Smarter or madder?
Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 7:42AM Yes, yes. The SysAdmin concept is sinking faster than the Titanic, according to John Robb.ARTICLE: The Thin Green Line: What the latest violence reveals about the failed U.S. strategy in Iraq, By Phillip Carter, Slate, Oct. 18, 2006
Except everytime somebody who's thought it through lays out a vision for how we fix the mess we're in, they basically recite the concept--chapter and verse.
I've said for almost five years now: this isn't gonna happen because it's cool or elegant or visionary. It's gonna happen because without such capacity we're gonna keep f--king it up royally and getting people killed needlessly. It's gonna happen beecause we can either deal with these people over there or we can wait and deal with them over here. We can either get good at it, or we can keep doing what we're doing and hope to get a different outcome. We can either tackle these problems at their source, or firewall ourselves off against fantastic bogeymen who "rule our world."
We can either grow up and face the world and its challenges as they are, or we can retreat under cover of the Powell Doctrine and play spy-on-terrorist games, pretending that's the sum total of the challenge.
We can either get smarter or we can get madder.
Thanks to Jason Brantley for sending this in.
Reader Comments (14)
"We can either tackle these problems at their source, or firewall ourselves off against fantastic bogeymen who "rule our world."
This is, essentially, the William Lind option and aside from the impossibility of a global maginot line, it represents a policy of economic self-destruction for the West (or least, some serious self-inflicted wounds).
But Lind announced that he isn't going to be constrained by economic reality ( or "economisism" as he calls it http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_10_17_06.htm)so I suppose he gets points for candor.
Tom, I worry about adjusting US foreign and military policy based on manufactured media events.
If an up-tick in media-broadcasts of "for-camera" violence in select provinces of Iraq, justifies changes in any of our "big-picture" planning theatres - from force-restructuring to '07's projected troop-levels for Afghanistan - then the wrong drivers are steering.
That's giving provocateurs way more power than they'll ever deserve.
Tom,
If the reason to invade Iraq was to force us to build a sysadmin capability its been a failure. The wisdom of this goal was always dubious, given a leader and political party which "didn't do nation building", and of course ignores the immorality and illegality of invading a country, no matter how bad the leader, merely to perfect our ability to do nation building. Afghanistan was a big enough job by itself.
The country has never, and is even less likely now, to support an increase in the size of the army (or some newly created entity) necessary to fight a counterinsurgency war successfully in Iraq. (Even you shrink from increasing the number of our troops.) Why? Because, as even you say, Iraq is merely a diversion from the big fight. So why spend the resources?
Carter has some good suggestions. But the US is too casualty averse to send its troops out in small groups or embed them with the Iraqi forces. Nor does the military want to fight that way. Officers get promoted for commanding units in war, not supervising foreigners. In any case there are too few troops to succeed even if Carter's suggestions were followed.
We can't even keep the electricity on in the country. In October, Brookings is showing 2.4 hours of electricity a day in Baghdad.
"We can either grow up and face the world and its challenges as they are, or we can retreat under cover of the Powell Doctrine and play spy-on-terrorist games, pretending that's the sum total of the challenge."
Your preferred option requires that the American people grow up. Ain't gonna happen.
"We can either get smarter or we can get madder."
I'll tell you what will happen, Tom. As we lose the Iraq war, the supporters of this screw-up will conduct a hunt for those who oppposed it, and will claim that the American Armed Forces were "stabbed in the back" by "the Libruls" who opposed the war but who had no actual influence on our government's decisions on whether or how to conduct the war and the reconstruction.
Thus will those who actually had power over our government's decisions on whether and how to conduct the war avoid being held to account for how they exercised their power.
This will also help the American politicians and American people avoid actually learning anything from the experience.
He’s right about the embedded teams (Mobile Education and Training [MET] teams) do a good job. The Iraqi army is actually pretty good, but there are a couple of problems. 1. They can’t plan missions this is done by the Americans the Iraqis just execute. 2. They don’t do logistics or base maintenance (I wouldn’t want to live with them). 3. The U.S. commanders don’t trust them. Meaning that because they’re not as good as American soldiers they aren’t ready to take over. It is true they are as good as the US Army but the insurgents are generally incompetent fighters so the Iraqi Army only needs to be a little better. Going to more MET teams would be the next evolution in our strategy to train the army. We should also look into what the Marines did in Haiti (Gendarmerie) and the Dominican Republic and actually make Marines and Soldiers officers in the Iraqi Army.
The police on the other hand are terrible. In the Sysadmin concept there are uniformed police as part of Sysadmin force, much needed. Soldiers can train soldiers but the only ones with police experience are the Reserve and National Guard.
Just a side note- the power appeared to be on all the time in Ramadi. The Iraqis leave a lot of lights on all the time; they have no idea about conservation because they have never had to pay for power.
Those people who say the SysAdmin concept is dead better start looking into the future and see where it is going to be needed. Unless you think the US military is out of the humantarian aid business for good. If we moved all of our troops out of Iraq and stepped into Sudan could we make that situation significantly better with our current force structure. Sure, we could probably stop the war and genocide (great start), but could we help move that country into a fuctioning society without suffering several Somalias.
I think this is Tom's point. Either we start moving towards a SysAdmin force learning from our shortcomings in Iraq or face similiar failings in countries in which most Amercians would agree our presence is needed.
Seth,
"Just a side note- the power appeared to be on all the time in Ramadi. The Iraqis leave a lot of lights on all the time; they have no idea about conservation because they have never had to pay for power."
But the national average is 10.4 hours of electricity a day in October.
BTW do you think we're going to win in Iraq even with the success of the MET teams? Do we have to put a lot more boots on the ground, whether to mentor the police or the army? And where will they come from?
The way we lose in Iraq is if when we leave the insurgents and the media can say that we lost. Frankly if we could give the country to the Iraqi army right now and send a majority of our troops somewhere else and be able to legitimately claim that we won I would be for that. The biggest danger is to look incompetent and weak. Jihadists use our weakness to recruit more than our strength.
The idea of the MET teams would be fewer troops. Instead of a 1-1 battalion ratio we could have 10 soldiers for 1 Iraqi Battalion.
The complaint about the power situation stem from the way the system was setup. All power in Iraq is produced somewhere other than Baghdad then sent there to distribution stations. Under Sadam if you were bad or Shia you got no power. Baghdad always had power. Now the Sunnis get a fair share so they think that we can’t run the electricity. The power infrastructure from the bottom-up was designed and maintained poorly. There are wires hanging every where like spaghetti and if something goes wrong with the transformers the locals people would just go out and try and fix the problem. This is the way that it was before we even arrived.
Seth,
If we stay we generate new recruits. If we leave we generate new recruits, unless we can do a good PR job and make it look like we "didn't lose". Looks like a wash to me. But as Tom seems to argue there will be new recruits whatever we do. So new terrorist recruits shouldn't be our decision criteria.
Victory will be not losing. It seems like part of the dynamic is our own sense of not losing face and making us feel like the hard sacrifices were all worth it. Leaving aside what we might owe to the Iraqi nation.
There are only 150,000 Iraqi troops. Even if they fought effectively on their own, that is way too few troops to win a counter-insurgency war, based on conventional metrics. So you need to increase the size of the Iraqi army. And of course they have no sysadmin capability. And the sysadmin capability of the Iraqi police and other security personnel seems to consist of murdering and robbing civilians of the other ethnic stripe.
I just don't see a good way out.
The actual size of the army is bit hard to tell. Plus if you say the army that doesn't count the police, though less effective. One the problems is this focus on the militia and Al Sader in the South. The commanders need to get over it all ready. Sader can be cooped he wants political power. This would free up even more troops. I do think that we would have enough Iraqis; the insurgents as a military force are largely in effective. It would be extraordinary to see more than 20 gathered together in one place. That is why they use tactics like car bombs, IEDs and snipers these require very little man power, but ultimately they are designed to create the feeling of insecurity. The key to stopping these tactics is intelligence. We gather Intel when the population is willing to give information. They are willing to give information when either the new government or us offers them something better than the insurgents. This isn’t a troop heavy mission. It’s driven by intelligence and civil affairs.
I agree victory is not losing. Good point about either way they use what we do to recruit. Never go there, go there, pull out or stay they will use that to pull in new people. The idea that I was getting at is when we attempt to provide security to other regions that have nations that are failed or have bad actors if we go there with the perception that we took off out of Iraq because we were chased out then this will deeply hinder out ability accomplish much.
Finally I would never want to abandon the Iraqi people. But we don't need all 140,000 soldiers/Marine there forever. We did what we said we would do and insurgencies can go on for decades (see Algeria).
Mark my words: The Leviathan/SysAdmin blueprint you will see in the future will be of the Spheres of Influence/Open Door Policy-type -- as was so successful in the 19th Century.
It seems that all the posters seem to think there is still something salvageable. IMO the real battle ground is for the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people. We have seriously lost this battle. Without very substantial support from the people, there is no point in being in the country. Unless your goal is to maintain it as a counterinsurgency test-bed/training-area.
It looks to me like we are going to have to leave, probably within the next six to twelve months. Hopefully we can find some way to minimize the humanitarian cost after we leave, we owe the Iraqis that much.
Unfortunately losing a catastrophic blunder like this gives no satisfactory answer to those families whose loved ones paid the ultimate price for someone elses error.
The only real gain we (as a people) can reap from this experience would be a sense of humility.
At least I don't subscribe to that theory that if we lose we will be fighting the hoards at home. Thats just more of the "appeal to fear" stuff that got us into this mess in the first place. Of course Al Qaeda will declare victory, and will gain status and recruits from that. An unpleasant, but survivable consequence.
So unless someone can come up with a way to win the "hearts and mind" thing, starting at this late date -and being so far behind, our only choices are between losing earlier, and losing later.
Tom - I think John Robb may be right, after Iraq I see a repeat of what happened after Vietnam. The Military will re-focus back onto the Powell Doctrine, I'll put twenty dollars on that bet.
Let me broaden the perspective of the discussion a little, to other countries in the world and the development their militaries are undertaking.
Operating as a sysadmin requires a deep understanding of how militaries and civilian actors need to work together. It also requires an ability to coherently manage foreign aid, development aid, trade, military and other activities so that they all support each other. Frankly, the European Union is a lightyear ahead of the US on this.
As long as the US insists of militarily 'defending' its interests a need for SysAdmin will be there. Moreover, if it wants to play a role in international crisis management operations, it will need those kinds of troops. Ironically enough, it is on the behest of the US that NATO has developed its Response Force (NRF) - aimed at the intersection of Leviathan (light) and Sysadmin. Perhaps in a misguided hope that NATO would become the de facto SysAdmin for the US military, so that the US could focus on Leviathan stuff.
The problem is, of course, it's no fun going into the china shop to pick up the pieces if you've had no role in breaking the place - so the US must also show a willingness to truly develop SysAdmin - which I believe DoD Dir 3000 on SASO does - now let's hope the implementation is effective.