The American army rethinks

The Democratic National Convention in Boston has dominated the American media in the past week, while a range of domestic issues has dominated the European. As a result, coverage of the security situation in Iraq has – until a day of explosive violence on 28 July – declined markedly outside the Arab world. This in no way reflects an easing of the insurgency, which persists in many parts of the country.

Assassinations, attacks on the Iraqi police and security forces, kidnapping, economic targeting and assaults on United States forces all continue. On 25 July, for example, the town of Mahmudiya was the site of an ambush in which two police officers died; a day later, a senior interior ministry official, Musab al-Awadi, and two of his bodyguards were killed as they left his house in Baghdad; on 27 July, the deputy director of a hospital in Mahmudiya, Qassem al-Ubadi, was shot dead.

The next day, 28 July – exactly one month after the handover to the Iraqi administration under Iyad Allawi – a combination of violent attacks and fighting across much of Iraq finally brought the conflict back into the western media. A car bomb outside a police station in Baquba killed at least sixty-eight people, many of them men queuing to join the police force. In a separate incident, an Iraqi police officer was shot dead in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Elsewhere, seven Iraqi soldiers and thirty-five insurgents were reported killed in fighting near Suwayra, south of Baghdad, and a US soldier was killed and three wounded by a roadside bomb north-west of the city. Eleven US soldiers were wounded in an attack on a US army camp near Ramadi, and in Baghdad itself, a person was killed in a rocket attack in a crowded street.

In yet another quite extraordinary incident, armed men attacked the home of the governor of Anbar province in Ramadi. They fought a gun battle with his bodyguards, over-ran the premises, abducted three of his sons and then set fire to the house.

In addition, a campaign directed against employees of the coalition forces has continued, with two women killed and two injured on 26 July while waiting for transport to their cleaning jobs in a British base in Basra.

Meanwhile, economic targeting against oil and gas pipelines is unremitting. The assessment, in recent columns in this series, that insurgents would systematically disrupt oil and power systems during the hot summer months is proving all too accurate [see “The Saudi jugular” (3 June) and “Baghdad and Kabul: politics versus war” (10 June)].

A combination of sabotage, vandalism and neglect persists in affecting electricity supplies. Baghdad is subject to several power cuts every day. The attendant effects include an eightfold increase in the price of ice blocks, widely used during the summer months (see Pamela Constable, “In Iraqi Homes, A Constant Battle Just to Stay Cool”, Washington Post, 28 July 2004).

Kidnappings are also becoming routine. The hostage-takers scored a further success when the release of the contract worker Angelo de la Cruz coincided with a Philippine government promise to withdraw its small contingent of forces from Iraq. After the kidnapping of two of its drivers, a Jordanian contractor to the US forces, Daoud & Partners, announced that it was withdrawing from Iraq and would try to secure the hostages’ release. It is also reported that two Pakistani hostages may have been murdered – an indication that nationals of Muslim countries are not exempt from the insurgents’ attacks.

A more general phenomenon has been the increasing control by insurgents of a ring of towns and cities around Baghdad. To the west, Fallujah is a prime centre of insurgency, so far resisting the security forces both of the US military and the Iyad Allawi regime; Ramadi remains largely controlled by insurgents despite recent US raids. To the south, Muqtada al Sadr’s Shi’a militia still have substantial influence and a degree of control in Najaf and Kufa. To the north, Baquba and Samarra are sites of intractable insurgency (see Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 22 July 2004).

Indeed, there are some indications that the Allawi regime and the coalition forces are actually losing control of significant parts of central Iraq. Juan Cole, one of the more astute analysts of Iraq, says: “At the moment, (Allawi’s) only effective forces are the US and coalition military. They clearly have no idea how to do counterinsurgency effectively and have been steadily losing the country, a trend I expect to continue”.

A deeply worrying signal to American forces accompanies this security deterioration: their own casualties have actually increased since nominal power was transferred to the Allawi regime on 28 June. More US troops were killed in Iraq in the first three weeks of July than in the whole of June, and this is reinforcing calls for the US troops to withdraw even more from routine patrols (see “No respite”, 17 June 2004). Already, much of their work is concentrating on keeping strategic roads open for supplies, rather than patrolling urban areas; this trend could increase.

The 1990s: the American military changes gears

Within the US military there is now an increasingly vigorous argument over the visibility of the US military presence in Iraq (Thomas E Ricks, “Officers Question Visibility of Army in Iraq”, Washington Post, 26 July 2004). A much lower profile, some officers argue, will ease relations with ordinary Iraqis, and encourage Allawi’s security forces to assert control with the US troops in rearguard support.

Other analysts, including Juan Cole, believe that Allawi’s forces are not strong enough to perform this role and that the result of any such strategy will be even more insecurity. Both sides agree, however, that large numbers of US troops will be required in Iraq for some years to come (see “Iraq’s Israeli factor”, 8 July 2004). This in turn is beginning to lead to a basic rethink over the size and shape of the US military, with an emphasis on the need for a larger army to provide more troops on the ground in areas of crisis.

This change of attitude is quite remarkable. It represents a real shift in thinking, whose scale can only be appreciated in its historical context. In the first post-cold-war decade, the US defence posture radically altered through a series of cumulative developments with a common theme. James Woolsey, President Clinton’s first CIA director, best expressed it at a Senate hearing in 1993: the US had (in the cold war) slain the dragon but was now living in a jungle of poisonous snakes.

To “tame the jungle” and ensure American security, new military orientations were required, which dispensed with many of the cold-war forces intended for fighting the Soviet Union and its allies. Much of the heavy armour deployed along the central front in Europe was withdrawn, and many of the navy’s anti-submarine warfare ships were mothballed. While some nuclear forces were retained, the numbers were severely reduced, including many of the heavy bombers, intercontinental missiles and tactical nuclear weapons.

While this was happening, though, the various forces that were considered appropriate for “taming the jungle” were maintained or even enhanced. There was an emphasis on rapid deployment of airborne troops and on the amphibious capabilities of the marine corps. Special forces, especially those appropriate for counterinsurgency operations, were viewed as particularly useful.

The air force, deploying long-range precision-guided missiles, developed the concept of the air expeditionary wing, a self-contained but substantial clutch of bombers, interceptors, refuelling aircraft and other units that could be quickly assigned away from the United States at short notice and in response to a regional crisis. The US navy, competing with this vision, concentrated more of its resources on aircraft carriers; each was the focus of a carrier battle-group able to use aircraft, cruise missiles and other weapons systems to project power.

There was a strong feeling that shows of force such as the use of cruise missiles could be a sufficient deterrent to weak states that opposed the United States and its allies, and that there was now far less need for a large standing army.

During the 1990s, all four branches of the US armed forces – air force, navy, army and marines – lost some of their personnel, although the marines were least affected. The army took the biggest cuts of all, losing around 300,000 people – 40% of its total strength. It was a reshaping founded on an assumption that costly high-tech weaponry would be developed mainly for the air force and navy, with both of them benefiting from future defence budgets at the expense of the army, in order to impose America’s will with fewer boots on the ground.

After 2006: who pays the price?

When George Bush came to power, this trend actually intensified, not least because the new defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, believed implicitly in the need for further reductions in personnel accompanied by an intensive commitment to high-tech military solutions. His view of the military future seemed to be confirmed by the termination of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2002. The use of special forces and intensive bombing, combined with the rearming of warlord-led Northern Alliance troops as ground forces all seemed to prove that the United States could manipulate circumstances, using its huge technical superiority, to sort out the jungle’s poisonous snakes.

Barely a year later, in the approach to the invasion of Iraq, there were continual internal Pentagon battles between the Rumsfeld caucus and many senior military personnel. Rumsfeld’s people argued that minimal forces were needed to terminate the Saddam Hussein regime whereas many military planners wanted large numbers of ground troops.

In the event, and partly because of the refusal of Turkey to allow an American army division to enter northern Iraq through its territory, a relatively small force of barely 200,000 troops overall conducted the invasion. As in Afghanistan it seemed to work; for a few short weeks in spring 2003, US military invincibility seemed assured. Airpower and long-range missiles, whether provided by the air force or navy, could combine with highly mobile marines, air-mobile army units and comprehensive intelligence-gathering to offer a solution to any rogue state or terrorist problem.

Now, sixteen months after the start of the Iraq war and nearly three years after the start of Bush’s “war on terror”, it all looks very different. Several thousand US troops are tied down in Afghanistan, and close to 150,000 troops are stuck in Iraq, bearing the brunt of a war with no end in sight.

This is now leading to strong pressure from the army for a thorough rethink on the overall defence budget as preparations begin for the fiscal year 2006 budget. This involves a challenge to the traditional division of the defence budget – into (approximately) 30% for the airforce, 30% for the navy and marine corps, 16% for defense-wide costs, and only 24% for the army, even though it is the largest force in terms of personnel.

The initial request is to increase this 24% share to 28% of the total budget in 2006, but some of the most senior army officers think even this will be insufficient. They are concerned about excessive reliance on reservists (see “America plans Iraqi escalation, 1 July 2004) and the sheer wear and tear on equipment and people because of the army’s heavy commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, they want to recruit as many as 40,000-50,000 more troops.

The army’s former deputy chief of staff, General John Keane, expresses the worry pointedly: “The fact of the matter is the Army’s carrying the lion’s share of this war. The reality is this war is going to be a very long war and will dominate the 21st century. The Army will pay a disproportionate price in that war and its needs additional resources – people and money”.

The situation is too serious for this to be dismissed as normal jockeying for budget shares. The military strategy of the early 21st century is being reshaped. It is patently obvious that the US army really is committed in Iraq and Afghanistan to an extent that wildly exceeds pre-war expectations (see “The American military: all stressed out”, April 2004).

This is the reality of US attempts to “tame the jungle”. The idea that it could be done by long-range precision strike weapons, agile rapid deployment forces and copious intelligence has foundered in Afghan mountains and Iraqi cities. The war, only sixteen months old, is already turning on its head earlier United States military thinking about how to maintain control in the post-cold-war world.