Iraq War, Surge

President George W. Bush, on January 10, 2007, announced that the US would surge at least 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, to improve security in the Baghdad to a point where the remaining Iraqi Security Forces could control violence from Iraqi sects and foreign sources. Intended to be more policing and engaging directly with the people, the approach was "population-centric" rather than "enemy-centric."

Context

Linda Robinson, a journalist and author, was invited to discuss the general situation with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. While her talk focused on the surge, she said it was necessary to set a context, and began by saying that the insurgency was caused by the early decisions of the US Coalition Provisional Authority for debaathification and disbanding of the Iraqi military. While an insurgency was already in progress January 2005, the next contributor was having an election that was boycotted by the Sunni comunity. This election created the body that would write the constitution. Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad made an "agreement was made that there would be constitutional revisions considered and implicitly a guarantee that some at least would be adopted within four months of the seating of the new parliament. And that agreement was never honored, still has not been to this day."

How had this come about? By 2005, the U.S. was in serious danger of a major loss in Iraq, and entered a serious reexamination of its approach. Core to this reexamine was the advice of GEN (ret.) Jack Keane, who retired after his term as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, declining promotion to Chief of Staff due to obligations to a sick wife. Nevertheless, Keane took a near-unprecedented role as a retired general who did not become a civilian leader such as George C. Marshall or Colin Powell.

Andrew Krepinevich had written, in Foreign Affairs, about a needed strategy.

On the political front, they have been working to create a

democratic Iraq, but that is a goal, not a strategy. On the military front, they have sought to train Iraqi security forces and turn the war over to them. As President George W. Bush has stated, "Our strategy can be summed up this way: as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." But the president is describing a withdrawal plan rather than a strategy...Instead of a timetable for withdrawal, the United States needs a real strategy built around the principles of counterinsurgency warfare...Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort -- hence the image of an expanding oil spot.

As much as any one event, the shock that forced the reexamination was the Second Battle of Haditha in November 2005. Keane had first been alarmed by certain reports of civilian casualties, which suggested indiscipline among troops and a breakdown in the chain of command. Linda Robinson, in her book, puts the breakdown earlier, with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the missteps of L. Paul Bremer, and attempts at damage control.

Both agree that Bremer's acts were part of the problem. Bremer was replaced by John Negroponte, who wanted to leave within six months. Negroponte was relieved by Zalmay Khalizad, who was originally to have been co-envoy with Bremer; Khalizad had a much more nuanced sense of Iraqi politics, and, in the summer of 2005, managed to salvage something from the upcomin elections. The first Prime Minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, eventually stepped aside for Nouri al-Maliki, better able to deal with the situation. George W. Bush liked Maliki and dealt with him directly, undercutting Khalizad's ability to pressure him. Rob Richer, Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency Middle East Division, said there was plenty of blame to distribute, but also cites Condaleeza Rice as insisting on American-style demoracy too soon, and the infant democracy was not able to deal with armed sectarian leaders.

Problems in field command

After the Iraq War, major combat phase, field command had been given to LTG Ricardo Sanchez. There is little question that he was not given the resources even to begin a serious security, not much more that he and Bremer were co-equal and barely on speaking terms, and some argument that Sanchez was not the imaginative leader needed there, or that it was simply the wrong assignment for him and he would have done much better elsewhere. His headquarters, eventually called Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I) was not staffed to run a national campaign.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke under Sanchez, and the four-star headquarters that should have been present all along, Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), was created under GEN George Casey. MNC-I went back to the tactical role for whic it was designed.

Casey was considered a thoughtful officer, better equipped by rank, experience, and personality to work the channels of power in the Army. Still, he was an essentially conventional officer with little grasp of counterinsurgency.

Not without difficulty, a sense arouse that then LTG-David Petraeus was the right MNF-I commander. As a division commander in Iraq, he had what was widely agreed as the most effective counterinsurgency campaign, which may have caused some resentment. In the Army culture, his doctorate in international relations may have been a detriment in some eyes, as was his ability to relate well to politicians and journalists. Ricks suggests that his extreme physical fitness may have been one of his saving graces; he was the only soldier ever to be first at both the Command and General Staff College and the Ranger School.

Petraeus also came from the wrong "mafia" in the Army. He was a "lightfighter" from airborne and light infantry troops, where Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez, and David McKiernan were from the "heavy" side of mechanized infantry and tanks. From the standpoint of personality, he is demanding of all, including himself, and described as hard to know.

It was, however, his force of will that led Chief of Staff GEN Peter Schoomaker, himself from the light infantry side and special operations, to select him to take command in 2007.

Planning

It was a campaign, ordered by GEN David Petraeus, the senior commander of coalition forces in Iraq (Multi-National Force-Iraq) and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Planning was by a Joint Strategic Assessment Team led by COL Peter Mansoor, COL H. R. McMaster (U.S. Army) and David Pearce (U.S. State Department); David Kilcullen was a counterinsurgency adviser to Petraeus.

Five major recommendations came from the JSAT:

1. Politically, seek cease-fire arrangements with individual groups or key actors
2. Militarily, protect the population and attack those who would not negotiate
3. Engage in active regional diplomacy
4. Build government capacity
5. Using the authority of the UN if necessary, remove those government members who would engage in Islamic sectarian conflict

The JSAT also recommended a large expansion of Iraqi Security Forces, including adding at least 170,000 Iraqi Army troops to replace the departing American personnel.

Concept of military operations

The JSAT urged unity of command: fusing the military and civilian pacification forces, much as the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam headed all U.S. organizations in the Vietnam War. Petraeus accepted a modified version, with fusion at the lower levels. All advisors to Iraqi battalions were put under the control of the local U.S. brigade. Each Provincial Reconstruction Team, who worked with police and other nonmilitary units, also reported to the brigades.

Operational control would be under Multi-National Corps-Iraq, under LTG Ray Odierno, with initial Baghdad tactical operations under a force built around the 3rd Infantry Division under MG Rick Lynch. This soon evolved to add Multi-National Division-Baghdad, built around the 1st Cavalry Division, commanded by MG Joseph Fil.

One of Fil's mottos was "we are very good at clearing areas, but theat does not count for anything unless you hold it afterward." He would quantify this in September: "The four categories that we track as we progress through the evolution of security in the city is, first of all, disruption, then clearance, followed by a control phase, and then finally, retain, which is the one in which Iraqi security forces are primarily in the lead. We started off with 70 percent of them in disruption, and about 21 percent of them in clearance last February. We're now down to about 16 percent in disruption and about 30 percent that remain in clearance. But the number in control and retain now are, of the 474 muhallas in Baghdad, well over 250 of them are in control and retain, some 56 percent."

By treating the problem as population-centric, several axioms come into play:

• "An insurgent enemy needs the people to act in certain ways"
• "The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed"
• "Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore can never be eradicated by purely enemy-centric means."
• "The enemy may not be identifiable, but the population is."

American infantry in the Baghdad area, prior to the surge, tended to operate in larger units, often supporting Special Operations forces making raids on time-sensitive enemy targets. As the surge began, the emphasis changed to a combination of patrolling, often on foot, and manning security outposts among the population. The US troops partnered with Iraqis, both from the army and police, but also local tribal or other authorities.

Political pragmatism

Petraeus sought a balance among the pressure for results from Washington, the bold steps recommended by the JSAT to break through national-level Iraqi political impasses and the realities that it was unlikely to solve that national puzzle in a reasonable time. His Joint Campaign Plan defined what seemed possible, as a series of concentric circles:

1. Local security: the combination of police, military, political, economic and diplomatic measures that stabilized provinces, cities, or, if nothing else, neighborhoods. Deals would be made. Jobs programs and infrastructure repairs would incentivize demobilization, while local leaders would have real involvement in governance. This was seen as possible between late 2007 and mid 2008
2. Sustainable security, achievable by June 2009, spread the local operations all over the country.
3. National reconciliation had no date, but was "generational."

Petraeus' intelligence officer, Derek Harvey, was not overly optimistic, but saw positives in the cooperation between Crocker and Petraeus, and a growing moderation in the Shi'a ISCI (formely SCIRI) faction under Vice-President Adil Abd al-Mahdi. Harvey also, at long last, had adequate intelligence analysis support at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He saw the chances of success as one in three.

In contrast to Contrast, Petraeus made as much public information available as possible, and personally met with Iraqis, accompanied by reporters.

Field Operations

Political dealings and Petraeus' visibility also bought time while the five Surge brigades arrived and readied for operations in mid-June.

Operation Phantom Thunder launched first, in the areas outside Baghdad and Diyala, with the intention not of defeating the insurgent groups but driving them away from the cities. As regular units continued to pursue in the subsequent Operation Phantom Strike, Joint Special Operations Command units struck against high-value tarets.

While urban troops had taken heavy casualties in April and May, the surge forces were ready to start in August.

Baghdad area

Many of the ideas for the Baghdad security drive came from an article, coauthored by LTC Doug Ollivant, intelligence officer of the 1st Cavalry Division at the time of the surge. It recommended that the basic unit of counterinsurgency should be a U.S. battalion "partnering with indigenous security forces and living among the population it secures." Battalion commanders would delegate operational control to their company commanders; the companies, with a significant number of veteran soldiers experienced in Iraqi culture, would be in daily contact with the same population.

The resulting operation, called Operation Fard al-Qanoon (Enforcing the Law), divided Baghdad into grids, each with an Iraqi brigade and a U.S. battalion. U.S. platoons rotated in and out of the smaller Joint Security Stations, usually police stations that were further fortified. While the U.S. troops were fewer than called for by counterinsurgency doctrine, half the surge forces deployed outside Baghdad, taking the fight to sanctuaries. Odierno created a second division headquarters in Baghdad to improve command and cotrol.

Reducing "commuting" reduced casualties. Kilcullen, visiting the 1/325 Airborne battalion, said they had reduced their casualties since the start of 2007, because they were vulnerable to ambushes and IEDs while "commuting to the fight". When, for example, they were based in a police station, they could react to problems immediately, but also make it harder to infiltrate the Sunni areas in which the security forces were concentrated.

Adhamiya

Since April 2006, before the Surge, units also built walls to provide security around Adhamhiya, separating it from both al-Qaeda and JAM. While al-Maliki made public protests, the national Iraqi leadership had agreed. Maliki, however, gained political credit by his public opposition to the twelve-foot walls, which indeed made legitimate travel very difficult. At a rally, Sunni residents of Adhamhiya, who had seen the Shi'a Maliki as a potential oppressor, began seeing him as a national leader. There is no hard evidence that these psychological effects were predicted, and the resentment was being channeled into national rather than sectarian feeling, although it is possible. There is also no evidence Maliki tried to stop the walls.

The Sunni neighborhood was under siege. It had been heavily attacked by Shi'a militia in April, with ten civilians found dead in the street every morning.

Pre-surge patrolling

Arriving in August 2006, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment (1/26, the "Blue Spaders") began to operate principally in southeast Baghdad, with C Company sent to Adhamiya, in northeast Baghdad, a Sunni neighborhood where Saddam Hussein had made his last public appearance. The insurgents constantly changed methods. At first, C Company stayed only for the day, but, after roadside bombings increased, the company moved into the neighborhood, to a small police post. The company was safer, in its dangerous area, than the rest of the battalion, which had to go through hazardous routes to reach it. This became increasingly dangerous when explosively formed projectiles were added to the gamut of roadside bombs.

Grenades were met with grenade shields, folloed by heavier roadside bombs. They began to use armored Bradley fighting vehicles, mixed with or replacing HMMWVs.

The soldiers of Charlie 1-26 were convinced the Iraqi Army troops they worked with, Shiite forces already despised by the majority of Sunni residents of the area, were untrustworthy and knew more about the attacks than they let on. “The corruption in the Shiite military was horrendous,” said Capt. Mike Baka, commander of Charlie Company. "And they didn’t understand why they couldn’t attack the Abu Hanifa Mosque, even when they could see insurgents shooting at them from the holy site. Politics, they said, held them back. Politics meant they had to ask permission from the Iraqi government. Politics dictated that they provide comfort to known insurgents."

Baka, according to schedule, was replaced as company commander by CPT Cecil Strickland, introducing the stress of new style. "Baka had treated his men like friends, but Strickland, a former enlisted soldier who had always dreamed of commanding a rifle company, kept a certain distance between his officers and soldiers. “Mike’s very charismatic,” Strickland said. “There’s always going to be that bond with Charlie Company. I’m a fool if I think I’m going to walk in and say, ‘Cut ties. You’re mine now.’” But as the surge took hold last spring, Strickland said he was required to plan more night raids in search of high-value targets and coordinate joint raids with special operations units. That meant he spent most of his time in the operations room, planning missions. He went out on four or five patrols a week, compared to Baka’s daily patrols. Baka, meanwhile, had moved into a new job, planning battalion operations.

On June 21, a C Company Bradley hit a new-generation IED, flipping it over and trapping six men. All died.

The battalion commander went on emergency leave when his son died. Charlie’s status was in limbo, but the patrols continued. Second Platoon took a couple of days off at Camp Taji. “Why can’t we just flatten them?” he said. “Why won’t they let us do our job? We need to do like Samarra and tell everyone they have 24 hours to leave, and then kill everything that moves after that.”

Soon, the 1-26 commanders realized they had to get Charlie out of Adhamiya — to a less volatile area of Iraq — to keep them from getting in trouble and from hurting anyone in anger. Their tour had been extended from 12 months to 15 months. They had been scheduled to go home June 20. They still had four months to go.

Surge operations

Three months later, the rest of 1/26 shifted to Taji in the northeast. Their first step, when the Baghdad security operation began in February 2007, was to establishing a Joint Security Station (JSS) in the Suleikh neigborhood. Joint patrols by Iraqi police and American troops were well received within a few weeks, and residents began to give them information.

JSS Adhamiya, several miles away, was in a firefight hours after arriving.

Increasing tempo

The main drive was under a command team with Iraqi LTG Abboud Qanbar and his U.S. adviser, COL Bob Newman, coupled with the assistant division commander for operations of Multi-National Division Baghdad, BG John Campbell. Much of Campbell's efforts were spent stimulating the Iraqi chain of command. Forces were organizaed into the Karkh Area Command (KAC) on the west side of the Tigris, and Rusafa Area Command on the east side. KAC was led by Iraqi Police MG Wajih Hameed with Army MG Abdul Ameer Yarella as his deputy, while RAC was led by an Army MG, Jalal Tawfiq, with police MG Abdul Karim as his deputy. Hameed was to develop as an officer, with considerably more capability after the surge.

Leading the clearing operations were Stryker armored vehicles, optimized for urban combat.

The last operations in Baghdad were in the southern neighborhood of Dora, which was the last al-Qaeda stronghold, which also contained areas controlled by the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of Moqtada al-Sadr. This fell to the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, under COL Ricky Gibbs. They took some of the heaviest casualties aong American forces, but murders of Iraqis fell from 563 in January to 35 in December, and attacks against U.S. personnel stopped completely.

As they conducted combat operations, the brigade also sought alliacnes with the local Jabouri clan. They began, before the local population demonstrated willingness to clear insurgents, a number of reconstruction projects, and then began to recruit local security volunteers. The matter of getting national Iraqi support from the Iraqi police was a challenge, up to the level of the Prime Minister.

Petraeus would say "'We can’t kill our way to victory,'" "He sought instead to convert those who were fighting—bringing the 'reconcilable' insurgents in from the cold. "

Outside Baghdad

Larger operations began in June, which Odierno called the true beginning of the surge. This was intended both to clear insurgent bases outside the city, and to support the local security operations within it. The MNC-I level campaign was designated Operation PHANTOM THUNDER.

When Lynch arrived in March, he identified four enemy sanctuaries, used by Sunni and Shiite insurgents, as well as al Qaeda in Iraq operatives. Once he had the troops"... we’ve got major operations across my battle space to disrupt those four sanctuaries,”

Detailed operations included:

• Operation MARNE ANVIL, aimed at Shi'a extremists associated with Muqtada as-Sadr’s militia, Jaysh al-Mahdi, located east of Baghdad. October 2007 - November 2007;
• Operation MARNE TORCH I: establish a presence on both sides of the Tigris River and disrupt AQI from moving improvised explosive devices into Baghdad
• Operation MARNE PILEDRIVER, near Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, March 2008-April 2008
• Operation MARNE DAUNTLESS, in the Mada'in Qada, east of Baghdad, May 2008 - June 2008

Ending the surge

When the last of the five extra brigades left in the summer of 2008, the military surge was considered over. This did not rule out increased tempo of joint Iraqi-U.S. operations, more civil-military operations and partnerships, and security sweeps by existing forces.

Evaluation and recommendations

Opinions of its effectiveness vary with the source. It clearly reduced violence, but the issue of whether Iraqi forces can sustain the security is an open issue, fraught with complexity, and sometimes viewed through an ideological prism. Nevertheless, it is an attempt to deal with a situation where there are no ideal options.

In November 2007, Qanbar and Campbell met with local leaders to plan stabilization. Ahmed Chalabi was Operation Fahrd Al Qanoon services committee chairman, joined by Sheik Hassan Al Sudany, a representative from Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Campbell would move up to a second star as Deputy Director, Regional Operations, on the U.S. Joint Staff, in February 2008.

U.S. Political

In January 2008, Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) termed the surge a failure.

In March 2009, House Republicans introduced a resolution, agreed to be symbolic, Its sponsor, Rep. Steve King(R-Iowa) "called it less of a criticism of Mr. Obama and more of an encouragement that he 'expand on the victory rather than walk away...Our military has achieved a definable victory, and I want to tell them that America appreciates them...They've left a legacy and it's up to the new leadership to preserve and enhance the victory they've achieved.'"

Internal to the U.S. Military

At the senior levels of the military, there remained strongly opinionated signs. Petraeus still was an outsider and challenger to much of the senior staff. While the White House wanted flexibility, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and United States Central Command chief ADM William "Fox" Fallon wanted commitment to dates.

Robinson quoted one of Petraeus' staff as saying "The army staff has really changed in dynamics since Casey came on board (as Chief of Staff of the Army). There is a personal, almost belligerent attitude to what he is doing. He keeps calling senators and talking about the harm the war is doing to the army and the need to prepared for future contingencies." She continued, however, quoting LTG Bill Caldwell, in Training and Doctrine Command, that they were short of officer instructors, and classes were not filled because the students were either in Iraq or had left the army. The officers selected as advisers to the Iraqis were not always the most experienced.

Analysis

Thomas Ricks said the American people have difficulty in understanding:

1. "how difficult the surge was and how different it was from the previous four years of the war
2. that the surge failed, judged on its own terms
3. the war is not over. In fact, I suspect we might be only halfway through it, which is to say that President Obama’s war in Iraq may well be longer than George Bush’s war in Iraq, which was five years and ten months old when Bush left office."

Ricks also describes the surge as demonstrating a new humility in the US approach to the war. Emphasizing how much of a change it was, he said "With the advent of the surge, the Army effectively turned the war over to its internal dissidents." GEN Petraeus took command after being deeply involved in a writing a counterinsurgency manual, the guidelines of which were not followed in the first year of the war. Ricks says Ambassador Ryan Crocker "reveals in my book that he had essentially opposed the original invasion of Iraq."

What is the potential outcome?

The best-case scenario is that Iraq isn’t going to look anything like a success to Americans. It’s not going to be democratic, it’s not going to be stable, and it’s not going to be pro-American. Ambassador Crocker predicts in the book that the future of Iraq is probably something like Lebanon today. Most of the other experts I’ve talked to consider that wildly optimistic.

Another proposal, from the Center for a New American Security, was supported by moderate Democrats. It described an immediate drawdwn to 60,000 troops, which Linda Robinson described as a plausible blueprint for a future security mission, "but the three bedrock U.S. security goals the author set out — preventing al-Qaeda safe haven, regional war, and genocide — could not be prevented with so few troops."

Iraqi improvement

MG Hameed was, by 2008, considered "an Iraqi general with an attitude", but also with new confidence. According to the new senior U.S. officer in Baghdad, NG Will Grimsley, , "Before, they would have asked us to propose a plan” in such a circumstance and then would have accepted it with little argument. Now they are telling us how they will do it...They have a self-confidence now that they didn’t have when (I) first arrived...they were struggling with manning checkpoints." According to Military Times, Hammond and nearly a dozen other American military officers told the Associated Press that successis in in Basra in March, followed by offensives in the northern city of Mosul and the Sadr City section of Baghdad ending in May, inspired the Iraqis.

On a positive side, as of August 2009, US casualties were the lowest since the invasion, and the death toll for civilians dropped from July.