Pentagon studies examine 'mistakes' in Iraq, Afghanistan

Pentagon studies examine 'mistakes' in Iraq, Afghanistan

August 16 (CSM), by Tom Regan

Quietly admitting that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have not gone as well as had been expected, the US military establishment has undertaken a complete review of its operations and strategy in those two countries, with the idea of identifying what went wrong, and fixing it before the US faces a similar conflict in the future.

The Boston Globe reports that over the summer, the Department of Defense ordered two separate studies to find the errors the military has made in these conflicts. The author of one of the reports says the results "won't be pretty."

The studies, according to several Pentagon officials involved, have found serious deficiencies across the board. For example, US troops in Iraq have often used too much force when conducting operations in civilian areas, unnecessarily alienating local populations. They cite US commanders as being too slow to establish working relationships with local allies, and note that providing security and safety for the Iraqi people wasn't an early priority.

The military's continuing shortcomings in gathering accurate intelligence about insurgents has particularly hampered its missions: "We know relatively little about insurgent motivation and morale, leadership, and recruitment," according to an unpublished study produced in June by the government-funded RAND Corporation.

The Globe reports that the military is also literally trying to "rewrite the book" on counterinsurgency operations, a skill that many in the military believe has been allowed to grow weak since the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s.

[A new draft of the Army-Marine Corps field manual on counterinsurgency] outlines ways to understand local culture, locate interpreters, train a local police force and army to help provide security, bolster the nascent government, effectively handle detainees, gather intelligence about enemy forces from friendly citizens, and link combat operations with humanitarian and other aid to rebuild the war-torn country – and peel the local population away from the insurgents to cut off the enemy's source of support.

"The challenge is to train the force not what to think but how to think," [Colonel Peter Mansoor, a former battalion commander in Iraq who now heads the newly established Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.] said in an interview, saying that troops must get inside the minds of the insurgents as well as those of the citizenry. ``Counterinsurgency is a thinking soldier's war. It is graduate-level stuff. There is public relations, civil affairs, information operations. It is not easy."