterinsurgency, and
new, softer-touch tactics will be adopted. Right?
Not on your life, or more accurately, not
on a lot of more innocent Iraqi lives. Petraeus'
and Amos' hard slog through two millennia of
military counterinsurgency history is running
straight up against the rocks of US military
officer-promotion policies. Petraeus may soon to
be at the top of the command pyramid in Iraq, but
influencing policy lower in the ranks is difficult
for any leader. Watch the military run
"counterinsurgency" up the flagpole, watch it get
saluted, and then watch the war be prosecuted
exactly as before.
Anybody who has ever
participated in the creation of one of those
fatuous "strategic vision mission statements" that
all organizations down to the neighborhood
paperboys now spout know that there can be an
enormous difference between what an organization
says and what it does. Whatever it says, how it
rewards or punishes its members illustrates its
real priorities.
For US military officers,
promotion to the next rank is the carrot. Lack of
promotion leading to eventual involuntary
separation (in military personnel jargon, you're
either "up or out") from the service, is the stick
by which the organization implements its
priorities.
Promotion to a higher officer
rank, which in the US military is a process
decided by the individual service's officer
promotion boards, is a difficult and by no means
automatic process. The simple fact is that the
military needs far fewer officers the higher one
climbs the promotion ladder. Currently, the US
Army has 22,768 officers at the O-3 captain level,
but only 8,633 at the O-5 colonel rank.
Exclusive of retirements (rare when you
get close to 20 years of service), if these
percentages hold, it means that 2.63 captains are
bucking for every colonel's billet. The ones left
standing when the music stops will eventually be
asked to leave the service, most without being in
uniform long enough to earn one of those lucrative
20-year pensions. In the Marine Corps, the
captain-to-colonel promotion rates are even more
bleak, with a 2.98:1 captain-to-colonel ratio.
Okay, let's say you have two ambitious
young officers serving in Iraq. Both of their
units are under small-arms fire from Iraqi
insurgents in a building ahead of them. One has
read Petraeus and Amos, so he does not call in an
air strike. Maybe he sends in his special-ops
infantry team to take out the bad guys with
small-arms fire. Maybe one or two of his guys get
shot up in the process. Do this in this way enough
times, and Petraeus and Amos say you will win the
support - the "hearts and minds", as this was
called in Vietnam - of the local population.
Do this enough times, and your unit could
get shot up pretty bad, with attrition rates
possibly approaching 50%. Yes, maybe your sector
of command would be pacified, but maybe it
wouldn't; how could you know what the future would
hold when you first start fighting Petraeus-Amos
style? Even if your operations succeed and you
pacify your area, your unit will soon be
transferred out of there, and who knows if your
successor will be equally enlightened?
That is what happened to US Army Colonel H
R McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored
Cavalry Regiment, in the Sunni city of Tal Afar. A
prominent military intellectual (author of
Dereliction of Duty, which stated that
high-ranking military officers failed to challenge
president Lyndon Johnson sufficiently when
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