Asking the Right Questions in Iraq

In a Dallas Morning News op ed piece today John Nagl states the obvious when he says ultimate success in Iraq is up to Iraqis, and that the key to military success is in training internal Iraqi security forces. But when he suggests the army has no doctrine for that purpose he is being disingenuous. The mission LTC Nagl describes is called "foreign internal defense." It is one of five primary missions of the US Army's Special Forces, the Green Beret. One can argue that the army has too few trained professionals in this area, or that current doctrine is inadequate or even misguided. But to argue, as LTC Nagl does, that the army has no such doctrine is to suggest that he is poorly informed at best.

The Bush administration is regularly accused of having no strategy for the insurgency phase of the war in Iraq. That isn’t true either. The White House released a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” way back in November 2005 highlighting the need for, you guessed it, strong Iraqi military and police forces and the need for training to produce them. It wasn’t a new strategy then and it hasn’t changed since. The surge that is getting so much credit for resulting in reduced levels of violence isn’t really a new strategy at all. It is the application of classical counterinsurgency tactics that would not have been practical as recently as two years ago. You have to have an enemy who is too weak to overwhelm small units before you can deploy those units to vulnerable positions among the populace, and you have to have reliable Iraqi troops before you can embed American troops with them. The strategy has always been to use US forces to maintain order in Iraq only until Iraqi forces can be made ready to assume responsibility. The frustration, and a legitimate criticism, is that it has taken far too long to get them ready.

It’s worth remembering that the general currently in charge of operations in Iraq, David Petraeus, was responsible for training Iraqi troops three and one half years ago. He wrote an opinion piece on the subject for the Washington Post back in September 2004. He said then he saw progress but there would be setbacks. I doubt the general appreciated just how serious some of those setbacks would be but you have to agree that there has been progress. Like the tactics now being used in the surge, the recent offensive launched in Basra by Iraqi army and police units would not have been possible when Petraeus wrote. It’s not surprising it had mixed results. Iraqi commanders had never before planned or led operations on anything like this scale. Nevertheless it’s encouraging that they can do it at all. Even if it turns out they aren’t very good at it yet they should learn from mistakes and improve over time.

All this is important because if we are to have informed public opinion on Iraq we need a serious public discussion about it. When we begin with false premises any ensuing discussion quickly falls into incoherence. If you don’t like our strategy in Iraq say so, say why, and say what you think it should be. First you have to understand what the current strategy is. To begin by saying there isn’t one is to lose any opportunity to critique it. Saying that the army has no doctrine for training foreign security forces robs LTC Nagl of credibility as he advances his alternative. That’s a shame. We should be asking our military leadership “what in the world is taking so long?” It takes about seventeen years to make a competent platoon sergeant in the American Army, about the same time it takes to produce a battalion commander. In past crises we’ve been able to expedite that process dramatically. What’s different about Iraqi’s? Is something wrong with our doctrine? The answer has to begin with understanding what the doctrine is.