What Have Our Army Learning From Iraq? (Tactics -- Not Policy)

Great Debates
1

Let’s assume (I do) that GWB was/is essentially wrong in his rationale for justifying the war a priori; for declaring it successful (on somewhat elided grounds) a posteriori; and for just being a general dupe of a bunch of neocons with Big Ideas that look more like Dumb Ideas.

Fine. That’s not my question.* My question’s quasi-factual, but I don’t fool myself that any Iraq/GWB-related thread could ever stay out of GD, and besides, my question does call for subjective judgment (albeit of the military, not geopolitical, variety). Here goes:

Let’s say it was the wrong war at the wrong time and will never achieve its geopolitical goals.

Even so: what is the best argument that the Alliance Of The Willing’s military forces are gleaning, as a fringe benefit, skills, experience, battle hardening, that will serve them well going forward? In answering these questions, it’s not completely irrelevant to ask if the harm outweighs any such good, but I’d like to limit the “offsetting harm” to issues that specifically limit the effectiveness of the troops themselves for future actions (such as an obvious starter: it’s hard to be prepared for War II when your guys are fully bogged down in War I; or, playing a tune up exhibition game against the Globetrotters, say, is counter-productive if half your squad ends up blowing out their knees; etc.).

I remember that before/during Gulf War I, much was made of the fact that the then-current military leadership had “learned lots of lessons” during their formative years in Vietnam. Thus, Vietnam wasn’t a total loss, went the argument.

So: GWB’s Excellent Adventure winds down. What could we plausibly say would (or would not) be a “lesson learned” or operational advantage gained in Iraq? E.g., lessons in urban counterinsurgency? Coordinating tribally-oriented security forces? How not to decommission an army?

How long would these lessons remain in the military’s institutional memory?

*Further caveat – policy isn’t totally inseperable from tactics. If the CIC is not crazy or stupid (yes, I know), he should at least listen when/if the generals tell him that Strategy X or Tactic Y from the think tank would not/could not ever work in the field. But I really want to avoid the “Was Iraq a good idea?, v.4472” thread.

2

I will do my best to avoid the rather overhanded politcizing that’s rampant in the OP, and see if I can come up with a factual answer.

1- The US is getting an opportunity to field test equipment, in several different theaters.
2- The various armed forces are getting actual field experience for their officers and enlisted. Some of the men fighting in the field today will be leading the army in the future. Always a good thing.
3- We are learning how valuable urban combat training is, and have subsequently set up MOUT training facilities stateside. As wars in the forceable future will probably result in insurgency type situations, this is invaluable.
4- Allied Medical facilities are being tested and improved, to deal more with the situations as they actually occur, and not as they are predicted to happen in a classroom.
5- It is showing weaknesses in the command and control of our forces that can be fixed. For example, the events that led to Abu Ghirab are a good example of how NOT to do certain things. We are, in theory, putting policies and such in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening again.

That’s just off the top of my head.

3

I would hope the military had learned something. And in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that they have. But what’s key is the time lag between now and when they next go to war. Between Vietnam and now, there was a pretty radical change in weaponry and guerrilla tactics, so if the Army “learned the lessons of Vietnam,” those turned out to be the wrong lessons for Iraq.

What also shouldn’t be forgotten is that if we’re learning lessons about how to fight the enemy, the enemy is also learning lessons about how to fight us – IEDs, EFPs, suicide bombing, car bombing, etc.

4

I think the two big lessons we have learned are that you go in with the force you actually need…don’t try and fight a war on a budget because in the long run it will end up costing you more in terms of both manpower and in terms of money. The other big lesson we learned is one we SHOULD have already known…know thy enemy. We should know about the culture we are proposing to fight, to know how it works, how it thinks, how it reacts…and we should make sure that the TROOPS understand those things because ‘it’ is actually the people, the men, women and children OF that culture. Without understanding how they think, what they react to and how…hell, knowing the language!..there are just to many opportunities for misunderstanding both ways. And those misunderstandings generally lead to people getting hurt or killed.

We can’t do anything about their side understanding us…but we need to do more up front to make sure WE understand THEM.

Other than that I think we have gotten a first class education in how insurgent and asymmetrical forces work against our own force structure…and how our equipment and training measures up to it. I doubt we could have gotten this experience any other way…not that I think this justifies the war mind (it doesn’t…we would have been better off finding out some other time).

I know you didn’t want to talk about the political side, but I think there were lessons to learn there as well…the most important being never go to war unless it is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, necessary…and if you DO go to war then make sure the population is (mostly) behind you and understands it is for the long haul…and go all out. Also, don’t attempt to dictate tactics or even theater level strategy from Washington…tell the military what you want to achieve and any constraints and let THEM figure out the best way to do it. Ask the shooters, not the bean counters.

Oh yeah…and add ‘Never try and fight a ground war in the ME’ to the other one…

-XT

5

A lesson we should be learning, but I don’t think we are: If we’re going to be involving ourselves in wars that primarily involve long-term police operations rather than invasion operations, we should reformulate the majority of our armed forces to meet the former need, rather than the latter (which is what they’re set up for right now).

Or else, don’t get into wars that involve you sitting in a foreign country for years and years acting as a police force.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll do either of these things. I think we’ll keep our invasion-geared military, and keep forcing our marines and paratroopers etc. to act as beat cops in neighborhoods where they know nothing about the customs or language.

6

Sorry–re-reading the OP title, maybe my post was a little too strategy-oriented and not tactic-oriented enough. But I think the tactical lessons of occupying a country like Iraq show that we have serious imbalances in the strategic makeup of our forces.

7

I think the lesson the military is learning is that recruitment should be valued higher than it is, and technological sophistication should be valued lower than what it is.

I hope they don’t take the lesson to heart, because the last thing we need is an army that’s actually capable of conquering and successfully occupying a foreign nation.

8

If you’re occupying unpacified cities, you need lots of well-armored vehicles.

9

Coulda swore we were supposed to have learned that lesson from 'Nam. Otherwise, I agree with your post, especially the last sentence, though it coulda been learned from Kipling a century-plus ago. :frowning:

10

In the next counter-insurgency war, presumably we’ll adopt a “clear and hold” strategy from the beginning. Instead of clearing out an area and then abandoning it, so the insurgents move back in and slaughter everybody who helped us, as happened the first time around in Anbar.

11

Unfortunately, when you (a) can’t tell the insurgents from the non-militarized civilians and (b) don’t disarm the population, the only way you can “clear and hold” is to completely depopulate the country neighborhood by neighborhood and city by city. Otherwise, someone is going to move back in, and we aren’t going to be able to tell if they’re insurgents (or, for that matter, local militias that just want us the f— out) or not, until we start getting shot again.

12

Well A is correct, but in my understanding B does not apply, insofar as our forces do disarm the population when clearing and holding, or at least do their darnedest to do so, without depopulating the areas they move through. Although in Anbar today, the strategy seems to be more to bribe and/or propagandize the Sunni militias to join us, rather than do clear-and-hold.

I agree that our troops still can be (and are) shot at while holding an area after a clear-and-hold operation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the tactic won’t work, as our troops win a lot more firefights than they lose. Much worse is when troops abandon a cleared area and have to start over from square 1, with all local allies slaughtered in the interim.

Note I’m not saying that I expect clear-and-hold tactics to win the current war (I think it’s far too late for that), and they won’t even win the next one without a lot of other improvements. But clear-and-hold is a lot less stupid than clear-and-abandon, or clear-and-turn-over-to-unreliable-local-forces, which amounts to the same thing.

13

All our base are belong to you! And you destruct they!

14

A buddy of mine just returned from Afghanistan and passed on one of the things he learned early on - when in convoy, watch out for men on rooftops holding cellphones.

15

Another big one I think we’ve learned - have fluent interpreters with you at all times. (Corollary: don’t discharge interpreters without a very good reason).

16

They were GAY! What better reason do you need? That stuff might be contagious…

17

Agreed…especially about the lessons we SHOULD have learned in Vietnam. However, I think, tactically, there are some key differences between how the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong fought us (and Kipling’s Fuzzy Wuzzy), and how the various groups are fighting us (and each other) in Iraq…especially the disturbing trend of direct and deliberately vicious attacks by insurgent/terrorist groups on the population or on support personnel (i.e. a mild first attack that draws in spectators and support personnel only to be hit by a second and in some cases third attack designed simply to kill more people).

This kind of warfare is pretty new (to American’s) and was a bit different than what we faced in Vietnam…and we have learned (to our cost) some pretty harsh lessons, both military AND political. Well…I HOPE we have fucking learned them anyway. :frowning:

-XT

18

Yeah but that just begs the question of wheeled or tracked.

Declan

19

The problem with that is when the majority of the population supports killing you, “clearing” would be hard to distinguish from genocide. This isn’t really a “war of insurgency”, which would be a war against the legitimate government; without such a government, there can’t be an insurgency or insurgents, despite how much we like to use the word. This is a resistance movement combined with low grade civil war. What might work against a small insurgency won’t work against something like that.

As for what the military is learning, I’m not sure if they are paying attention but it seems clear that mercenaries are a poor replacement for professional soldiers. There’s other lessons they should be learning, like how enraging the population of the country you are in is a bad idea, but I think they along with most Americans are too arrogant to learn that.

20

I’m not sure if they are, but they really should be learning that in these types of occupational wars, “Winning Hearts & Minds” has got to be ingrained in every soldier on the ground from the very beginning. That means mandatory language and culture shock programs at the very least, and soldiers who don’t take learning the local language seriously get penalized. There should also be mandatory cultural exchanges; perhaps have each soldier linked with a local family and they must eat dinner together once a week, with an interpreter (if needed), or something like that. There needs to be some sort of real, personal connection with the soldiers, or else they will always be perceived as Imperial Storm Troopers. A strict code of conduct must be also be enforced, and violations must be punished and the punishments must be made public. Etc, etc.

They should be learning that first and foremost, this type of occupation is a propaganda war, and it must be won.

Hopefully, learning (again) how difficult it is to really win hearts and minds, they’ll just stop attempting such occupations altogether.