Provincial Reconstruction Teams

A couple posts ago I mentioned how other cabinet departments should get involved, upon further research i found that a few have.

PRTs are mixes of DOD (Army), State Dept, Ag, Commerce etc that are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's what I found.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams: Building Iraqi Capacity and Accelerating the Transition to Iraq Self-Reliance

A weekly status report

US Military Controls Diplomacy In Iraq As US State Department Stands On The Sidelines

The Graduate Level of Warfare

In the logistics field we often say that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. This week we have been training on what is referred to as "The Graduate Level of Warfare;" Counterinsurgency. If you've pain attention to the news lately you know that General David Petraeus has taken over the helm as the top U.S. General in Iraq. Petraeus was most recently at Fort Leavenworth where he oversaw the publication of the first Counterinsurgency manual written for the Army since the Vietnam Era, FM 3-24. This Manual was co-written by an Officer named LTC John Nagl.

LTC Nagl served in the first Gulf War where he realized that due to our overwhelming success against what was at the time one considered one of the most formidable Armys in the world. He realized that in the future no country would stand toe to toe with us and that the wars of the future would be fought against squad and platoon sized insurgent elements. He attended Oxford University as a Rhode's scholar and completed his PhD on counterinsurgency with a thesis titled "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife." His book was a study of counterinsurgency in Malaya (British) and Vietnam (U.S.)

Anyway, LTC Nagl came to speak to us today about Counterinsurgency and his talk was very very good. He discussed how the Army has been loathe to change or even realize that it needs to change with regard to this.

The reason counterinsurgency is so difficult is because you have to be able to do everything necessary in traditional warfare, i.e. Artillery, Close Air Support, Logistics, Patrols etc., but you also have a responsibility for public infrastructure, political legitimization, foreign internal defense etc. I encourage any of you to read through the links here and realize just how difficult this is, and consider that the British success in Malaya, considered the textbook case, took 12 years. I'm not sure what that means, for war to continue you need three things, equipment, soldiers and public will, at this point I'm pretty sure we are at best 2/3. The American public just doesn't have the stomach for much more of this, and thats fine.

A couple funny, (ironic?) vignettes from vietnam counterinsurgency:

When General Westmoreland was asked at a press conference what his plan to deal with the counterinsurgency in Vietnam was, he responed "firepower." He was quickly replaced by GEN Creighton Abrams

When General Abrams met his North Vietnam counterpart after the war he told him "you know we never lost a military engagement against you" the NV General told him "that may be true, but it is also irrelevant."

It may take a while to change an organization as big as the Army, there are alot of people who still want to line up all the tanks and fight the communists, they will soon also be irrelevant.

READ THIS, ITS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

33 Dead in School Shooting

That's the headline all across the country tonight as the nation reacts to this unexplained violence. It made me realize how calloused and insulated we have become about the violene in Iraq. Consider this, a massacre on the scale of the one today in VA Tech occurs at least weekly in Iraq yet it barely makes a ripple in the "drive by" news media which informs most of us. Last week when we were debating the racial overtones of "Nappy Headed Hoe's" hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of Americans were killed in Iraq. A recent post of mine linked to a story about a bombing in Tal Afar which proved to be the single deadliest attack since the war begain. Nearly 100 innocent citizens where killed, the Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army exchanged gunfire yet it was in and out of the news in less than 24 hours. Not one reader of this blog (if there are any) posted anything about it. This may be understandable if we weren't involved in this bloodshed, but our occupation and subsequent mismanagement of the war is direcly responsible for it. No one in this country is responsible for what happened today, but dozens of elected and appointed officials are at least indirectly responsible for the chaos in Iraq.

This isn't intended to minimize what happened today, but it does shed some light on how we view the news and how we receive and process information.

Later this week I'll try to post on what I perceive as the lack of participation by other cabinet level agencies in D.C. Imagine the progress that a bit of assisstance from the Ag, Commerce, Transporation, Energy or Health and Human Services departments could stimulate. What is it that the DOD is saddled with this responsibility we are the least trained for it. Driving a HMMWV or wearing Body Armor isn't that hard. And the DOD didn't ask for this war, we were simply ordered to execute it.

Here's some links to some interesting stories from the weekend and a video of a HMMWV being towed back through the creek after it got flooded out.

The Power of Green

McCain Sees ‘No Plan B’ for Iraq War

McCain Self-Destructs

4 Years Later

Its been four years since the fall of Baghdad, and I would submit that very few Iraqis are better off today than they were before the capital fell. By nearly any measure most of Iraq is in worse condition than at any time in recent history, income, security, basic sanitation, electricity, access to clean water. I guess if you go into something without a plan, its easy to say that your plan didn't fail. Juan Cole has an interesting post on titled "How to get out of Iraq," worth clicking over to. Muqtada Al-Sadr has organized a big rally today

and has urged his Sadr Militia-men to quit targeting Iraqi Soldiers and Policemen and instead focus their efforts on US Forces. Bear in mind that his loyalists votes in the parliament are responsible for Nouri Al- Maliki being in place. So in some ways Al-Sadr is a legitimate politicial figure, imagine if Jesse Jackson or David Duke urged their followers to kill and got away with it... Its happening in Iraq.

We had four days off for Easter Weekend and had some much needed Rest and Relaxation, we're back to training tomorrow and I'll keep you updated on how thats going.

Presidential politics are getting interesting, Hilary and Barak have refused a Fox News Debate, John McCain seems to be staking his success squarely on the success of the troop surge. I generally won't talk much about my thought on politics here, though if you really care leave a comment or two.