There's more about the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, currently engaged in the Tal Afar operation, in a must read article from the Chicago Tribune today. The report is an excellent examination of what I have been saying for some time now - current U.S. counter-insurgency doctrine doesn't work and must be adapted if the situation in Iraq is to be saved.
Rather than adopting a new strategy, the generals and civilian leaders in the Defense Department have continued to support conventional, high-intensity conflict and the expensive weapons that go with it. That is happening, critics say, despite lethal insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They don't understand this kind of warfare," said Greg Wilcox, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and critic of Pentagon policies. "They want to return to war as they envision it. That's not going to happen."
Wilcox is just one of a number of maverick officers, active and retired, who have been agitating for change. Others include Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, whose recent book on the subject is required reading in some units, as well as Marine Col. G.I. Wilson, currently serving in Iraq, and H. John Poole, a retired Marine who has written extensively on insurgencies.
Together they make up the public face of a much larger debate within the U.S. military over whether the Defense Department is doing enough to train troops to fight insurgents.
This group of maverick officers take their lead from the U.S.'s foremost expert on "Fourth generational Warfare", one William Lind, a military analyst and former Senate aide who is director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism. If readers care to search the Newshog archives, they will see I have often cited Lind with admiration on this subject, even though he is very much a rightwing libertarian that I don't agree with on other matters. The pro-Iraq War bloggers of the right never mention him at all. Why? Because he is highly critical of Bush and his defense/homeland security team, saying "It is increasingly clear that under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have also been taken over by 'wreck it and run' management". They are more interested in cheering for Bush than in successfuly concluding the war he rushed into without planning or actually giving the troops the hard material support they need. Need I cite again the 38 Republican Senators who voted against money for extra body armour?
Here's where the 3rd ACR comes into the story:
Still, some units are adapting. The Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, for instance, last month began its second tour of Iraq after months of innovative training, including a requirement that all officers and soldiers receive basic Arabic language and culture training.
"It's working," said Col. H.R. McMaster, the regiment's commander, who has lectured at U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and written a book about the failures of the Vietnam War. "It's a hard problem. Nothing is easy over here. But I'm telling you we're getting after it, we're pursuing the enemy, we are totally on the offensive right now."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office has given irregular warfare a "higher priority" in the upcoming 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, according to an excerpt of the document. But the report will not be completed until next year. Real war, the mavericks point out, is happening now.
Chinese war philosopher "Sun Tzu had it right," said one Army lieutenant colonel who spent a year fighting insurgents in Iraq and who requested anonymity. "If you know your enemy and if you know yourself, you'll never lose. We know about half of what we should about the enemy, and we don't know ourselves. We can't figure out what kind of Army we want to be."
The 3rd ACR are leading the way, moving their tactics towards the model the British Army have been using all along with great success, up to and including language/culture courses and a focus on the scalpel, not the bludgeon. Their tactics are not those of the official doctrine of the Pentagon desk-pushers, who continue to hanker after times gone by:
"There's definitely the sensation that the Army's holding its breath," said one officer who recently took command of deploying forces, "that this will all blow over, and they can go back to what they want to do."
At the same time, said the officer, who requested anonymity, younger officers with command of fighting units are making the changes they need to, whether the Pentagon approves or not.
"There's a way the institution does things," he said, "and then there's the way that things are actually done."
Well done to Col. McMaster and the other officers with the courage to buck the system and save the lives of soldiers and Iraqi citizens alike in the face of losing their career opportunities because they will be labelled as "mavericks". I hope their example leads everyone from Bush and Rumsfield on down to re-examine antiquated wishful thinking in the corridors of power and I also hope that their efforts are not too late.
postscript In his latest online essay dated 1st June, Lind has this to say:
Earlier today, I attended the funeral and burial of one of America’s real military heroes at Arlington cemetery. Colonel David Hackworth would not have sat silent, as our current senior military leadership sits, while "wreck it and run" civilian management drove America’s armed forces into the ground. Rumsfeld & Co. will bear primary responsibility for the disaster, which will no doubt disturb them greatly as they enjoy their luxurious retirements. But our senior generals and admirals are the equivalent of the board of directors, and they would have some difficulty convincing Hack that they were just the piano players in the whorehouse. It would not surprise me if when the current crowd finds itself approaching the Pearly Gates, Hack has a few claymores waiting for them.
Maybe that's why no representaitive of this administration attended. I wouldn't have put it past the Colonel to have made one final arrangement for an "honor guard" of those he despised to accompany him on his next big campaign.
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