ARMY’S INSURGENT MANUAL AUTHOR SPEAKS

Last week, Defense Tech took a look at the Army’s new field man­ual for Counterinsurgency Operations and how that guide seemed, at first blush, to be at odds with the assault on Fallujah.
The story kicked up a nice lit­tle dust-​​up over on the new Defense Tech forum. One of the peo­ple who weighed in: Lt. Col. Jan Horvath, with the Army’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate. He’s the man who led the team that put together the coun­terin­sur­gency man­ual, “FM-​​I 3–07.22.“
Lt. Col. Horvath and I have traded e-​​mails a few times this week. I’ve parsed the con­ver­sa­tion into a Q & A. In it, he’s some­times crit­i­cal of U.S. oper­a­tions in Iraq — the Fallujah strike should have empha­sized “oper­a­tional secrecy and sur­prise,” for exam­ple. But he finds a lot of good in how American troops are han­dling this ongo­ing guerilla war. 

DEFENSE TECH: Who put together this man­ual? And what is it sup­posed to be used for? Is it some kind of aca­d­e­mic exer­cise, or does it really guide troops on the ground?
JAN HORVATH: The FM-​​I is a col­lab­o­ra­tive prod­uct devel­oped pri­mar­ily by the U.S. Army but in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the USMC [U.S. Marine Corps], the [Army’s] Special Warfare Center and the British Army.
The FM-​​I is NOT aca­d­e­mic. It applies lessons learned and tac­tics, tech­niques and pro­ce­dures to artic­u­late what we learned in Vietnam, El Salvador, Afghanistan and Iraq and what oth­ers learned in Colombia, and Northern Ireland. It is descrip­tive and not pre­scrip­tive. The FM-​​I rec­og­nizes each envi­ron­ment (and for that mat­ter each day) is unique.
I believe we all rec­og­nize doc­trine has rarely ever been an American strength. However, the FM-​​I is just a good, first-​​draft for the field man­ual we are now writ­ing.
Did we miss any­thing? Of course, we only had five months to research and write it. What are we adding? An oper­a­tional and the­ater strate­gic focus and guide­lines, near state-​​of-​​the-​​art intel­li­gence analy­sis, [and] prin­ci­ples for train­ing indige­nous secu­rity forces. Tactically, [we missed] the “swarm” attack, urban oper­a­tions (going through walls rather than down the street); logis­tics, Intel[ligence] analy­sis, and the media and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. After all, if coun­terin­sur­gency is a war of ideas, we bet­ter win the for­mu­la­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of those ideas.
The Army refers to me as the author of FM-​​I 3–07.22 — I am not. I am the leader of an infor­mal, dis­trib­uted, team that put the mate­r­ial together and then shaped it into a coher­ent (and what we regard as a use­ful) product.

DT: But the man­ual is already being chal­lenged, in some ways, by events in the field, right? For exam­ple, FM-​​I sug­gests com­man­ders should “con­cen­trate on elim­i­na­tion of the insur­gents, not on ter­rain objec­tives” and “get coun­terin­sur­gency forces out of gar­risons, cities, and towns.” Doesn’t the Fallujah attack run counter to these sug­ges­tions?
JH: No, I do not believe the Fallujah attack runs counter to these rec­om­men­da­tions. Why not? An imper­a­tive is to elim­i­nate insur­gent sanc­tu­ar­ies. Fallujah is the pri­mary sanc­tu­ary from which most insur­gent polit­i­cal direc­tion emanated. The armed sup­port­ers of that spe­cific counter-​​state had to be bro­ken and elim­i­nated. The polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal appa­ra­tus will be elim­i­nated in Fallujah over the next 6 months.
Our military’s role is to secure the pop­u­lace from insur­gent vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion, there­fore, influ­ence. In secur­ing the peo­ple, we must sep­a­rate them from the insur­gents. We do this by patrolling every­where, talk­ing with the peo­ple, and earn­ing a mod­icum of trust. After all, we don’t want any­thing from them… except infor­ma­tion. Our very pres­ence (on-​​the-​​spot) should dis­rupt the insur­gents’ influ­ence and move­ments.
We learned from an ear­lier mis­step when we attacked the insur­gents too soon in Samarra. Yes, we won. However, we left the area and did not remain to secure the local pop­u­lace AND the police. The insur­gents came back, attacked the police and intim­i­dated their way back into author­ity. The next attack had to wait until the mili­tia and police we were train­ing were trained and capa­ble of effec­tively defend­ing the peo­ple and area, ini­tially with our assis­tance, after our suc­cess­ful attack. Then, sol­diers and mili­tia attacked in the mid­dle of the night together, and sur­prise and dis­rup­tion reigned. We still own the peo­ple of Samarra, and the city is no longer a sanctuary.

DT: So what do you see as the big issues ahead as the U.S. fights the Iraq insur­gency?
JH: Operationally, there are two issues. We must elim­i­nate all sanc­tu­ar­ies, and we must per­ma­nently sever the lines-​​of-​​communication and sup­ply from Syria through Ar-​​Ramadi to Baghdad — darn near done. We did not do this in Vietnam.
Second, we must effec­tively elim­i­nate all enemy insur­gents that will pre­vent or inter­fere with the Iraqi Govt estab­lish­ing a strong pres­ence in Fallujah that pro­vides secu­rity for the res­i­dents while sep­a­rat­ing them per­ma­nently from the insur­gents — crit­i­cal, and we are suc­cess­fully cre­at­ing those con­di­tions.
Tactically, we haven’t used fire­power to flat­ten Fallujah as we applied in Hue, Vietnam to destroy the VC [Viet Cong] bat­tal­ions dur­ing Tet in 1968. We have used dis­trib­uted, net­worked sys­tems (drones and long-​​range sur­veil­lance, and eye­balls to ID where the enemy is fol­lowed by pre­ci­sion FA [field artillery] and tanks, LAVs [light armored vehi­cles], BFVs [Bradley Fighting Vehicles] and sniper and rifle fires to kill them.
We should move along a city block by mov­ing inside build­ings and through walls more. However, more res­i­dents might have become injured. We must still find the two lead­ers of the Fallujah Muj[hadeen] — an Imam and a Sheikh — regard­less of where they have fled in Iraq or Iran, and assist them in their rapid tran­si­tion to Paradise.
We [also] missed on the oper­a­tional secrecy and sur­prise, but we will con­tinue to tac­ti­cally sur­prise. [FM-​​I coun­sels U.S. com­man­ders to “empha­size secrecy and sur­prise” dur­ing their attacks. But the build-​​up to Fallujah was long and noisy — ed.]
Yes, we must still root out the counter-​​state infra­struc­ture in Fallujah using pop­u­la­tion resource con­trol. [That’s a] mech­a­nism to col­lect social and eco­nomic intel­li­gence… The Nazi’s Gestapo and the Eastern European com­mu­nists were the best at this. Without becom­ing tainted or infected by their meth­ods and atti­tudes, we have picked up some of their sys­tems and processes.
We rarely have an oppor­tu­nity to plan and exe­cute such oper­a­tions — this is exactly one of those oppor­tu­ni­ties. [It’ll take] 6–12 months [for this to work].
Otherwise, I appre­ci­ate our mil­i­tary lead­ers’ appli­ca­tion of the prin­ci­ples and com­mon sense. They are smart enough to have teams fol­low­ing the sol­diers to pro­vide food and blan­kets, med­ical care, and basic ser­vices as well as turn­ing power and water on in areas we have secured.
We won’t con­vince every­body overnight we mean them well, but we can pro­vide a stark con­trast — deeds, not words. Fortunately, peo­ple will always demon­strate their inten­tions for us. What we must demon­strate very quickly is the Iraqi Government is legit­i­mate, and we are not the same though our goals and objec­tives are com­ple­men­tary. Then per­haps, the Iraqi peo­ple can show us whether they have the capac­ity for free­dom, or not.
After all, free­dom is never free.

November 17th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.