FALLUJAH PUSH: BY THE BOOK?

Maybe this means some­thing. I’m more than will­ing to believe it doesn’t. But I found it a lit­tle odd that the U.S. military’s push into Fallujah seems to be almost 180 degrees opposed to the tac­tics and tech­niques laid out in the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Operations field man­ual.
In Fallujah, if the news reports are to be believed, U.S. armed forces are engaged in a clas­sic, house-​​to-​​house bat­tle, to remove Fallujah as a guerilla base of oper­a­tions. Overwhelming fire­power, and man­power, have been brought to bear gun­ships and artillery, more than ten thou­sand sol­diers and marines. For months, every­one has known the attack was com­ing.
Now look at what the man­ual unearthed by Inside the Pentagon and Secrecy News sug­gests for coun­terin­sur­gent “Offensive Operations”:

Concentrate on elim­i­na­tion of the insur­gents, not on ter­rain objec­tives
Get coun­terin­sur­gency forces out of gar­risons, cities, and towns; off the roads and trails into the envi­ron­ment of the insur­gents
Avoid estab­lish­ment of semi­per­ma­nent patrol bases laden with artillery and sup­plies that tend to tie down the force. (Pay spe­cial atten­tion to pre­vent mobile units from becom­ing fixed.)
Emphasize secrecy and sur­prise
Judicious appli­ca­tion of the min­i­mum destruc­tion con­cept in view of the over­rid­ing require­ments to min­i­mize alien­at­ing the pop­u­la­tion. (For exam­ple, bring­ing artillery or air power to bear on a vil­lage from which sniper fire was received may neu­tral­ize insur­gent action but will alien­ate the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion as a result of casu­al­ties among noncombatants.)

Doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?
Now, of course, no bat­tle is fought exactly “by the book.” And the field manual’s sec­tion on “Clear and Hold” oper­a­tions aimed at dis­lodg­ing gueril­las from an area they con­trol does feel a bit more like the Fallujah push. There are calls for “mil­i­tary forces clearly supe­rior to the insur­gent force,” “emer­gency leg­is­la­tion to pro­vide a legal basis for pop­u­la­tion and resource con­trol mea­sures,” and “psy­cho­log­i­cal prepa­ra­tion of the pop­u­la­tion of adja­cent areas.” That’s rem­i­nis­cent of the build-​​up of U.S. troops, the recent dec­la­ra­tion of a state of emer­gency by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Alawi’s, and of the long, slow ratch­et­ing up of pres­sure on Fallujah.
But that sec­tion also warns that “no area or its pop­u­la­tion that has been sub­jected to the inten­sive orga­ni­za­tional efforts of a sub­ver­sive insur­gent orga­ni­za­tion can be won back until the insur­gent hard-​​core orga­ni­za­tion and its sup­port struc­ture has been neu­tral­ized or elim­i­nated.” And given the U.S. Army’s admis­sion that insur­gent lead­ers like Abu Musab al-​​Zarqawi likely slipped out of Fallujah before the attack, that seems like a goal that will remain out­stand­ing.
THERE’S MORE: “I’m sure the com­man­ders know the man­ual,” says Winds of Change’s Joe Katzman. “I sus­pect that polit­i­cal con­straints made a num­ber of its pre­scrip­tions moot, or that the com­man­ders decided to treat it as a con­ven­tional urban war­fare pitched bat­tle. It hap­pens, and I’m reluc­tant to sec­ond guess peo­ple on the ground who have all the facts, but it’s good to know what’s in that manual.”

November 11th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.