Page 2 of 2 A 'surge' in the wrong
direction By Julian Delasantellis
you get a practical illustration of
just why the insurgency possesses as much
"recuperative power" as Petraeus fears it does.
Besides the concern with disproportionate
force, there are other counterinsurgency-policy
prescriptions from FM 3-24 that are not being
implemented. Petraeus and Amos recommend a 25:1
ratio of the civilian population to the
counterinsurgency forces. Even with the "surge",
the total coalition forces just in the Sunni areas
and
Baghdad (let alone the threat from the Sadrists in
the Shi'ite areas) are still short of this
requirement by about half.
They also
recommend getting the troops off and out of the
huge US military "superbases" on the outskirts of
the population centers and into smaller,
police-station-type outposts in the cities. This
is being attempted, but with US military forces
stretched so thin from the demands of now
four-plus years of repeated Iraq deployments, the
full complement of troops will not be available to
man the new local outposts until at least late
summer - about the time that the advocates of the
"surge" said last winter that it would end.
Many current and former members of the US
military do not share the new conception of US
military commanders as eternally infallible and
omniscient. Representative of a growing chorus of
dissent is an article in the current edition of
Armed Forces Journal, a publication that describes
itself as "the leading joint service monthly
magazine for officers and leaders in the United
States military community".
The article,
"A failure in generalship", by US Army
Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Yingling, a deputy
commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and
veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, is in essence
a 4,500-word lament against US generalship in the
Iraq war. In the current political environment,
any anti-war civilian who spoke these same words
would immediately be labeled a "defeatocrat" for
"not supporting the troops". Here is an excerpt
from Yingling's article:
For the second time in a generation,
the United States faces the prospect of defeat
at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975,
the US fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning
our allies to their fate at the hands of North
Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and
deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope
for an American victory and portends risk of an
even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to
individual failures, but rather to a crisis in
an entire institution: America's general officer
corps. America's generals have failed to prepare
our armed forces for war and advise civilian
authorities on the application of force to
achieve the aims of policy.
In
postings on Military Times (a sister publication
and website of the Armed Forces Journal)
discussion boards, you can read similar
sentiments; what they lack in Yingling's erudition
and eloquence they more than make up for with
passion.
Commenting on Yingling, a poster
identified as ENGSOC84 states:
I served a tour in Iraq and agree
that the upper echelons are clueless on many
levels. Examples include ignorance of the Middle
East and for that matter foreign culture. The
army tends to think that they live in the real
world and everyone else is wrong. Lack of
preparation for an insurgency. Training
infantrymen to think on their feet and be able
to use discretion when applying force just
doesn't have the same appeal as building a new
weapons system.
Another, Ridgerunner,
states, "I agree with Yingling. The other night on
the PBS's [US Public Broadcasting System's]
NewsHour I watched the photos of 23 more US
KIAs [soldiers killed in action]. Twenty-one were
young enlisted men. The rank of the other two was
lieutenant. That sums up the situation. The
generals are out of touch."
Amazingly,
many posters, possessing far more courage than the
daily ever-meeker Democratic Party opposition,
even feel that their service, either current or
previous, allows them a license to criticize the
president's Iraq policies vigorously.
One
poster wrote, "There is no way that this [the
'surge'] can work becasuse [sic] there is no
purpose for the US military being in Iraq other
than this dumb-ass president and his gang of
cavemen advisers being too cowardly to admit that
THIS ENTIRE IRAQ POLICY WAS A DUMB IDEA IN THE
FIRST PLACE."
One poster who definitely
has not received the current administration
talking-points about the requisite necessity of
showering Petraeus with periodic panegyrics is
army veteran Roger Simpson. He says, "These guys
don't have a clue but they'd do anything for a
command of their own. Petraeus is no different. He
wanted that fourth star [the highest rank in the
US military] and he agreed to do whatever CINC
[commander-in-chief] Bush told him in order to get
that star. Now he is up to his neck in crap and he
smells to the high heavens."
One would
hope that, both literally and figuratively, this
is not true. Petraeus, with his Princeton
University PhD, is certainly one of America's
great military intellectuals - he certainly
qualifies as one of "the best and brightest", as
the late David Halberstam described the team of
elite intellectuals who misguided the United
States into the Vietnam War. Retired general and
MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey calls him "the
brilliant General Petraeus" so frequently you'd
think that "brilliant" is his actual given name.
While agreeing to implement a plan, the
"surge", that many of his military officer peers
thought was folly, and then not objecting as the
surge's supporters constructed a cult of
personality around him, one hopes that hubris and
a hunger for that fourth star has not so clouded
his judgment that he accepts in practice
operational battle tactics and conditions that as
recently as last year he so decried in theory.
All evidence is to the contrary.
When victorious Roman generals received
their triumphal parade through the streets of the
city, a slave would stand on a chariot platform
behind him whispering, "Memento mori"
("You are only a man") into his ear. The Roman
Senate did not want its conquering heroes to get
overly swollen heads and think they were gods;
that was considered bad luck for Rome, and
potentially terrible luck for the senators.
By making Petraeus into an unassailable
figure of unquestionable perspicacity, a modern
American military god, just to sell a dubious
policy, the supporters of the "surge" are sowing
the wind. If, with almost the entire complement of
ready US ground forces now committed in Iraq, the
surge turns out to be a disaster, a Dien Bien
Phu-style flaming denouement to the ongoing and
intensifying debacle that the Iraq misadventure
has become, they, and the United States, will reap
a frightful whirlwind in recompense.
Julian Delasantellis is a
management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state
of Washington. He can be reached at
juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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