Despite what you might have heard from other media, the Iraqi Army does not suck. In fact, by regional standards, it’s a fine little army: well-armed, well-led and capable of defeating terrorists and insurgents in a stand-up fight. It wasn’t always that way, but the coalition’s clean-sheet approach and years of hard work by training teams has really paid off.
But the Iraqi Army has two major weaknesses. First, its units are locally recruited, like the U.S. National Guard. This combined with Iraqis’ overriding allegiance to tribe over nation means that most of them refuse to deploy when ordered to do so by Baghdad. Those units that have agreed to deploy, such as the highly disciplined Kurdish battalon sent to the Shiite town of Balad early this year, have been besieged in their forward operation bases by xenophobic locals.
But even if they were willing to deploy, most units are incapable of sustaining themselves far from their major bases for very long. This is the second major weakness. I go into detail in a new National Defense feature:
The [Iraqi] 10th Division is capable of planning and executing its own missions, but usually operates alongside British forces. The division, a light infantry formation, has four brigades each with two line battalions of 800 troops apiece, plus engineer and bomb disposal companies. Small divisional attachments including signals troops and military police are just now standing up with foreign assistance. There are currently no organic logistics troops.
This is consistent with the overall structure of the Iraqi Army. No more than 15 percent of Iraqs 120,000 soldiers are involved in logistics, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Gerald Ostlund told the Associated Press. By contrast, Western armies feature more logisticians than combat troops.
“What you see is what you get,” [British Army Lt. Col. Tim] Barrett says, referring to the 10th Division’s infantry-heavy structure. While the battalions are adequately equipped with light arms and machine guns, there is a “desperate need” for vehicles, Lateef says. Currently, a handful of Russian-built medium trucks comprise the divisions major motor assets.
A dearth of vehicles plus a broader lack of logistical support means the 10th Division is incapable of sustaining operations away from its bases for more than a few hours, according to Barrett. This effectively limits it to urban operations in Basra and short sorties from a handful of rural installations.
What all this means is that the Iraqi Army will, for the time being, remain a local defense force. A good local defense force, mind you, but local nonetheless. So when Baghdad goes to shit, as it did a couple months back, the national government has few options for boosting the number of troops in the city. All it can do is try to recruit more troops locally … and call for U.S. and British help.
–David Axe
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“A desperate need for vehicles”
It still amazes me that this should be an issue, and begs the more complicated political questions regarding US intentions to turn Iraq into a military protectorate with an army that is incapable of functioning in anything other than an auxiliary role.
I cannot understand why after 3+ years there should be any lack of vehicles at all – it’s not as if there wasn’t an existing stock of serviceable Iraqi military hardware as a launching point for re-equipping at the war’s end ( much of which seems to have been mysteriously exported for scrap, in contrast to the US exporting scavenged Iraqi military kit after Desert Storm to their allies in Afghanistan ), it’s not as if there’s a world-wide shortage of cheap, decent and appropriate Russian/Soviet era military kit that a percentage of Iraqi recruits would already be familiar with, and there’s no shortage of cost-effective contractor and maintenance support as a fill-in until the Iraqis were able to fully indigenise these functions.
Obviously it didn’t help that the first tranche of Iraqi defence equipment procurement monies ( $1.2 billion ) was stolen under the US-appointed Allawi “administration”, but if there had been a “serious” effort to fully equip an Iraqi army it could have been done for less than $5 billion, with the proper oversight, and could at least have been well on its way to completion by now.
Then again, I suppose that when the Iraqi airforce has a grand total of 4 planes with top speeds of 80 miles an hour, the army should be glad that it even has a few trucks.
The Iraqi (and US) military is undersupplied because of the amount being spent on mercs (private security forces). Merc pay is up to $1,000 per day plus equipment and supplies. With corporate honchos (and many others) profiting from the privatization of war, it’s no wonder Iraqi and U.S. troops are getting the short end of the stick.
While this is partly due to the U.S. system of corporate-funded politics, it is also due to fear that up-to-date vehicles and munitions provided to Iraqi “army” will eventually be used against U.S. forces.
Although my point of view was admittedly limited, the battalion that I worked with was not locally recruited. As a matter of fact, they were mostly Shi’a, and were serving in al Anbar (i.e. Sunni area). The battalion had previously fought in Mosul and Ramadi. So I’m not following the bit about the locally recruited Iraqi Army being unwilling to deploy, or the part about units from other parts of the country being besieged by the locals. For our part, the battalion was largely besieged during the early part of the year. That would be due to the fact that the area in which they were stationed had never been controlled by Coalition forces before the Iraqi Army was thrust in there. By the time I left they had established pretty solid control over a 3-4 kilometer swath of territory, and the Sunni inhabitants in that area exhibited no signs of animosity towards the Shi’a soldiers.
As for the question of transportation, I personally observed a new Iraqi transportation battalion that possessed a motor pool full of Russian ZIL trucks, as well as a smattering of old US 5-ton trucks. Those are of questionable value to the average Iraqi infantry battalion, until someone can pony up the money to buy them some sort of uparmored transportation asset. The battalion I worked with did have some Panhard APCs (donated by the UAE) and several M1114 Uparmor HMMWV’s, but they were not enough to give them much in the way of operational mobility. Personally, I don’t think it’s an issue, since the Iraqis are not aggressive or tactically competent enough to mount operations that require substantial lift assets. As I mentioned earlier, that battalion effectively controlled 3-4 km of terrain. That was getting pretty close to the limit of their capabilities, and they were able to patrol it effectively with the assets they had.
Noone said a few dozen Rams. The whole idea that they lack vehicles throughout the military is silly.
If their is no equipment for the Iraqi military, why have vehicles been rolling through BIAP to the Iraqi forces for years?
Why hasn’t this problem come up earlier?
There might not be enough vehicles, of the perfect combo-but they are their they are likely being misused or misassigned, have been destroyed or are not being maintained properly.
If their was simply not enough vehicles, we would have heard this long ago. Instead Iraq has become a place where SUV’s get eaten like a wolf chomping rabbits and almost every country has donated dozens of armored vehicles.
The situation will never be perfect, but we can count on the press to oversimplify it.