ONE LAST TRY: Finally, a Better Strategy

Posted by johnhouk on Jan 17, 2007
Lt. General David Patraeus has been assigned the task of executing the “new strategy” in Iraq.

Retiring General John Abizaid’s strategy for Iraq is criticized by Thomas Donnelly writing for the American Enterprise. Donnelly says that Abizaid directed “… that our military “footprint” should be as light and small as possible, that it should be the U.S. mission to train Iraqi security forces while waiting for the Iraqis to achieve a post-Saddam political consensus.”

Frankly this is a namby pamby strategy that portrayed weakness to radical Mohammedans. The kind of Western thinking was due to fail where strength by violence is held in honor in the Middle Eastern mind.

I join Donnelly in praying that the new strategy implemented by Patraeus is one aimed at decimating radical insurgents whether they are Sunni or Shi’ite.
JRH
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ONE LAST TRY:
Finally, a Better Strategy

By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Tuesday, January 16, 2007
American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research

“We need a man, and then a plan.”

So Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery is reported to have said when recommending Gen. Sir Gerald Templer to be British high commissioner at the height of the Malayan insurgency of the early 1950s. When Templer was summoned to meet Prime Minister Winston Churchill, newly returned to power, the British Lion--satiated by a full dinner and waving a brandy glass, bellowed: “Templer! Malaya!” A few minutes later: “Templer! Full powers!” And finally, “Full power, Templer. Very heady stuff. Use it sparingly.”

One hopes that something like this scene, sanitized to meet modern sensibilities, will repeat itself when President Bush finally and formally summons Lt. Gen. David Petraeus to Washington to take charge of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. For all the thunder and lightning in Washington this week about a new strategy in Mesopotamia, the fact is that the plan does depend on the man: In irregular war, perhaps more than in any other form of combat, people and leaders matter most. Napoleon reckoned that moral factors outweighed material factors by 3-to-1, but the ratio in small wars is larger still. What matters most in Iraq now is not what President Bush or the Democratic leadership in Congress do in Washington--they can lose the war but cannot win it--but rather what Petraeus and the Iraqis do in Baghdad.

Already we have seen how leadership matters. American strategy in Iraq has thus far been shaped primarily by retiring Gen. John Abizaid, the long-serving chief of U.S. Central Command. Abizaid has operated from the premise that Americans are inevitably seen as occupiers in Arab lands, and thus that our military “footprint” should be as light and small as possible, that it should be the U.S. mission to train Iraqi security forces while waiting for the Iraqis to achieve a post-Saddam political consensus. That was a reasonable plan, but it has failed. And so Lt. Gen. Petraeus will ship out for Iraq with a new priority: Get the security situation under control. The plan he will have to invent and imagine on the spot.

At the same time, it will be a plan consistent with the principles highlighted in President Bush's speech last Wednesday: The core mission is to secure and protect the Iraqi people, particularly the people of central Baghdad. This definition of the mission is far more important than whether there is a “surge” in U.S. forces; what American troops do matters more than how many of them there are. And this is a mission Petraeus is uniquely suited to execute.

The new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, which Petraeus has directed in his current post at Fort Leavenworth, declares, “The cornerstone of any effort is establishing security for the civilian populace. Without a secure environment, no permanent reforms can be implemented and disorder spreads.” These are principles that also guided Petraeus' tenure as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which not only participated in the initial invasion of Iraq but conducted a highly successful counterinsurgency and reconstruction campaign in and around the city of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2003 and early 2004. But alas, this success--and this embrace of classic counterinsurgency tactics--has been the exception rather than the rule for U.S. forces.

Nor is this a mission impossible. Despite the popular, television-fed image of Iraq as a country eternally in flames, the majority of the violence and sectarian cleansing operations occur in familiar and relatively restricted areas: The three provinces of Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad account for the overwhelming majority of attacks. And the city of Baghdad is unquestionably the strategic “center of gravity,” the central front not only for the Sunni insurgents but for the Shia militias such as Moqtada al Sadr's Jaysh al Mahdi, or “Mahdi Army.” This is where, first and foremost, the United States and the Iraqi government must win by protecting the people.

This recognition is also the key to defining the size of the troop increase. Petraeus will soon have nine U.S. brigades to call on to secure Baghdad, making the outcome almost a foregone conclusion, regardless of what the Iraqis do. This is a force sufficient to put an American battalion in each of the 23 key neighborhoods--the traditionally ethnically mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad--that are the front lines of the current conflict. Importantly, it will also provide for a sufficient reserve for emergency response or to exploit success.

A second calculation shaping the size of the surge is the need to increase forces in Anbar province. This is not only in anticipation that Sunni fighters driven from Baghdad might return to their traditional base of operations, but in recognition that the Marine Corps and Army units now stationed there have achieved a significant success in recent months, driving a wedge between the Sunni sheiks and clan leaders and the al-Qaeda-led insurgency and Baathist remnants.

The factor of time is the third and most crucial element shaping the surge. Indeed, “surge” is the wrong term; ironically, the Democrats' rhetoric of “escalation”--intended entirely to enflame and to evoke memories of Vietnam--is more accurate. We will not be able to break the cycle of violence in Iraq unless we likewise break our cycle of abandoning our allies in their hour of need.

More than a year ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defined an American strategy of “clear, hold and build.” To be successful, the surge must be sustained; it will take three months or more to deploy the new units and it will take a year to 18 months to convince the Iraqis, friend and foe, that we mean business.

Here we cross from where the plan determines the size of the force to where the size of the force determines the plan. It is no secret that the Army and Marines are mightily stressed by continuing deployments, not only to Iraq but to Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa--where a significant victory recently resulted from the Ethiopian invasion, aided and abetted by the United States, of Somalia and the rout of Islamist government from Mogadishu. This past week, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the administration's intention to expand the active Army to 547,000 and the Marine Corps to 202,000. A larger land force is essential, not only for sustaining the initiative to be won in Iraq in the coming year but for sustaining the long-term fight against Islamic extremism, the rightly called “Long War.”

And if there is a real weakness in the administration's plan, a moment this week when their long habits of denial, happy talk and political spinning reared their unfortunate heads, it was in this regard. The Army numbers, in particular, are less than meet the eye. To begin with, Gates announced that Army strength would increase by 65,000, but in fact the number is half that; they double-counted “temporary” increases made by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The size of the Army will soon be 512,000, so the increase is less than advertised. It's also far below what's needed. For the past four years, the size of the active Army--meaning regulars plus those mobilized Guardsmen and Reservists called to active service--has hovered between 600,000 and 625,000. That's indicative of what the real need was, even to carry out a cheeseparing strategy. To execute and sustain a winning strategy will require a far larger force of regulars, soldiers and Marines raised, trained and schooled to carry out the constabulary duties of the Long War.

Thus, the story of the past week also comes back to the test of a man, a leader. In this case, Gen. George Casey, the man Petraeus will replace and who has been designated to become the next Army chief of staff. I have known both Casey and Petraeus for the better part of two decades, since they both served on the special staff for Gen. Carl Vuono, Army chief when the Cold War ended.

Press reports have it that Casey was opposed to the new direction in Iraq, and some pundits worry that Casey would fight a rear guard action from the Pentagon, delaying deployments and so forth. I believe, however, that Casey is well-suited to be chief of staff and will work well with Petraeus. I think these are two men who can work together to shape a plan that can achieve the near-term success so needed in Iraq and build the force needed to fight the battles of the Long War. We may have found the men who can create a plan for victory.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI.

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