The Surge is Working or Not ?

The Surge seems to be working if only in a very limited geographical area of Baghdad and along the Dyala River in Baquaba and to the north. The status of Anbar Province remains hopeful. Meanwhile al Basra is going very badly and al Qaeda appears to be moving north so the future of Tikrit and Mosul, with only one combat brigade or less covering the area, must be doubtful.

Still, the Surge seems to be working but a political solution is nowhere in sight. So now I have to ask the question, “If FM 3-24 calls for a troop density that calculates to about 50+ brigades for successful COIN operations, how is it that 20 brigades are doing that good?”

I think the answer lies along three lines of thought. First, none of the insurgencies that were studied as the basis of FM 3-24’s COIN theory were as religiously driven as are the Islamic jihadist movements were are now facing. Only France’s Algerian war was close and even that war was part anti-colonialist.

Second, as I’ve noted in an earlier post, while noting that insurgencies and the host nation citizenry have many factions, FM 3-24 addresses both the insurgencies and citizenry as somewhat monolithic. This is definitely not the case in Iraq. We may debate the impact that al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has on the whole situation, but there is little doubt that we do have several insurgencies currently active. The most obvious set of insurgencies are Shia against Shia, mostly in the southern oil-prize al Basra province and around the Sadrist sections of Baghdad. There are the Sunnis, with and without AQI and often against AQI, but certainly against the varied Shia militias and sometimes against the Iraqi Army and Police. All these insurgencies, except those associated with AQI, involve multiple factions in both the insurgencies and the citizenry.

My major problem with FM 3-24 has been the sheer numbers of COIN troops required by FM 3-24. It is the problem most mentioned when our leaders speak about too few troops too late in this war. But now I am thinking that FM 3-24 was wrong in this predictor. FM 3-24’s troop requirements would probably be more accurate if we had just one insurgency (albeit with many factions).

Conducting COIN operations with one insurgency requires a high number of troops. But when there are several insurgencies and they are actively fighting each other AND they have widely different goals, the required COIN troops is probably a lot less than FM 3-24 states.

FM 3-24 also assumes the people in the host nation have some common vision of the kind of desired government. The citizens will want a government that provides security and a working infrastructure that provides utilities, medical services, etc. They also want a government that can be mostly trusted to provide all this to the majority of citizens. Simply stated, the various citizen factions in Iraq do not trust the other factions to form a trusted government. My gut feeling about this division among the citizens is that it won’t necessarily affect the numbers of troops required but it should increase the time needed to unite the citizens into some kind of majority of opinion. FM 3-24 notes the ease with which terrorists can change public opinion and states that a firm majority must support the government. Fifty-one percent is not enough.

Third, the Surge aims to control only a limited amount of real estate. So far that includes only Baghdad and surrounding areas. FM 3-24 speaks to host nations, not parts of host nations. Therefore, the Surge cannot prove or disprove the validity of FM 3-24 so long as its objectives are limited to a portion of Iraq.

Our military will probably learn a lot from Iraq about counterinsurgency operations and FM 3-24 will undoubtedly be revised accordingly. Counterinsurgency operations theory is still new to the Army and Marines and some learning period is inevitable. FM 3-24 will need to be updated to account for countries like Iraq since there are more of those in the Middle East and Africa. But Iraq is not the laboratory that will prove or disprove the validity our new COIN operations theory.

As it now stands, COIN operations in Iraq are failing for reasons that have nothing to do with day-to-day COIN operations but everything to do with COIN objectives. And those reasons are the political ones. COIN operations aim to stabilize a host nation’s government and that is a political goal. Although COIN operations can provide an environment that might promote a political solution, they have limited power to create that political solution.

FM 3-24 assumes that a political solution is possible, otherwise why would we commit our lives and money to an impossible goal, unless by miscalculation. The political solution is proving impossible in Iraq. Perhaps it is time to move the Iraqi government toward a soft partition. Two issues seem to be the big stumbling blocks – oil revenue sharing and trust in the Iraqi military and police. The soft partition retains the oil revenue problem but would change the discussion on trust in the military and police. Solving one of the major stumbling blocks might help that government find a solution to oil revenue sharing.

But without a political solution, our counterinsurgency operations will be a failure because they have not accomplished their prime purpose.