Archive for the 'Weapons and Tactics' Category

In Terror Tactics, we observed that the difficulty in emplacing IEDs had caused a more discrete tactic, that of suicide bombers.  We also observed that this had caused an inversion of the kill ratio in the Iraq campaign.

… in both Iraq and Afghanistan, direct kinetic engagements are being avoided.  The kill ratio which has been maintained throughout both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom is approximately 10:1.  This has caused huge losses for al Qaeda (and the Taliban in Afghanistan), and they have largely transitioned to a tactic which is much more surreptitious and difficult to stop: the suicide bomb

The Taliban haven’t completely turned off the faucet of kinetic operations against NATO forces, but when they engage they usually lose.

Seven Taliban militants have been killed in Afghanistan at the weekend after two separate attacks on police posts in the south and east, officials said Sunday.

In eastern Nangarhar province, four militants were killed in an exchange of fire early Sunday after attacking a police post near the border with Pakistan, provincial spokesman Noor Agha Zwak told AFP

Three others were killed on Saturday in the former Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala in restive Helmand province, police said.

“They attacked our police post. Our guys returned fire and three Taliban were killed,” provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal told AFP.

Taliban rebels stormed and captured Musa Qala early last year, making it their biggest military base from where they directed attacks on Afghan and foreign troops across the war-ravaged country.

Afghan and NATO forces recaptured the remote town in a large-scale operation involving thousands of troops in December. Two NATO soldiers were killed in the fighting.

Elsewhere, the US-led coalition, which has thousands of troops fighting here alongside a 40,000-strong NATO-led force, said it had killed “several” militants on Friday in an operation in eastern Khost province.

“A number of armed militants were killed when they posed a credible threat to coalition forces,” the military said in a statement. Five other militants were captured, it added.

Yet about the same time in Afghanistan, the kill ratio was reversed with terror tactics.

A suicide car bomber killed two Danish and one Czech NATO soldiers, an interpreter and three civilians in southern Afghanistan on Monday, officials said.

The Taliban have threatened to step up their campaign of suicide attacks this year to wear down Afghan and Western public support for the presence of foreign troops in the country.

The bomber attacked a convoy from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) near the village of Girishk in the southern province of Helmand, an ISAF spokesman said.

“Three ISAF soldiers, one ISAF interpreter and three Afghan civilians were killed by the blast,” said spokesman Captain Mark Gough. “Four ISAF soldiers and approximately six Afghan civilians were wounded.”

Suicide vests are now the weapon of choice in Iraq.  Coalition forces can no more stop suicide tactics when the weapon (human plus ordnance) gets into theater than they can stop the Taliban from targeting the cell phone towers.  The tenth cell phone tower has been attacked since the start of the campaign against them, and some cell phone networks have begun to turn off service at night in compliance with Taliban orders.

The solution lies in aggressive offensive operations against the insurgents.  The combination of humans and ordnance must be stopped where they are born, and no later than at the borders (Pakistan, Syria), and if they do make it into theater, the enablers and save havens must be targeted.  No amount of force protection can succeed when offensive operations are strategically necessary.

Al Qaeda finds it difficult to emplace IEDs because of the population (which points them out to U.S. forces) and UAVs operating discretely above.  Further, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, direct kinetic engagements are being avoided.  The kill ratio which has been maintained throughout both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom is approximately 10:1.  This has caused huge losses for al Qaeda (and the Taliban in Afghanistan), and they have largely transitioned to a tactic which is much more surreptitious and difficult to stop: the suicide bomb.  Eight U.S. soldiers died Monday due to this tactic.

A man walked up to a group of American soldiers on foot patrol in an upscale shopping district in central Baghdad on Monday and detonated the explosives-filled vest he was wearing, killing five soldiers and wounding three others and an Iraqi interpreter who accompanied them.

In eastern Diyala Province, north of the capital, three more American soldiers and an interpreter were also killed Monday when they were attacked with an improvised bomb, according to the military, which did not release any more details.

Another soldier was wounded in the blast.

The suicide bombing in Baghdad was the deadliest single attack on American soldiers in the capital since the height of the troop buildup here last summer. Nine Iraqi civilians were also wounded in the blast, according to officials at Yarmuk Hospital, where the victims were taken.

Reports from Iraqi witnesses suggest that the soldiers may have let down their guard because of the relative quiet of the last few months, leaving the safety of their Humvees and chatting with residents and shopkeepers.

Hours later, a car bomb exploded outside a hotel in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, killing two people and wounding 30 in the first significant attack in that city in several years.

Noncombatants have also been targeted with the violence in other parts of Iraq.

A roadside bomb has killed at least 16 people travelling on a bus in southern Iraq, reports say.  At least 22 people were also wounded in the attack.

The civilian passenger bus was travelling on the Basra-Nasiriya road some 80km (50 miles) south of Nasiriya, police said.

The attack came a day after eight US soldiers and an interpreter were killed in two separate incidents, the US military said.

One attack took place in Diyala province, killing three soldiers and an interpreter, while five other soldiers were killed in a suicide attack in Baghdad.

As if consistent with swarm theory, al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan have also directed their efforts away from direct kinetic engagements and are using the same tactic of suicide bombs.

A new United Nations report says insurgent and terrorist violence in Afghanistan sharply increased last year, with more than 8,000 conflict-related deaths …

His report also highlights the way the conflict has changed from a conventional war between western forces and the Taliban to an insurgency using suicide attacks, assassinations, abductions and roadside bombings.

Pakistan has recently seen its share of the same thing.  On Tuesday, Lahore suffered another suicide attack.

Suicide attackers detonated two huge truck bombs in Pakistan Tuesday, killing 26 people, partly demolishing a police building and deepening a security crisis facing the new government.

Another 175 people were wounded in the attacks in the eastern city of Lahore, which came just minutes apart in the morning rush-hour and left rescue workers scrambling through rubble in a bid to find survivors.

It is ultimately ineffective to fight these tactics within the battlespace itself.  By the time the suicide weapon (the ordnance and the human) has made its way to the population it is too late to stop it.  There is no incentive to stop these tactics on the part of the jihadists, because they can directly reverse the kill ratio to their own advantage.  These tactics have to be fought at their proximate birthplace, which in this case is Iran and Syria for Iraq, and Iran and Pakistan (NWFP and FATA) for Afghanistan.

The stream of jihadists has to be dried up.  The enemy has adapted his tactics to reverse the kill ratio in the battlespace.  Without adaptation by U.S. forces, we cannot long sustain this reversal of effectiveness.  The hard choices must be made about black operations against known facilitators and handlers in Syria, air strikes against training camps in Iran, strikes into the NWFP and FATA areas of Pakistan, and other options that should be available to stem the flow of global fighters.  It’s a matter of winning or losing the campaigns.

Popular Mechanics tells us about a Pentagon program that couples advanced computer technology with UAVs to aid in IED-hunting.  The program relies on physical terrain mapping by the use of UAVs along with a Cray supercomputer to utilize the information gleaned from the survey data.  These two things, when combined with “learning” algorithms (i.e., artificial intelligence), are intended to produce knowledge of the battle space for the warrior thousands of miles away.

Half a world away from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, nestled near the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, a 34-year-old electrical engineer is wielding one of the planet’s most powerful computers to lend a virtual helping hand to American soldiers. Joshua Fairley’s detailed 3D modeling of warzone scenes, based at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Miss., has vastly improved the effectiveness of airborne sensors in scoping out deadly ground-based threats.Deployed in space or on aircraft—often in UAVs—electro-optical and infrared sensors scan urban and rural terrain for explosive devices. Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) algorithms then digitally decipher the fuzzy images, picking out the mines from the manholes and the bombs from the bushes. At least that’s the hope, with visual clutter triggering regular false alarms. One very time-consuming and expensive way to improve the sensors would be to fly the systems repeatedly, performing case study after case study. Instead, Fairley and his team have used the ERDC’s Cray XT3, the Defense Department’s second most powerful supercomputer, capable of 40 trillion computations per second, to simulate landscapes from combat and do the case studies in a lab on American soil.What makes the work stand out is the level of detail they are achieving: By taking into account soil types, plant distribution, species of plants and even the distinct characteristics of those species, Fairley says his team has processed data “literally down to the weeds.” Soon, the Army Corps researchers hope to model beneath the ground. Why? “Each plant takes up a certain amount of moisture through its roots,” explains Fairley, who once designed sensors for Lockheed Martin. “That moisture could affect localized temperature, which affects the ability to detect a threat.” Fairley then uses the sensors to scan these “synthetic images” for potential hazards, taking note of how well the sensors function under certain weather conditions, at certain times of year and even different times of day. That way he can write complex new algorithms to “teach” the sensors, some of which take thermal readings, to distinguish harmless objects from threats. In one case study, he cut the false alarm rate by 75 percent. Results like that, he says, “will benefit the well-being and health of our warfighters, which is a reason why I get up in morning and come to work.”

While the best intelligence is still human, in a campaign that has seen its fair share of unpreparedness for the enemy tactics, this is welcome advancement.  The technology is basically one of finding what is out of place - the old game of “what doesn’t belong in this picture?”  As long as the UAV coverage is sufficient, the computing should be able to cope.  Still … Crays?  I thought that the Cray had disappeared with the dinosaur?  I thought most supercomputing was done now with multiple RISC processors communicating via message passing (MPI), similar to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Blue Mountain computer?

As it turns out, Cray has apparently kept up with technology, or so they say, and the “vector processor of the Cray XT5h system has unique global addressing capabilities programmable by Co-Array Fortran and Unified Parallel C (UPC), which can solve problems beyond the capabilities of MPI.”

It would have been nice if Popular Mechanics had followed this story up with a discussion on the type of computer being used and why the choice had been made.  In any case, this is good leveraging of our technological advantage to aid in the campaign in Iraq, even if the timing is later than desirable.  A followup article should be issued in the future to report on the effectiveness of this program.  Theory is good, but results are proof of principle.

Having been a strong proponent of the wise and strategic use of air power in small wars, The Captain’s Journal continues to advocate both retooling and rethinking not only the Air Force proper, but air assets in the Navy, Army and Marines.  The order of the day seems to be small wars and counterinsurgency, and any air support of the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are bound to be highly visible.  The Air Force knows this, and the Multinational Force cooperates with the need to publicize the many accomplishments of air power in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  MNF press releases routinely include air power summaries, whether involving precision-guided munitions, A-10 engagements, helicopter gunship engagements, or flyovers to cause a “show of force.”

This advocacy for involvement in small wars on our part can be misconstrued, however, to intend the diminution of the Air Force proper, and some analysts have gone on record advocating not just the diminishing of the Air Force, but the complete reorganization of this branch into the other branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, in a role subservient to the needs of the specific branch to which the assets have been assigned.  But are these calls for busting up the Air Force really strategic, and if so, how forward reaching is the underlying strategy?

In terms of global strategic thinking, Pentagon senior leadership has bigger problems than what to do with the Air Force.  In a stark admission of what repeated and protracted (15 month) deployments have done to the Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen weighed in on his view of the current state of the ground forces: “Are the ground forces broken? Absolutely not,�? Mullen told the audience at the Center for a New American Security here. “Are they breakable? They are. And I will do everything I can to prevent them from breaking.�?

There are also the materiel problems associated with the heavy duty demanded of it in the two campaigns.  After his most recent visit to Iraq, Victor Davis Hanson observed:

The number of vehicles, arms, bases, and American infrastructure in Iraq is staggering. And the wear and tear on it all is evident everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised that 30% of our equipment is worn out to the degree that it wouldn’t make sense hauling it back, and would be better off left to help transition the Iraqis. Humvees have sprung doors, broken glass, missing pieces, well in addition to the wear from sand and heat. I think the American people should accept that after Iraq we have an enormous tab to pay to reequip the air force, marines, and army. When you ride in a Ch-46 Frog marine helicopter, or a chugging Humvee or see banged up looking semis, you get some idea of the huge refitting job awaiting us after this is over, I’d say $30-40 billion at least.

Yet in light of the hardship to both man and machine caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a tip of the hat to half-century old unrepentant cold war thinking, U.S. NATO Command is arguing for an increased troop presence in Europe.

U.S. military commanders have asked the Pentagon to keep more combat forces stationed in Europe to respond to a rising Russia and other potential threats, according to senior military officials.

Plans to cut the number of soldiers based in Europe will leave commanders with too few troops to protect and train with allies on the continent and to stand ready for deployment to hot spots elsewhere, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, said Gen. David McKiernan, head of Army forces in Europe.

“In this era of persistent conflict, we have some fault lines that are there in the European Command (area of responsibility) that we have to pay attention to,” McKiernan said on Thursday.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of a resurgent Russia,” he said in Washington.

For all of the magnificence of the A-10 - and it is indeed magnificent with its redundant controls, titanium bathtub around the pilot, ability to loiter over the battle space, forward mounted Gatling gun, durability and ability to support counterinsurgency as well as kill tanks - there is a big difference between domination of the local battle space and domination of the regional air space.  The former assists in winning wars, while the later makes the wars possible to begin with.  It is rightly said that the U.S. has enjoyed air superiority for so long that we have forgotten what it is like not to have this superiority on which to rely.

Upon Rumsfeld’s resignation, John Noonan of OpFor had what should go down as the most succinct, deadly accurate assessment of the Rumsfeld era in a large catalog of assessments throughout the military:

To some, his leadership was inspirational. To others, he was the guy who was single handedly dismantling a force that had barely survived eight years of Clinton-era defense cuts. The name for the pain was Transformation, Rumsfeld’s baby. The Pentagon’s “bridge to the 21st century.�? And before September 11, it sounded and felt pretty slick. A lighter force, with emphasis on flexibility, technology, and force multiplication. Maximum effect, minimum loss cheered supporters.

In Afghanistan, Transformation was looking pretty good. A couple of hundred SPECOP warriors exploited our new, network-centric approach to warfighting and accomplished what the much-feared Soviet juggernaut could not. Who needs tanks? Who needs divisions? One foward air controller with a horse, a laptop, and a MILSTAR uplink to a B-52 could now do the heavy-lifting of an entire mechanized brigade.

And that’s when Transformation blasted off. The Air Force started delivering Raptors and Global Hawks while BRAC cut our fighter force by 20%. Money poured into the Army’s Future Combat Systems, the Marine led V-22 procurement, and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships. New tankers for the Air Force, new EELV heavy lift rockets to facilitate our budding space weapons program, a new class of aircraft carrier and a new class attack sub. All very useful weapon systems, but all very expensive weapon systems.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to get the Transformation concept over that final, sizable high-cost hurdle. Afghanistan was mostly asymmetric, fought almost exclusively at the platoon and company level. OIF was Transformation’s real test. State v. State conflict, a real army -albeit ill-equipped and poorly trained- to prove the mettle of the new force. And again, Transformation worked. Less troops, higher tech did the job. Mission accomplished.

And like a Shakespearean tragedy, Rumsfeld’s bold new vision for a brave new military collasped at the height of its success. The insurgency dug-in, and with each IED blast another hole was punched in the Transformation concept. Billion-dollar B2s flew helpless overhead as suicide bombers and roadside bombs took the lives of troops who lacked armor on their Humvees and on their bodies. 100 dollar bombs killed 100,000 dollar weapon systems. The highly touted, highly financed UAV force could only watch as car bombers exploded Iraqi marketplaces. What we needed was more troops. What we got was more gizmos.

Rumsfeld made a serious error in creating an armed forces modeled upon the notion that air power, special forces operators and high tech gadgets can win ground campaigns.  But it is a category error equally as serious to assume that Soldiers and Marines can control the sea and air.  The Russians are making no such errors, with plans for advanced submarine technology and plans to design and build a fighter superior to the F-22.  Ironically for U.S. forces in the European theater, we assume that their presence is a deterrent to a “resurgent Russia,” while Russia makes plans to construct more fighter aircraft.

When thinking seriously about the deployment of U.S. forces across the globe, the paradoxes abound.  The U.S. supports tens of thousands of troops to deploy in a region in which there is no war (Europe) and in which the best deterrent would probably be more air power, while Soldiers in Operation Iraqi freedom are in theater for fifteen months at a time.  Similarly, we position U.S. troops in South Korea allowing that country to pursue their  “sunshine diplomacy” with North Korea for half a century at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.  We promise Japan and Taiwan that they are under the umbrella of U.S. protection in order to dissuade them from the development of a nuclear program, while questions arise in the United States concerning the real value of the Air Force and Navy since they are not “contributing” to the campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The thinking concerning the future of the Air Force cannot be seen in a vacuum.  It is a part of the larger penchant for empire building within the ranks, and paucity of global strategic thinking at the highest levels of the Pentagon.  It is the same kind of thinking that led to Paul Wolfowitz having the freedom to bully General Eric Shinseki out of his position when he argued for more troops for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  At its root it is a failure to listen and learn and think in an analytical, questioning and forward looking manner.  This root has omniscience as its arrogant presupposition.

The Armed Forces of the United Stated faces high hurdles and challenges to assure victory in the campaigns currently underway.  The long war is far from concluded, and it is predicted that it will require more than ten years in order for the Afghan forces to be fully capable of national security.  Additionally, these campaigns must be engaged while ameliorating and reversing the effects of aging and wear on existing arms and equipment.

These campaigns are part of more global strategic interests involving the air and sea, as well as expansion of the size of the Army and Marines, all of which requires the application and expenditure of wealth.  Given that it is unlikely that either this or the next Congress will allocate the funds necessary to meet the needs of every perceived armed forces program, moderation and wisdom will become valuable commodities.

Instead of the holy grail of the real-time satellite-connected warrior who knows the locations and engagements of all assets in his battle space, U.S. Joint Forces Command might have to settle for tactical solutions such as innovative adaptations on satellite patrols and better body armor including lighter SAPI plates that have a larger surface area or scalar armor; instead of the number of new destroyers that the Navy would like to have, they might have to settle for the number they need; the Air Force might have to sacrifice a few fighters to refit and refurbish more A-10s to support the current campaigns; the Army might have to realize that their new UAV program will not control the air space for the Persian Gulf; the European command might have to acquiesce to the idea that training with Iraqi troops is better than training with German troops and being deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan or Qatar (the future home of CENTCOM) is more regionally and globally strategic than being deployed in Germany; and this will all have to be done while advancing weapons systems and programs in order to keep ahead of the various enemies of the state.

Empire building and self-preservation is the enemy of efficiency, and leadership, wisdom and foresight must come first from the highest levels of the Pentagon.  For the first time in history, military blogs are read and digested by professional military, and actually have a role to play concerning open communication over everything from global strategy to unit tactics and equipment.

Globally strategic thinking is required, smartly applied to a collection of complex, symbiotic organizations.  Thus far, the best that this community has been able to come up with is to bust up the Air Force and order them to report to the Army.  We are off to a sorry and pitiful start.

Related Sources:

Body Armor Goes Political, TCJ

Body Armor Wars: The Way Forward, TCJ

Time Slams the V-22 Osprey, TCJ

V-22 Osprey Deploys, TCJ

Faster Kill Chain, TCJ

A-10s Aid in Counterinsurgency, TCJ

Air Power in Small Wars, TCJ

Can the Navy Afford the New Destroyers?, TCJ

Abolish the Air Force, The American Prospect

More on the Relevance of the U.S. Air Force, The Tank

Kill the Air Force, OpFor

Disband the DC Punditocracy, Aviation Week

Abolish the Air Force, Small Wars Council Discussion Thread

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In an interesting discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal, an LA Times article is linked that examines the effectiveness of combat outposts.

The neighborhood outposts that the U.S. military launched with great fanfare in Baghdad early this year were supposed to put more American patrols on the streets and make residents feel safer. But some soldiers stationed at the posts and Iraqis who live nearby say they are doing the opposite.

The outposts, along with joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations, form a cornerstone of the current Iraq strategy. Following a classic counterinsurgency tenet, military planners are trying to take U.S. forces out of their distant, sprawling military bases and into the day-to-day lives of Iraqis.

Here there is an unspoken problem that they are trying to address with this tactic, and it is the Ratio of Support to Infantry.  Infantry has always been out on patrol, raids, peacekeeping, nonkinetic operations, constabulary operations, etc.  The overgrown fraction of support troops, at least many of them, have not made it off of FOBs.  Combat outposts will not solve that problem.  Continuing:

Although senior U.S. commanders and mid-level officers say they believe the bases are starting to work, many soldiers stationed at the outposts are doubtful, arguing that the burden of protecting the bases means they spend less time on the streets.

“They say we are spending more time ‘in sector,’ which we are doing — we live here,” said Spc. Tyrone Richardson, 24, a member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry, that operates in the east Baghdad neighborhood of Ubaidi, outside Sadr City. “But we aren’t spending the time patrolling.”

Iraqis who live nearby say they feel less safe now, because many of the bases have quickly become magnets for rocket and mortar attacks. When attacks miss the troops, they often hit Iraqi civilians.

For some, the risk of rocket attacks might be worth it if the Americans were driving away Shiite Muslim militias that many say act as death squads. But some junior soldiers say that Al Mahdi militiamen loyal to anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr are able to conduct more “patrols” of the area than can the U.S. Army.

“The Mahdi army goes around to the houses more than we do,” said Pfc. John Evans, 21, a member of 1-8 Cavalry’s Alpha Company.

When advocates of the current troop buildup pushed the U.S. to more aggressively adopt counterinsurgency tactics, their main criticism was directed at the sprawling bases where troops were stationed.

Moving soldiers to smaller bases inside Baghdad, according to the counterinsurgency experts, would allow them to spend more time interacting with the population. Regular contact with U.S. troops would make people feel safer, the main mission of counterinsurgency operations.

In practice, however, the outpost strategy has a key flaw: As many as half of the soldiers there at any one time are dedicated to protecting the outpost.

Here we may observe a fundamental law of geometry.  Let’s take a cube, 4 X 4 X 4 units.  Its volume is 64 cubic units.  Its surface area is computed to be 96 square units.  Now take the same volume, except divided into 1 X 1 X 1 units, and the surface area for the same volume is computed to be 384 square units, four times the previous surface area.  This is why ice melts faster when crushed into smaller pieces.  An analogous point can be made about the perimeter, where the perimeter of the contiguous square is 16 units, and the perimeter of the divided area (1 X 1) is 64 units, or four times the circumference for the contiguous area.  The point is that there is an economy of scale.  The same volume (or area) divided into smaller units gives a larger surface area to volume ratio (or circumference to area ratio).  The larger FOBs require less to provide force protection than smaller combat outposts.  On the other hand, the situation is worse than described by this little mathematical example, since the FOBs are not shut down with the emergence of the combat outposts.  Force protection is made extemely difficult with the emergence of combat outposts.  Continuing:

“In my tactical opinion, the combat outpost hasn’t worked,” said one junior officer stationed in east Baghdad. “It’s not a bad idea, but we are doing it wrong. We have a bigger presence but we have less boots on the ground. You only have one platoon that can maneuver tactically at a time.”

Many of the soldiers interviewed asked to speak anonymously because senior officers disapprove of noncommissioned officers and junior officers questioning military strategy.

Many of the large bases outside the city are protected by support soldiers or security units not available for the outposts.

Before the outposts were created, some companies maintained a constant presence on the streets, with each of their platoons doing two eight-hour patrols a day.

“Before, we would do two patrols a day, of six to eight hours a day. There was almost always a patrol on the street. Now we patrol just 12 times in a month,” an experienced noncommissioned officer said. “That’s not a lot of interaction with the people. And it’s problematic if the intent of this strategy is to interact with locals.”

As a result of the decrease in the number of patrols, some officers say, they are not even able to keep militia elements out of the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the outposts.

“I just know it’s not much different than it was seven months ago,” said one junior officer in east Baghdad. “We are retaking the same ground every day.”

David Kilcullen, the senior counterinsurgency advisor for the U.S. military command in Iraq, said not all the outposts were being used correctly. The outposts, he said, should not be mini-camps but rather a patrol base used for breaks between walking the neighborhood.

“You should not think of it as a nest where you retreat to and hunker down in,” said Kilcullen, a lieutenant colonel in the Australian army reserves.

On balance, he said, the concept is working and is helping to protect Iraqi neighborhoods.

“We are covering an area continuously rather than just visiting it,” Kilcullen said. “If you do not provide continuous coverage, that creates opportunities for insurgents to come in and kill the population.”

Still, other problems remain. Although one purpose of the outposts is to allow Iraqis to walk up to Americans and give them tips, the little bases are generally imposing structures ringed by machine-gun nests and high concrete walls.

1st Lt. Luis Marin, 31, Charlie Company’s executive officer, acknowledges that the need to put many of the soldiers on guard duty and erect high walls around the outposts presents challenges. But he says it is unavoidable.

“The No. 1 priority has to be to protect the outpost, and you have to use soldiers for force protection,” he said. “It almost looks like we are pushing people away, and that is not what we want to do.”

There is no doubt the outposts face threats. When what GIs ironically call “Happy Hour” begins each afternoon in east Baghdad, the soldiers of the 1-8 Cavalry seek cover in a concrete building from the rocket and mortar fire from Shiite militias.

Because the rockets are not accurate, after each attack soldiers check to see whether any residents have been hurt.

Charlie Company has been delivering fuel and water to a man who was seriously injured in an attack. After a recent visit to the injured man, Sgt. 1st Class Alberto Gordillo, 31, was confronted by another resident who lived near the site from which militants were firing rockets at the post.

“Why are you shooting at my house? Why shoot at us? We are not shooting at you,” the man said. Gordillo tried to calm him, and explain what had happened.

“If they shoot mortar rounds at us, if we positively ID them, we will shoot back. If we don’t, they won’t stop,” he said. “But we are not aiming at your house.”

In some Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad, such as Ghazaliya, some residents who were initially excited about the outposts and joint security stations have grown disgruntled. They believe the Americans are doing too little to stop attacks by Shiite militias and are intent on targeting only Sunni insurgents.

“The Americans won’t come out to help unless they have orders,” said Abdul Rahman, 29, a chemist. “They don’t prevent the Mahdi army from attacking us.”

In Shiite neighborhoods, residents say the opposite, arguing that the outposts are targeting Shiite militias, prompting militants to strike back.

“Since they started firing mortar rounds at the outpost, it has become very chaotic,” said Ali Bahadli, a clothing salesman in his 20s who lives near the U.S. outpost in the Baladiyat neighborhood of east Baghdad. “When the Americans go out, I say, ‘Here comes trouble.’

“Some hate the Americans for the mortars. Others hate the Mahdi army,” he said. “I blame the Americans. These mortars start when they go out and arrest someone.”

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sauer, the commander of the 1-8 Cavalry, said the benefit of the troops’ presence is seen in the increased numbers of warnings of possible roadside bombs and information about suspected insurgents that is being called in to the tip lines.

“Six months ago, my ability to gain intelligence in the neighborhoods was very minimal,” Sauer said. Now, based on “information provided to my soldiers on patrol, information through the tips line,” he said, “I have between 10 and 20 good pieces of information a day. That is a significant difference.”

To some of the soldiers, however, the quality of the intelligence seems thin. They say many of the tips are actually traps aimed at hitting them with bombs as they leave the post to check out the information.

Soldiers who defend the use of the outposts say their chief advantage is cutting down the time it takes to help patrols that have been hit in roadside bombings.

“The theory was to get us more hands-on with the people, more face time, and reduce our response time. That has been beneficial — when the unit is hit, we can respond quickly,” said Sgt. Scott Snyder, 36, of Charlie Company. “But as far as face time, we still get the same amount.”

There is further recommended reading on combat outposts:

1. Ramadi Combat Outposts
2. Combat Outpost Vulnerabilities
3. Recent Combat Outposts Built in Anbar (more here)
4. Combat Outposts Built in Baghdad to Accomodate the “Surge”
5. The Earlier Days of Combat Outposts in Anbar

Combat outposts were initially used in Anbar to take urban terrain which had essentially seen no Marine.  In Baghdad, this is not the case, and the parallel application of combat outposts might be dubious.  There are pros and cons associated with the use of this tactic, and it should be used circumspectly and wisely.

**** UPDATE ****

I am reminded by Michael Fumento’s comment that he authored a good and ground-breaking piece on this very subject from an embed in Ramadi.  Parts of it follow, and it helps to set the context for the proper use of COPs.

The capital of al Anbar Province, Ramadi remains for U.S. troops the most violent city in Iraq. Yet as I reported in my November 27th “Return to Ramadi�? Weekly Standard article, we seem finally to be gaining ground there against the insurgents and al Qaeda in Iraq. And COPs – Combat Operation Posts – may be one of the most important reasons.

Historically, successful counterinsurgency efforts have involved pacifying areas by plopping small garrisons with interlocking communications into enemy territory and sending out patrols to gather information and engage the enemy. Perhaps the most famous example of such garrison use was that of King Edward I of England (the guy who gutted Braveheart) who used castles to consolidate his hold on Wales. More recently U.S. Army Special Forces established Civilian Irregular Defense Group camps in South Vietnam, manned primarily by indigenous tribes or South Vietnamese with a core of Special Forces soldiers. These were considered one of the most effective strategies of that war.

There’s no set size for a COP, but in the Ramadi area it’s an undersized company of four platoons, or about 80 soldiers. 1st Brigade Combat Team, which overseas Coalition Forces in Ramadi, put in 11 COPs so far and is going to install more. The first in Ramadi was created in June. These garrisons are tiny offshoots from much-larger forward operating bases, which have about 1,000 men. The COP in which I was embedded, COP Anvil in northern Ramadi, comprises just two concrete houses commandeered and leased from Iraqi civilians.

Anvil was commanded by Capt. Don Sapp of A Company, 1/6 Infantry when I was there although he rotated out right after I left. It has an oversized company of more than 120 men from three American platoons and one Iraqi platoon. Anvil also has four M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles attached to it, giving it real firepower. Anvil also draws support from Forward Operating Base Blue Diamond, which in turn draws support from Camp Ramadi.

The military refers to COP use as “the inkblot strategy.” One dot spreads into a bigger spot. Further, the troops are practically forced to work with the locals. That means building up networks of indigenous people who know the terrain, culture, and other people better than any forces – even one from the same country but another province – ever could. All of this creates a force multiplier. Since we simply don’t have enough troops in the Anbar, this ability to make better use of troops without weakening the forward operating bases from which they’re drawn is vital. Another value of the Ramadi COPs over the FOBs and Camp Ramadi is that we’re fighting an enemy that relies primarily on roadway bombs – whether IEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, or suicide-vehicle borne IEDs (driven vehicles) – to inflict casualties and damage, with the potential for greatly restricting movement. But missions from COPs are inherently short-range; you’re always almost there. That’s less road to be on and hence fewer explosives and ambushes to worry about. COPs also have no chance of being overrun both because of the inability of the enemy to fight skillfully or mass in large numbers and because of the multilayered defenses.

The entire article is highly recommended.