As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.'s

USA Today
May 1, 2007
Pg. 1

By Jim Michaels, USA Today

FRIEDBERG, Germany — When U.S. strategy in Iraq called for pulling American forces back to large, heavily protected bases last year, Army Col. Sean MacFarland was moving in the opposite direction. He built small, more vulnerable combat outposts in Ramadi's most dangerous neighborhoods — places where al-Qaeda had taken root.

"I was going the wrong way down a one-way street," MacFarland says.

Soon after, MacFarland started negotiating with a group of Sunni sheiks, some of whom have had mixed loyalties in the war. His superiors initially were wary, fearful the plan could backfire, he says. He forged ahead anyway.

Today, with violence down in Ramadi and the surrounding Anbar province west of Baghdad, MacFarland's tactics have led to one of Iraq's rare success stories. Al-Qaeda's presence has diminished as Iraqis have begun to reclaim their neighborhoods. And Army officials are examining how MacFarland's approach might help the military make progress in other parts of the violence-racked country.

Pentagon officials say the encouraging episode in Ramadi is a poignant reflection of shifting leadership tactics within the U.S. military, which is trying to develop a generation of officers who can think creatively and are as comfortable dealing with tribal sheiks as they are with tank formations on a conventional battlefield.

"You can't take a conventional approach to an unconventional situation," says Col. Ralph Baker, a former brigade commander in Iraq who is assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

The Army is training its officers to be more collaborative with non-military types and to be able to work with relief groups and local reporters, says Col. Steve Mains, director of the Center for Army Lessons Learned, an office based at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., that analyzes battlefield tactics and distributes its findings across the Army.

As shown by MacFarland, 48, such a pragmatic style can run counter to the traditional image of a hard-charging, swagger stick-carrying Army commander epitomized by Hollywood's version of Gen. George Patton. It's also an adjustment for a fighting force that has been armed and organized for conventional wars.

"There are big changes coming," Mains says. "It's not like we turned into a debating party. … It's just the way we try to draw in other people to get the other viewpoint." The military's new counterinsurgency manual makes clear that firepower is only part of the equation.

Mains acknowledges that in the current Army, "not every brigade or battalion commander has gotten that." He says MacFarland, whose brigade returned to its home base here in Germany in February, "really understood this is an argument between us and the insurgents."

Last week, the Army sent a team here to interview MacFarland and other key leaders in the brigade to examine what they accomplished in their 14-month tour in Iraq.

"A lot of ideas are out there," says Col. Eric Jenkins, who headed the team from the Center for Army Lessons Learned. "Everybody's looking for solutions."

MacFarland said he was willing to try just about anything to win over the population and reduce violence in Ramadi. "You name it, I tried it," he says.

MacFarland grew up amid dairy farms in Upstate New York. He exudes confidence but little swagger, he doesn't sport a traditional buzz cut, and he speaks softly — not exactly the stereotypical Army leader on the battlefield.

MacFarland attended Catholic schools as a youth. He graduated from West Point in 1981 and later received a master's degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech as well as two graduate degrees from military schools.

When most of his 1st Brigade was ordered from Tal Afar in northern Iraq to Ramadi in late May 2006, "I was given very broad guidance," MacFarland says. "Fix Ramadi, but don't destroy it. Don't do a Fallujah," he recalls, referring to the 2004 offensive in which U.S. Marines and Army soldiers fought block by block to expel insurgents from that Sunni stronghold. The operation leveled large parts of the city and angered many Sunni Muslims there and across Iraq.

In Ramadi, MacFarland embraced the freedom and accepted risk.

"I had a lot of flexibility, so I ran with it," he says.

He lacked the number of troops required for a large offensive. The combat outposts allowed him to secure Ramadi "a chunk at a time," he says, adding that he pursued the sheiks because of their "leverage" over the population.

The brigade, which commanded about 5,500 soldiers and Marines, immediately began building combat outposts in Ramadi.

"We did it where al-Qaeda was strongest," MacFarland says. The outposts housed U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and civil affairs teams.

It was a risky strategy that put U.S. soldiers in daily battles with insurgents.

The brigade lost 95 soldiers; another 600 suffered wounds over the course of its tour in Iraq.

Taking troops out of heavily fortified bases as MacFarland did often produces results but increases risk, says Hy Rothstein, a retired Special Forces officer who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

MacFarland put a battalion under Lt. Col. V.J. Tedesco in the southern part of the city, where al-Qaeda fighters were concentrated.

Before the battalion arrived, that part of the city "was largely off-limits to coalition forces," Tedesco said at a briefing for the Army Lessons Learned team last week.

His battalion lost 25 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and trucks to roadside bombs as they began patrolling and setting up bases.

"We just absorbed IEDs," Tedesco said, referring to roadside bombs.

MacFarland's brigade didn't wait until a neighborhood was entirely secure before launching construction projects, recruiting police and trying to establish a government. Lt. Col. John Tien, commander of 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor, says the brigade was "aggressive" about pushing ahead on projects as soldiers were establishing security.

By the time the unit returned to Germany, the brigade had built 18 combat outposts in and around Ramadi.

The combat outposts helped reduce violence last summer, but the brigade wasn't close to winning over the population, an essential part of defeating an insurgency.

Anbar province, population 1.2 million, is a vast tract of desert dotted by cities and villages, stretching from outside Baghdad to the Syrian border. It's a region of very religious Sunnis governed largely by sheiks, imams and tribal law. Ramadi's population is 300,000.

MacFarland says he soon realized the key was to win over the tribal leaders, or sheiks.

"The prize in the counterinsurgency fight is not terrain," he says. "It's the people. When you've secured the people, you have won the war. The sheiks lead the people."

But the sheiks were sitting on the fence.

They were not sympathetic to al-Qaeda, but they tolerated its members, MacFarland says.

The sheiks' outlook had been shaped by watching an earlier clash between Iraqi nationalists — primarily former members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party — and hard-core al-Qaeda operatives who were a mix of foreign fighters and Iraqis. Al-Qaeda beat the nationalists. That rattled the sheiks.

"Al-Qaeda just mopped up the floor with those guys," he says.

"We get there in late May and early June 2006, and the tribes are on the sidelines. They'd seen the insurgents take a beating. After watching that, they're like, 'Let's see which way this is going to go.' "

MacFarland's brigade initially struggled to build an Iraqi police force, a critical step in establishing order in the city.

"We said to the sheiks, 'What's it going to take to get you guys off the fence?' " MacFarland says.

The sheiks said their main concern was protecting their own tribes and families.

The brigade made an offer: If the tribal leaders encouraged their members to join the police, the Army would build police stations in the tribal areas and let the recruits protect their own tribes and families. They wouldn't have to leave their neighborhoods.

"We said, 'How about if we recruit them to join the police and they go right back into their tribal areas?' " MacFarland recalls.

Some tribes agreed.

The number of police recruits in Ramadi jumped from about 30 a month to 100 in June 2006 and about 300 in July. More than 3,000 new recruits had joined the police by the time MacFarland's brigade left in February.

Trying to blunt police recruitment, al-Qaeda fighters simultaneously attacked one of the new Ramadi police stations with a car bomb in August 2006, killing several Iraqi police, and assassinated the leader of the Abu Ali Jassim tribe.

They hid the sheik's body, denying him a proper Muslim burial, and his remains were not found until four days later. Members of the tribe were outraged.

A couple of weeks later, one of the brigade's officers went to visit Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, a local tribal leader. The officer was shocked to see a gathering of 20-30 sheiks jammed into al-Rishawi's home. Al-Rishawi was asked what was going on.

"We are forming an alliance against al-Qaeda," the sheik replied, according to MacFarland. "Are you with us?"

MacFarland was. Now he needed to convince his bosses.

Officials at MacFarland's higher headquarters, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based near Fallujah, were worried. The U.S. military was supposed to be supporting Iraq's government. A tribal alliance could pose a threat to Anbar Gov. Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Awani.

Al-Awani's government wasn't popular and had been thinned by threats and assassinations. Still, U.S. policy was to back Iraqi government institutions.

The tribal leaders didn't like al-Awani and wanted him replaced. MacFarland said the sheiks agreed to back off their demand that al-Awani step down.

There were other concerns. Al-Rishawi and his colleagues were second-tier sheiks. Most of Anbar's senior tribal leaders, some of whom amassed considerable wealth in a variety of businesses, had decamped to Jordan because of the growing violence after the U.S.-led invasion.

The Marine headquarters in Anbar was in contact with the tribal leaders in Jordan and was concerned that an alliance involving the U.S. military and junior leaders — the ones who remained in Ramadi — would jeopardize that relationship.

MacFarland says he saw it differently. The contacts in Jordan had yielded little. "Maybe there is a power struggle between the sheiks in Jordan and the sheiks in Anbar," MacFarland says. "But let's back the sheiks in Anbar. Let's pick a horse and back it."

He says the results were immediate when a sheik pledged to support the alliance with the U.S. Army, an agreement some of the sheiks involved would grandly name The Awakening. "Once a tribal leader flips, attacks on American forces in that area stop almost overnight," MacFarland says.

Marine headquarters officers also raised concerns about the backgrounds of some of the tribal leaders involved in The Awakening. Anbar's desolate roads and stretches of empty desert have long been home to smugglers.

"I've read the reports" on al-Rishawi, MacFarland says. "You don't get to be a sheik by being a nice guy. These guys are ruthless characters. … That doesn't mean they can't be reliable partners."

Despite its concerns, the Marine headquarters allowed MacFarland to pursue his work with the tribes and ultimately supported it.

The alliance grew to more than 50 sheiks by the time the brigade left Iraq, spreading throughout the province. Police recruiting continued to increase. The tribes began attacking al-Qaeda leaders who were on U.S. target lists, according to brigade documents.

More than 200 sheiks are now part of the alliance. They plan to form a political party.

Military analysts say there are no textbook guides for what MacFarland did. Battling a counterinsurgency demands leaders "who understand that this is a different kind of war than the Army and Marine Corps have trained for," says Andrew Krepinevich, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "The big difference is in the leadership."

Some military analysts question whether the Army has made enough institutional changes to prepare officers for the demands of a counterinsurgency effort, even if some leaders such as MacFarland do well in such situations.

"This type of warfare is so much (more) fundamentally different than what the U.S. armed forces stand for," says Rothstein, the instructor at Naval Postgraduate School. "On the margin there will be some people who get it, but whether the entire institution is going to make a 180-degree turn is doubtful."

From MacFarland's standpoint, it was less about leadership style and more about necessity.

"Maybe I was a bit of a drowning man in Ramadi," he says. "I was reaching for anything that would help me float. And that was the tribes."

The MacFarland file

Army Col. Sean MacFarland, 48, commander, 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division:

Education: Undergraduate degree, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 1981; Master of science degree, aerospace engineering, Georgia Tech; Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; Master's degree, School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; Master's degree, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.

Served in: Bosnia; Macedonia

Recognition: Two Bronze Stars; Six Meritorious Service Medals; Joint Service Commendation Medal; Army Commendation Medal; Five Army Achievement Medals

Source: U.S. Army

The final version of Army FM 3-24, "Counterinsurgency," (MCWP 3-33.5 for the Marine Corps) deserves applause for coming a long way fast. The Sept. 21 draft was a jumble of platitudes and a prescription for continued failure. After key leaders in the Marines and Army realized how badly the doctrine had gone off track, earnest debate and long days spent rewriting and editing the document resulted in a useful manual that begins to come to grips with the actual challenges facing us, instead of simply repeating the failed recommendations of the last century's counterinsurgency (COIN) "experts."

The manual now admits the existence of religious zealots and ethnic demagogues -- salient insurgent types the previous draft ignored -- and accepts that some enemies are irreconcilable and must be killed. It states bluntly that "old, strongly held beliefs define the identities of the most dangerous combatants in these new internal wars." The draft field manual's most-foolish claims, exemplified by its "paradoxes of counterinsurgency," have been qualified and the text now stresses the importance in many COIN operations of a "high ratio of security forces to the protected population." If only more of our military leaders had stressed that point to their civilian superiors four years ago.

Yet, FM 3-24 still doesn't swing open the door to the future of COIN warfare; at best it's a hinge between the failed dogmas of the 20th century -- myths embraced by soldiers and civilians alike -- and a growing sense that the reality on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere contradicts the theories we were fed. This document isn't meant as definitive doctrine but as a stopgap. Responsible leaders in the Marines and Army recognize the need for an ongoing process to continually improve our COIN doctrine. The manual will help officers think more incisively about the problems facing them, but many of the solutions it offers, nonetheless, are outdated and dubious -- when not foolhardy. 

It isn't just our armed forces that are in a period of transition, but also our entire civilization, including both the vanguard English-speaking nations and reluctant Europe. The half-century between the resurrection of Germany as a federal republic and Sept. 11, 2001, might well be labeled "The Age of Frivolity" by future historians. Despite the dangers of the Cold War era, the breathtaking expansion of American wealth and power led our population into a sense of detachment from the travails and dangers that never stopped afflicting much of the globe. Despite intermittent recessions and a series of distant wars, the party never ended: Life just kept getting better for Americans.

For Europeans, the internal discipline as well as the external protection provided by America's presence and power permitted not only an unprecedented spread of wealth across social class lines, but also nurtured a blithe attitude toward both distant troubles and the suffering of neighbors behind the Iron Curtain. Europe became a continent of Marie Antoinette's.

Then came Sept. 11. Americans sensed at once that a profound break had occurred between a confident, easy past and a painful re-immersion in the world. Marx, not God, is dead, and old enemies have been re-inherited. Europe lags in grasping that the Age of Frivolity is over (and will resist facing the grave new world as long as possible), but reality will carve its initials in Europe's flesh soon enough.

The legacy of that Age of Frivolity persists, however, in our own military circles. Despite repeated failures and graphic casualties, military alchemy refuses to yield to science, and comfortable prejudices continue to stave off the acceptance of chilling facts. During the strategic stalemate of the Cold War, we suffered a unique affliction: Theorists with little or no military experience flourished, propounding visions of how war should be waged that were so disconnected from reality they resembled unicorn sightings. To its shame, our military establishment embraced one madcap theory after another -- especially those that promised easy victories through a "revolution in military affairs" or COIN models "proving" that a bottle of Coke and a smile would win over the poor, benighted natives.

The reality of Somalia and the Balkans, Afghanistan and now, above all, Iraq, has made inroads against the fantasies of bloodless war and the deadly absurdity that "all men want peace." But the last holdouts among the peace-through-palaver zealots include military intellectuals suffocating our service-college faculties, men so obsessed with defending their theses that they never stop to ask themselves why their COIN templates haven't worked anywhere we've tried them.

The possibility that their prescriptions for COIN operations might be wrong never seems to occur to the Ph.D. gang. Their response to disaster is always, "We've got to try harder." Faced with our strategic and operational failures in Iraq, our theorists cling to a few transitory tactical successes as evidence that their constructs can work, if only, if only, if only we keep reinforcing failure. Confronted with the ultimate collapse of those few tactical successes, they argue that our efforts needed more time, or better funding, or more troops. They justify our casualties with platitudes and miss the fundamental point: We will never operate under perfect conditions. We will always lack something, whether it's time, resources or even a clearly defined mission. The test of a military doctrine's validity is its effectiveness under imperfect conditions. Any doctrine that requires every star to be in perfect alignment is destined to fail.

The doctrine espoused by the new COIN manual lies between a failed past and a threatening future. The introduction and key chapters now say many of the right things, but they also retain far too many contradictory passages (compromise is the enemy of clarity and utility). Perhaps the gravest omission is the failure to analyze the "combatant" role of the global media, which can determine the outcome of battles, campaigns and entire wars in the post-modern era. Military leaders admit that they found the issue too politically sensitive and complex to address at this stage of the doctrine's development; nonetheless, any COIN strategy that fails to plan for the media's inherent hostility to any American endeavor sets itself up for unnecessary failures. The insurgents are our open enemies, but many elements within the world's media are their conscious or unwitting allies. Until we force the media to admit its role in shaping outcomes, we will continue to grant our opponents a huge strategic advantage.

Other deficiencies range from the continued insistence that all insurgencies have political goals, even though religion-fueled movements view politics as a means, not an end, to the assumption that all insurgencies focus on the overthrow of a government -- this despite the apocalyptic nihilism and transcendental objectives of the Islamist movement. Political grievances sometimes may be satisfied, but the ambitions of a god tend to be insatiable. The manual stresses correctly that "learn and adapt" is an imperative, yet clings to failed Vietnam-era theories of how insurgencies must be understood and treated. Consequently, there's a fatal assumption that all foreign populations ultimately want what we want and can be cajoled into supporting us in their own interests. Yet, a crucial lesson from Iraq is that not all foreign populations identify with our vision for their future.

Although the manual correctly stresses the importance of cultural awareness, it fails to warn that an overemphasis on cultural sensitivity -- sloppy pandering of the sort we've seen in Iraq -- plays into a cunning enemy's hands by allowing him to set the terms of the struggle. For example, our well-intentioned, naive decision to stay out of mosques guaranteed that mosques would become terrorist refuges and insurgent arms depots. Instead, we needed to put the onus on our enemies for any violations of holy precincts. Cultural knowledge certainly gives us an advantage -- but not if you carry your sensitivity beyond the bounds of common sense and lose sight of the mission.

The Army and Marines will work through these weaknesses in time. As midgrade and junior officers discover for themselves that the traditional COIN wisdom is often dead wrong, our doctrine will improve. The immediate problem is that many nation-building techniques appear to work in the short-term, because they function as bribes, but collapse over time -- the commander returns from his one-year tour convinced that he's made progress in City X, only to learn that his illusions merely gave the enemy breathing space. To make progress in environments such as Iraq, commanders have to unlearn most of what they've been told about counterinsurgency operations.

bad history

Returning veterans are going to have an increasingly tough time with the schoolhouse Army, that tribal refuge of our intellectual Taliban (the Marines are quicker to grasp changed realities). The most troubling indication of how difficult it's going to be to convince the officers, active duty and retired, with too much formal education and too little common sense that their beloved theories don't work lies in the treacherously selective and unscrupulous use of historical examples in the new COIN manual.

Even though the doctrine now admits the necessity of killing at least some of our most fervent opponents while accepting the validity of religion and ethnicity as motivating factors, the authors of the manual ignored the massive body of historical evidence that contradicts their claims in favor of a handful of unique cases that appear to buttress their theories. Bluntly put, the manual lies about history.

The doctrine's authors keep propping the same worn-out hookers up on the barstools: Malaya and CORDS -- the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support program in Vietnam -- are treated as the definitive examples of COIN warfare, even though they're anomalies from a specific historical juncture (and the latter was, of course, a failure). Other successful COIN operations from the same period go ignored, because the lessons they offer contradict the hearts-and-minds dogmas the drafters treasure. In Kenya, the British destroyed the Mau Mau insurgency -- through a combination of hanging courts, concentration camps and determined military operations -- but you won't read about that in the new COIN manual. Because they were bloody and messy, more recent COIN successes in Central America are glossed over, too. Algeria is treated selectively, yet the ferocious French military approach won the Battle of Algiers; a war-weary nation quit because successful military techniques were applied too late. (A key lesson is that, while COIN operations may require years of presence, time cannot be squandered.) Nor does Jordan's savage -- and successful -- repression of Palestinian unrest merit a mention here. The doctrine writers shun any examples that contradict their politically correct biases.

Reading the manual, it's hard to tell whether the drafters just don't know much history or intentionally rewrote history in the best Stalinist (and American-academic) tradition. Many of the claims made about the historical track record of insurgencies are absurd, and the speciousness of the examples cited reminds one of a quack doctor who, faced with the death of 98 patients, trumpets the miraculous survival of two as proof that his treatment works.

Consider the manual's claim that "killing insurgents -- while necessary, especially with regard to extremists -- by itself cannot defeat an insurgency." Oh, really? Over the past 3,000 years, insurgencies overwhelmingly have been put down thoroughly by killing insurgents. The teething-ring nonsense that insurgencies don't have military solutions defies history -- it's campus and think-tank nonsense. Certainly, the military will fail if it isn't used resolutely, but even in our own national history, insurgencies and insurrections have been defeated only with military force, from the Whiskey Rebellion, through a long succession of Indian wars, our Civil War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Moro insurrection, any number of "banana wars" and right down to the 2001 destruction of the Taliban regime.

Critics might respond that some of these military solutions didn't last -- but they consistently proved more sturdy than negotiated treaties. We have to accept that there are few permanent solutions in history -- those who take a long view recognize that counterinsurgency operations often are about buying time or shifting a regional equation, not achieving ideal end states. But the record is clear that military responses historically have achieved the most durable successes. Our reluctance to face overwhelming amounts of historical evidence is a holdover from that Age of Frivolity, when we could afford to believe comforting nonsense.

Unfortunately, the manual's misleading use of history goes much further. Consider the statement that "Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies have been common throughout history, but especially since the beginning of the 20th century." That would be news to the Roman legions serving from Britain and Gaul, down along the Danube frontier, on to Asia Minor and Palestine, and back to northern Africa (and that doesn't include the slave revolts). There are literally thousands of examples of insurgencies crushed definitively by military force over the millennia, from the revolt of the Zealots in Palestine to the insurrection of the Zanj in Basra, from various Celtic risings down to Nestor Makhno's guerrilla warfare in Soviet Ukraine.

The myopic claim that insurgencies became increasingly numerous in the past century even ignores the other great -- and frequent -- insurgencies of the Age of Ideology (circa 1789 to 1991). What about the multiple insurgencies that swept Latin America, ultimately driving out the Spaniards? What about the near-endless succession of insurrections and civil wars that ravaged so much of Latin America thereafter -- not least tragic Mexico, whose revolution of 1910 remains the greatest unstudied example of multi-sided insurgency warfare of the last century?

What about the thousands of years of popular insurgencies in China?

That list still ignores the multiple revolutions and insurgencies of 1848 in Europe, as well as the repeated freedom struggles of the Poles, Balkan insurgencies against Turkish rule, tribal insurgencies throughout Africa, multiple uprisings against British rule on the Northwest Frontier, the Mahdist revolt, the Boer uprisings, and on and on. For the serious student of COIN operations, the historical examples are inexhaustible.

Twentieth-century insurgencies that arose in the recession of empires were a mere subset of a subset of history's countless insurgencies. But the common thread running through the sampling above is that those confronted by adequate military forces resolutely employed failed, while insurrections against irresolute foreign rulers or weak domestic governments often succeeded.

Even the rare examples of pre-20th-century insurgencies cited in the text are misinterpreted. Although it's true that the "Spanish uprising against Napoleon ... sapped French strength and contributed significantly to Napoleon's defeat," that Spanish ulcer never healed because British expeditionary forces kept ripping it open; indeed, Britian's policy of supporting anti-French interest groups on the Iberian Peninsula resembles the support Iran and Syria provide to Iraqi insurgents today -- while the Iranians and Syrians have not deployed military formations in Iraq, they have provided arms, funds, training and, above all, encouragement. Without foreign backing, the Spanish uprisings against Napoleon's forces would have failed (as did the anti-French insurgency in the Tirol and partisan-warfare efforts elsewhere in the German-speaking lands). The operative lesson isn't about people-power but about its exploitation by third parties.

Bad medicine

Determined to prove that, in the end, all insurgencies really are the same, the manual offers maxims and prescriptions for global application, contradicting its own claim that all insurgencies have their own unique characteristics that demand a grasp of their cultural contexts. As a result, the drafters muddle together conservative and revolutionary insurgencies, blur religious, ethnic and political uprisings into a single mass, and confuse struggles to preserve traditions with those that re-invent traditions (as al-Qaida has done). Yet, the medicine for one type of insurgency can be deadly in another. The authors just don't seem to believe that insurgencies really come in different flavors but were forced to sprinkle on some rhetorical toppings to that effect at the last minute.

The default position of the manual is still the Maoist model, with sound bites from T.E. Lawrence tossed in. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then inadequate historical perspective is deadly. Although acknowledging the progress that has been made from the last draft to the final document, one reads this manual asking how many dead American soldiers and Marines it will take before our doctrine writers stop insisting that black is really white, that north is south, that peace is the natural state of mankind and that foreign populations enduring violent insurgencies just need a bowl of Cheerios.

We need to stop defending the old intellectual order. It's immoral to throw away the lives of our troops in repeated attempts to validate somebody's doctoral thesis. It's time to look honestly at the historical record, to stop saying and writing things we think will make everybody else happy and to tell the truth about COIN warfare.

The great truth missing in FM 3-24 is that military solutions traditionally have been the only effective tools in defeating insurgencies. To be effective, the military must be used with resolve and boldness -- but no other model has a history of consistent success. The implications are obvious: Other branches of government may be of some assistance (or, depending on the circumstances, an impediment) to COIN operations, and our endeavors may range from the limited involvement of special operations forces to massive deployments, but if our nation's leaders are unwilling to accept that violence is the currency that pays the serious bills, the insurgents win. After all of the grand academic theories have collapsed, COIN warfare is a fight to the death.

From The London Times, May 1, 2007

The demonisation of Sarkozy

Charles Bremner in Paris

Ségolène Royal intensified a desperate final effort yesterday to tar Nicolas Sarkozy, her presidential opponent, as a dangerous tyrant whose election would threaten the peace of France.

Ms Royal, the left-wing candidate who is about four points behind the conservative Mr Sarkozy in polls, denounced her opponent for the “great violence” and “brutality” of a campaign that she maintained was frightening away voters.

She will use a critical television debate with her opponent tomorrow to contrast her “France at peace with itself” with Mr Sarkozy’s “France of the hard Right”.

Ms Royal’s line of attack, five days before the country goes to the polls, was amplified yesterday by aides and supporters. In the latest torrent of anti-Sarko vitriol, 100 stars of the arts and sciences declared that “Sarkozy embodies a hard radicalised Right . . . with all its fears and hates. Entrusting the presidency to a demagogue like this means real danger.” 

For the Left, vilifying Mr Sarkozy offers a last hope of breaking his march to the Elysée Palace on Sunday. Ms Royal’s aim is to stir anti-Sarkozy fears among those who voted for the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, who was eliminated with 18 per cent of the vote on April 22.

After attacking Mr Bayrou as a stealth Sarkozyite in the first phase of the campaign, Ms Royal has reversed course over the past week and waged a charm offensive towards him and his voters. In another gesture yesterday, she suggested that, if elected, she would appoint as prime minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist rival who is popular with the pro-Bayrou centre.

Fomenting the TSS factor (Tout sauf Sarkozy — anyone but Sarkozy) became inevitable when he emerged from the first-round vote with much greater credibility than Ms Royal but little popularity.

A CSA poll on Sunday found that 65 per cent of French people think Mr Sarkozy “solid” compared with only 24 per cent for the Socialist. Yet only 29 per cent find him likeable, compared with a 57 per cent rating for Ms Royal.

The Socialists set out to demonise Mr Sarkozy months ago, according to Eric Besson, a senior campaign official who defected after falling out with Ms Royal. “Since we had a weak candidate, it was the best path to take,” he said.

As a tough Interior Minister until last month, the ambitious Mr Sarkozy earned the dislike of many young people — especially those from the immigrant ghettos. His doctrines of radical economic reform and individual responsibility — never before aired by a senior French politician — have been welcomed by many as a revolution, but cast by opponents as divisive, cruel and unFrench.

Mr Sarkozy has offered opponents new ammunition over the past month by breaching politically correct taboos on immigration and national identity and successfully wooing supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate.

With his character increasingly a campaign issue, Mr Sarkozy mused at the weekend over the antipathy that he stirs: “Why so much hate? Maybe it is because I say out loud what everyone thinks to themselves.”

He proceeded to spur fresh fury among the left-wing Establishment by blaming the “generation of 1968” for the moral crisis of France. The Socialist party elders and many top civil servants and academics were students in that year of revolt.

Pro-Royal campaigners have called him a “French Berlusconi”, a new Bonaparte and a “French George W. Bush”.

Marianne, a low-circulation magazine, has sold out 300,000 copies of a cover story on “The True Sarkozy”. This called him insane. “His is the kind of madness that has stoked a fair number of apprentice dictators in the past,” it said.

The 100 artists and intellectuals called for a Royal vote yesterday: “To vote against Nicolas Sarkozy is to avoid the danger of a France at war with itself, in conflict and in crisis, divided and torn apart,” said the group, which included the actress Jeanne Moreau, the film directors François Ozon and Constantin Costa-Gavras and the singer Georges Moustaki.

Many of the signatories are to join Ms Royal, along with pop singers and other celebrities, at a rally tonight at the Charlety Stadium in Paris.

Also on hand will be Lilian Thuram, the Caribbean-born football star and member of France’s 1998 World Cup-winning team, who said yesterday: “Mr Sarkozy stirs the latent racism in people.” Thuram, who now plays for Barcelona, has been one of Mr Sarkozy’s most vocal critics.

The demonisation of the favourite is one of the most striking phenomena of the 2007 campaign, academics and historians say. Max Gallo, an historian who served as spokesman for the late President Mitterrand, said: “Putting aside Jean-Marie Le Pen, I cannot think if any other case of a politician being execrated like this since the hatred of opponents of de Gaulle.”

LTC Yingling is the 3rd Armored Cav Regiment's Deputy Commander, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, so he's neither an intellectual nor professional slouch.  The article's publication speaks for itself vis-a-vis the turmoil that must exist within the Active Component of the U.S. Military Forces.

"You officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service. This is a source of stupidity which would become most dangerous in case of a serious conflict."
- Frederick the Great

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.

The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.

Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.

However much it is influenced by passion and probability, war is ultimately an instrument of policy and its conduct is the responsibility of policymakers. War is a social activity undertaken on behalf of the nation; Augustine counsels us that the only purpose of war is to achieve a better peace. The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgment in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities.

The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.

To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, "In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."

The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.

After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.

Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.

Failures of Generalship in Vietnam

America's defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America's general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America's generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.

Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America's enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America's political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of "another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him." In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America's armed forces for counterinsurgency.

Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America's generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, "Any good soldier can handle guerrillas." Despite Kennedy's guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that "the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military." While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called "the Army concept," a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy's forces.

Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America's generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department's "Blowtorch" Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public's commitment to the conflict began to wane.

America's generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in "Dereliction of Duty," the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.

Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

By the early 1990s, the Army's focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation's history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army's National Training Center honed the Army's conventional war-fighting skills to a razor's edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union's demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America's swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world's fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the U.S. military's post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.

Failures of Generalship in Iraq

America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.

Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.

After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.

After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.

The Generals We Need

The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller's "Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure." Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.

The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.

Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America's military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.

To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.

Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.

To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

Mortal Danger

This article began with Frederick the Great's admonition to his officers to focus their energies on the larger aspects of war. The Prussian monarch's innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia's security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick's successors were checked by France's ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick's prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq is America's Valmy. America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.


ARMY LT. COL. PAUL YINGLING is deputy commander, 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment. He has served two tours in Iraq, another in Bosnia and a fourth in Operation Desert Storm. He holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago. The views expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of the Army or the Defense Department.

Wow!  What can I say?  After the debacle at Abu G, wherein the responsible MP Commander, no less than a USAR Brigadier General, attempted to pass the buck onto everyone but herself for her pathetic lack of leadership , you'd think the MP's, and the USAR, would have cleaned up their act.  However, with the arrest of Lt. Col Steele, it certainly appears that the USAR still thinks "this whole Global War On Terrorism thing" is nothing more than an extension of the welfare state wherein, regardless of performance, you're guaranteed a job, and can spend all of your time working on  OER's and sleeping with detainees daughters, rather than focusing on the actual business of helping the Active Component prosecute the GWOT.  Of course, to quote the great Buck Turgedson, "I'd hate to judge before all the facts are in..."

However if proven true, can you imagine what must have been going through Steele's mind?!?  Man!  To give detainees in a prison unfettered access to an unmonitored cell phone, in exchange for a little "bow chica, bow, bow" with one of the detainees daughters, is downright treasonous.  Afterall, an Iraqi prison is just like an American one except that rather than being a graduate school for criminals it's a graduate school for terrorists within which they network, trade IED and ambush ideas and I'm sure have an office pool wherin they bet on which guard they can make cry first.  I wonder how all the Eleven Bravos feel about this idiot.  For all we know, Steele may have unwittingly, or even wittingly, helped detainees coordinate IED attacks on the area security forces when they left the wire.  I can see it now:

Ring, ring, ring...

   Detainee: "Hello Achmed...Salam, the Americans, they are leaving the wire now."
   Achmed:   "Salam, Who is this?"
   Detainee: "Who is this!  It's Abu Zaphel, that's who it is you dummy.  Have you already forgotten the sound of my voice?"
   Achmed:  "Zaphel, I heard you were in the hoosegow?  What are you doing talking to me?"
   Detainee: "The American Colonel, he is a weak man, he wants a little Bow Chica, so I promised him my daughter, the one with the red hair, green eyes and the chest you could do pull ups on.  In return, he's given me a cell phone, some American Porn, which is crap by the way because everyone knows the best porn comes from Jordan, and some French cigarettes which I've traded for two cartons of Miami's."
   Achmed: "Nooooo!"
   Detainee: "Yes.  I swear upon the Prophet himself."
   Achmed: "Wait, you idiot, they'll track this call!  You've killed me you moron!"
   Detainee: "Nooooo!  Don't worry, I've got it covered, you're safe.  This Colonel keeps mumbling about his OER Support form being overdue, he gave my daughter the money to buy the phone and she bought one from a KBR employee, it's untraceable.  Anyway, I want to tell you, I can tell you whenever the Americans leave the gate, I'll call you, just have the VBIED ready... You can zap them as they come out, or, simply pay another Sunni schmuck $200 to emplace a 155 round on the side of the road tonight, we hear the Americans won't shoot at anyone digging on the side of the road anymore, even at night..."
   Achmed:  "I'm skeptical..."
   Detainee: "O.K., listen, I'll call the next three times they come out, you just put someone on the side of the road, they can pretend their car is broken down.  Have them remember the times the Americans came out, then you two can compare notes, if I'm right, and I will be, set up the ambush."
   Achmed: "Hmmm..."
   Detainee: "Look, Achmed, I'm only calling you because we go way back, I could call anyone with this info and they would jump on it!  There are plenty who will want the good press...  So do you want in, or not?  Because I've got Fallad on speed dial."
   Achmed: "O.K., O.K., I'm in... You start calling me in two days...let me know everytime they leave the wire...Then, I'll confirm your info.  Who knows, if you're right, maybe we can work something out.  Now, I've got to go to prayers, the Imam is really on me because he doesn't think I've done enough lately in fighting the infidels.  Heck, I miss the good old days when you could simply lob a few mortar rounds at their camp and the Imam would leave you alone for a month...  Do you need anything?"
   Detainee: "No, I've got everything I need and everyone, who is someone, is in here with me.  We're having a great time playing with the Americans.  Tomorrow, we're going to pretend they've stolen our Korans again, you should watch them run around when we do that!  Hey, it's lunch time, I've got to go.  Bye."
   Achmed: "Bye."

In summation, UNBELIEVABLE!!!  I always knew the USAR was substandard...but this is really mind blowing.  The charges, as released by MNCI, are below.

April 26, 2007

Charges Against Lt. Col. William H. Steele

The Charges Against Steele:
RELEASE No. 20070426-01
April 26, 2007

Charges announced
Multi-National Corps - Iraq PAO

Regarding the separation of church and state, and the "redding and blueing" of America, the Pew Foundation's done an interesting study into Latinos, faith and politics.  The article gives anyone interested in election politics a baseline from which to better understand the Latin political agent.

Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion
A joint survey by the Pew Hispanic Project and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Executive Summary

Hispanics are transforming the nation's religious landscape, especially the Catholic Church, not only because of their growing numbers but also because they are practicing a distinctive form of Christianity.

Religious expressions associated with the pentecostal and charismatic movements are a key attribute of worship for Hispanics in all the major religious traditions — far more so than among non-Latinos. Moreover, the growth of the Hispanic population is leading to the emergence of Latino-oriented churches across the country.

About a third of all Catholics in the U.S. are now Latinos, and the study projects that the Latino share will continue climbing for decades. This demographic reality, combined with the distinctive characteristics of Latino Catholicism, ensures that Latinos will bring about important changes in the nation's largest religious institution.

Religious Affiliation of Latinos in the U.S.

Most significantly given their numbers, more than half of Hispanic Catholics identify themselves as charismatics, compared with only an eighth of non-Hispanic Catholics. While remaining committed to the church and its traditional teachings, many of these Latino Catholics say they have witnessed or experienced occurrences typical of spirit-filled or renewalist movements, including divine healing and direct revelations from God. Even many Latino Catholics who do not identify themselves as renewalists appear deeply influenced by spirit-filled forms of Christianity. Similarly, the renewalist movement is a powerful presence among Latino Protestants. More than half of Hispanics in this category identify with spirit-filled religion, compared with about a fifth of non-Hispanic Protestants. The study also shows that many of those who are joining evangelical churches are Catholic converts. The desire for a more direct, personal experience of God emerges as by far the most potent motive for these conversions. Although these converts express some dissatisfaction with the lack of excitement in a typical Catholic Mass, negative views of Catholicism do not appear to be a major reason for their conversion.

While most predominant among the foreign born and Spanish speakers, Hispanic-oriented worship is also prevalent among native-born and English-speaking Latinos. That strongly suggests that the phenomenon is not simply a product of immigration or language but that it involves a broader and more lasting form of ethnic identification.

These two defining characteristics — the prevalence of spirit-filled religious expressions and of ethnicoriented worship — combined with the rapid growth of the Hispanic population leave little doubt that a detailed understanding of religious faith among Latinos is essential to understanding the future of this population as well as the evolving nature of religion in the United States.

Beyond the strictly religious realm, this study suggests that the roles Latinos play in U.S. politics and public affairs are deeply influenced by the distinctive characteristics of their religious faith. Most Latinos see religion as a moral compass to guide their own political thinking, and they expect the same of their political leaders. In addition, across all major religious traditions, most Latinos view the pulpit as an appropriate place to address social and political issues.

The study also sheds new light on the role religious affiliation plays on party identification among Hispanics. Latinos who are evangelicals are twice as likely as those who are Catholics to identify with the Republican Party. Latino Catholics, on the other hand, are much more likely than Latino evangelicals to identify with the Democratic Party. These differences rival, and may even exceed, those found in the general population.

The centerpiece of the study is a telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 4,016 Hispanic adults conducted between Aug. 10 and Oct. 4, 2006. The survey included an oversample of 2,000 non- Catholics, which permits an examination of the growth of evangelical and pentecostal Christianity among Latinos, including the process of conversion, in unprecedented detail. The sampling methodology also provided for robust numbers of respondents in all the major country-of-origin segments of the Hispanic population, allowing for detailed analysis of results by this important variable.

Both the extent of renewalism and of ethnic-oriented worship were further examined in recontact interviews with 650 Catholics drawn from the sample of the first survey. The research team also examined data from a large body of surveys previously conducted by both projects, particularly the latest of the Forum's extensive surveys of religious belief and behavior in the general population, which offer various comparisons between Hispanics and non-Hispanics on many points.