United States military casualties in Iraq are small in number compared with the hundreds of Iraqi civilians being killed each week. In human terms the imbalance is stark, but in cold strategic terms it is less significant than that these casualties are continuing at a consistently high level. In real terms the trend is highly disturbing, for US forces are far less dispersed in numerous, vulnerable small bases than in 2004, and increasingly consolidated in huge bases such as Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad.
In the first three weeks of September 2006, another fifty American soldiers were killed; in the four weeks to 19 September, more than 700 were wounded in combat. This latter figure takes the total wounded in combat since the conflict began in March 2003 to more than 20,000, and the additional total of those injured in non-combat incidents exceeds 10,000.
Meanwhile, internal security assessments (including a leaked report by Colonel Peter Devlin) indicate that the US occupying forces and the Iraqi administration's own forces have effectively lost control of the large Anbar province, which stretches from Baghdad to the Syrian border. Increasingly, the emphasis now is on trying to bring some degree of security to Baghdad itself.
A new security operation due to start in October 2006 has as its core aim to control all transit of insurgents and weapons into and out of Iraq's capital. It will cordon off the entire perimeter of the city (ninety-six kilometres in extent), and establish twenty-eight checkpoints to control all vehicles. A system of trenches will block all other roads and tracks, including cross-country routes passing through the city.
The lack of US forces in sufficient numbers means that the main personnel guarding the new perimeter will be Iraqi security personnel. The issue of their reliability in the project is reason enough to doubt its viability. But in any case, what is being attempted in Baghdad is to repeat on a massive scale what has already proved unsuccessful in Fallujah and Ramadi.
Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001
From Fallujah to Baghdad
The second assault on Fallujah in November 2004 killed thousands of people and destroyed or damaged half of the city's 39,000 homes. After it, United States troops ringed the city and erected barricades, with only four entry-exit points. All boys and men were liable to searches, many were forced to wait for four hours, and there was a 7pm curfew (see "Iraq's state of insecurity", 21 April 2005). Despite these measures and thousands of US soldiers to enforce them, insurgents remained active in Fallujah to the extent of being able to manufacture car-bombs within what was intended to be a "locked-down" city.
In this light, the new Baghdad security project has a certain despairing feel, especially when US military sources have confirmed that any expectation of a decrease in troop levels in Iraq has been put to rest. This is in marked contrast with confident talk of reductions in late 2005, including Pentagon estimates that the numbers might decline to around 100,000 by the end of 2006.
There are currently 147,000 US troops in Iraq; this represents an increase of around 20,000 in the past three months, made necessary by the high levels of violence, especially in greater Baghdad. A further component is the retention of the army's 172nd Stryker brigade in Iraq beyond a scheduled return to the US in July. Military sources in Iraq now say that the brigade will now depart, but that troop levels will stay at around 140,000 until spring 2007; indeed, the head of US central command General John Abizaid even says that he will call for more troops if necessary (see David S Cloud, "Iraq force not likely to be cut, officer says", International Herald Tribune, 20 September 2006).
When General Abizaid was asked on 19 September whether the US was winning in Iraq he replied: "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war". His comments form part of a new pattern of very blunt and often pessimistic assessments coming from military sources in the region, and follow the leaking of a US marine's intelligence assessment of the parlous state of security in Anbar province (see "Al-Qaida's new terrain", 14 September 2006).
A billion-dollar bungle
But two other indicators from quite different sources are just as revealing of the US's parlous predicament in Iraq. The first comes from the US army's bid for a substantially increased budget for fiscal year 2008. This runs for the twelve months from October 2007 and therefore parallels the last presidential year before the 2008 election, when the military can appeal to the sympathy of both the main political parties.
Many senior army officers are still bitter at the manner in which it has borne the brunt of what some analysts term "Rumsfeld's wars" - especially given that defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's original intention was to reconfigure the US military towards a much smaller army, strenuously avoiding large numbers of "boots on the ground", and placing much greater reliance on long-range strike forces and special forces.
Instead, more boots on larger ground is exactly what the Pentagon has got, and the army - worn down by years of war in two theatres, Iraq and Afghanistan - is bearing most of the burden. To meet the cost of replacing lost equipment, repairing worn-out kit and buying huge quantities of ordnance while modernising its systems, the army is reported to be seeking a massive 26% increase in its budget from $111.8 billion (its 2006 request) to $141 billion in 2008 (see Greg Grant, "US Army's Big Funding Push", Defense News, 4 September 2006 [subscription only]).
The second indicator is even more revealing. This is a reported assessment of the main technology requirements being faced by the US military. The driving force here has long been the fundamental requirement for the United States to retain a pronounced lead in military technology over every other country, as this is seen is the one sure way to maintain superpower military dominance.
This has been a feature of long-term US military planning for more than sixty years. It started with the Manhattan Project that resulted in the atom bomb, and continued through to the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles and more recently stealthy aircraft such as the B-2 strategic bomber and the new F-22 and F-35 fighters (see Amy Butler, "What's Next", Aviation Week, 18 September 2006 [subscription only]).
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris (October 2005)
These have all been multi-billion dollar programmes, some lasting thirty or more years. Yet the biggest problem facing the US military is a device that costs a few dollars to produce and is causing huge problems in Iraq and now Afghanistan. John Young, the director of defence research and engineering in the Pentagon, says that the biggest technology question facing the US military today is the roadside bomb or "improvised explosive device" (IED).
Insurgents in Iraq have developed increasingly sophisticated IEDs, some with shaped armour-piercing charges, others using infra-red triggering devices. The shaped charges may be crude and capable of being built in a small back-street workshop, and the triggering devices may simply borrow mobile-phone systems or even the gadgets used to open garage-doors, yet they have played havoc with US troops across Iraq and are now being used increasingly in Afghanistan.
In short, the world's most powerful and best-equipped military is facing basic homemade devices that can destroy main battle-tanks and armoured trucks costing millions of dollars to produce. Moreover, the knowledge and techniques to manufacture these devices are proliferating rapidly, aided by the huge amount of experience that insurgent forces and transnational paramilitaries have gained in the past three years of war in Iraq.
This is perhaps one of the most subtle indications of the way George W Bush's "long war" is evolving. For all its power and hundred-billion dollar defence budgets, the United States is facing the ultimate in asymmetric warfare as its opponents exploit vulnerabilities that would have seemed ridiculous barely five years ago.
