Fundamental Redesign
Daniel Henninger's Wonder Land column in the Opinion Journal is one of my weekly must reads. So it is this week as well. Henninger digs beyond the soundbites and naysayers to the plan to help stabilize Iraq. He points out that this is really a fundamental redesign of tactics produced from within the armed forces and incorporating the lessons already learned in Iraq. If the military has always followed the pattern of fighting the last war it was in, this is an attempt to do that earlier than usual.
The U.S.'s primary problem in Iraq, manifest across 2006, has been an urban insurgency in a 30-mile radius around Baghdad and in Anbar province. The Petraeus command is the overdue beginning of the counterinsurgency.
This isn't a one-off effort as at Fallujah, but counterinsurgency as daily U.S. military policy. It is the product of an enormous amount of self-criticism and analysis done by military and civilian analysts in and out of government. It does not mean, as often suggested the past 24 hours, that 20,000 U.S. troops are now going to run out and look for gun battles with insurgents in back alleys.
In broadest outline, the plan divides Baghdad into nine districts, essentially neighborhoods. The job of providing daily security in each district will be undertaken by an Iraqi army brigade of several thousand soldiers, a U.S. support battalion of up to 1,000 troops, and most importantly, about 20 U.S. military "embeds" or advisers.
Some of us predicted late last year that advisory embeds would be part of the new Bush strategy on reading National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's November memo of advice to the president in the New York Times. After a late November trip to Iraq, Mr. Hadley said four times in the memo that the U.S. should embed coalition forces with Iraq's army and dysfunctional police.
The source of this idea, in part, was a successful Marine experiment in Anbar province. Rather than attach just a single U.S. military adviser to an Iraqi commander at the division level, the Marines put advisers alongside Iraqi units down to the NCO level. They stayed with and fought with their Iraqi counterparts 24/7. And the Marines reported that the Iraqis fought with more confidence and effect, a k a spine-stiffening.
Read the whole thing. The man tasked with fighting this counterinsurgency is Gen. David Petraeus. He also happens to be the man who oversaw the drafting of the new counterinsurgency manual the military has just adopted. If the armed forces reinvent their tactics now rather than after the war, isn't that the way it should be? Henninger does not know that this effort will pan out, neither does anyone know it will not. But the cost of failure in Iraq is more than this nation - or the Iraqis themselves - can bear.
