Our Leaders' Surge Questioned -- By Its Military

The Israeli experience in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 should warn Americans against having an Army that has become so focused on irregular and counterinsurgency warfare that it can no longer fight large battles against a conventional enemy. In an important essay in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Israeli scholar Avi Kober recently noted that years of policing by the Israeli Army in its territories had degraded its ability to fight the Hezbollah enemy that used conventional tactics. The result was a significant battlefield defeat for the Israeli Army.

The American Army is in a similar condition today, and we should be worried.

A misleading current narrative contends that the recent lowering of violence in Iraq is primarily due to the American "surge" and the application of so-called "new" counterinsurgency methods. Because these new counterinsurgency methods have worked in Iraq, the thinking goes, why not try them in other places, such as Afghanistan? This hyper-emphasis on counterinsurgency puts the American Army in a perilous condition. Its ability to fight wars consisting of head-on battles using tanks and mechanized infantry is in danger of atrophy.

The truth is that American combat forces in Iraq have been conducting counterinsurgency operations successfully and pretty much by the book since about the middle of 2004. By that time, U.S. commanders had identified the mistakes of the first few months of the occupation, had absorbed a significant number of lessons learned from previous counterinsurgencies, and had started to train units on correct counterinsurgency methods prior to their deployments.

Recent proclamations by American political leaders, neoconservative writers, and some serving Army officers who have taken part in the surge, however, fly in the face of this reality.

They say that it took almost five years of fumbling and slow learning for the American Army to finally begin to get it right in February 2007 under Gen. David Patraeus, at the outset of the surge. In this telling, the dramatic lowering of violence in Iraq in the summer of 2007 was caused primarily by the Army doing counterinsurgency operations "right" and by the increased number of troops.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said in a recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the surge's "new battle plan is succeeding where our previous tactics failed." A senior Army officer who was a member of Gen. Patraeus's "brain trust" characterized American operations prior to the surge as consisting of hunkering down on large bases, unable to protect the Iraqi people.

Neoconservative writer Clifford May noted that, prior to the surge, American combat forces had pretty much quit the country while an Iraq Civil War raged around them.

This commentary is simplistic and unfair. It does not accurately represent what was happening prior to the surge at the small unit level, where platoons, companies, and battalions were successfully employing counterinsurgency tactics before the surge had even been conceived.

At that level, there has been no significant change since the middle of 2004. Those who have observed the war firsthand know this. A reporter for a major national newspaper who has spent the last few years embedded with American Army combat outfits observed to me that by and large American combat units have conducted operations in the same way since prior to the surge: conducting reconnaissance to gain information on the enemy; meeting with Iraqi locals to help improve security, governance and services; conducting combined patrols and operations with the Iraqi Security Forces; cleaning up garbage and opening schools; capturing and killing the enemy; and talking to locals to assess their needs and problems. At the small unit level, the primary mission of platoons, companies, and battalions has been the protection of the Iraqi people.

There has been one notable difference between surge and pre-surge operating methods: the use of combat outposts. Since the surge, such outposts have been increasingly used by small numbers of American combat soldiers to camp in Iraqi neighborhoods. Baghdad has seen a particularly substantial increase in the use of combat outposts. Proponents of the surge credit them and the troops occupying them with the drastic downturn in violence that began in the summer of 2007.

History shows that the use of combat outposts against insurgents can prove successful. The French officer David Galula, who fought insurgents in French Algeria from 1956 to 1958, used combat outposts in small villages to isolate the insurgents from the people. Galula's area of responsibility was very small and was located deep inside the north Algerian mountains. The local population totaled about 15,000, and they were isolated from the few major urban areas in Algeria. With his infantry company of about 150 men, Galula could easily isolate and control the few villages in his area by placing platoons in these outposts.

Still, in this relatively straightforward environment, it took Galula close to a year and a half to pacify the area by separating the insurgents from the people. Galula later wrote a short book about his experiences, which has heavily influenced the American Army's current approach to counterinsurgency.

If Galula needed almost 18 months to succeed in northern Algeria, where conditions were much more suitable to a classic counterinsurgency campaign than today's Iraq (a multi-sectarian landscape with many sides fighting each other), it is naïve to believe the American surge in Iraq could succeed in a matter of months.

The reduction in violence has had more to do with the Iraqis than the Americans. First, senior American leaders began paying our former enemies -- non-al-Qaida Sunni insurgents -- large amounts of money to become U.S. allies in fighting al-Qaida. Second, the Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr announced a six-month ceasefire and stood down his attacks against Iraqi Sunnis and coalition forces; recently, he extended the cease-fire for another six months. Absent those two necessary conditions, there would have been no let up in the level of violence despite the surge.

If U.S. commanders and policymakers believe that the surge lowered violence by applying "new" counterinsurgency methods at the small unit level, then the U.S. military might be tempted to travel down the counterinsurgency path many times again, placing further strain on an already heavily strained American Army, and dangerously damaging its ability to fight the sort of battles that the Israelis tried, and failed, to win against Hezbollah in Lebanon in summer 2006.

Gian P. Gentile, an active duty Army lieutenant colonel, commanded a combat battalion in west Baghdad in 2006.

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