How to do counter-insurgency

[juan_gigante]

Apparently, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is performing exceedingly well in its efforts to quell the insurgency in Tall Afar.

A few quotes:

In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

Last summer, there were about six insurgent attacks in the area each day. Now there is about one, according to U.S. military intelligence.

However -

"Baghdad is a much tougher nut to crack than this," said Maj. Jack McLaughlin, Hickey's plans officer, who attended Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Va. Standing in the castle overlooking the city, he said, "It's a matter of scale -- you'd need a huge number of troops to replicate what we've done here."

Congratulations to the 3rd, and hopefully the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces can achieve that sort of effectiveness else where as well.

[Moronic Max]

I wonder how long making that nine foot high, twelve mile long dirt berm took.

I was a bit confused by parts of the article, though. How many of the civilians in the city left for the camp? A quarter? Half? More? How long did they stay there? Are they still there?

EDIT: I forgot to thank you for the link, Juan. It's nice to see something that isn't doom and gloom every so often.

[ February 16, 2006, 06:51 PM: Message edited by: Moronic Max ]

[aka_tom_w]

Thanks

It was a good article.

Nice to see there are some examples of success stories over there.

-tom w

[hellfish]

The CO of the 3rd ACR is the same guy who kicked ass at the Battle of 73 Easting.

[juan_gigante]

Originally posted by fytinghellfish:

The CO of the 3rd ACR is the same guy who kicked ass at the Battle of 73 Easting.

I wondered where I recognized his name. Thanks!

[Dirtweasle]

That was Col. McMaster fytinghellfish?

He gave a long breifing a while back on Iraq which DOD I beleive still has streaming video available at their website.

I posted the letter from the Mayor of tal A'far to the 3rd ACR in a locked thread below something to do with status report on Iraq...

[hellfish]

Yes, Col. McMaster. The Army's Golden Boy (and rightly so!)

[akd]

Anybody know what's up with the 3rd ACR being stiffed for personal equipment compared to the other regular Army units in theatre?

[Dirtweasle]

What does that mean?

[akd]

Originally posted by Dirtweasle:

What does that mean?

Well, they kinda stand out amongst the other Army units there now:

10th Mountain Division:

101st Airborne:

172nd SBCT:

82nd Airborne:

4th Infantry Division:

3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment:

Just a subjective, and possibly distorted, perception based on recent photos out of Iraq.

[ February 17, 2006, 05:20 PM: Message edited by: akd ]

[akd]

oh yeah, 1st Armored, too:

[hellfish]

I think the 3rd ACR got to Iraq before the ACUs were issued to other active duty units. They're about to come home now, most of those other units just got there in the past 6 months or so.

[Los]

Keep in mind that Tall Afar has fully trained and operational Iraqi army units there that are doing the down and dirty intel gathering/rooting out bad guy/ making the IP and Peshmerga play nice together stuff. That makes a major diffence also in that area.

Los

[Yardstick]

Originally posted by fytinghellfish:

I think the 3rd ACR got to Iraq before the ACUs were issued to other active duty units. They're about to come home now, most of those other units just got there in the past 6 months or so.

Bingo.

[Peter Cairns]

For all this is good news, it is worth looking at it from an Iraqi perspective.

How would you feel if a foreign army built a wall around your town and searched everyone going in and out. The claim is that they caught a lot of insurgent leaving, but a lot of people may see this as akin to what happened in Afghanistan, lots of young men of military age being bundled away because, well they were young men of military age.

Likewise with the local army units every few blocks, is that security or a occupation, well it depends on your point of view.

All in all I think it looks like good progress has been made and they are doing the right things, but I am just adding a bit of caution.

The UK built checkpoints, outposts, and barriers and the like in Northern Ireland and had great success with foot patrolling in greatly reducing the IRA activity to virtually nothing. But ask any British soldier what would happen if he went up a catholic street on his own in uniform today, and he's tell you, he'd be dead inside ten minutes.

Peter.

[Imperial Grunt]

Originally posted by juan_gigante:

Apparently, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is performing exceedingly well in its efforts to quell the insurgency in Tall Afar.

A few quotes:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

Last summer, there were about six insurgent attacks in the area each day. Now there is about one, according to U.S. military intelligence.

However -

"Baghdad is a much tougher nut to crack than this," said Maj. Jack McLaughlin, Hickey's plans officer, who attended Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Va. Standing in the castle overlooking the city, he said, "It's a matter of scale -- you'd need a huge number of troops to replicate what we've done here."

Congratulations to the 3rd, and hopefully the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces can achieve that sort of effectiveness else where as well. </font>

[Bigduke6]

I dunno guys. 3ACR seems to be on the right track, but Tal Afar was the site of a big old American offensive in summer 2005, and 3ACR has been in the town ever since then. The place has been pretty much impervious to central government since the Americans invaded. Just because a few 3ARCR troopers have learned to say "please" and "thank you" in Arabic, that don't mean the place is suddenly nice and civilized and ready for shopping malls.

The test is what happens when the Americans leave. Me, I am real skeptical, in places like Tal Afar the police are usually corrupted by the resistance long before the foreign occupation troops bail out.

For fun, try googling up Petreus (the 101st Airborne commander who supposedly had figured out how to lick the insurgency) and the word "success". You'll get a lot of hits, and many of them are years old.

It's pretty easy to declare "we've got this insurgency problem licked". I bet Petreaus makes the Joint Chiefs on the strength of people believing statements like that are true.

It's a lot harder really to make it happen, and it's even harder to make it happen when you have the resources to pacify a provincial town or two, and the insurgency covers about a third of an entire country, including the capital.

[Michael Emrys]

I'm with Bigduke6 on this one. Insurgents are like weeds. You can cut them back, and they grow back. Cut 'em again and they still grow back. Pull 'em all out by the roots, and in a couple of years they're back. Nuke everything in a ten mile radius and...well, okay, no more weeds. But your house and garden are gone too.

Michael

[Dave H]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

I'm with Bigduke6 on this one. Insurgents are like weeds. You can cut them back, and they grow back. Cut 'em again and they still grow back. Pull 'em all out by the roots, and in a couple of years they're back. (snip)

Michael

Anybody who doubts this should read about the Roman efforts to eliminate the early Christians. It went on for what, something like three centuries? The Romans weren't hindered by any kind of human rights concerns either, burning Christians as torches or feeding them to wild animals. Exactly like today's Muslims, the Christians looked at martyrdom as THE most direct route to paradise. Remember how well that campaign ended up working out for the Roman Empire?

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Dave H:

[snips]Anybody who doubts this should read about the Roman efforts to eliminate the early Christians. [snips] Remember how well that campaign ended up working out for the Roman Empire?

Fantastically well once Constantine decided to adopt it as the official religion, ISTR.

All the best,

John.

[MikeyD]

the PBS show 'Frontline' did an hour report on Iraqi insurgents last night. Watching was enough to give you the willies!

According to the show, a main reason for the U.S. success in Talll Afar was that foreign jihadists were roundly despised by the locals for their pointless brutality. In another town that had friendly local 'resistance fighters' as opposed to jihadist nut-jobs, the task of pacification would be much more difficult.

Fighting an insurgency (especially in a population of 25 million or so) is more a psychological game than a military one.

What strategies are there?

• Scorched earth. Kill all insurgents, all potential insurgents, their families and their kin. A.k.a. Saddam's gas attacks on the Kurds.

• Shock & Awe. Take on the Alpha Male role in the region, amass so much overwhelming power that insurgent attacks would seem a pointless pursuit (Israel in the Golan).

• Bait & Switch. Get the resistance to do something other than attack you! I recall Reagan's CIA threw their backing (financial and oherwise) behind an alternative leader to Nelson Mandella in the hope a split in the the anti-apartheid ranks would cause them to fight eachother instead of the white government. The plan didn't exactly work. For Iraq, one hope may be the foreign jihadists make such a nuisance of themselves that the insurgents view them as a more pressing problem than the occupation.

• Hearts & Minds. Flood the country with good works. build schools, help the sick and elderly. Become beloved for your good works so everyone will be your friend.

• Fuel to the Fire. Assess your goals and make a judgement whether your presence in-country is more a help or a hindrance to the overall objectives. You don't put out a fuel fire with more gasoline and you don't send in more flies to conquer flypaper. A a cool-headed (or cold-blooded) cost-benefit analysis.

•Status quo. You can conclude the current situation is preferable to any of the others and you grimly accept the costs and burdons of keeping things the way they are (Northern Ireland up until a few years ago).

Can anyone think of any other approaches?

[Bigduke6]

Sure.

* Pretend it's a conventional war, and use conventional warfare techniques against the insurgents. Seek out battles, and win them.

Then tell your own populace and your troops you are winning, see, how many battles have we lost?

Blow off civilian affairs, call it "silly affairs", and stop the career of any officer who starts specializing in foreign stuff rather than proper career track troop command and staff college and so on. Make sure your smartest officers are trained for conventional wars, and put dumber ones with less career prospects into intelligence.

That approach might not win the war, but it's been tried and true by what I keep hearing is the mightiest military in the history of the planet.

* Let the insurgents come to power, and then fund your own insurgency. When they're sitting in the capital they're much better targets.

* Don't even wait for them to come to power, start your own insurgency now, and make sure your insurgents are nastier and better financed than the original insurgents. Once the civil war is over, your insurgents turn over for you, and if you're really playing the game right you then kill most of your insurgents, just to be safe.

That's how the Soviets established control in Ukraine. The resistance to Soviet rule there lasted until 1953; talk about your lost causes.

* Then there's the Malaysia approach (isolate the insurgents from the populace, then hunt them down using infantry and lots of field craft and Gurkhas if you have them - but for this to work it really helps if the insurgents aren't the same nationality as the populace).

* The modern Russia approach, which cherry picks from all of the above, combining a brutal military occupation with even more brutal police state methods. You don't kill the populace so much as force them to flee as refugees, although lots of them die. That won't end the insurgency problem, but it will generally keep it under control, and as long as your people are in place and you don't mind them being killed from time to time, the region is yours, insurgency or no.

* The Han Chinese approach in Sichuan is probably the most effective of all. Just sent immigrants, swamp the local population with your ethnicity, and make sure your people have the education, get the good jobs, and reproduce faster, and just to be sure give your people decent medical care, and let the natives live their primitive native way with no disease control and Neanderthal infant mortality. Two or three generations and problem solved.

The bottom line is that you can defeat an insurgency if you have the will to take it on over the long term, meaning a generation or more. Otherwise you need special conditions.

That's feasable where a country has a long term interest, or less frequently where a country has a sense of manifest destiny about needing to overcome the insurgents. The 19th century U.S. did just fine against plenty of Native American insurgencies, and some of the tribes - the Apache particularly - would give the Pushtuns and the Chechens a run for their money as natural guerillas.

But for a country like the modern U.S., which as a population mostly didn't even know about where Iraq was located before Washington decided to invade, and even less of a sense of international politics than cartoon-like good guys and bad guys, the chances of getting together enough public will to sustain a troop commitment for 20 years or more is just about zero.

[MikeyD]

"Let the insurgents come to power, and then fund your own insurgency. When they're sitting in the capital they're much better targets."

Brilliant! Brilliant! The first original idea on the subject! We've always done better fighting other governments than populations.

"Start your own insurgency now, and make sure your insurgents are nastier"

Some months ago there was a news report that 'someone' was quoted promoting a plan to 'El Salvadorize' (I think that was the phrase) Iraq. Not long after sunni bodies started floating down-river. Not everyone seems to be singing out of the same hymnal on this though, the uniformed U.S. military really really really seems to be opposed to this particular development.

[ February 22, 2006, 01:07 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[Moronic Max]

Brilliant! Brilliant! The first original idea on the subject! We've always done better fighting other governments than populations.

Well, hell, in that case, don't bother funding your own insurgency; just invade, leave, wait a year, invade again, leave, wait two years, invade again, leave, wait three years, invade again, leave, and so on.

[mun13f]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

[QB] Sure.

* Pretend it's a conventional war, and use conventional warfare techniques against the insurgents. Seek out battles, and win them.

Then tell your own populace and your troops you are winning, see, how many battles have we lost?

Blow off civilian affairs, call it "silly affairs", and stop the career of any officer who starts specializing in foreign stuff rather than proper career track troop command and staff college and so on. Make sure your smartest officers are trained for conventional wars, and put dumber ones with less career prospects into intelligence.

That approach might not win the war, but it's been tried and true by what I keep hearing is the mightiest military in the history of the planet.

Great points. Unfortunately, I missed the Frontline report, but I checked out the website (you'll be able to watch the episode online tomorrow, they say), and found a very honest interview with a former Special Forces soldier who has served four tours in Iraq.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/insurgency/can/

Also, check out the interviewee's article on best vs. worst counter-insurgency tactics.

The year I was there (Sep 2003-Sep 2004), I saw a whole lot of measures conducted that fall under his "unsuccessful practices" column.