My coverage of rules of engagement has been sweeping and continues to get traffic, especially The NCOs Speak on Rules of Engagement, and Rules of Engagement and Pre-Theoretical Commitments. I have argued for more robust rules of engagement, but I have nowhere argued that the lack of robust ROE is felt throughout Iraq in every unit and in every engagement. In the comments section to the later article, I responded to Charlie B. of OpFor that:

… those individuals who have had good experiences with the ROE will tend to side with you, while those individuals who have been in specific circumstances where the ROE have let them down will tend to agree with my article (some to greater and some to lesser degrees).

Second, I still believe that our pre-theoretical commitments determine the outcome of our thought. For instance, suppose that we began the discussion by asking the question, “why does such a thing as ROE need to exist?� The answer to that will differ per person, one saying something like “in order to comport with the LOAC,� another (like Victor David Hanson) saying something like “so that we do not lose momentum in our combat such as happened with the withdrawal from Fallujah the first time and as occurred with the failure to shoot looters.� When the Iraqis saw that we would not / could not protect their assets, they had to consider militias. Yet another person may respond on utilitarian grounds (the potential consequences of overreaction are more important than anything else). There are other potential answers.

… the discussion MUST begin on pre-theoretical grounds. One must know why an individual believes that ROE should exist before he can know how that person wants the ROE to look. The two are that connected. They are inseparable.

I do not purvey or traffic in propaganda. If there is another side I want to show it. There is one particulary poignant example of robust rules of engagement that is interesting, and the video is worth watching completely. The reporter is somewhat propagandistic, but if you ignore the reporter and focus on the facts, this is a worthwhile example to consider and discuss.

There are only three choices: (1) engage in recon by fire, (2) send Marines into the thicket with a high likelihood of taking casualties, or (3) allow the shooter to escape, living to kill Marines another day. Which choice would you have made?

In U.S. Presses for Amnesty for Insurgents, October of 2006, I discussed the press towards a broad-based amnesty program for the Sunni insurgents, observing that:

This is without question an attempt to quell the violence in al Anbar, and the hope appears to be that the tribes in al Anbar will root out al Qaeda (and other foreign elements), while a deal with the former Saddam loyalists will end the bloodshed associated with the insurgency.

But a deal will without doubt create many personal and emotional wounds with mothers and fathers of Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines who have died in Iraq fighting the insurgency.  There are still difficult times ahead.  Either these emotional wounds are created - probably never to heal - or the fight continues, with an uncertain end.

More than simple amnesty, U.S. forces are making allies of former insurgents, in spite of the unease that this creates with the Shi’a and Kurds.

Shi’ite and Kurdish officials expressed deep reservations yesterday about the new US military strategy to partner with Sunni Arab groups to help defeat the militant organization Al Qaeda in Iraq.

“They are trusting terrorists,” said Ali Al Adeeb, a prominent Shi’ite lawmaker who was among many to question the loyalty of the Sunni groups. “They are trusting people who have previously attacked American forces and innocent people. They are trusting people who are loyal to the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Throughout Iraq, a growing number of Sunni groups profess to have turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq because of its indiscriminate killing and repressive version of Islam. In some areas, these groups have provided information to Americans about Al Qaeda members or the deadly explosives that target the soldiers.

The collaboration has progressed furthest in the western province of Anbar, where US military commanders enlisted the help of Sunni tribal leaders to funnel their kinsmen into the police force by the thousands. In other areas, Sunnis have not been fully incorporated into the security services and exist as local militias.

Some of these groups, believed to be affiliated with such organizations as the Islamic Army or the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have received weapons and ammunition, usually through the Iraqi military, as well as transportation, food, handcuffs, and direct assistance from US soldiers. In Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, a local group of Sunnis, the Baghdad Patriots, were driven around earlier this month in American and Iraqi vehicles and given approval by US forces to arrest suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq members.

In Fallujah, Regimental Combat Team 6 is training former insurgents to fight al Qaeda.

Marine Sgt. Tony Storey doesn’t like to think about what-ifs as he watches the young Iraqis he is helping to train take target practice. He recalls one man who was a natural with his AK47.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Storey asked.

“Insurgent,” the man said with a smile.

“Was he joking?” Storey asked while surveying the 50 men from the Albu Issa tribe firing their weapons at a distant target. “I don’t know.”

For the men of Regimental Combat Team 6, who are training members of Anbar province tribes to fight Al Qaeda, Storey’s question isn’t simple curiosity. Less than a year ago, the tribes viewed Al Qaeda in Iraq as an ally in their effort to push Americans out of the province.

Now, the tribes see Al Qaeda as a threat to their society and their businesses — many of them dependent on illegal smuggling — and they’ve turned to the U.S. military for help.

This model is also being implemented in the Diyala province.  The alliance goes to the point of arming the Sunnis to manage security in their own geographical areas.  After some aborted starts at a coherent reply to this, Prime Minister Maliki who initially repudiated this idea later claimed credit for it.

Maliki, representing the Shi’a, doesn’t appreciate the new alliance with and arming of the Sunni no matter what he claims, and there is a tense relationship between him and General Petraeus.  But the point goes far deeper than interpersonal relationships between U.S. generals and Iraqi politicians.  The alliance being implemented in Iraq is a high-risk / high payoff strategy that must be successful if Iraq is to be pacified, Maliki’s objections notwithstanding.

When the U.S. forces begin to stand down and withdraw, to remove the U.S. men and materiel in Iraq will take more than a year.  Withdrawal will be slow and deliberate.  Furthermore, it is likely that complete withdrawal will not happen for a long time.  More likely is that the U.S. will re-deploy to the North in Kurdistan, assisting the Iraqi army and police with kinetic operations upon request, while also serving as a stabilizer for the Middle East and border security for Iraq.

But it is just as likely that U.S. forces will not be performing constabulary operations for much longer.  The counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, was written based on the presupposition that the U.S. has the ten to twelve years necessary to conduct the classical counterinsurgency campaign.  This was never true, is not true now, and will not be true in the future.  Military needs aside, the public - by the power of the vote - has the right and prerogative within the American system to make the policy decision on the conduct of war.  Asking the American pubic to support a counterinsurgency campaign over three consecutive presidential administrations is expecting the impossible, no matter how well the administration communicates the conditions of the campaign to the public.

All wars must end.  The end of Operation Iraqi Freedom necessitates settling with the enemy, a high stakes strategy, absent which there is only loss of the counterinsurgency campaign.

 Sun Tzu — “If I am able to determine the enemy’s dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own then I can concentrate and he must divide.  And if I concentrate while he divides, I can use my entire strength to attack a fraction of his� (The Art of War, VI.13).

While the Department of Defense wastes time and effort on policy for military blogging, MySpace, pictures and e-mail, we are losing the intelligence and information war.  The national debate on the so-called “surge” warned the enemy that new and robust kinetic operations were coming, and specifically, to Baghdad.  Discussing the surge, we pointed out that AQI was previously reported to have been leaving Baghdad and heading for the Diyala province on orders directly from Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who wanted the fighters to avoid a direct house-to-house battle with U.S. forces.

The enemy are students of American politics, and the fact and timetable of the surge were bandied about in open forums and by politicians so long that they couldn’t possibly miss the fact that Baghdad was first and of primary importance.  Rather than die, they fled to fight another day.  Now it appears that we are watching Baghdad surge redux in Baquba.

U.S. troops hoping to directly confront al Qaeda militants in a major offensive in the Iraqi city of Baquba instead found themselves “swimming through a minefield”, a senior officer said on Sunday.

The operation in and around Baquba, capital of volatile Diyala province, is in its sixth day and is a major part of one of the biggest offensives by U.S. and Iraqi forces against the Sunni Islamist group in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

Some U.S. officers said they believed the initial combat phase of the offensive is nearly complete and any militants left could be confronted in the next 24 hours. Hundreds of militants were thought to be still holed up in Baquba’s western districts.

But others believe many al Qaeda fighters left Baquba after getting clear signals from U.S. commanders who have said for some time that the city was high on their list of priorities.

“It’s frustrating. You set up something that you know will work … now we know that most of the al Qaeda enemy got away,” said Captain Julian Kemper. “Our purpose was not to push them out somewhere else. It was to end it here.”

Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno, the deputy U.S. commander in Iraq, has said there was little doubt al Qaeda knew that a major offensive was coming.

“They watched the news. They understood we had a surge, they understood Baquba was designated as a problem area,” he told Pentagon journalists on Friday.

Colonel Steve Townsend, commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, said the latest intelligence indicated some fighters were still inside an American cordon, which has been steadily tightened since the operation began.

The campaign in Diyala, north of Baghdad, as well as offensives in other regions around the capital, is expected to last several weeks.

After heavy street fighting on the first day, Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Baquba has shifted to the slow and dangerous job of clearing scores of buried bombs and booby-trapped houses.

A U.S. jet dropped a precision-guided bomb on one booby-trapped house, setting off a massive secondary explosion.

“Even though we’re not fighting an enemy soldier, we are swimming through his minefield,” Townsend told Reuters.

He expected the combat phase of the operation in Baquba to be over in the next 24 to 48 hours as his men re-checked areas to make sure they had not missed any concealed bombs.

Barriers and checkpoints, manned by Iraqi security forces, were being put up around three of the most troubled districts in west Baquba to prevent al Qaeda slipping back into the city.

Baquba is an al Qaeda stronghold that has also become a sanctuary for militants escaping a security crackdown launched in Baghdad in February.

Tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are engaged in the simultaneous offensives in and around Baghdad to deny al Qaeda sanctuary in farmlands and towns from where they launch car bombs and other attacks in the capital and elsewhere.

In Operation Marne Torch, an offensive targeting al Qaeda in Baghdad’s southern “beltlands”, Major-General Rick Lynch said 12 insurgents had been killed and 142 detained.

U.S. and Iraqi forces say they have killed 90 al Qaeda fighters around Baghdad, 55 of them in the Baquba operation.

With more U.S. soldiers engaged in offensives around the country the death toll for U.S. forces has begun to rise in June after hitting a two-and-a-half year monthly high in May of 126, the third highest monthly total since the start of the war.

Eighty U.S. soldiers have been killed so far in June, 28 of them in the past week.

Worse than simply missing some of the AQI leadership, we are now wading through a landscape littered with IEDs.  The knowledge the enemy had of our actions will redound to real casualties of American troops.  Until America learns to have a national conversation without invoking our military strategy, we will educate the enemy with our open deliberations.

Despite the World War II adage “loose lips sinks ships,” focus on blogs, MySpace, pictures, e-mail and telephone discussions is misplaced and wasteful.  The enemy doesn’t need to mine our personal communications to ascertain our strategy.  He only needs to listen to our public discourse.

In The Covert War with Iran, we discussed the ongoing intelligence war and weapons trafficing in which Iran was engaging throughout Iraq and the broader Middle East, as well as the distributed operations by the Quds force.  Later in The Summer War with Iran we discussed how this would intensify due to the surge and security plan.  This intensification has occurred, as Iranian conventional forces have been seen crossing over the border into Iraq.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, The Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday.
Britain’s defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on “intelligence matters”.

An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: “It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran — but nobody has officially declared it.”

“We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard for us to strike back. All we can do is try to defend ourselves. We are badly on the back foot.”

The Sun said that radar sightings of Iranian helicopters crossing into the Iraqi desert were confirmed to it by very senior military sources.

In response to the report, a British defence ministry spokesman said: “There is evidence that explosive devices used against our troops in southern Iraq originated in Iran.”

“Any Iranian link to armed militias in Iraq either through weapons supply, training or funding are unacceptable.”

See also a related article at The Sun.  We are in a proxy war orchestrated out of Tehran, Damascus and to some extent Riyadh.  This assertion doesn’t deny that there is an insurgency created out of and supported by the disaffected Ba’athists, Fedayeen Saddam, and other criminal and rogue elements in Iraq.  But it does fill in the complete picture and highlight the international war that is occuring in Iraq.

To the extent to which there is an international war occuring, counterinsurgency doctrine, e.g., winning hearts and minds, proper governing (viz. David Galula), and even largesse, reconstruction, and reconciliation efforts, will be to no avail.  These tactics target a different element who fights for a different reason and in a different way.  Prescribing the wrong medicine is dangerous not only because it can harm the patient, but also because it can give the illusion of progress, safety and security while letting the disease grow worse.

In the summer of 2005, fourteen Marines were tragically lost near Haditha while being transported in an Amphibious Assault Vehicle.  Soon after this event I had the opportunity to discuss it with a seasoned Marine Staff Sergeant, and I complained vigorously about the idea of running an Amphibious Assault Vehicle down a desert road in Iraq.  It lacked the armor for its mission, it wasn’t designed to do what was being demanded of it, and it is particularly susceptible to ordnance from the side (here is a picture of what this vehicle looked like after the IED attack).  The seasoned Sergeant waited patiently until I was finished and said, “Infantry belongs on foot, sir!”

The Strategy Page has an analysis of infantry, IEDs and travel on foot.

June 21, 2007:  Roadside bombs in Iraq now cause over 70 percent of the U.S. casualties. Moreover, most of the bomb casualties  now are combat troops, not the guys and gals who run the supply convoys up from Kuwait, and to dozens of bases in Iraq. Those routes are close watched and well patrolled. The danger comes when combat troops move into a n new area and have to patrol a lot of roads that are not closely watched for people setting up bombs. Not only are there more bombs to be encountered in these areas, but the troops naturally spend more time looking for them as they drive around on patrol. They should be looking for the bad guys and suspicious activity, but self-defense must come first.

To lower the bomb threat, many infantry commanders are resorting to an ancient practice; walking. This eliminates nearly all contact with roadside bombs. Troops can’t always accomplish their missions on foot, but many jobs can be done that way. If a raid is on a location a kilometer or so from the base, walking is no problem. Many such raids are usually carried out early in the morning, in order to take the suspects by surprise. Going in by foot in these situations is not a problem.

Another major activity, patrolling, is usually done in the vicinity of the base. You can see a lot more on foot, and have more opportunities to get information from the locals (who are increasingly willing to give it.) Even with all the heat, the troops appreciate the opportunity to amble about. Normally, the only work done on foot is frantic scrambling in combat, after dismounting from an armored vehicle. But whether the troops like to hike cross country or not, they all quickly come to appreciate the decline in roadside bomb casualties, or the anxiety that one may be just down the road.

This is the reason that Marines train to “hump” twenty miles at a time with full gear.  In an area the size of Fallujah, there isn’t any reason that foot transport cannot carry them from one side of the city to the other (and even South into the Euphrates River valley area).  Of course, heavy battlefield weight becomes a significant concern, an issue we have discussed in Body Armor Wars: The Way Forward, and Body Armor Goes Political.  Battlefield weight must be reduced, an important aim of next generation technology for the warrior.

**** UPDATE ****

A few hours after I published this article, the L.A. Times published an extensive article on EFPs, walking and infantry.

U.S. troops working the streets of the capital fear one Iraqi weapon more than others — a copper-plated explosive that can penetrate armor and has proved devastating to Humvees and even capable of severely damaging tanks.

The power of what the military calls an EFP — for explosively formed penetrator, or projectile — to spray molten metal balls that punch through the armor on vehicles has some American troops rethinking their tactics. They are asking whether the U.S. should give up its reliance on making constant improvements to vehicle defenses.

Instead, these troops think, it is time to leave the armor behind — and get out and walk.

“In our area, the biggest threat for us is EFPs. When you are in the vehicles, you are a big target,” said Army Staff Sgt. Cavin Moskwa, 33, of Hawaii, who patrols Baghdad’s Zafraniya neighborhood with the Bravo Battery of the 2nd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery Regiment. “But when you are dismounted … you are a lot safer.”

In the last three days, 15 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, nine of them in two powerful roadside bomb blasts. The military does not publicly identify the kind of weapon used in improvised explosive attacks, but the deadly nature of the blasts Wednesday and Thursday suggested that EFPs may have been used.

Read the entire article by the L.A. Times.