It's fuckin' Christmas
I got sent this by an armybuddy who'd been emailing his Marine friend in Iraq. First of four.
Graham, you have it right regarding the targeting of Iraqis. We seem to be a peripheral or after thought. There is a civil war going on here and in my view began right after we marched into Bahgdad in 2003. The Sunnis do not wish to relinquish power after having it since the mid 60s. Everything here is tribal and even in individual tribes there are divisions and animosities. The Shia are seeking payback for the oppression they have suffered, the Sunnis are fighting for survival - politically and physically.
There are gun runners, arms dealers, criminals, Wahabists, Shia radicals, ex-regimists, gangs, foreign fighters from Chechnya, Saudi, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine and lord knows where else. It is a lot like US gangs and drug runners in US cities. The weirdest groups form short-term alliances based on immediate need. Al Qaeda funds a lot of anti-US stuff but will assist other groups if it feels it can gain a superiority. Syria has supplied a lot of technical training to the Baath party aligned groups, mostly mortar teams and bomb makers. The Shia are not in favor of aligning with Iran due to the past war with them.
The group in Bahgdad with Sadde are not indicative of the motivation of the rest of the country. Most of the Shia look at him as a puppy upstart. But the Sunnis have been killing and terrorizing the Shia in their Triangle area to send a message. This is in fact turning more unaligned Shia into the more radical camp. The religious aspect of this war is being fractured by the many factions in Iraq. Factions are the glue that binds their society together by being different. It is also what allows the people to be oppressed.
Non believers are usually forced to submit or if they convert to another religion they are simply killed. This mentality is very strange to most Westerners. There is a book called the ‘Arab Mind’ by a man named Patai which I highly recommend. The idea proposed by some that we can’t beat a birth rate is wrong. You will be surprised to learn that in these tribal cliques, if you kill enough of a family, the women will stop the war: blood feuds will only go so far.
As to your question on tactics, in an insurgent war everything must be small unit operations and respond to the local to the situation. If you can buy off the right people it will give you enough information to base operational decisions on. In my view intelligence generated from higher formation has not always been helpful. In some instances intel that my platoon gathered from operations was often returned to us a week later and was treated as if it had come from some highly secretive source. It was usually stale and operations generated from it were pure fantasy.
Once we put sniper teams on the ground, and small 4-6 man teams, we began to have success. The upper command discouraged it, as it was seen as risky. We continued with it and were very successful. The Iraqi National Guard have a lot of problems but are improving by the day. They tended to tell others about any operation we are doing so we stopped including them in any prior planning and simply dragged them along. On guard duty they tend to let terrorists go as they will be paid later. Some intel they generated was based on the inter- tribal rivalry or people they disliked in their own organization. Sound familiar? Correct The Phoenix Program, Vietnam. Again, much like drug gangs in the US who will rat out another gang and give information about where drug houses are etc. If you understand the dynamics of the situation you can generate missions to deal with this. The hearts and minds thing is a relic from Vietnam and I will tell you that the collective memory from that war has lodged itself in the upper command echelon. You can not do any hearts and minds stuff in the Sunni triangle. When you have no incentive for the Sunnis to buy into the game then there is no way to win their hearts. They believe if they lose, the Shia will kill them out. At best they will be relegated to being dirt poor farmers with no place in the new regime.
We need to stabilize the region and make it secure so the nation-building can occur. All the local shepherd or farmer wants is to be left in peace so his kids have some chance to live. Due to the centralised nature of Iraq, the countries surrounding it are very threatened by the thought of a democratic Iraq and are sending forces and assets into country to keep it de -stabilized. The idea of keeping huge bases here is a mistake in my opinion. It is the result of the experience of people who were junior officers in Vietnam and are now generals. Instead of Fire Bases we have Forward Operating Bases. This is where we store our supplies and people and make it so like home that it almost a 9-5 job for some guys.
What we need is to split up into smaller units and really not present large targets, nor provide transportation conduits too and from these bases. If we were to do that, things may stabilize a lot sooner. The fear of casualties is also a problem. In order to be effective the risks that we must be taken involve sending small, very well supported units deep into the enemies country to disrupt their operations. This is not a generals, or even a Colonels war. The Marine Corp says it’s a Corporals/Team Leader war. Let the small unit leaders fight it and results will follow.
On the ground, morale is very high. I lived under a bridge overpass on route 1 a few miles South West of Baghdad for a while. You wouldn’t do that with poor moral. We protected convoys; ran raid missions and sniper missions and were virtually an independent platoon. Our Companies operated out of smaller FOBS. We are hurting the enemy more than they are hurting us, and we count success one terrorist at a time, one mission at a time. Overall we are getting the job done, but the media and the people back home are impatient. It took 3000 years of tyranny to make that sand box. It has only had the chance of freedom for a couple of years. Personally the freedom of Iraq is only important to me as it impacts on the safety of the United States. If by fighting here we can prevent another attack on my nation, then I will fight here and any where else. Semper Fi
Lucky.
Brother Warrior. The embedded journalist issue is an interesting one and I agree with your thoughts. The public watches the history channel and reads a few books and they think they know more about fighting a war than the soldier. So do the media. My problems with upper command, and I am talking Flag level, is from the perspective of a Platoon Sergeant of a line infantry company. There are still some of your Vietnam Veterans around, very few, who are in active service and are doing a superior job. Mostly medical staff and a few Warrant Officers. The issue is one of tactics and common sense regards the cultural /ethnic situation on the ground. What worked in Vietnam, specifically winning hearts and minds, does not work here. I am a small unit tactics man who believes the trick to winning is to get your rear end out there and lock horns with the enemy. I was almost relieved 3 times for sending small teams out on ambush patrols, until it became an effective means of area denial because we were killing bad guys. If it doesn’t involve a lot of troops, tanks and Tacair, then it is not sexy enough for the top level management guys. I have a sniper team background and the tactical situation screamed for this sort of asset. Once we got it up and running and were successful, we found the upper command pulling our attachments to go to more urban areas where they had an almost impossible time blending in.
Our war is very small unit oriented, very scary to battalion and higher, but it has succeeded in turning our 7 miles of bad road from Black to Green. We have made huge mistakes and suffered some casualties for this but learned on the fly until we had the code almost cracked. I read a lot of Gunney Pooles books, such as The Last Hundred Yards, One More Bridge to Cross, Phantom Soldiers, Soldiers of the Crescent Moon. You were right about them, they are excellent tactical primers. As you know, the first is a how-to book on being an infantryman and I highly suggest it to anyone. The others are basically philosophy, history and a lot of how our enemies think. Letting the team leaders and Sergeants run the war when it comes to small unit operations is the key.
As you suggested, if your training has not been tailored to do this then it is very risky sending small teams out to lock horns with the enemy. We devised quick response teams and had a good fire support plan, always 60 mm mortars. As you tactfully reminded me, it is the only asset we can rely on due to clearance requirements for artillery. In fact we man pack this asset and also have them on the back of Hummers and fire it hand held: very good weapons system. I won’t ask how you knew. We have developed an excellent knowledge of the ground around us and of enemy infil and exfil routes. We’ve found that boots on the ground give us a lot of intelligence and even if the enemy know we are in the area, it denied it to him.
Further, we saturate areas with small teams and plant snipers in other less hot zones. This drives them to the les shot zones and we kill them. This whole thing takes patience and a lot of communication assets. We were reduced to buying off the shelf radios and using mike clicks and simple codes. Upper command gets very impatient and seems to abandon operations without allowing the situation to fully develop. Our enemy simply waits us out sometimes. The tribe in our area brought in Syrian mortar teams and other hired help to try and get rid of us. We changed with the circumstance and ended up getting rid of them. The bad guys are very adaptive and will change their method of operation to suit the circumstances. Out-thinking them is the key.
The roads are the problem as they really canalize where we can go. Our solution was to go deep with teams and keep eyes on areas where our enemy congregates and mobilises, cross roads, bridges, Mosques and all the usual suspects. The tendency for our armor heavy units was to not leave the roads and these units are infantry poor. We have Humvees, and very light ones I might add, no over head protection and reminded me a lot of the old M3 Half Tracks of WWII. In ambush situation when the sides of the road are dry, we turn into it and disappear from the road, as the sides of the roads on the main highways have depressions on both sides. Our vehicles will race to the next canal berm, dismount infantry, and supported by 240G and M2 heavy MGs will aggress our trouble makers.
Due to the heavy body armor we wear a lot of times, our guys often get rid of it and jump the small canals just to get closer. The bad guys usually have two water or trench obstacles between you and them. They will also attack asymmetrically from both sides of the road and even include mortars to assist the extraction of their forces.
Almost every ambush I have been in, except one, was initiated by an explosive device. Very aggressive action by ambushed forces is deadly to the enemy as they know that units travelling down the road are told to push through ambushes, which allows time for the bad guys to get away. This is insanity in my opinion as the only reason we are there is to kill these guys. Operations get very tiring and the strain of something going boom every day wears you down, though, that being said, staying at a base where internet and movies and ice cream are a daily occurrence, not to mention hot chow and showers is a little too much like peace. Nice every now and then but should not be a staple.
Our higher command, with the aid of the Internet, will tell lower units how to do things, from where to place your machine guns to what type of ammo you should use. We simply ignore this lunacy and find it is best to simply fight the battle. Since most of our small unit actions are less than 5 minutes, this is not an issue. The amount of useless reporting is also a waste of time. These morons were asking for shell reports on incoming mortar fire and want us to measure craters and find points of origin when we could see where the bad guys were shooting from and knew from the sound and impact what calibre it was. Missions coming down from higher would some times include our less than armored little force leading "up armored hummers "and armored vehicles into hot spots where an explosion would scratch the others paint but would kill us.
Oh well enough ranting.
The good news is that we are successful in spite of our higher headquarters and all the problems. At the basic infantryman level, we are excelling. More resources spent on better equipped infantry, especially communications assets, (the bad guys have cell phones) would assist greatly. Looking back I think another mistake is not being aggressive enough, and keeping operations more continuous. After almost 7 months, even though my men are very tired, we could have done more. A couple battalions of Australian infantry on joint operations with the Marine Corp in theatre would also help. It is good talking about all this and nice to talk to an old time soldier. I thank you for your friendship. To your wonderful nation I thank you for what Australia has done in the past and for what you are doing in Iraq.
Semper Fi
Lucky.
Graham, you have it right regarding the targeting of Iraqis. We seem to be a peripheral or after thought. There is a civil war going on here and in my view began right after we marched into Bahgdad in 2003. The Sunnis do not wish to relinquish power after having it since the mid 60s. Everything here is tribal and even in individual tribes there are divisions and animosities. The Shia are seeking payback for the oppression they have suffered, the Sunnis are fighting for survival - politically and physically.
There are gun runners, arms dealers, criminals, Wahabists, Shia radicals, ex-regimists, gangs, foreign fighters from Chechnya, Saudi, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine and lord knows where else. It is a lot like US gangs and drug runners in US cities. The weirdest groups form short-term alliances based on immediate need. Al Qaeda funds a lot of anti-US stuff but will assist other groups if it feels it can gain a superiority. Syria has supplied a lot of technical training to the Baath party aligned groups, mostly mortar teams and bomb makers. The Shia are not in favor of aligning with Iran due to the past war with them.
The group in Bahgdad with Sadde are not indicative of the motivation of the rest of the country. Most of the Shia look at him as a puppy upstart. But the Sunnis have been killing and terrorizing the Shia in their Triangle area to send a message. This is in fact turning more unaligned Shia into the more radical camp. The religious aspect of this war is being fractured by the many factions in Iraq. Factions are the glue that binds their society together by being different. It is also what allows the people to be oppressed.
Non believers are usually forced to submit or if they convert to another religion they are simply killed. This mentality is very strange to most Westerners. There is a book called the ‘Arab Mind’ by a man named Patai which I highly recommend. The idea proposed by some that we can’t beat a birth rate is wrong. You will be surprised to learn that in these tribal cliques, if you kill enough of a family, the women will stop the war: blood feuds will only go so far.
As to your question on tactics, in an insurgent war everything must be small unit operations and respond to the local to the situation. If you can buy off the right people it will give you enough information to base operational decisions on. In my view intelligence generated from higher formation has not always been helpful. In some instances intel that my platoon gathered from operations was often returned to us a week later and was treated as if it had come from some highly secretive source. It was usually stale and operations generated from it were pure fantasy.
Once we put sniper teams on the ground, and small 4-6 man teams, we began to have success. The upper command discouraged it, as it was seen as risky. We continued with it and were very successful. The Iraqi National Guard have a lot of problems but are improving by the day. They tended to tell others about any operation we are doing so we stopped including them in any prior planning and simply dragged them along. On guard duty they tend to let terrorists go as they will be paid later. Some intel they generated was based on the inter- tribal rivalry or people they disliked in their own organization. Sound familiar? Correct The Phoenix Program, Vietnam. Again, much like drug gangs in the US who will rat out another gang and give information about where drug houses are etc. If you understand the dynamics of the situation you can generate missions to deal with this. The hearts and minds thing is a relic from Vietnam and I will tell you that the collective memory from that war has lodged itself in the upper command echelon. You can not do any hearts and minds stuff in the Sunni triangle. When you have no incentive for the Sunnis to buy into the game then there is no way to win their hearts. They believe if they lose, the Shia will kill them out. At best they will be relegated to being dirt poor farmers with no place in the new regime.
We need to stabilize the region and make it secure so the nation-building can occur. All the local shepherd or farmer wants is to be left in peace so his kids have some chance to live. Due to the centralised nature of Iraq, the countries surrounding it are very threatened by the thought of a democratic Iraq and are sending forces and assets into country to keep it de -stabilized. The idea of keeping huge bases here is a mistake in my opinion. It is the result of the experience of people who were junior officers in Vietnam and are now generals. Instead of Fire Bases we have Forward Operating Bases. This is where we store our supplies and people and make it so like home that it almost a 9-5 job for some guys.
What we need is to split up into smaller units and really not present large targets, nor provide transportation conduits too and from these bases. If we were to do that, things may stabilize a lot sooner. The fear of casualties is also a problem. In order to be effective the risks that we must be taken involve sending small, very well supported units deep into the enemies country to disrupt their operations. This is not a generals, or even a Colonels war. The Marine Corp says it’s a Corporals/Team Leader war. Let the small unit leaders fight it and results will follow.
On the ground, morale is very high. I lived under a bridge overpass on route 1 a few miles South West of Baghdad for a while. You wouldn’t do that with poor moral. We protected convoys; ran raid missions and sniper missions and were virtually an independent platoon. Our Companies operated out of smaller FOBS. We are hurting the enemy more than they are hurting us, and we count success one terrorist at a time, one mission at a time. Overall we are getting the job done, but the media and the people back home are impatient. It took 3000 years of tyranny to make that sand box. It has only had the chance of freedom for a couple of years. Personally the freedom of Iraq is only important to me as it impacts on the safety of the United States. If by fighting here we can prevent another attack on my nation, then I will fight here and any where else. Semper Fi
Lucky.
Brother Warrior. The embedded journalist issue is an interesting one and I agree with your thoughts. The public watches the history channel and reads a few books and they think they know more about fighting a war than the soldier. So do the media. My problems with upper command, and I am talking Flag level, is from the perspective of a Platoon Sergeant of a line infantry company. There are still some of your Vietnam Veterans around, very few, who are in active service and are doing a superior job. Mostly medical staff and a few Warrant Officers. The issue is one of tactics and common sense regards the cultural /ethnic situation on the ground. What worked in Vietnam, specifically winning hearts and minds, does not work here. I am a small unit tactics man who believes the trick to winning is to get your rear end out there and lock horns with the enemy. I was almost relieved 3 times for sending small teams out on ambush patrols, until it became an effective means of area denial because we were killing bad guys. If it doesn’t involve a lot of troops, tanks and Tacair, then it is not sexy enough for the top level management guys. I have a sniper team background and the tactical situation screamed for this sort of asset. Once we got it up and running and were successful, we found the upper command pulling our attachments to go to more urban areas where they had an almost impossible time blending in.
Our war is very small unit oriented, very scary to battalion and higher, but it has succeeded in turning our 7 miles of bad road from Black to Green. We have made huge mistakes and suffered some casualties for this but learned on the fly until we had the code almost cracked. I read a lot of Gunney Pooles books, such as The Last Hundred Yards, One More Bridge to Cross, Phantom Soldiers, Soldiers of the Crescent Moon. You were right about them, they are excellent tactical primers. As you know, the first is a how-to book on being an infantryman and I highly suggest it to anyone. The others are basically philosophy, history and a lot of how our enemies think. Letting the team leaders and Sergeants run the war when it comes to small unit operations is the key.
As you suggested, if your training has not been tailored to do this then it is very risky sending small teams out to lock horns with the enemy. We devised quick response teams and had a good fire support plan, always 60 mm mortars. As you tactfully reminded me, it is the only asset we can rely on due to clearance requirements for artillery. In fact we man pack this asset and also have them on the back of Hummers and fire it hand held: very good weapons system. I won’t ask how you knew. We have developed an excellent knowledge of the ground around us and of enemy infil and exfil routes. We’ve found that boots on the ground give us a lot of intelligence and even if the enemy know we are in the area, it denied it to him.
Further, we saturate areas with small teams and plant snipers in other less hot zones. This drives them to the les shot zones and we kill them. This whole thing takes patience and a lot of communication assets. We were reduced to buying off the shelf radios and using mike clicks and simple codes. Upper command gets very impatient and seems to abandon operations without allowing the situation to fully develop. Our enemy simply waits us out sometimes. The tribe in our area brought in Syrian mortar teams and other hired help to try and get rid of us. We changed with the circumstance and ended up getting rid of them. The bad guys are very adaptive and will change their method of operation to suit the circumstances. Out-thinking them is the key.
The roads are the problem as they really canalize where we can go. Our solution was to go deep with teams and keep eyes on areas where our enemy congregates and mobilises, cross roads, bridges, Mosques and all the usual suspects. The tendency for our armor heavy units was to not leave the roads and these units are infantry poor. We have Humvees, and very light ones I might add, no over head protection and reminded me a lot of the old M3 Half Tracks of WWII. In ambush situation when the sides of the road are dry, we turn into it and disappear from the road, as the sides of the roads on the main highways have depressions on both sides. Our vehicles will race to the next canal berm, dismount infantry, and supported by 240G and M2 heavy MGs will aggress our trouble makers.
Due to the heavy body armor we wear a lot of times, our guys often get rid of it and jump the small canals just to get closer. The bad guys usually have two water or trench obstacles between you and them. They will also attack asymmetrically from both sides of the road and even include mortars to assist the extraction of their forces.
Almost every ambush I have been in, except one, was initiated by an explosive device. Very aggressive action by ambushed forces is deadly to the enemy as they know that units travelling down the road are told to push through ambushes, which allows time for the bad guys to get away. This is insanity in my opinion as the only reason we are there is to kill these guys. Operations get very tiring and the strain of something going boom every day wears you down, though, that being said, staying at a base where internet and movies and ice cream are a daily occurrence, not to mention hot chow and showers is a little too much like peace. Nice every now and then but should not be a staple.
Our higher command, with the aid of the Internet, will tell lower units how to do things, from where to place your machine guns to what type of ammo you should use. We simply ignore this lunacy and find it is best to simply fight the battle. Since most of our small unit actions are less than 5 minutes, this is not an issue. The amount of useless reporting is also a waste of time. These morons were asking for shell reports on incoming mortar fire and want us to measure craters and find points of origin when we could see where the bad guys were shooting from and knew from the sound and impact what calibre it was. Missions coming down from higher would some times include our less than armored little force leading "up armored hummers "and armored vehicles into hot spots where an explosion would scratch the others paint but would kill us.
Oh well enough ranting.
The good news is that we are successful in spite of our higher headquarters and all the problems. At the basic infantryman level, we are excelling. More resources spent on better equipped infantry, especially communications assets, (the bad guys have cell phones) would assist greatly. Looking back I think another mistake is not being aggressive enough, and keeping operations more continuous. After almost 7 months, even though my men are very tired, we could have done more. A couple battalions of Australian infantry on joint operations with the Marine Corp in theatre would also help. It is good talking about all this and nice to talk to an old time soldier. I thank you for your friendship. To your wonderful nation I thank you for what Australia has done in the past and for what you are doing in Iraq.
Semper Fi
Lucky.