Are We Winning Iraq?

In my first post I noted some major, recent changes the Army and Marine operations in Iraq. The last few months have seen a renewed concentration on cleaning out Baghdad so that, hopefully, the Iraqi government can make progress toward an agreed upon federal government. The troop surge from 15 to 20 brigades was announced in January and peaked about the middle of this month (June).

I also noted that, according to the Army/Marine field manual for counterinsurgency, troops should be deployed, as a minimum, in the ratio of 20 soldiers for each 1,000 citizens. Based on the population of Iraq about 50 combat brigades would be required and we now have only 20 such brigades in all of Iraq. Bill Roggio and DJ Elliot have a good summary of the current operations at the Fourth Rail website. In their maps of the general Baghdad area, I count 15 U.S. brigades, 18 Iraqi army brigades, and 6 Iraqi National Police brigades.

The centers of operations are in Baghdad and Baquaba, the latter seeing the most action at this time. I calculate about 4.8 million citizens in Baghdad and Baquaba. The ratio of troops to citizens then is about 30 per 1,000 which should be enough to do some damage to insurgents. Even with the Iraqi army brigades’ questionable value and the untested police brigades, their presence is an added value. If we look at Baquaba alone, the ratio grows to a whopping 100 U.S. troops per 1,000 civilians and even twice that if we count the three Iraqi brigades there.

Of the remaining twelve brigades in the Baghdad area, only 5 are actually in Baghdad (most are in cordons 11 to 16 miles outside the city). The Mahdi Army has apparently gone into hiding along with al Sadr. I believe that is only temporary until the U.S. surge dies down.

I won’t even calculate the ratio for the remaining five brigades for all the rest of Iraq. Even removing Baghdad, Baquaba, Basra, and the Kurdish areas from the calculation leaves only a smattering of troops to cover most of the remaining Iraqi citizens.

FM 3-24 notes that intelligence is a major factor in counterinsurgency. With insurgents of every kind, imbedded within the population, it is not hard to see that the insurgents are winning the intelligence factor. Four days ago, General Odierno (second in command) reported that 80% of the al Qaeda fighters escaped Baquaba before the operations began. Elements within the Iraqi army are most likely responsible but we still need their participation as part of building that army into a credible national force.

And where will those escaped Al Qaeda fighters go? Maybe back to Anbar Province, maybe to other parts of the Dyala Province, or maybe even to Baghdad. But mostly to just about anyplace in Iraq that they want to go.

The importance of FM 3-24 cannot be overstated. According to the introduction by Colonel Nagl in my University of Chicago Press edition, the manual was published on December 15, 2006, and was downloaded over 1.5 million times in the first month. Among all the reviews, many were by Jihadi web sites. Copies of the manual have been found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan. Our military thinks it’s important and, apparently, our enemies think it’s important.

But will these new counterinsurgency operations succeed in Iraq? The question has a multitude of faces. Can we raise military recruitment to the required levels for just Iraq and additionally consider fighting more than one insurgency elsewhere and at the same time? Does America have the will to occupy a country in the ten plus years most counterinsurgency experts say is a minimum? Should our military change over to a dedicated counterinsurgency structure or should it be a dual purpose force also capable of operating in a conventional war against someone like China when competition for oil heats up?

We must ask if the essence of counterinsurgency operations as defined in FM 3-24 would even succeed, assuming we staff and equip our forces as necessary. Remember that the manual is a distillation of lessons learned by the losers. It’s not so much that you can’t learn lessons from the losers but that we have few counterinsurgency winners to date.⁽¹⁾

My opinion is that we need to learn through practice. FM 3-24 involves new war fighting concepts and they must be tested and refined. Iraq is not the place to test FM 3-24. The situation in Iraq has deteriorated beyond any single insurgency faction. We do not have enough ground forces to cover all of Iraq and we do not have the time to correct that.

The Army and Marines have studied counterinsurgency and distilled the knowledge into FM 3-24. If the field manual is to be the guide for Iraq, then we are clearly not going to win in Iraq, at least under any current definition of a win.

Yet a withdrawal of forces without some negotiated settlement would be a disaster of even greater magnitude. Expect Mid-East chaos that would lead to one or more wars, expansion of jihadist movements, higher oil prices, higher civilian deaths and displacements than now, and the eventual requirement to redeploy our troops to somewhere in the Mid-East under even worse conditions.

General Petraeus must certainly know his efforts will fail so one must wonder why he took on the job. My military career ended 31 years ago and I do not pretend to fully understand some things about today’s force, but I do know the leadership mentality hasn’t changed much. General Petraeus was undoubtedly asked by President Bush to take on this job. Petraeus probably expressed his reservations about success but, being a good soldier, took the job as his commander requested. I also suspect that a September evaluation of the surge was Petraeus’ request.

Since counterinsurgency operations may become the most common use of U.S. forces, I plan to investigate the subject in a broader range than Iraq in further posts.

⁽¹⁾ Two notable exception are Syria’s Assad’s defeat of Islamists and the British success in Northern Ireland. Assad destroyed a city and some tens of thousands of people to quell the insurgency in 1982. Britain used diplomacy to counter the IRA, something not yet discussed in my posts.

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.