Earlier this week I attended a retired general and flag officer conference
at Fort Carson, hosted by MGen Bob Mixon, the 7th Infantry Division
Commander which calls the Fort its home. For those of you who are unfamiliar
with Ft. Carson, it is a huge installation located to the south of Colorado
Springs; it's in the process of becoming one of the larger Army installations
in the country (26,000 soldiers); and it is the test location for the
new "modular brigade" concept that will reflect the Army of tomorrow
by 2008. It is also the home post of the largest number of troopers
who have served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and, regrettably,
the largest number of troopers who have died in combat there over the
past three years. There are Ft. Carson units going to and returning
from the combat area virtually on a monthly basis.
The conference was primarily organized to explain the modular brigade
concept, and it featured a panel of officers who had either very recently
returned from commands in the combat zone or were about to deploy there
in the next two months. Three of the recent returnees were Colonel H.R.
McMaster, Colonel Rick S., and Captain Walter Szpak.
McMaster is the commander of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, the unit
that, through very innovative and population-friendly tactics, rid the
city of Tal Afar of insurgents. The mayor of Tal Afar came back to Carson
two weeks ago to thank the troopers and their families personally for
"freeing his people". (You say you didn't hear about that in the mainstream
media?) McMaster is considered the foremost U.S. expert on modern insurgent
warfare, has written a book on the subject which is widely circulated
at the war colleges and staff colleges, and he was asked to testify
before Congress when he returned from the 3rd ACR combat deployment.
He is obviously one of the great combat leaders that has emerged from
the war and is highly respected (some would say revered) by his troopers
and his superiors alike.
Colonel S. is assigned to the 10th Special Forces Brigade and he headed
up all of the 31 Special Forces A-teams that are integrated with the
populace and the Iraqi Army and national police throughout the country.
Many of these are the guys that you see occasionally on the news that
have beards, dress in native regalia, usually speak Arabic and don't
like to have their identities revealed for fear of retribution on their
families (thus the Colonel S.) Captain Szpak was the head of all the
Army explosive ordnance teams in Iraq. He and his troops had the job
of disarming all the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and explosive
formed projectiles (EFPs) that were discovered before they were detonated.
They also traveled around the country training the combat forces in
recognizing and avoiding these devices in time to prevent death and
injury. IEDs and EFPs are responsible for the vast majority of casualties
experienced by our forces.
Despite the objective of the conference (i.e., the modular brigade concept),
it quickly devolved into a 3½ hour question and answer period between
the panel and the 54 retired generals and admirals who attended. I wish
I had a video of the whole session to share with you because the insights
were especially eye opening and encouraging. I'll try to summarize the
high points as best I can.
* All returnees agreed that "we are clearly winning the fight against
the insurgents but we are losing the public relations battle both in
the war zone and in the States". (I'll go into more detail on each topic
below.)
* All agreed that it will be necessary for us to have forces in Iraq
for at least ten more years, though by no means in the numbers that
are there now.
* They opined that 80% to 90% of the Iraqi people want to have us there
and do not want us to leave before "the job is done".
* The morale and combat capability of the troops is the highest that
the senior officers have ever seen in the 20-30 years that each has
served.
* The Iraqi armed forces and police are probably better trained right
now than they were under Saddam, but our standards are much higher and
they lack officer leadership.
* They don't need more troops in the combat zone but they need considerably
more Arab linguists and civil affairs experts.
* The IEDs and EFPs continue to be the principal problem that they face
and they are becoming more sophisticated as time passes.
Public Affairs: We are losing the public affairs battle for a variety
of reasons. First, in Iraq, the terrorists provide Al Jazeera with footage
of their more spectacular attacks and they are on TV to the whole Arab
world within minutes of the event. By contrast it takes four to six
days for a story generated by Army Public Affairs to gain clearance
by Combined Forces Command, two or three more days to get Pentagon clearance,
and after all that, the public media may or may not run the story.
Second, the U.S. mainstream media (MSM) who send reporters to the combat
zone do not like to have their people embedded with our troops. They
claim that the reporters get "less objective" when they live with the
soldiers and marines - they come to see the world through the eyes of
the troops. As a consequence, a majority of the reporters stay in hotels
in the "Green Zone" and send out native stringers to call in stories
to them by cell phone which they later write up and file. No effort
is made to verify any of these stories or the credibility of the stringers.
The recent serious injuries to Bob Woodruff of ABC and Kimberly Dozier
of CBS make the likelihood of the use of local stringers even higher.
Third, the stories that are filed by reporters in the field very seldom
reach the American public as written. An anecdote from Col. McMaster
illustrates this dramatically. TIME magazine recently sent a reporter
to spend six weeks with the 3rd ACR as they were in the battle of Tal
Afar. When the battle was over, the reporter filed his story and also
included close to 100 pictures that the accompanying photographer took.
TIME published a cover story on the battle a week later, allegedly using
the story sent in by their reporter. When the issue came out, the guts
had been edited out of their reporter's story and none of the pictures
he submitted were used. Instead they showed a weeping child on the cover,
taken from stock photos. When the reporter questioned why his story
was eviscerated, his editors in New York responded that the story and
pictures were "too heroic". McMaster had read both and told me that
the editors had completely changed the thrust and context of the material
their reporter had submitted.
As a sidebar on the public affairs situation, Colonel Bob McRee, who
was also on the panel and is bringing a Military Police Battalion to
Iraq next month, invited the Colorado Springs Gazette to send a reporter
with the battalion for six weeks to two months. He assured the Gazette,
in writing one month ago, that he would provide full time bodyguards
for the reporter, taking the manpower out of his own hide. The Gazette
has yet to respond to his offer.
Ten More Years: The idea that we will have troops in Iraq for ten more
years sounds rather grim, even though by contrast, President Clinton
sent troops to Bosnia and Kosovo nearly ten years ago. And they're still
there with no end in sight. While Iraq is clearly a different situation
right now, the panelists believe that within a few years at the most,
it will become very much the same - a peace keeping, nation building
function among factions that have hated one another for centuries. There
is factionalism and there was bitter fighting in the Balkans before
NATO intervened and with peace keepers, the panelists believe that Iraq
will be a parallel situation. This, by the way, is why they all believe
that linguists and civil affairs military personnel are so necessary
for the future.
Colonel S. went out on a limb by suggesting that if most of the troops
in Iraq were deployed home "tomorrow" he could have the entire country
"pacified" and the terrorist situation brought under control with just
one brigade of Special Forces. Since these guys are linguists, civil
affairs experts, among many other skills and talents, he may not be
too far wrong.
Iraqi Attitudes: The panelists agreed that the public affairs problem
manifests itself most significantly in the American public belief that
the people of Iraq want us out of their country which we are occupying.
They have served in different parts of the country but each agreed that
we are wanted and needed there. I refer you to the anecdote from Col.
McMaster and the thousands of pictures available on the internet of
the U.S. forces shown in very cordial relations with the locals. Of
course, our media's obsession with Abu Graib and, if the initial reports
regarding the small group of Marines at Haditha prove to be true, then
those attitudes will change somewhat. But as one of the panelists pointed
out, the atrocities suffered under Saddam were much worse and much more
common.
Morale and Capabilities: Two weeks ago, the local TV channels showed
a 3rd ACR re-enlistment ceremony held at Ft. Carson and officiated by
Colonel McMaster. Mind you, this unit has just returned from a one-year
combat tour of hard and bloody fighting in Iraq and will likely return
there again in eight to ten months. Of the 670 soldiers eligible for
re-enlistment, 654 of them held up their right hands and signed on for
another four years. Incredible!
The Army goal for re-enlistments for fiscal year 2006 was for 40,000
soldiers to extend their active duty commitments. With four months remaining
in the fiscal year, they have already exceeded their goal of 40,000
and may have to go back to Congress for authorization to exceed their
force structure manning limitations. Since Congress has been pontificating
for the past couple of years that the Army is woefully under strength,
that should not pose any difficulty.
Iraqi Forces: Every one of the returning commanders had experience in
joint operations with the Iraqi soldiers - and in the case of some
of them, with the local and national police. They all are supportive
of the quality of the forces, but culturally, they believe that we may
be expecting too much from them as a pre-condition for handing over
greater responsibility for area control. McMaster said that he worked
with the army and the police at Tal Afar and was not the least bit reluctant
to assign major responsibilities to them in the operations that were
conducted.
Col. S.'s Green Berets, on the other hand, caught a national police
lieutenant who was directing the emplacement of an IED by cell phone
in order to disrupt a convoy - immediately after the lieutenant had
been briefed on the convoy's route. The good news in this situation
was that they were able to reroute the convoy, safely, and track the
lieutenant's entire network through the use of the speed dial on his
phone. Having terrorist infiltrators in both the army and the police
force remains a problem. But by no means does that detract from the
courage and determination of those who are loyal to the new Iraq.
Explosive Devices: The combined command in Iraq is becoming increasingly
effective in countering the significant threat posed by the IEDs and
EFPs. The frequency of attacks has decreased in large part through training
to recognize the threat, the new technology (UAVs - unmanned aerial
vehicles or drones, for example) which help to discover where the devices
are emplaced, the infiltration of some of the terrorist cells, etc.
However, the technology being used by the terrorists is also improving
measurably. In the past six weeks, two bomb making sites were found,
raided and the bad guys arrested. In both cases, the head bomb makers
were master's degree graduates (one in chemistry and one in physics)
from American universities. That's a lot of brain power to bring into
the fight, but we also have some pretty talented people in the military,
industry and academia who are doing their best to even the odds.
Conclusion: This is more than I had intended to write on the subject
- so what's new a lot of you might say - but it is a subject that doesn't
get the proper balance from other sources, in my judgment at least.
I trust the information that we received far more than anything that
I have heard or seen in our usual news sources. The most disturbing
thing that I heard was that our MSM is changing the stories filed by
their own people on the scene because they sound "too heroic".
The over riding opinion that I came away from the conference with is
that we have incredibly talented and professional leaders who are facing
up to the challenges and are making inexorable progress toward the goals
of our nation. We're fortunate to have courageous and valorous people
on the combat front, even though there seems to be a serious dearth
of these same types of people in Congress and the mainstream media.
Paul Sutton "Dominus Fortissima Turris" IF YOU DON'T STAND BEHIND OUR
TROOPS, PLEASE, FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM !!!
************************************************************************
A friend of mine sent this to me and I thought that you might find it
interesting.
A Naval Academy classmate of mine who is a retired Air Force general
officer recently attended a conference at Fort Carson which was a briefing
on the Iraq War. This is the report he sent out about the conference.
I thought you would be interested in reading Dick's report. Knowing
the author of the report, I know it is factual.
Regards, Joe
Just got this today from an old friend. Interesting reading
Bob Ohm
