A New Kind of War

Something is new and different about the military operations in Iraq. Rather than staying in protected enclaves (as in the waning years of the Vietnam War), the Army and Marines seem to be on the move and engaging the enemy. Since the January troop surge announcement, White House and Pentagon press releases have talked about the need to pacify Baghdad and give the Iraqi government a chance to make progress. But it seems like something else is going on.

In fact the Army and Marines are executing a whole new kind of war fighting. It’s called counterinsurgency operations, or COIN for short. It is so new that the Army’s field manual, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, was published just six months ago. The Marines adopted FM 3-24 as the Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5. It is worth noting that the manual was produced at the Army Combined Arms Center under the command, and active participation, of Lt. General David Petraeus, who is now General Petraeus commanding the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Petraeus is a experienced combat troops commander but had seen no actual combat before Iraq in 2003, so his selection as the top commander in Iraq is no coincidence. A pdf version of FM 3-24 is available from the Combined Arms Center Web site.

What is all this talk about COIN operations? A little history. After Vietnam, our military forces were nearly broken and certainly demoralized. Time was needed to repair, restore, and restock. Time was also needed to consider the loss of Vietnam and it’s impact on military operations. However, any lessons learned about fighting insurgents in Vietnam were soon forgotten, partly because those lessons reminded us of losing a war. Instead we rebuilt the services into a highly mobile, hard striking force to fight the Soviet Union.

The success of that new, all-volunteer military was proven in the first Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. It’s capabilities are far beyond those of any other country’s (or any combination of countries’) conventional military. But we also learned that we still couldn’t fight little wars involving insurgents in places like Somalia, Lebanon, and now in Iraq.

In the 1990s some military officers and think tank folks discovered the many books on lessons learned in fighting insurgencies. These ranged from French experience in Indo-China and Algiers, British experience in Malaya, and over 100 years of U.S. Marine experience in fighting little wars. And the answer from most of these books was revolutionary. The number of required troops depends on the population of regular citizens rather than the number of insurgents, and that number is quite large. Also, winning over insurgencies usually takes years, maybe decades.

The complete answer is more complicated and it deals with issues of dealing fairly with the citizens while protecting them, it deals with how the occupiers go about interviewing and interrogating the citizens to gain intelligence on insurgents, how to isolate and destroy insurgents, and a host of other pertinent issues. But the issue of how many troops sticks in my mind because the number is far higher than we are now committing.

James Quinlivan, a RAND analyst, published the results of his study of insurgent wars in the Winter of 1995 issue of Parameters, a quarterly magazine from the U.S. Army War College. Quinlivan found that the required counterinsurgency force levels were from 15 to 25 troops per 1,000 citizens. Quinlivan recommended the higher number because of the difficulties of determining exact requirements. FM 3-24 calls for 20 to 25 troops per 1,000 citizens.

How many troops do we have in Iraq? It is often difficult to determine the number of troops in any deployed area. The Pentagon tends to speak in terms of combat brigades, each of which is about 9,500 strong with about 4,000 of those being actual combat troops (the remainder are support troops). I was not able to determine if Quinlivan’s troop requirements were based on all troops or just the actual combat troops, so I chose to use the 9,500 number. I am currently reading FM 3-24 and that might shed some light on these numbers.

Based on Iraq’s estimated population, the COIN force should be about 50 brigades. The current surge peaked this month at 20 brigades. Clearly we are far short of the required troop levels to even consider “winning” in Iraq. We don’t even have half the number called for in Army studies. Adding Iraqi army brigades gets one closer to the requirement, but it seems like we never know whether those are with us or against us. In the next post, I plan to look at the current operations in and around Baghdad to see if it is counterinsurgency operation could be successful in just this limited area.

Those who want to look into the counterinsurgency literature should see the list of recommended reading for Army and Marine officers at Global Security.