A Cheap Shot
when the truth just isn't enough
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Andrew Krepinevich is one of a cabal of self proclaimed defense experts who have made a cottage industry of bashing the conduct of the war in Iraq whenever they are not otherwise employed being wrong.
In October 2005, just as MNF-I was creating the conditions to stabilize northern Iraq in a campaign to deny the Euphrates Valley to the insurgents which culminated in the successful actions of Colonel H. R. McMaster’s 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment at Tal Afar, Krepinevich was advocating an ”oil spot strategy” and a “grand bargain.” Arguably, elements of the “oil spot strategy” are apparent in the current tactical operation in Baghdad but its applicability to the Iraq war in general was fanciful.
None of this is to say that Krepinevich is a doof. He’s not. He’s just not right very often. His latest op-ed, however, crosses the line from being the musings of someone given to thinking BigThoughts™ to a series of cheap shots that are made more tawdry by the fact that Krepinevich has enough experience to know better.
Read on.
His first gripe is organizational:
Neither Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad nor Gen. George Casey, our senior political and military leaders in Baghdad, is in charge.
This is a striking violation of one of the most basic principles of war: unity of command. Apparently neither the State nor Defense departments wants to yield bureaucratic turf, and President Bush doesn't feel inclined to force them.
We are supposed to take on faith that 1) this is true and 2) that the effort suffers because of this perceived shortcoming. The first fallacy is obvious; Ambassador Khalizad’s real counterpart is GEN John Abizaid, not GEN George Casey. This is not to say that Casey and Khalizad don’t have to work together cooperatively, they do. I’m sure there are boodles of org charts out there showing who does what to whom, but the big issue that Krepinevich is missing is that the Iraqis are now in charge. Nouri al Maliki is the prime minister and Iraqi armed forces are under Iraqi command.
The same holds back in Washington, where the President has yet to establish a "war cabinet" that meets to oversee the war's conduct on a daily basis. The lessons of history are clear on this. If you want to win a war, you must be prepared to adapt more quickly than the enemy to changes in the conflict's dynamics — from the top on down.
This is simply asinine. The idea of a “war cabinet” disappeared with the establishment of the Defense Department and the formation of the National Security Council. If anyone wants to make the case that Rumsfeld, Hadley, and Rice aren’t dealing with Iraq daily I’d be willing to entertain it but it is hard to see where the evidence can be marshaled to support that view. In fact, it seems to run counter to the first objection, that neither Casey nor Khalilzad are in charge in Iraq. Taken to its logical conclusion, Krepinevich is asserting that no one, anywhere, is concerned about Iraq. An assertion that is really hard to take seriously.
Take another example. In a championship football game, would you constantly rotate your star players in and out of the game? Of course not. But that's exactly what the administration has done with its best generals. Three years into the war, where are generals like David Petraeus, David Barno and Peter Chiarelli — all of whom earned reputations for their skill in Afghanistan or Iraq? Petraeus was ordered back to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Barno has inexplicably been retired, while Chiarelli — who is leading the do-or-die fight in Baghdad — is scheduled to be replaced in December.
Glad I never played on any team Krepinevich coached because it didn’t win very many games.
Of course you rotate your players, that’s why the term “deep bench” is a positive attribute not a negative. Petraeus is influencing military doctrine and a generation of young majors in a way he could never in the field. He has time to reflect, to study, to share ideas and to do so free of the daily pressure of a combat command. The new manual on counterinsurgency, the first such manual jointly produced by the Army and the Marine Corps, will fundamentally change the way the Army and the Marines fight small wars. Petraeus is widely expected to succeed John Abizaid as CENTCOM commander. Petraeus was succeeded by LTG Martin Dempsey in the responsibility for training Iraqi Army and police forces. By all accounts he is doing quite well.
As the saying goes, the graveyard is full of indispensable men. We should be thankful that the Army officer corps is blessed with a large reservoir of talent not bemoaning the fact that we are able to rotate officers out of key positions and replace them with equally skilled officers.
Can anyone imagine pulling Gen. George Patton from command halfway through his campaign in France during World War II?
This is the kind of comment that makes one question Krepinevich’s fundamental honesty. Patton was in and out of command several times during World War II. From August 1943 until August 1944 he was virtually unemployed. Patton’s campaign across Europe was nine months in length. Petraeus served a year in his position developing the Iraqi Army. He will inevitably serve another year. John Abizaid has been in his position for three years. It isn’t like any of these men are being pulled out “halfway” through anything.
Indeed, given the stakes involved, it remains shocking that the administration has asked nothing of the American people. No tax surcharge to pay for the war. Not even a war bond drive — or a call to conserve energy.
Whatever. This is not even serious discourse. Is there any evidence that any of these actions would further the chances of success in Iraq? No. There isn’t a whit of evidence to support that contention. But if your real objective is to make the prosecution of the war as politically difficult at possible then all these things aid your cause. If he wishes to accuse the Administration of taking steps to minimize the impact of the war on the average American I guess I would have to agree with him. Yes, they have done that. But to say that was a bad or erroneous course of action simply betrays an agenda.
In the Iraq War, like any war we have fought since the French and Indian War, there have been mistakes. There is a great deal of disagreement to be had on what exactly the mistakes were and the severity of those mistakes but not on their existence. What Krepinevich does is reduce the broad sweep of events into caricatures and memes. Bush is disengaged. The military is competent. The people are complacent. This is dishonest even by the standards we expect on blogs. It is inexcusable from someone who has served in the military and is on the faculty of a major university.
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A Cheap Shot 8 Comments (0 topical, 8 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Krepinevich is taking full advantage of the luxury of not having to actually face this enemy or make decisions that have any practical significance. This allows him to ignore the potential pitfalls of his proposed plans and gloss overy any inconvenient details--I think it behooves us all to keep his strategies on paper, as it were.
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld
that one of the great strengths of our modern military is the fact that we can and do rotate our combat experienced officers, NCOs, and men out to staff and training roles rather than leave them in place until they, inevitably, make a mistake, get in one fight too many, or both.
In WWII, the German and Japanese air forces had aces with hundreds of kills, best I recall the highest scoring American had 28, but our aces and their commanders went back and shared what they'd learned with new flyers and commanders, the Axis aces kept on fighting until most were dead and in the last year their new flyers were mere cannon fodder.
In Vino Veritas
First, this from Krepinevich: "To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents." If true, the U.S. is using an ineffective counterinsurgency strategy, similar to the failed search-and-destroy approach in Vietnam. The "oil spot" or clear-and-hold strategy has proven successful historically. It worked in Haditha, for example, until those Marines were redeployed to Fallujah. You completely ignore that part of the discussion, which is central, and instead are nipping at the more peripheral issues, the lower-hanging fruit as it were.
That said, I agree with your critique of his comments about chain of command, Patton and our not raising taxes.
But I have mixed views about rotations. And whatever did happen to Barno? A deep bench doesn't help much without gaining and passing down experiences learned. This was one of the reasons why we lost Vietnam. To quote John Paul Vann: "We don't have twelve years' experience in Vietnam. We have one year's experience twelve times over." For the most part, I think we have learned from that, and I wouldn't completely dismiss Krepinevich for bringing that up.
I think Krepinevich is wrong by limiting the "insurgency" to just two groups. He completely left out Sadr and his Mahdi para-military, but I suppose I can understand it since this article is over a year old, which also explains the deja vu I got from reading it. But for a more current view, this one works for me. An excerpt:
American military advisers, and the Green Berets they take after, are our greatest assets in Iraq because they are a model for how to fight insurgents and build indigenous forces. Our advisers teach the Iraqi troops everything from physical fitness to urban warfare tactics, and mentor their officers in leadership and mission planning.I once visited an Iraqi base where a combination of officer corruption and insurgent activity had led to a severe water shortage. An entire battalion was ready to quit, but the Green Berets embedded with the Iraqis encouraged them to stay while they pressed for a solution — and endured the shortage alongside the Iraqi soldiers. The battalion remained intact, and we discovered new problems with the Iraqi supply system and new tactics of local insurgents.
Our advisers can also thwart militia attempts to infiltrate the Iraqi units, and are better able to judge when the Iraqis are competent to take over. Most important, while sharing intelligence and conducting joint operations, these small groups of American soldiers and marines develop the trust of their Iraqi soldiers and the local populace. Our growing megabases do anything but.
I would depart from Moulton in one aspect. We do have the right kinds of soldiers, provided they are trained for the right kinds of tactics.
First, this from Krepinevich: "To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents." If true, the U.S. is using an ineffective counterinsurgency strategy, similar to the failed search-and-destroy approach in Vietnam. The "oil spot" or clear-and-hold strategy has proven successful historically. It worked in Haditha, for example, until those Marines were redeployed to Fallujah. You completely ignore that part of the discussion, which is central, and instead are nipping at the more peripheral issues, the lower-hanging fruit as it were.
Simply a fundamental misunderstanding of military doctrine and of the Vietnam war. You only have two options in military operations: orient your force on the enemy or orient it on the terrain. Neither solution is right or wrong but dependent.
Search and destroy tactics were very successful in Vietnam because for the most part we were fighting a conventional war against North Vietnamese regulars. The idea that the strategic hamlet/CAP program was some magic wand it just not right. Strategic hamlets and the CAP could only function if main force VC battalions were destroyed, which happened in one fell swoop in Tet 68, or if regular NVA formations were not allowed to interfere.
The military strategy of clearing the Euphrates Valley and destroying enemy centers in Fallujah and the forces that fled Fallujah for Mosul was correct and set the predicate for the clear and hold strategy, not oil spot strategy, that we carried out culminating securing the Syrian border at Tal Afar.
If you read Krepinevich's article he advocates giving up the rural areas in favor of establishing security in population centers. His theory is that it is from there that security would flow. I think it should be pretty clear from the way Baghdad is soaking up forces that had his strategy been followed there would be a raging insurgency in 18 provinces.
2. Seriously, the only way you can have mixed feeling about rotations is because you aren't the guy being rotated.
Vann, if you read the book, was speaking about our practice in Vietnam of rotating individual soldiers through Vietnam for 12 month tours. Most soldiers and officers only pulled one tour. That is not the case here. Petraeus, for instance, commanded the 101st Airborne during OIF Phase 1. He rotated home. He went back to Iraq for a year training the Iraqi security forces. He rotated home. Petraeus has spent two of the past four years in Iraq. His replacement, Martin Dempsey, had already commanded a division in Iraq for a year. The typical trooper spends one of every three years in Iraq.
So I really don't understand either your objection to rotations or the applicability of Vann's quote to either Iraq or Afghanistan.
So I do dismiss Krepinevich because he knows Petraeus' bio as well as I and he knows Martin Dempsey's, the guy he implicitly criticizes, as well as I do.
Barno retired as a 3-star. Most guys would consider that to be a successful career. I don't know why he retired but I don't see where a 3-star retiring after 30 years service is either unexepected or a tragedy.
3. He left out the Mahdi Army because it was written in October 2005? You do recall that we went to war with the Mahdi Army in April-June 2004? It isn't like they became good guys after that. And we knew they were behind attacks on the Brits before that article came out, in fact, in May 2005 the Brits classified the Mahdi army as a terrorist organization.
4. The advisory teams are possible now that there is an army to advise and that army has been vetted to one degree or another. Of course, the "more troops" crowd will have a fit over this a troop levels will go down and the Murtha "readiness" crowd will have a fit because units will be reporting C-3 for Personnel because key leaders are in Iraq as advisers.
an oil spot strategy for Baghdad last year would've been premature last year because we didn't have the manpower, i.e., enough U.S. forces and trained Iraqi forces to do the job. But, clear-and-hold is workable because it's a better vehicle for securitizing an area. The number one complaint since the end of major combat operations is the lack of security. Baghdad holds about a quarter of the country's population, so at some point a major operation to control and hold Baghdad has to happen.
On the Mahdi para-army, they were a concern at the time but they didn't engage in sectarian violence to any degree until the after the Golden Mosque bombing.
I can't see how you can say search-and-destroy was a success in Vietnam. Starting mid-1965, which was also the time when we significantly ramped up manpower (from 75,000 to 498,000 in January 1968), this was the primary strategy Westmoreland employed and it failed horribly. We didn't have the element of surprise. We would attack an area and then leave--neglecting security--allowing Viet Cong to backfill and re-entrench. We created a massive refugee problem. We destroyed an uncomfortably high number of civilian lives and buildings while pursuing this tack. It allowed the enemy to dictate time, place, type and duration of combat. It diverted resources away from training GVN forces, implementing pacification efforts, and giving the South Vietnamese a government worth fighting for. The North Vietnamese lost badly in the Tet offensive, but it did show that our efforts to attrite the enemy and pacify the country failed, so much so that LBJ passed on trying to get reelected.
I can't see how you can say search and destroy didn't work. Let me rephrase that, I know how you can say it because that's a widespread meme. I don't know how you can believe it. You don't think it was necessary to actually kill the mainforce Viet Cong units? You don't think it was necessary to kill NVA regiments? Viewing the Vietnam war as a counterinsurgency is simply a misunderstanding of that war. It was an invasion of the RVN by the North. There was an insurgency to be sure, but there was also an active insurgency in France and the Low Countries in 1944. That doesn't mean the Germans were fighting a counterinsurgency campaign.
When 1st Cavalry Division engaged in the first major combat of the war in the Ia Drang Valley their opposition was not insurgents and not VC. It was NVA regulars.
So I am really not sure what point you are trying to make with this, in my view, nonsense that large scale military operations were a failure when the obviously were not. One might argue that Westmoreland continued with these operations past their prime and Creighton Abrams perceived the changing dynamic. But if one takes that tack then one has to agree that 60 Minutes libeled Westmoreland when they claimed that Westmoreland deliberately undercounted the number of NVA regulars opposing us to make the situation look better.
As I said before, I think the problem is that you are failing to grasp the idea that you can't set tactics in a vacuum. If there are large hostile units out there, like there were in Vietnam throughout the war, then you have to find those units and destroy them because they will overrun the small security forces and police units that are better suited for pacification. By the same token, I will happily admit that large units are not the best solution for counterinsurgency which is why the "more troops" argument leaves me cold. The fact is that you can't run one or the other, you have to run both and constantly calibrate the mix.
By 1968 the VC had been eradicated as anything but a nuisance.
It didn't detract from training the ARVN. In fact, the ARVN turned back the NVA invasion at Easter 1972 with only the assistance of US airpower and 6000 US advisors. The ARVN offensive in Laos, Lam Son 719, demostrated that ARVN troops could go toe to toe with the NVA and win.
Don't know about all this backfilling and retrenching stuff. If you look as province by province reports it is pretty obvious that by 1972 the VC were a spent force and we were fighting NVA regulars. The fact that there was no VC uprising in conjunction with the 1975 offensive should be a clue that they really weren't an issue by then.
I'd recommend Harry Summers' "On Strategy" as a good starting point for what worked and didn't work in Vietnam.
Pat Walsh:
Agree with everything streif has said so far. I even wrote to some folks over at "The Corner" making the same points when Krepenivich's original article came out. Couple additional points:
First to expand on a point that Streif made: Tactics, techniques and even strategy change over the course of a war. Everytime I hear someone say we should be doing or should have done X it often sounds like they think the war is static and all we have to do is one thing and everything will be fine. Westmoreland's approach was probably right for at least a couple years at least in some places. In 1964, we committed troops because the RVN was losing a battalion a day to Main Force VC and PAVN units in stand up battles. The VC controlled a large "liberated zone" within RVN complete with fortified villages a la Apocalypse Now. Up to that point we had been putting all of our effort into Advisory and SF type actions and were getting beat. We had to destroy those big units before we could do the pacification stuff. Good book on Abrams' approach to the war post 1968 is "A Better War" by Sorley.
Second:Forward Operating Bases. I think Moulton and some others cited above are decrying the FOB mentality and saying we are wasting resources that could/should be used either training the Iraqi's or clearing houses or making friends and influencing people in the villages. Full disclosure: I have used the term REMF many a time and nodded sagely as we young officers disparaged the Vietnam era "firebase mentality" .
Yet, in every era of history I have studied, when a small army needs to control a large area, they use castles, fortresses, fortified towns and even fortified zones and colonies. That is because they work (sometimes) and because unless you are willing to kill every living thing in the area that isn't a verified friend or ally (which is what the Mongols did), there isn't anything else you can do.
You don't want to quarter large numbers of troops in the cities and villages, that would be an unmitigated disaster on so many levels. If you put your Combat Support and Combat Service Support out in the desert in tents, your unit will by non-combat effective in 90 days...you might be able to send some of those folks home but not enough to make a difference.
So you need someplace that is secure, easy to defend, away from civilians and with good protection from the elements. FOB's. If you got to have them, you might as well make them as pleasant as possible within reason. Take away the air conditionning, the showers, the gyms, the computers, the tv's and fast food joints and watch drug use, illegal distilleries and unauthorized fraternization (of all types) with civilians go up and morale and reenlistment go down.
The forces we need to do the clear and hold or "oil spot" stuff are the Iraqi's. Sending the 5th Mess Kit Repair Company home isn't going to stand the Iraqi units up any quicker. The advisors for these units are mostly coming out of our combat units. You know, the ones some folks think we shouldnt be rotating out.
One more nit to pick with Krepenevich. He holds both the Huk campaigns in the Phillipines and the counterisurgency in Malaya as examples of how we should be doing less search and destroy and more "oil spot" and hearts and minds stuff. Well, in both campaigns the eventual winners did a lot of search and destroy operations, for all the reasons Streif has pointed out. The Brits went so far as to bring in Dyak headhunters to help them track the ethnic Chinese guerrillas down in the jungle. In the Phillipines we formed small Ranger-like teams equipped with air to ground radios. They pursued the bad guys relentlessly and called in airstrikes every time they could. These hunter-killer tactics were instrumental in driving the guerrilas away from the populated areas (or just plain killing them). In Vietnam, after the PAVN had retreated into Laos and Cambodia, we still really didn't make a lot of progress in some places until the Phoenix Program systematiclly stripped the surviving or reconstituted (with North Vietnamese apparatchiks) Viet Cong infrastructure out of the villages and hamlets, so that the other stuff could go forward.
One final observation on the subject of troop rotation. The very first episode of the HBO series Rome opens with a great battle scene in which the front Roman rank is relieved at intervals by the next rank to the rear as front rank retires to the rear of the formation to rest. This rotation system is one reason why the Romans could defeat forces, literally, ten times their size in hand to hand fighting. Not precisely on topic but I just think it is a very well done scene.
Instead of saying we're "fisking" someone's article or posting, when the job is done not line-by-line but concept-by-concept, thoroughly dismantling a faulty, agenda-driven screed ridiculous meme by ridiculous meme, that process should be called "streiffing".
And you, sir, are the Master. You stick to your areas of expertise and, like an expert artillery officer, destroy the enemy's positions one embattlement at a time.
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There be one Cap'n 'ere.