War of the flea
- In small steps and without fanfare, the U.S. Army is adapting its training to "the war of the flea," the type of hit-and-run insurgency that is gripping Iraq, where more than 2,000 American military personnel have been killed.
Counterinsurgency training, military experts say, largely vanished from the curriculum of Army schools after the Vietnam War. It began a slow comeback after the Iraq war, which opened with a massive ground and air assault, turned into a protracted conflict of ambushes, bombings and hit-and-run attacks.
"Now, there is counterinsurgency (instruction) at every level, from the warrior leader course (for front-line sergeants) through to the war college," said Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
A revised field manual on counterinsurgency, compiled jointly by the Army and the U.S. Marine Corps, is due to be issued next spring, Warner said in an interview. From the beginning of next year, the syllabus at the Command and General Staff College will include 18 hours on the theory of counterinsurgency.
One of the books that will be required reading at the college -- an essential career step for all officers who want to rise above the rank of major -- is a textbook by David Galula which was first published in 1964.
It deals with the central dilemma facing counterinsurgency forces: To break an insurgency you need intelligence about the insurgents from the population. But the population will not talk to counterinsurgency forces unless it feels safe from retribution from the insurgents. It does not feel safe as long as insurgents are active.
In Iraq, assassinations and bomb attacks have killed thousands of people seen as sympathetic to the Americans or working with the government. The Iraqi civilian death toll has topped 50 a day on average for many months.
Crime and lawlessness have added to the perception, reflected in Iraqi opinion polls, that U.S. forces are providing little or no security to Iraqis -- the key condition for winning the hearts and minds of the population.
Galula's book first appeared at about the same time as another treatise on counterinsurgency that is now high on contemporary military reading lists because of Iraq, "War of the Flea" by Robert Taber.
Taber likened guerrillas to fleas and conventional armies to dogs. The dog is always at a disadvantage against the flea -- he has "too much to defend, too small, ubiquitous and agile an enemy to come to grips with. If the war continues long enough ... the dog succumbs to exhaustion and anemia without ever having found anything on which to close its jaws or to rake with its claws."
BUSH CHANGE OF POLICY
The U.S. approach reflects a distinct shift of policy. President George W. Bush made aversion to "nation building", the process under way in Iraq, a plank in his election campaign platform in 2000.
Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, said peacekeeping and civil administration functions in such places as Bosnia were sapping the morale of the military. "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."
Hostility to using American military forces for anything other than fighting war ran so deep that the Pentagon decided to close the only U.S. military establishment devoted to post-combat peacekeeping operations, the Peacekeeping Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The decision was canceled after protests from both inside and outside the Pentagon and as violence took hold in the streets of Iraq despite the overwhelming military victory over the Iraqi army in 2003.
Now renamed the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, its faculty has doubled, according to its director, Col. John Agoglia.
The Army is addressing two of the biggest hurdles for an effective counterinsurgency -- problems in understanding cultural differences and problems in communicating.
It is including "cultural awareness" classes in its training and to help overcome a severe shortage not only of Arabic speakers but also of interpreters, the Army has issued hundreds of hand-held translation devices.
Called SpeechGuard, the device enables the user to communicate by proxy -- it "speaks" a list of around 3,000 phrases stored in its memory and can be hooked up to loudspeakers.
At the same time, the Army is encouraging voluntary language training.
While official efforts to sharpen counterinsurgency skills have proceeded at a stately pace, know-how spread rapidly through an informal network of Web logs that began appearing during the war in Afghanistan.
"The informal channels are running ahead of the institutional ones," said John Gavrilis, a Special Forces major who published a first-person account of the occupation of the city of Rutbah in Foreign Policy magazine this month. For a time, Gavrilis served as the city's mayor.
"These exchanges can happen in real time, with commanders exchanging tips on what works and what doesn't. That makes for fast learning."
Counterinsurgency training, military experts say, largely vanished from the curriculum of Army schools after the Vietnam War. It began a slow comeback after the Iraq war, which opened with a massive ground and air assault, turned into a protracted conflict of ambushes, bombings and hit-and-run attacks.
"Now, there is counterinsurgency (instruction) at every level, from the warrior leader course (for front-line sergeants) through to the war college," said Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
A revised field manual on counterinsurgency, compiled jointly by the Army and the U.S. Marine Corps, is due to be issued next spring, Warner said in an interview. From the beginning of next year, the syllabus at the Command and General Staff College will include 18 hours on the theory of counterinsurgency.
One of the books that will be required reading at the college -- an essential career step for all officers who want to rise above the rank of major -- is a textbook by David Galula which was first published in 1964.
It deals with the central dilemma facing counterinsurgency forces: To break an insurgency you need intelligence about the insurgents from the population. But the population will not talk to counterinsurgency forces unless it feels safe from retribution from the insurgents. It does not feel safe as long as insurgents are active.
In Iraq, assassinations and bomb attacks have killed thousands of people seen as sympathetic to the Americans or working with the government. The Iraqi civilian death toll has topped 50 a day on average for many months.
Crime and lawlessness have added to the perception, reflected in Iraqi opinion polls, that U.S. forces are providing little or no security to Iraqis -- the key condition for winning the hearts and minds of the population.
Galula's book first appeared at about the same time as another treatise on counterinsurgency that is now high on contemporary military reading lists because of Iraq, "War of the Flea" by Robert Taber.
Taber likened guerrillas to fleas and conventional armies to dogs. The dog is always at a disadvantage against the flea -- he has "too much to defend, too small, ubiquitous and agile an enemy to come to grips with. If the war continues long enough ... the dog succumbs to exhaustion and anemia without ever having found anything on which to close its jaws or to rake with its claws."
BUSH CHANGE OF POLICY
The U.S. approach reflects a distinct shift of policy. President George W. Bush made aversion to "nation building", the process under way in Iraq, a plank in his election campaign platform in 2000.
Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, said peacekeeping and civil administration functions in such places as Bosnia were sapping the morale of the military. "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."
Hostility to using American military forces for anything other than fighting war ran so deep that the Pentagon decided to close the only U.S. military establishment devoted to post-combat peacekeeping operations, the Peacekeeping Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The decision was canceled after protests from both inside and outside the Pentagon and as violence took hold in the streets of Iraq despite the overwhelming military victory over the Iraqi army in 2003.
Now renamed the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, its faculty has doubled, according to its director, Col. John Agoglia.
The Army is addressing two of the biggest hurdles for an effective counterinsurgency -- problems in understanding cultural differences and problems in communicating.
It is including "cultural awareness" classes in its training and to help overcome a severe shortage not only of Arabic speakers but also of interpreters, the Army has issued hundreds of hand-held translation devices.
Called SpeechGuard, the device enables the user to communicate by proxy -- it "speaks" a list of around 3,000 phrases stored in its memory and can be hooked up to loudspeakers.
At the same time, the Army is encouraging voluntary language training.
While official efforts to sharpen counterinsurgency skills have proceeded at a stately pace, know-how spread rapidly through an informal network of Web logs that began appearing during the war in Afghanistan.
"The informal channels are running ahead of the institutional ones," said John Gavrilis, a Special Forces major who published a first-person account of the occupation of the city of Rutbah in Foreign Policy magazine this month. For a time, Gavrilis served as the city's mayor.
"These exchanges can happen in real time, with commanders exchanging tips on what works and what doesn't. That makes for fast learning."
posted by professor rat at 9:56 PM
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