Military in Peril

Military in Peril
by Sean D. Naylor

The Iraq war has left the U.S. military “in a position of strategic peril,” retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has warned in the wake of a recent trip to Iraq.

“This whole Iraq operation is on the edge of unraveling as the poor Iraqis batter each other to death with our forces caught in the middle,” McCaffrey writes in a March 26 memo to colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he is an adjunct professor of international affairs.

“The majority of the Iraqi population [Sunni and Shia] support armed attacks on American forces” while “U.S. domestic support for the war in Iraq has evaporated and will not return,” he writes.

In a March 29 interview with Military Times, McCaffrey said the best hope for the U.S. is that the military will be able to keep a lid on the violence long enough for the new leadership team in Baghdad — Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker — to forge a political consensus among the three main Iraqi population groups: Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds.

“The armed forces will give these guys a chance to talk us out of this situation if it can be done,” he said.

But in his memo, he says the window of opportunity is closing…

“We can still achieve our objective” of a stable Iraq, he writes, but “we have very little time left.”

Failure in Iraq will have dire consequences, according to McCaffrey. “A disaster in Iraq will in all likelihood result in a widened regional struggle which will endanger America’s strategic interests in the Mideast for a generation,” he writes. “We will also produce another generation of soldiers who lack confidence in their American politicians, the media, and their own senior military leadership.”

The retired four-star had his own criticism for the military’s senior leaders, whom he blames in part for what he views as the calamitous state of the Army.

“I do not believe the most senior military leadership spoke up in an adequate manner … to the Congress, to the American people, to the DoD leadership in particular, about the shortfalls in resources,” he said. “No one with a brain in his or her head thinks that the U.S. Army isn’t now progressively starting to come apart.

He cited problems with the Army’s equipment readiness and availability, as well as the quality of the recruits coming in, many of whom continue to be the best young kids in America, [but] some of whom are now without question drug addicts, non-high school graduates, [with] felony arrest records, etc.

“We have written off the NCO education system to a large extent, and to some extent we’re doing the same thing to officer training. So the readiness of the force, unequivocably and in the minds of most observers, is starting to unravel on us.”

McCaffrey paints a similarly gloomy picture of the situation in Iraq, which he says “is ripped by a low-grade civil war which has worsened to catastrophic levels with as many as 3,000 citizens murdered per month.”

“The population is in despair,” he writes. “Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate.”

McCaffrey, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who retired in 1996 as head of U.S. Southern Command and then served as President Clinton’s drug czar, wrote his eight-page memo based on a March 9-16 trip to Iraq and Kuwait during which he talked to over 65 U.S. and allied officials.

They include Petraeus, the new commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of Multi-National Corps-Iraq, as well as virtually every other senior U.S. and allied military figure there.

McCaffrey’s view that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war is at odds with that expressed by incoming U.S. Central Command chief Adm. William Fallon, who told CNN March 27 that he didn’t think Iraq was in a civil war.

Three million Iraqis, including many of the country’s educated elite, have fled the country, McCaffrey notes.

In the land they left behind, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “has little credibility among the Shia populations from which it emerged,” writes McCaffrey. “It is despised by the Sunni as a Persian surrogate. It is believed untrustworthy and incompetent by the Kurds.

“There is no function of government that operates effectively across the nation — not health care, not justice, not education, not transportation, not labor and commerce, not electricity, not oil production. There is no province in the country in which the government has dominance. No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign [nongovernmental organization employee], contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection.”

Iraqi security forces are in poor shape, according to McCaffrey. “The police force is feared as a Shia militia in uniform which is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings,” he writes. “The Iraqi Army is too small [and] very badly equipped.”

The army “is also unduly dominated by the Shia, and in many battalions lacks discipline,” writes McCaffrey, adding that the high rates of desertion and absence without leave “frequently leave Iraqi army battalions at 50 percent strength or less.”

In contrast, the number of insurgent and sectarian militia forces likely exceeds 100,000, McCaffrey writes. “These non-government armed bands are in some ways more capable of independent operations than the regularly constituted” Iraq security forces, he adds.

McCaffrey notes that although the U.S. and its allies have arrested 120,000 insurgents and have 27,000 still in custody, and killed “some huge number of enemy combatants” that he estimates at “perhaps” over 20,000, “the armed insurgents, militias, and al-Qaida in Iraq without fail apparently regenerate both leadership cadres and foot soldiers. Their sophistication, numbers, and lethality go up — not down — as they incur these staggering battle losses.”

McCaffrey’s memo then warns of looming disaster for the U.S. military if current trends are not reversed.

“Stateside U.S. Army and Marine Corps readiness [is] starting to unravel,” he writes. “Ground combat equipment is shot in both the active and reserve components. Army active and reserve component recruiting has now encountered serious quality and number problems. Promotion rates for officers and NCOs have skyrocketed to replace departing leaders.”

Noting that the Army “will be forced to call up as many as nine National Guard combat brigades for an involuntary second combat tour this coming year,” he adds that “many believe that this second round of involuntary call-ups will topple the weakened National Guard structure — which is so central to U.S. domestic security.”

Yet despite this overwhelmingly gloomy picture, the situation in Iraq is not irretrievable, according to McCaffrey.

Since the arrival of Petraeus, “the situation on the ground has clearly and measurably improved,” he writes.

The Maliki government has “given the green light” for U.S. and Iraqi special operations forces to “prune out” elements of Shia politician Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army, McCaffrey says.

As a result, U.S. and Iraqi forces have “harvested” over 600 “rogue leaders” from the Mahdi army, while “Sadr himself has fled to Iran and many of his key leaders have escaped to the safety of the Shia south. “His fighting cadres were ordered to go to ground, hide their weapons, take down their check points, stop the terrible ethnic cleansing and terror tactics against the Sunni population, and ignore (not cooperate with) US and ISF forces.”

The new U.S. and Iraqi strategy of establishing joint security stations across Baghdad also is working, according to McCaffrey.

“The Iraqi people are encouraged — life is almost immediately springing back in many parts of the city,” he writes. “The murder rate has plummeted. IED [improvised explosive device] attacks on U.S. forces during their formerly vulnerable daily transits from huge U.S. bases on the periphery of Baghdad are down, since these forces are now permanently based in their operational area.”

The Iraqi government also has “finally committed credible numbers of integrated police and army units to the battle of Baghdad,” McCaffrey says. Those forces are also “showing increased willingness to aggressively operate against insurgent/militia forces.”

In Anbar province, there is a “real and growing groundswell of Sunni tribal opposition to the Al Qaeda in Iraq terror formations,” he writes. “This counter-Al Qaeda movement … was fostered by brilliant U.S. Marine leadership.” The result is an ongoing fight between the western Sunni tribes and Al Qaeda in Iraq. “This is a crucial struggle and it is going our way — for now,” McCaffrey says.

A senior U.S. military official in Baghdad acknowledged there is “nothing easy about reconciliation among sects that have been torn apart by the terrible violence in the wake of the Samarra Mosque bombing” in February 2006.

“However,” the official said in an e-mail response to questions, many important leaders of the sects, as well as Iraq’s prime minister and others, are focused and working hard to try to achieve reconciliation.”

“Meanwhile, of course, [al-Qaida in Iraq] is doing everything possible — in the most barbaric way imaginable — to try to reignite sectarian violence,” the official said.

Ultimately, only a political deal will end the bloodshed and secure a satisfactory outcome for the U.S. in Iraq, McCaffrey says.

The “primary war winning strategy” for the U.S. in the coming 12 months must be for Crocker and Petraeus “to focus their considerable personal leadership skills on getting the top 100 Shia and Sunni leaders to walk back from the edge of all-out civil war,” he writes. “Reconciliation is the way out. There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable U.S. force levels.”

Military power cannot alone defeat an insurgency — the political and economic struggle for power is the actual field of battle.”

McCaffrey said in the interview that the senior field grade and general officers he spoke with in Iraq are not giving up. “Battalion and brigade commanders, division commanders, have poured their lifeblood into this war, and they don’t want it to fail,” he said.

The commanders are excited about serving under Petraeus, who McCaffrey said he has known for about 25 years and regards as “probably … the most talented person I’ve ever met.”

Petraeus is giving it his best shot, McCaffrey said. “I don’t believe the guy went over there saying to himself, ‘I’ll get winched off the roof of the embassy 24 months from today,’ ” McCaffrey said. “I think he believes he can turn this around.”

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