Redstate

information ops is one of the five main counterinsurgency pillars, yet we're not progressing enough

By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

So far, there are initial signs of improvement in Baghdad. Getting soldiers out of forward operating bases (FOBs) and onto the streets appears to be beneficial. The NY Post:

Read on

What tactics are working? "We got down at the people level and are staying," he said flatly. "Once the people know we are going to be around, then all kinds of things start to happen."

More intelligence, for example. Where once tactical units were "scraping" for intelligence information, they now have "information overload," the general said. "After our guys are in the neighborhood for four or five days, the people realize they're not going to just leave them like we did in the past. Then they begin to come in with so much information on the enemy that we can't process it fast enough."

[...]

Petraeus has his troops applying a similar formula in Baghdad's Sadr City: "We're clearing it neighborhood by neighborhood." Troops move in - mainly U.S. soldiers and Marines supported by Iraqi forces, although that ratio is reversed in some areas - and stay. They are not transiting back to large, remote bases but are now living with the people they have come to protect. The results, Petraeus says, have been "dramatic."

"We're using 'soft knock' clearing procedures and bringing the locals in on our side," he notes. By being in the neighborhoods, getting to know the people and winning their trust, the soldiers have allowed the people to turn against the al Qaeda terrorists, whom they fear and loathe. Petraeus says his goal is to pull al Qaeda out "by its roots, wherever it tries to take hold."

Another change: an emphasis on protecting of gathering places like mosques and marketplaces. "We initiated Operation Safe Markets," Petraeus said, "and have placed ordinary concrete highway barriers around the vulnerable targets." Car bombings have dropped precipitately - the limited access thwarts them.

[...]

Are the policies paying off? "King David" as Petraeus is known from his previous tour of duty up near the Syrian border, is cautiously optimistic. "Less than half the al Qaeda leaders who were in Baghdad when this [surge] campaign began are still in the city," he said. "They have fled or are being killed or captured. We are attriting them at a fearsome rate."

There is some additional evidence of attriting. In The Blotter:

U.S. forces have arrested the two leaders of the network believed responsible for the brazen raid in Karbala by terrorists disguised as Americans, in which five U.S. soldiers were kidnapped and later killed in January, U.S. military officials said today.

In operations over the past several days in Basra and Hillah, coalition forces captured Qais Khazali, his brother Laith Khazali and several other members of the Khazali network, a splinter faction of the Mahdi army.

The Guardian is reporting that the al Sadr militias are splintering (they call it "ominous", but I say the opposite because the traitors of the Iraqi government are being separated from the larger group of Sadrists). West of Baghdad, Bill Roggio is reporting on the success of the Anbar Salvation Council and its confrontations against al Qaeda terrorists.

But Petraeus also noted that there's a long way to go. So what's not working so well? Two words: Information operations. According to the Counterinsurgency Manual (page 82), information operations is one of the five "overarching considerations in COIN operations:

• ▸ The commander and HN government together must select the logical lines of operations for attacking the insurgents’ strategy and focusing their effort to establish government legitimacy.

• ▸ The HN and COIN forces must establish control of one or more areas from which to operate. The HN forces must secure the people continuously within these areas.
• ▸ Operations should be initiated from the HN government’s areas of strength against areas under the insurgents’ control. The HN must regain control of the major population centers to achieve stability.
• ▸ Regaining control of insurgent areas requires the HN government to expand operations to secure and support the population. If the insurgency has established firm control of a region, its military apparatus there must be eliminated and its politico-administrative apparatus rooted out.
• ▸ Information operations must be aggressively employed to accomplish the following:
  • ▸ Favorably influence perceptions of HN legitimacy and capabilities.

  • ▸ Garner local, regional, and international support for COIN operations.
  • ▸ Publicize insurgent violence.
  • ▸ Discredit insurgent propaganda.

On page 88: "Though information operations (IO) is a separate strand in the coil of LLOs [Logical Lines of Operation], it is probably the most important, since it is interwoven throughout all the others and surrounds them."

Emphasis mine. So if IO is so important, why is the military--and at least one general--treating embedded journalists so abysmally? Michael Yon is doing hero's work in Iraq (along with Bill Roggio, Michael Fumento, Michael Totten (technically not an embed) and Bill Ardolino), reporting important information back to Americans and the rest of the Interweb, yet he's being treated like crap:

I have not left base in a good two weeks. This is unprecedented, given that sometimes I would run two or three missions per day, or at least try for five or six or seven per week. Trying to get living quarters and good communications is truly a waste of time. Only the richest or most determined news agencies dare come here for more than a brief stay. Most of the journalists seem to start cracking pretty quick anyway.

Generally it’s a huge waste of time and money to come here, and the hassle and risk to reward ratio is very bad. I’ve spent more than a year embedded in Iraq, and numerous times public affairs people have made snide remarks that journalists should be happy they get to eat “their chow” for free. Of course, they don’t mention that “their chow” belongs to American taxpayers, the same taxpayers they hurt when they squelch journalism from the war. Whether they do it directly, intentionally indirectly, or just by plain bungling the simplest stuff, like making sure writers have a surface to write on, whatever the case, I haven’t met anyone yet who knows how to write or hold a camera who comes to Iraq for free food. It’s really not fun here, next to impossible to do the job, and the food is nothing special. After all, we’re not talking about covering the French army.

The dining facilities are interesting and vastly different throughout the country. Some are rough and soldiers are lucky and happy to get sandwiches. But here in Baghdad the mess halls are like restaurants. Steak and crab once per week. All the major sodas, lots of cake and ice cream, complete with African guards out front. Most people can enter the dining facility without a problem, but at the dining facility near my tent, I get searched every time because I have a press ID. That’s a nice touch–wand the press before they eat. But I know first hand that it can get even more heavy-handed. One time, in 2005, after I wrote something they didn’t like (Proximity Delays), I needed a guard to eat.

[...]

But considering all the planning, organization, logistics and resources that went in to putting up what amounts to a food court in a surburban mall, how hard would it be, really, for there to be a clean, well-lit press trailer, open 24-7, with some desks, chairs and lockers, wired for the internet? Not on every base, but on enough of them so that stories from everywhere else could get out on a regular basis. For a military that is the first to gripe about not getting enough press–in a kind of war where the press can determine the outcome–it seems fairly obvious that the first step would be to at least make sure there is a place for the press to work. If this were a few months into this war, I could understand it, but to not even be at square one this far in?

A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called "Gates of Fire." Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by "Proximity Delays" were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use "Gates of Fire" as a catapult. In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I’m not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.

Yon is calling these entries RUBS, which stands for Raw, Unedited and Barely Spell-checked. As far as I'm concerned, the more RUBS the better. Information ops doesn't just extend to the local populace, but to the rest of us. We need to know what's going at the ground level, and our military has overly choke-pointed the flow rather than opened it up. If IO is as important as the COIN manual says it is, then Petraeus needs to have a chat with a general or two, not to mention restructuring the Public Affairs Office so that the Yons and Roggios and others can help us win this Information War. They need to be unleashed, not muzzled and cast aside.