Bring your Shotgun to Work Day! (30 April 2009)

I have been promising several of y'all some Skeet and Trap shooting at Brunner Range. Please let me know if Thursday at 1530 works for everyone. Cost is around $5.00 a round plus ammo, with International students on the house. If you have a Shotgun of any type, bring it as I only have one pump shotgun suitable for skeet. Brunner Range sells ammunition in most common Shotgun Gauges/Calibers and has appropriate safety gear if required. If you wish to bring your own ammo, remember that Brunner does not have any power restrictions (3" and 3 1/2" Magnums are OK) but that the shot can be no larger than # 7 1/2 (NOTE: If you are bringing a gun with your own ammo and haven't shot for a while, remember that shot size is inverse to the shot number, so the larger the number, the smaller the shot size, i.e. For Brunner Range anything numbered between #1 and #7, Bad; anything between #7 1/2 and #10, Good! If the Ammo Box has the words "0", "00" "Buck", "Turkey", or "Large Game" and "Shot" in the same sentence printed on it, run away! ). If you wish to bring your kids and you trust them to shoot with supervision and instruction, there are semi-auto youth shotguns available for rental, as well as 20 Gauge ammo and the appropriate safety gear. I plan on bringing along my son James. If your children are not into skeet but are into Archery, there is > an archery range adjacent to the skeet range. Let me know if there is a requirement for Archery; if there is I will bring a coupe of youth bows and some arrows. Let me know if this time/date works for everyone and if you wish to attend.

Sincerely,

Rick

Disturbing Homeland Security Document

Greetings All:

I guess there is a personal cost to refusing to lose in Iraq. I can tell you without reservation that I met the best of America while I was in Iraq during my two tours. Between our soldiers who rucked up, busted their ass and didn't bitch when the entire political and intellectual establishment was ready to quit, and many civilians who supported us through thick and thin, no matter what exaggerations the mainstream media reported about how we were violent headcases, inferring our guilt of virtually every war crime imaginable. Well, after winning an "unwinnable" war, our own Department of Homeland Security had this to say about my soldiers:

(According to Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog)
One of the report's most offensive features (the DHS Report) is its casual defamation of servicemen and veterans:

A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that "large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces."

The "prominent civil rights organization" is the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. But what support is there for SPLC's assertion that there are "large numbers" of "white supremacists" serving in the armed forces--as opposed to, say, a "tiny handful"? The SPLC's full report is entirely anecdotal; the closest thing to data is this:

[Scott] Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year.

But even this alleged statistic appears to be false. Barfield was a gang investigator, and what he actually said was: "I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present." So we now have the Department of Homeland Security defaming our servicemen on the basis of a press release by a left-wing pressure group that misrepresented the principal empirical support for its claim. Nice.

The Homeland Security report further supports its suspicion of returning veterans by referring to an FBI report released last year:

The FBI noted in a 2008 report on the white supremacist movement that some returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.
So, how many are "some"? You can read the FBI report, titled "White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel since 9/11," here. Notwithstanding the deliberate vagueness of the Homeland Security document, the FBI was actually very specific:

A review of FBI white supremacist extremist cases from October 2001 to May 2008 identified 203 individuals with confirmed or claimed military service active in the extremist movement at some time during the reporting period. This number is minuscule in comparison with the projected US veteran population of 23,816,000 as of 2 May 2008, or the 1,416,037 active duty military personnel as of 30 April 2008. ...

According to FBI information, an estimated 19 veterans (approximately 9 percent of the 203) have verified or unverified service in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There you have it: a whopping 19 actual or alleged veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan have joined the "extremist movement." (The FBI notes that some of these "may have inflated their resumes with fictional military experience to impress others within the movement.") (Courtesy www.powerlineblog.com)

For the record, nearly one million Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen and Coasties (Inclusive of Reserve and National Guard forces) have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or in adjacent countries. I would like to compare the number of Police, Firemen, Paramedics and other civilian security personnel (including, by the way DHS members) to the number of suspected extremists who have served in Iraq either on active duty or as members of the Reserve and National Guard. Besides the huge number of civilian law enforcement personnel who did tours as reservists and national guardsmen, I know for a fact that returning service members leaving active duty were heavily recruited by organizations as diverse as the FBI, the NYPD, Border Patrol, ICE, the CIA, the Broward County, Florida Sheriffs Department, the New Orleans Police Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Phoenix Police Department, the El Paso Police Department, The US Marshall's and the Ohio Highway Patrol. Seems strange to me that there is such a demand for Disenchanted White Supremacist Veterans among the nation's intelligence and public safety agencies.

Needless to say, these accusations trouble me. That, with a drug war raging less than four miles from the house Louise grew up in and a little over two miles from the Church I got married in; Drug gangs controlling entire neighborhoods in large cities; an international border you can infiltrate with a semi truck; so-called port security that permits thousands of unmonitored ships and boats access to America's coasts; a home-grown Jihadist threat among some Muslim immigrants and American-born converts, as well as the environmental wacko movement that torches car dealerships, lumber mills and subdivisions, DHS worried about US. The American Solder!

Sorry for the Rant, but I needed to get this off my chest. I will not stand by silently while my soldiers, some of the most courageous men and women I have ever met, are slandered by some gutless bureaucrat. If the author of this report had any testicular fortitude whatsoever, he would get off his dead ass and run down the few dozen bad apples out there instead of slandering gun owners and an entire generation of combat veterans. Of course, that would require taking personal risks and getting your hands dirty. Way too much like what members of the Armed Forces do on a daily basis.

Rick

Oklahoma Bound

We will be going to Fort Sill. Louise and I are looking at houses. Currently, it looks like we'll have to buy, as the rental market is very tight and there is a shortage of Field Grade housing on post. I will keep you posted on our move.

Rick

Happy Easter! (Again)

He Has Risen! He Has Risen Indeed!

Just had to make sure that everyone knew it was Easter. My Original "Easter Sunday" Blog was actually written on "Good Friday", and since I posted a bunch of stuff over the weekend, I was afraid that the news of our risen savior would be lost in the clutter, which happens all too often in our own lives.

Posted are a couple of really cool pictures I found from my last tour in Iraq. The above picture is a British Rolls Royce Armored Car from the British Mesopotamian Campaign in 1920. Above the 1920 picture is an Uparmored HMMWV being used by the Iraqi Army in Iraq (it is identical to the US Version except for different radios and crew-served weapons) from last year. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

UPDATE Captain Richard Phillips, Captain of the SS Maersk Alabama has been freed reportedly after Navy SEALS killed three of his captors shooting from the fantail of the USS Bainbridge, which was towing the captors and captain on a captured lifeboat.

I spoke with my father, Jim Kaserman, who has done extensive research on piracy and written a few books, reference this issue. Dad's take on this is that the killing of the pirates could potentially lead to escalation along the Somali coast. Up until now, very little blood has been shed. For the Somalis, this has been a cash transaction with little risk. The few casualties we have seen were mostly due to accidents. With this intentional take down of the pirates, no matter how justified, the US has raised the ante, and the pirates may seek retribution in order to save face and scare merchant fleet owners into pressuring the US Navy behind the scenes to stop anti-piracy actions.

Hopefully, we are willing to bear the cost of fighting piracy not only in the Aden Gulf and Indian Ocean, but worldwide. The straights of Malacca are still a pirate hot-spot, and drug smuggling in the Caribbean, with it's use of stolen and hijacked ships, boats and planes has become a first-cousin to outright piracy. At one time, this seemed like a no-brainer; however, I have seen the war-weariness in our population with regards to both Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the pro-drug legalization movement in the US, I am not so sure that we have the national will to stay the course. Ransoms are cheaper than Destroyers and SEAL Teams. Anti-piracy is a lot like seaborne counterinsurgency, or at least a form of Stability Operations combined with Military Support to Civil Authorities. Considering how quickly many in our media, academia and political class tire of these long, hard missions and turn against them, if I were a Coast Guard Acquisition Officer, I would probably start researching how long it will take to design a long-range helicopter optimized for dropping ransoms to pirates. I hope I am wrong, but based on our recent experience in Iraq, I am expecting a "Code Pink" protest any day now in support of the Somali "Freedom of the Sea Fighters" and hear congressmen calling those SEALS who took out the pirates using night vision devices cold-blooded murderers and/or assassins on the floor of the house.

Hope I'm Waaay off base on that one!

Happy Easter (and a Belated Passover for my Jewish friends).

Sincerely,

Rick

General Dempsey's View of the Army

This is a speech given by my old Regimental Commander from my days in 3rd ACR to the Army War College in Carslile Barracks, Pennsylvania. Currently, General Martin E Dempsey commands the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). I realize that this speech was given in association with slides (which I do not have) and is full of MILSPEAK, but if you wonder what issues keep the General in charge of training our Army awake at night, this is a great speech to peruse.

General Dempsey: Thank you very much. It's great to be here with the Army War College. I couldn't get in. I was the Armor Branch Chief and I got ranked into the National Defense University.I spend a lot of time traveling around to pre-command courses. Later this morning I'll be at the JFLC Course. This is a time I think in the history of our Army where we really need to enter into a conversation about our profession, and that's the way I'd like to characterize what we'll do here today. I'll spend a bit of time with my part of the conversation telling you what I think is going on, where I think we're headed, what I think is most important, how you can be part of accomplishing that which our institution of the Army, but not just the Army because of course we fit into a national defense strategy that causes us to partner with our joint and international partners. But the point is, you're in the War College at a great time. We've been at war now for seven or eight years. We can certainly see that it will be another seven or eight. We can also see that there's probably something beyond that. We're not exactly sure what it is. So you're in the right place at the right time, and you'll leave here and get the kind of jobs that will cause you over time to be those responsible for following us and figuring it out.I don't know that I came to exactly that realization at the War College in 1996. Meaning I don't know that I really appreciated what I was about to get into for the rest of my career, but here I am. I've spent seven of the past eight years in the Central Command AOR; about a year,almost, a little less, as an acting combatant commander; and now Training and Doctrine Command. So I'll be happy to talk to you about any or all of that because it all fits together somehow, or it should.By the way, that's the NCO of the Year at TRADOC, Drill Sergeant of the Year. It is the Year of the NCO, and every chance you get you ought to thank them for what they do.We always say we're the Army we are because of our non-commissioned officers, and we say it. We're not exactly sure what it means. At least I've not been entirely sure. What I do know is when you get into units and reset and in trained and ready that are short of NCOs and long on 10-level Soldiers, you can really see why the NCOs are the backbone of our Army.Okay, go ahead.That's my job. Literally there are three core competencies. We've Got to provide the right Soldiers at the right time with the right skills into the Army ARFORGEN model to meet the demands of our customers, the combatant commanders.How are we doing? We are meeting the demands of the combatant commanders. Fundamentally, we're meeting those demands late and extraordinarily inefficiently and we cannot continue to deliver Soldiers after MRE or just before deployment, and we can't continue to spend the kind of money we do with the thing called the TRAP process which is Training Resource Arbitration Panel. I don't know who dreamed that up,but fundamentally it's when we miss the mark on what we need we react in a fashion that gets us what we need but it's late and it's extraordinarily expensive... probably about half a billion dollars last year. It's kind of the Thelma and Louise model of personnel management.The thing's going off the cliff and at the last minute we toss them in the back seat. So we've got to get a little better at that, or a lot better.Now the Chief says to me and says to the other four-stars, you've got to align the institution with ARFORGEN. We all understand that. We all understand, however, that that's going to be very difficult to do. For example, here, to fully line up behind ARFORGEN I might come to General Williams and say we really need three War College starts a year. We need three graduations a year to keep up with the demands of ARFORGEN.And then the second order effects of that have to do with families indwell time and all the things that you know are other factors in your life.So what we're trying to do among the four-stars of the Army and those that are helping us is align ourselves with ARFORGEN, but maintain that balance of mission and people. We can talk about that more if you like.The middle one is my most important job, bar none. We can get the organizations wrong, we can get the equipment wrong, we can give you bad guidance and we probably do from time to time, but if we've got adaptive, creative thinking leaders, they'll figure it out. Do we have any evidence of that? Absolutely.What we went to do in 2003 in Iraq is not what we were doing in 2004.Every division over there made significant adaptations to the mission set in which they found themselves. We know how to adapt. The question is, in developing our leaders today, how we create that as a core competency throughout the course of a professional military education.And we are taking some risk in leader development, and here's why I say that. Somebody said to me, you're in charge of leader development.What you really ought to do is hire somebody to do a study and they'll come back and tell you what you really need to do. So before I launched off on a $5 million study, I did a little personal reading and I discovered there have been studies done throughout our history.Probably the best ones were done in the late '80s or so. There are also recent books like a book called Outliers by a guy named Malcolm Gladwell, that if you haven't read I encourage you to do so, an entertaining look at leader development. He also wrote Blink and also wrote Tipping Point. But they all say the same thing. The studies and the books all say the same thing, that there are three pillars of leader development -- training for skills, education for thinking, and experience. And in fact of the three the one that actually produces leaders is the experience factor, but you can't ignore the first two.So why do I say we're taking risk? Well, for example, battalion and brigade command tours are beginning to creep on us. For good reason if you're on the tactical side of it. Continuity matters if you're deploying. So we have the average brigade command tour length is creeping up toward 40 months. When Bob Williams and I went through that phase of our career the average command tour was about 24 months. Just the mathematics of it would suggest that we're giving about 35 percent of our officer corps fewer opportunities to experience that level.So where's the balance? I don't know yet, but we are taking risk.We're taking risk because we're not releasing our young men and women into the professional military education pipeline. We're building up huge bubbles at ILE (Intermediate Leadership Education) or what you probably knew as CGSC (Command and General Staff College). So we've got to figure out how to align with ARFORGEN, deliver leader development training and education differently -- I'm not sure what that means yet. How much (class time) in the brick and mortar schoolhouse,how much in distance learning, how much by MTT (Mobile Training Team)? And we've got do so consciously including the experiential factor. How do we get people experience in the joint community and the interagency community, in academia, so that we build these adaptive leaders for 2025.By the way, the battalion commanders of 2025 are probably entering the ranks of our officer corps this summer, so that's what we've got to watch. Again, because we are going to be at this pattern of cyclic deployment, persistent conflict, for a while.My other world is future capabilities. The Chief does, part of the responsibility for the future resides on the Army Staff, but that's more requirements. Capabilities concepts and how those concepts are expressed materially belong to me in an organization called ARCIC at TRADOC. So that's the life of the TRADOC Commander.I'll be happy to tell you about any one of those when we get to the question and answer period, but I want to move on.Next slide.You probably have had this in spades, but I retain just so you see how important this is, I retain the proponency, if you will, for definingthe operating environment at Training and Doctrine Command Headquarters.What does that mean? That means that I, through my G2 (Intelligence Section) and a variety of organizations that work for me in TRADOC, I define the threat against which scenarios are driven at the training centers and in the classrooms. This is what allows me to provide a consistent product, if you will, coming out of the TRADOC school system. And we've got some work to do in this regard.You've seen all of the data that backs these things up, but I would suggest to you that, well in fact, let's go to the next slide.I would suggest to you that that previous slide, the operating environment, feeds this one and begins to cause us to question our institutional aim point. And let me explain that.The Army, in my entire career, to include today, has had an institutional aim point against which we optimized the DOTLMPF domains. Doctrine, organizations, training, leadership, materiel, personnel and facilities. We optimize against a single aim point which is oriented on the major combat operations and the spectrum, and we do that because that's the most dangerous scenario. We've always done that.If you look back in history, however, we tend to organize and orient ourselves -- now I said we optimize against MCO (Major Combat Operations, Like WWII), but we tend to organize ourselves from time to time against other threats. And typically we organize ourselves at the extremes. So MCO for a period of time --let's go back to Vietnam. Irregular warfare. Following that it was the Soviet threat, we're all the way over here on the MCO side. We sort of ignored the peace operations. We saw that as an aberration. We didn't really change anything. We conducted missions in the Balkans but didn't change anything. Now we're making incredible tactical adaptation to the irregular warfare side of the threat. Big organizations are comfortable at the extremes. Where we're trying to move as an Army is somewhere between MCO and irregular.Now the Chief, I don't know if he's going to talk to you all. He's going to be here for the JFLC course. But he's got us trying to understand where on that spectrum of conflict he should be organized.Should it be a single aim point, and again to optimize ourselves such that we could gain a few, if you use a boxer's analogy. So if you're a middleweight fighter you gain a few pounds then you can fight heavyweight, or you lose a few and you can fight lightweight. Is that the right answer for our institution? Or do we end up with two aimpoints? One that is somewhere approaching MCO and the other which is clearly irregular?The answer to that question has profound implications because if you --We've also started down the path of answering the question by our doctrine, which I hope, you're paying some attention to. Along thebottom there you see offense, defense, and stability ops. That's out of FM 3-0. The companion piece, FM 7-0, talks about DMETL and CMETL. I know you've probably had conversations about what does that mean.The real question that we're posing and asking ourselves is the DMETL tasks are pretty clear to us. That's the mission in which we currentlyfind ourselves engaged. But what is CMETL? Today as we stand here it's still oriented on the major combat operations side. Is that right? So we're trying to get at that.The reason you see that, the Chief calls this the Tennessee Chart, by the way, because of the shape of the thing I guess, but if you see therein the middle, what really perplexes us in general, me in particular, is that the original Tennessee Chart, if you look in 3-0, it's Figure 2-2.The original Tennessee Chart has gaps there between major combat operations, irregular warfare, peace and limited intervention. I have of late begun to blur those because my personal experience and yours too, I'm sure, in places like Iraq, is that any of these conflicts tends to migrate into those various kinds of threats.So we go to Iraq looking for an MCO environment, we find it, we defeat it, it migrates into irregular warfare. There was a period of time there in the '04, '05 pre-Samara Mosque bombing where we really thought we had it almost to the point where we were ready to transition, if you recall, then it migrated back into irregular warfare. If you were the battalion commander sent down to Karbala or Najaf, the distinction between irregular and regular was probably lost on you.So the point is that the threat doesn't stay in one place if you're in a protracted conflict. And therefore, what really matters is how you identify those transition points. Do you anticipate them? Do you even recognize them?I can tell you Bob Williams and I struggled with that in '03, '04 in Iraq, and you recall there were people in government that said thou shalt not use the word counterinsurgency. Seriously. You probably have heard that they said don't use it. We're here to confirm for you that they said don't use it.So the question was, did we even acknowledge the transition in which we found ourselves? And if you buy that, then you probably need to buy the argument that -- back to my senior leader hat -- what a senior leader probably brings to the fight as his or her most important competency is anticipating, recognizing and adapting to transitions. And how do you introduce that into a leader development program? Where do you introduce it? At what level?So that's why I use this chart in my discussions about leader development. What are the competencies? Where do we deliver it? And what's the impact on the way we fight? But this discussion about aimpoints is one that will go on here for the next few months as we run upto the QDR.I've got two slides that talk about my reflections of being at the operational level. You're going to leave here and many, probably a few of you are going to go back to the tactical level; many of you will go to the strategic level. You'll get sucked into that five-sided building (The Pentagon), I suspect. And then a handful of you will go into the operational level, either in this country or somewhere downrange. So I think it's probably worth going through a couple of these things in detail and then I'll open it up for questions.The first one is fairly obvious. But again, we're in a QDR year and in QDR years these kinds of discussions begin to have greater importance and resonate through the ranks. I don't know whether you've been introduced, for example, to the capstone concept for joint operations.I'm going to talk about that when I go down the street and talk to the JFLC course. But sometimes we listen, but we don't hear what our senior leaders are saying to us. So the capstone concept talks about the requirement for a balanced force. The Secretary of Defense says he wants us to be a balanced force. The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michelle Flournoy, comes to visit us at TRADOC and says we're really looking for you to be a balanced force. And by the way, you can't any longer optimize yourself against "the MCOs of the past." So we are being troop led into determining how we will fight and organize ourselves against something other than MCO.And that gets at that first bullet. We have always said that we're interoperable and we've always aspired to be interdependent. I believe this next QDR will actually force us in a direction to have to live up to that phrase interdependency. You'll be in the right place to watch that occur, but it will fundamentally, I think, change the way that we organize ourselves.The second bullet. One could take a look at how Iraq is today and determine that in February of '07 decisions were made that turned that conflict around and that nothing before that mattered. If you read the books, you'll see that there's this tendency to believe that everything that happened before February of '07 didn't make much difference. But let me tell you what really happened before February of '07, from about May of '03 and on.That second bullet was the biggest problem we had. I say that because your Commandant and I live the experience of watching an Army General and a US envoy try, unsuccessfully in my view, to come together with a common campaign plan. There was painfully little negotiation between the tactical/operational commander, CJTF7 and his political partner Mr.Bremer. It just didn't happen.As a result of that we had essentially three or four different division commanders making, we think, I was one of them, making what we thought were very good and very effective campaigns for our own piece of the battlespace but nothing to knit them together. We did that for about a year.What happened after that was then came George Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad. Better relationship, to be sure. Much better relationship.But still there was this feeling among us senior leaders -- by that time I was back as the MNSTC-I (Multi-National Security and Transition Command-Iraq) commander now. There was a feeling that there were two campaigns. Try as they might to merge them. And frankly, we fought off the notion; we continued to criticize each other for one thing or another. The civilian side would criticize the military for failing to provide adequate security so that the government and economic workers could get out and about; and we criticized them for not sending enough people. You probably lived it, you've heard it. But fundamentally we had two campaign plans that just never merged.Then came along Ryan Crocker and Dave Petraeus, and if there's a single thing that made the biggest difference -- forget being out with the population. We were with the population in '03. Forget about the surge. That was going to happen anyway, by the way. There was always a plan on the books for 2+1+1+1. The question was how fast do you pull them over there. What really changed was the relationship between the MNFI (Multi-National Forces Iraq) Commander and the Ambassador which caused the synergy that we just hadn't had before. This is my view. Unwritten, probably likely to remain that way. But nevertheless important to remember, because that second bullet is one that I think we should take away as one of the enduring lessons of this or any conflict. That negotiation between the military commander and his political partner must occur and they must find a way to harmonize their activities or the mission will not succeed-- no matter how many resources you throw at it.The third one there, defining the problem. How many of you have heard of this design construct called systemic operational design? That's probably okay, because you'll see where I'm heading with this.When we got to Baghdad -- let me back up. Military leaders, given a well defined problem, take that hill, and understanding the mission, the enemy, the terrain, the troops available and the time available -METT-T, can go straight to the military decision making process and find a solution. That's obvious.The question we confronted in Baghdad, for example, in 2003 was it didn't lend itself to an MDMP (Military Decision Making Process) process because we really didn't know what the problem was. Now we kind of got there. We got there through trialand error, frankly, watching brigade commanders adapt theirorganizations and start to perform lines of operation in governance andeconomics and all of that. But we didn't have at the front end acampaign based on the design of the problem. In other words, we didn't first understand the problem. What we're trying to do now inside of TRADOC is provide an instrument through which a leader can confront an ill structured problem in a structured way to essentially feed into the MDMP problem. Simply stated, understand the problem first before you start trying to figure out how to solve it. The reason I mention it in this context is you're going to go back outinto an Army that is struggling with that issue of design. Because design precedes MDMP. And there's, like we always find, there are schools and advocates that are coming up out of the ground to advocate one position or another. The one called systemic operational design really comes out of an Israeli construct and is very complex. It's no kidding based on post modern French philosophy and the art of thinking,and I frankly find it extraordinarily rich for what we're trying to do. But there's a real camp out there advocating. I'm blogging, if you can believe this, a 56 year-old Irishman from Bayonne, New Jersey, bloggingto try to convince people we don't need to go that route. And so far, so good. By the time you get out there we will have something that precedes MDMP and you ought to pay attention to it. The problems we confront in thefuture are not going to lend themselves to us launching straight into MDMP. We've got to have some way of defining the problem. The third one there, I say designate the main effort and then actually resource it. That's a tactical principal. You go to the NTC or the JRTCor any of the combat training centers, and the first thing they'll do toyou during the AR is they'll say what your main effort was? How did youweight it? Did you give it extra resources? Did you give it less terrain? How did you in some way make sure that you were going to succeed in your main effort? We didn't do that in Iraq in the early days? I'm not even sure, frankly, having been the acting combatant commander, that we were doing it in 2008 at the CENTCOM level. It is an issue of moral courage. Somebody's got to vote and say this ismore important than that. And when you do, once you do that, and by theway you'll do it with great resistance on the part of the person you'redesignated as the supporting effort, but it allows you then to weight the main effort. So for example in Iraq, 2003, we had all four divisions -- north, Baghdad -- Actually way north, Diyala Province, Baghdad and west, all of which had about the same resources. Any time resources were called intoquestion it was fundamentally a distribution based on fair share. We didn't weight the main effort. Now I was probably the biggest nuisance about that because I figured Baghdad ought to be the main effort, but I would have been okay ifsomebody just voted. But we didn't do it. CENTCOM, 2008. We can see Afghanistan beginning to falter and we can see Iraq beginning to succeed, but we wouldn't bring ourselves to use the phrase main effort, supporting effort, shift resources. Would not do it. We're beginning to do it now, but I think we're a little late to need and we're going to pay the price this summer if I had to predict,because we're not going to get it there quick enough.It's an issue of moral courage, in my view. Distinguishing between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness, and I say there a source of interagency friction. How many of you have served in Afghanistan? All right. You probably know that when we report levels of violence or incidents, particularly in Afghanistan, we get a dog's breakfast of answers. The reason it's so hard to figure out what is really going on in Afghanistan is we have about three different reporting metrics. We have NATO which has its own reporting criteria and its own reporting processes. We have US Army Afghanistan, and then we have the intelligence agencies. Now you would think that as the CENTCOM Commander I could have successfully found a single standard, a single definition to establish a single standard, and then to find a way with knowledge management to have the databases feed each other so that I could tell the Secretary of Defense and the President, this is really what's going on in Afghanistan. However, if you believe that you're wrong. We never got to it. And we're not there today. So it is vitally important to pick measures of performance and measures of effectiveness that really matter, and then drive them to conclusion and then actually let them inform your planning process. We're not there in Afghanistan today, believe it or not. Set the theater. The Chief says to me, okay General, what is it that you're worried about in terms of rekindling or restoring lost competencies? And if you go out into the field, I'm talking about the Army now, but I suspect it would be applicable for other services, the artilleryman will tell you we're not massing fires. The armor officer will tell you we're not conducting mounted mass maneuver. The communications community will tell you we're not echeloning command and control on the move. You'll get answer after answer after answer. The one that worries me the most, frankly, is the lost art of the RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward movement and Integration of forces). We have really lost some skills in how to set a theater. Right now, in fact since about 2004, there is no real RSOI for the Army.Those conditions are set in Kuwait and are down to a drill. It's a battle drill. But when we -- when, not if -- we're faced with some other access issue, I think we're going to have a real challenge unless we rekindle those skills. The other thing you need to know is that the Theater Army Command, that's the Army sub-component command, ARCENT for CENTCOM. The role of the AFCC is evolving. One of the other lessons of this conflict that the Chief has taken to heart in particular, is we rarely go to war with the organization we have. We build these organizations, and then as soon as you say you're going to war with it, here comes the JMD, or here comes the RFF, and it doubles in size almost overnight. So what the Chief said to me was look, I can't afford to have an AFCC, ARCENT happens to be the one I'm most familiar with, with capabilities sitting there that are not being used elsewhere. And what got him onto this was when we started looking in Afghanistan to how we would provide extra support to General McKiernan. We tried to use the OCP, the Operational Command Post for ARCENT, but we couldn't unplug it. We couldn't unplug it because it had started doing other things, plus we hadn't resourced it. It was resourced at about 65 percent. So the Chief said to me, look, if we're not going to use the damn thing, redesign it. So we have redesigned it. The new design for the TheaterArmy Command will have a main command post capable of Title 10 and a contingency command post capable of literally contingency operations --NEOs, humanitarian, disaster relief, small intervention, one or two BCTs-- but will not have the capability to be a JTF. That's a big moment. What that says is we're balancing ourselves. Again. The threat or thepotential to need a JTF for an MCO scenario is diminished and thereforewe're taking those resources and rebalancing them elsewhere. This isthe kind of thing that's coming to us at every echelon and eventually will migrate into a relook of the BCT structure as well. Next slide. This is the last of the slides. Lead up and laterally. I say there it comes down to relationships. Policy and guidance always come late. Always. It's just the nature of the beast. So there are some examples I could use in CENTCOM but they'd still remain compartmented. But if I thought that we might face something, some violation of Iraqi airspace, for example, and I asked for guidance about what to do in the event that would occur, the answer back would almost always be who, that's a tough one, what do you think we should do. But that's okay, actually. I just came to the realization late. So what I got in the habit of doing as I matured as the Acting Combatant Commander is I would introduce, first of all you build relationships. That's what the combatant commander does. Relationships with the interagency, in particular with the CIA given the current fight, FBI so you can share their authorities and complement them with yours. We have Title 10, they have Title 50. FBI's got whatever it is, 32, I forget. But whatever it is, they've got authorities that you need as the combatant commander and the ability to have them give you access to their authorities and them gain access to yours is by the relationship. So I spent an enormous amount of time building those relationships. The same thing with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman. You have to have a relationship with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman in order to help them understand -- they will always appreciate your advice. Seriously. I came to that recognition a little late. If I had it to do over I think I'd probably be more effective. The issue with the Secretary of Defense is he's got the world. You've got a combatant command's AOR and there's only a handful of things in that AOR that really could go badly, and if you can focus on them and provide him your best advice, I have to say that I've never seen, especially this Secretary of Defense, he'll question it, he's a very good listener, he asks extraordinarily good questions, but he takes the advice of his military leaders. But what comes first is the relationship. That's true -- I already mentioned to you about the relationship with Ryan Crocker and Dave Petraeus which was fundamentally the biggest change that I saw in my three years in and out of Iraq. Balancing effectiveness and efficiency. This is going to surprise the hell out of you. The components compete for resources.Let's use ISR as an example. Why don't we? That's coming up in the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) too. So there's a finite amount of ISR. My Air Force component commander, Gary North, comes to me and says if you give it all to me I can make sure it's being used efficiently and we can lift and shift. We'll still base it on the ground commander's desires. How many of you have been in the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center)? Make sure you all get there someday. It's really a remarkable place. In any case, the ground commander says we can't do that. I can't have the unpredictability that comes with not owning it. A parochial answer? Absolutely. Absolutely parochial, but one you can understand if you're on the other end of it. So fundamentally, this is where I go back to the point about weighting the main effort. The combatant commander then takes, and by the way,the naval component commander who was always getting almost no ISR support, who at the same time in CENTCOM was tasked with tracking Iranian activity in the Straits of Hormuz, so he was banging on my door as well. So that's the job of the combatant commander, to make adetermination of where the greatest need is, weight the main effort and then give it out. Along comes the MQ9 (Unmanned Aircraft). By the way, the way ISR is managed is in a system called PRISM. Does anybody know what PRISM is? It doesn't matter thatyou know it, it's just that PRISM is where ISR is managed; JTARS iswhere the air tasking order comes out, my blue brethren here will confirm, which is close air support, fundamentally. They're on separate databases. Here comes MQ9. MQ9 is the Reaper; MQ9 is armed ISR. It's an ISR platform. Full motion video is what everybody wants in the G Box to do signals intelligence. But the point is, MQ9 comes along and it's also got ordnance. Where does it go? Air Force puts it into the JTARS, the ground commander wants it in PRISM, the combatant commander comes inand finds an artful solution to all that. But the point is, you do have to -- that's just internal to my components.Then you've got, MNFI has never given up, I think until about three months ago, we were never able to shift an ISR platform from MNFI to Afghanistan. The commanders develop a sense of ownership about it. That doesn't mean they're bad people. In fact the reason I'm telling you about this is that when you work in staffs for them and for the next commander up, you have to understand what each other are doing. The ground commander is always going to ask for whatever he thinks he needs. The tactical commander. The combatant commander has the responsibilityfor organizing the theater, the AOR. Then of course the Chiefs through the Chairman, have the responsibility for managing global risk. I talked a little bit about managing transitions. I had no idea how hard that would be. When I became a general officer, General Shinseki, I raised my hand in the general officer charm school and said what the most important job is for a general officer? I thought he was going to say something about leader development, which is a passion of mine, and it is. But he said managing transitions. I didn't really understand what he meant then, to tell you the truth, but I understand it in spades now. Look at the tactical transitions that occur in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's always somebody on the move there. Changing battlespace. Then if you think about the transition we've been trying to manage withthe host nation called Iraq, and some day Afghanistan, how do you transition responsibility for their own security to them? And by theway, we've been at fits and starts. You would think that transition in Iraq would sort of, in terms of assessing the Iraqi security forces; you'd expect that it would be kind of on a gentle incline, but it's not. When you look at the way we've measured success, it goes up and then it goes straight down, then it goes up and it goes straight down, it's likea saw tooth. Why is that? Because the brigade commander who's partnered with the 5th Iraqi Army Division in Diyala Province, when he takes the unit as part of his partnership responsibility, he assesses that it's not good, or less good than he wants it to be. When he leaves, what do you suspect he will declare? They're a lot better now. The new guy comes in, I don't know what that guy was looking at, but they're not s good. By the time he leaves they're good again. Am I making that up? So as the MNSTCI Commander it occurred to me that we'd be there a longt ime if we kept on that path. I've actually come to the idea, by the way, and have introduced it to the Chief, as we try to put into doctrine this thing called Foreign Security Assistance, that we need an external assessment tool, external assessment organization, to actually look atthe host nation units. When you own it, you can't be objective about it. Whether we should be or not, we can't. Anyway, that's another transition. And by the way, the enemy has a vote and he'll transition on you too. That's back to the other slide, the Tennessee Chart. We have to managethe transitions the enemy makes. Even today, small example, the RKG hand grenade, you know the hand grenade that actually has the ability to penetrate armor, the TTP for the last six months has been to attack the last vehicle in a convoy. We came onto that, we've adapted our TTP. They're no longer attacking the trail vehicle, now they're attacking the next to the last vehicle. Now that's a small tactical example of an enemy making a transition. Or how they hang their EFP arrays. But those are small tactical examples.In the aggregate, though, the enemy in both Iraq and Afghanistan today,while we're sitting here, are adapting their plans based on the waywe're flowing forces. And it's almost as though sometimes we areoblivious to the fact that the enemy gets a vote. Okay, communications. I recall as the 1st Armored Division Commander publishing what I thought was my ultimate campaign plan for Baghdad, and I think it was probably by that time August of '03. And then believing that that would take me through my tour, which I thought at the time was going to end in April. It didn't end until July. But the point is, I thought I pretty much had locked in my campaign plan and I quickly came to the realization that in that environment at that time we needed to review, revise, and in particular I needed to republish my commander's intent about every 90 days. I don't know what it is today. My suspicion is it might not be every 90 days today because there is, in Iraq anyway. But my point in all this is, you absolutely have to understand what your commander's intent is telling your subordinates to do. And in this kind of warfare in particular, you're empowering and you're resourcing, and that fight is being fought at the lowest levels. So your commander's intent becomes far more important than it is in the central corridor of the NTC (National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA) and youhave to revise it and refresh it frequently. Information is a weapon. I got to go to one DSLC as the acting commander. They were actually good to me. I was the three-star who could be the pain in the ass at the table, but the group -- the Secretary, the Chiefs, the other combatant commanders -- they were really very good to allow me equal voice as an acting commander. One of the things I introduced at the only DSLC I went to was my belief that information is a weapon. If you look at our doctrine, we say there are six war fighting functions and two enabling functions. One enabling function is leadership and one enabling function is information. I think that grossly understates the importance. I think information is a war fighting function. I could give you countless examples of my personal experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan and why I firmly believe that. We can do it in question and answer if you like. But I'll give you one example of, and when I say weapon, I mean it does have elements of you wield it or you defend against it. I would like to see us adopt it as a war fighting function as a nation, or as a military, because it will cause us to resource it and to clarify its use in a way that we're still blurring, we're setting up firewalls, and we're just not as agile as we need to be. And generally those that use it well are probably violating some particular form of policy. So we've got to get after that. Health of the force, not just a service problem. Remember I said earlier that a combatant commander, a tactical commander should, and will you can count on it, ask for whatever they think they need. In fact like the old supply sergeant, if they think they need three they're going to ask you for five. What it does, though, is it puts an enormous-- Up until now the Army is not a supply based Army, we're a demand based Army. If the demand is out there, we work to meet it. I don't know whether we can continue to be a demand based Army. One of the things we're talking about when we look at our aim point and we look at the force mix and the available pool is are we, should we, can we be more like the model that the Navy operates on or the Marines, where for example it's always absolutely predictable how many carrier battle groups are in the available pool and how many are in the, they don't call them the same things we call them, but how many are resetting, how many are training to deploy, and how many are indeployment. I don't know. But what I do know is that as long as we remain a demand based Army the operating side of the force still has to have an appreciation for what the conflict is doing to the health of theforce. That's not whining because I'm on the TRADOC side now, the generating force. But I've been stunned, actually, to go to pre-command courses and tell them about what the Army is doing; drill sergeants are kind of my touchstone for what I mean by this. We take a kid that just came back from the fight, and in his dwell time we make him a drill --and by the way, drill sergeants, it's a two year tour. They work seven days a week, 18 hours a day. That's a fact. That's their dwell time. And by the way, they don't complain about it. Sometimes their wives do,f rankly, if you have a town hall meeting with the families, and rightly so. It's not uncommon to hear a wife say why don't you just deploy him? At least he'll be getting combat pay and I won't expect him to come home. But there's a lot of pressure on both sides of the Army. I've had an ongoing conversation with the deployed four stars is, I got it. We'll meet your needs. But you've got to understand that we've been at this for seven years, we're going to probably be at it for seven more, and we better figure out what that means to the health of the force. I think we're going to be okay. But as you leave here and you get out there and you're now in the J5 shop of a combatant command or you're down range in a C5 shop, I'm just suggesting to you that when you look at that RFF (Request For Forces) you're preparing to drop on me just understand whatwe're doing to the force over time. And if you need it we'll get it, but don't do the supply sergeant thing to me. If you need three, tell me you need three. I'd actually rather if you only told me you need two because we're really stretched. The next to last bullet is just some personal advice to you. In March of '04 we were halfway redeployed out of Iraq. The 1st Cav Division had literally taken over responsibility for Baghdad. I had half of the unit back to Germany. I also had the 2nd Cav with me and about half of them were back in Fort Polk, Louisiana. And the first Sadr uprising occurred. I walked out of my TOC and I could see plumes of oil fires where I knew Route Tampa was. And they had dropped many of the bridges south of Baghdad on Route Tampa. So I walked back into the TOC and I said Houston, we've got a problem. I don't think we're going home. I didn't say it to the entire TOC or they would have scampered out on me, I'm afraid, but I did say it to the key leaders. I said we've got a problem. What I mean by we've got a problem, we, MNFI or CJTF7's got a problem, and I don't know of any other uncommitted force so I think we better do some parallel planning here. Within hours General Abizaid came and said I don't think we can let you go home. I said yes, sir, I had a feeling that was coming. But I said can you give me a little clarity on -- Remember I told you about leading up? Here it is. He said, I don't know. What do you think? I said, well sir, it depends on what the mission is. If you need me to reopen Route Tampa, that's one thing. If you need me to reopen Tampa and regain control of Karbala, Najaf, Diwaniya and Al Kut, that's a different mission set. He said, can you do both? I said yeah, I think so; if I can get the unit pulled back together I think we can. He said, how long would it take you? I said, I think about four months. By the way, I had no frigging idea what I was talking about. Seriously. But I knew, honestly I didn't. But I knew that if I missed this opportunity to shape the discussion, I knew he was flying right back to talk to Secretary Rumsfeld and that there would be some deliberation about an extension and there would be some deliberation about how longthe extension would be. And I knew if I missed that opportunity, I missed it. About 30 minutes after he left, in came General Sanchez. He said, I think you've got to stay. I said yeah, I had a feeling that was going to happen. I didn't want to let him know that his boss had already let me know. I said, when can I tell my families? No, I said two things. I said, can I stop my convoy movements and my air movement out of Balad? He said no, you can't do that. I said why, sir? He said, because thatwill be a trigger, everybody will know you're staying. Sir, look outthe door. I can't move the convoys. They cut the frigging locks (Logistic Corridors)anyway. So all I'm telling you is I'm going to have to stop. He said you can't tell anybody to stop. I said, can I bring some people back from Germany? No. Not yet. Wait until it's announced. So we all had seen what happened when uncertainty had hit the 3rd ID in the early days. They had been told several things along the way and we saw what happened. So I'm not advocating selective disobedience here, but what I am advocating is that you lead up and laterally. So Pete Chiarelli and I started to parallel plan about equipment. I did in fact schedule a VTC with my senior leaders in Germany. I did send Mark Hertling, my ADC, back to Germany and that's where the families come in and I'll tell you about that in a second. And I did stop all movement. And I did so though, under the rubric, if you will that they couldn't go any place anyway because the locks were cut. Then I sent Mark Hertling back to engage the families. I told him, I said go ahead and tell them. Even if the CNN announcement isn't made yet, go ahead and tell them. Keep the media out of the town hall meetings; we had nine separate casernes (facilites) in Germany. I said keep the media out, but empower them. Empower them to be part of this. So Mark Hertling, who by the way some of you know him, is just a terrific guy but is a very emotional leader. We used to kid him that he would cry at an opening of a WalMart. You know what I'm saying? So he went back to these town hall meetings with my wife, the rear detachment commander, and to his enormous credit, General B.B. Bell, the USAREURCommander, who by the way threw the entire weight of United States Army Europe behind this thing, and they went to nine separate town hallmeetings. They let the people kind of express their frustration, they told them what was going on, and told them they would solve whatever personal problems that would accrue because of this, and we told them this was a four month mission. Took some risk, empowered the families. And what happened was, seriously, not a single news article or media engagement on the extension of 1st Armored Division. And it was so powerful that some of the NCOs told me later they -- and by the way, theother reason you always have your families with you, is they're connected all the time. So they're emailing each other back and forth.And one staff sergeant said to me, just so you know, sir, I was emailing my wife and I was sort of bitching about the fact that we had to stay,and she told me to suck it up because --. Really. She told him, I gotit, I'll take care of the soccer games, and you stay safe, complete the mission and get home. So it is a different kind of environment for you and your families and especially your Soldiers and their families, and just don't ever forget that. The last thing, and it's not last because it's not important, it's last because as I was flying here making notes it occurred to me that I am going to have a chance to say how much we appreciate our coalition partners. And I'm an internationalist by nature. I've spent 12 years in Germany over the years, and seven years in CENTCOM AOR too, in Saudi Arabia, 3 in Iraq, and then as CENTCOM Commander all over the rest of it. So I get it. The issues that confront us are not issues that we will solve alone. I value our partnership deeply. And the comment there, by the way, is we tend to focus on what the allies say they can't do. Now our military partners are not doing things like that because they don't want to do them. They have some pretty stringent political advice that comes to them. What I found in CENTCOM was it was always better to focus on what they could bring to the fight, what they were able to do, and let somebody else -- whether it's SACEUR or the Chairman or for that matter somebody out of the State Department -- to negotiate away the caveats. But you as a combatant commander with your military partners just have to remain focused andfixed on the opportunities that a coalition brings. And shame on us if we can't find coalitions to help us with the challenges that we face in common in this world. So I just want to tell you how much I appreciateyour partnership. I'm glad you're all here working side by side with this class. Thanks very much. Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE

Style in the War Zone

2005

As you examine pictures taken in Iraq or Afghanistan, you can often determine the vintage of an image by the uniforms. In the first picture, you will see a classic "old meets new" image from OIF III (2005) taken at East Abu Grahib Airfield. In the photo, I am wearing the older DCU pattern fatigues, my tactical vest and body armor are a mix of DCU and BDU pattern gear, my helmet is a first-generation PASGT Kevlar helmet and I am carrying an M16A2 rifle. The Lieutenant from 2-130 IN, whose unit deployed 6 months after we did, is wearing the inital-pattern ACU pattern (note the solid-color nametapes) with legacy DCU ammo pouches. Note that he is wearing the improved Kevlar helmet and carries an M4 Rifle. This image was taken sometime in summer of 2005, when 256th BCT (LAARNG) was working for 3rd ID in MND-B. 2-130IN is a ILARNG unit that was originally under 48th BCT (GAARNG), and later worked with 1st BCT, 10th Mountain Division.

2007

The second picture was taken at Hurricane Point on the intersection of the Nasr Canal and the Euphrades River in Ar Ramadi, Al Anbar in March 2007. Note that I wear the new-pattern ACU uniform and gear and now carry an M4. The Marine Gunnery Sergeant on my right is wearing the digital-pattern Marine Digital Cammies. At the time of the photo, 1/6 Marines was attached to 1st BCT, 3rd ID in Ar Ramadi and occupied a former "guest palace" complex that was later returned to the Al Anbar provincial government to use as a courthouse and administrative complex.

A Comparison of Iraq and the Philippines

By MAJ Richard C. Kaserman

100 Years Too Late: A Comparison of Insurgency in Iraq and the Philippines

As the United States Army conducts counterinsurgency combat operations in Iraq, comparisons have been made between modern-day operations in Iraq and the army’s efforts in Vietnam in the 1960’s. While the current Iraq conflict does in some aspects resemble operations by the United States Army in Vietnam, the debate of whether Iraq resembles Vietnam in the military profession and the popular media appears to have obscured valuable lessons that could have been taken from the Philippine Insurrection. All military operations and situations are unique; history does not precisely repeat itself. However, many similarities exist between the Philippine Insurrection and the Iraqi Insurgency, and these similarities draw clear parallels between these US Army operations that occurred 105 years apart. Arguably, a close study of the Philippine Insurrection provides valuable insights into the current counterinsurgency conflict in Iraq. A delineated study of the lessons of the Philippine Insurrection regarding political and diplomatic goals, security requirements of the civilian population, political action, recruitment of local security forces and legal procedures may have potentially created an acceptable outcome in Iraq much earlier and with fewer US and Iraqi casualties.
The Spanish-American War preceding the Philippine Insurrection lasted from April until December 1898 and relied heavily on the mobility and firepower of the US Navy. This war was generally popular with the public and was considered by some to be the model of a short war. Similarly, the Invasion of Iraq came soon after the successful and rapid takedown of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was popular with the public and, with its small ground troop commitment and heavy reliance on airpower, was considered by some to be the prototype for future wars. In the Philippine Insurgency, as during the Iraq operation, the United States began the operation with barely enough troops to conduct conventional combat operations.[1] In both the Philippines and later in Iraq, when the enemy transitioned conventional operations to an insurgency, the Army had, in the opinion of many observers and participants, too few troops to conduct counterinsurgency operations.[2] During the period of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, virtually every officer in the Army served in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines.[3] In the present era, due in part to the Iraqi Insurgency, the vast majority of Army officers have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. A comparison of the Iraq insurgency and the Philippine Insurrection provides valuable lessons for the current military professional, since there are valuable lessons learned for the Army in these two insurgencies.
On 1 May 1898, a squadron of the United States Navy defeated and sank the Spanish fleet in the Philippines and forced a de-facto cease-fire with the Spanish forts around Manila.[4] On 30 June 1898, the first 2,500 soldiers of Eighth Corps arrived in Manila to conduct military operations against the Spanish forces in the Philippines.[5] By the beginning of February 1899, a combination of military, political and diplomatic events would trigger the start of the Philippine Insurrection.[6]
Upon landing in the Philippine Islands, both the Navy and Army commanders understood clearly the military goal of defeating the Spanish fleet and Spanish forces in the Philippines.[7] However, initially, these commanders were uncertain of the political and diplomatic goals associated with the Philippine campaign. Even as the Spaniards were surrendering, MG Wesley Merritt, the commander of Eighth Corps, was given vague instructions that were hard to comprehend beyond the task of setting up a temporary military government. These unclear instructions created complex difficulties for the American military leadership in the aftermath of the surrender of the Spanish garrison in Manila.[8] In Iraq, the political and Department of Defense civilian leadership underestimated the requirement for security, reconstruction and civilian governance, and therefore planning for postwar contingencies was woefully inadequate. Within several days of arriving in Iraq, LTG (Ret) Jay Gardner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction, was replaced by Paul Bremer and the Office of Reconstruction was absorbed into the Coalition Provisional Authority. In summation, both the Iraq and Philippine operations suffered from unclear and/or unformed political and diplomatic objectives which adversely impacted military operations during the initial stages of the insurgency. The obvious difference between Iraq and the Philippines was that MG Otis, the commander in the Philippines, understood implicitly from his experiences in the Indian wars that security and isolating the civilian populace from the insurgents was critical from the outset in order to establish functional civil government.[9] Due to the modern Army’s focus on major conflict and lack of experience with pacification, this same lesson regarding security of the civilian populace in Iraq took over three years for the Army to learn, understand and implement.
In order to conduct these required security tasks to secure the civilian populace from insurgents, the proper number and type of security forces had to be brought to bear. In both the Philippine and Iraq operations, shortages of trained soldiers had to be overcome to provide the forces necessary to defeat the insurgent forces militarily. During the Philippine Insurrection, MG Arthur McArthur achieved the forces necessary to implement the “Policy of Chastisement” in December of 1900 when he had 70,000 veteran soldiers to carry out his policies.[10] To support the “Surge” in Iraq in January 2007, force levels in Iraq were boosted by approximately 30,000 soldiers in addition to the 145,000 already on the ground. Both the Surge and the Policy of Chastisement were successful mostly due to their effect on the enemy’s will. However, neither the Surge nor the Policy of Chastisement would have been successful in isolation. Both the Surge and Policy of Chastisement were linked to policies encouraging insurgents to surrender or to switch sides. Further, both the Surge and the Policy of Chastisement were short-term and targeted operations. The real long-term change engendered by the Surge and the Policy of Chastisement was their utility in standing up and training native forces. The differences were primarily the extent to which “hard war” measures against selected civilian populations such as concentration of population, crop seizure, devastation and destruction of civilian property in selected were utilized in the Policy of Chastisement in the Philippines.[11] Similar measures were not taken against civilian populations during the Surge in Iraq.
In order to move beyond defeat of the insurgents to the structural destruction of the insurgent infrastructure, the Army recruited local auxiliary forces both in Iraq and the Philippines. In Iraq, both because of its prewar ineffectiveness and the fact it was dissolved by the Coalition Provisional Authority as a “debaathification” measure, the US Army was forced to reconstruct the Iraqi military essentially from scratch. Because of issues with police corruption, sympathy and support for the insurgency and desertions, the various Iraqi police agencies also required nearly complete reconstitution. In addition to the near-total reconstitution of the police and the military, the United States military forces also formed other auxiliary forces to combat insurgents, most notably the local security forces known as the “Sons of Iraq”. Similarly, in the Philippines the Army set up a variety of Auxiliary and local forces to conduct operations against insurgents, bandits, and other security threats. U.S. Army units manned by U.S. officers and Filipino soldiers (Philippine Scouts), a National police force consisting of U.S. and Filipino personnel (Philippine Constabulary), local police, volunteer militia, locally recruited security personnel, secret agent networks and auxiliary personnel were all utilized to defeat the Philippine Insurgency.[12]
In order to legitimize a counterinsurgency, it is critical to set up a legal mechanism to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of suspected guerillas and sympathizers and duly sentence the guilty to an appropriate punishment. In the Philippines, the Army initially relied on the Lieber Code and General Order 100, as well as the so-called “Policy of Attraction”. Later, civil government and courts were established in the Philippines between 1901 and 1902. Like the Iraqis in the 21st Century, the Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century were less than impressed with the US system of courts, either military or civilian, since harsh sentences, even when justified, were often overturned.[13] Further, the Philippine Insurgents, like their Iraqi counterparts a century later, largely exceeded their American enemies in brutality, which caused much of the populace to remain neutral or even eventually turn against the insurgents.[14] However, this factor also reinforces the requirement to secure the majority of the civilian populace, as in both the Philippines and Iraq, insurgent brutality coupled with deficiencies in local security impeded cooperation by the population with the counterinsurgent forces.
All military operations and situations are unique; history does not precisely repeat itself. However, examining the many similarities between the Philippine Insurrection and the Iraqi Insurgency is valuable in understanding the dynamics of insurgency. Enough similarities exist to draw clear parallels between these US Army operations that occurred 105 years apart. In comparing the Philippine Insurgency to the current conflict in Iraq, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that better study of the lessons of the Philippine Insurrection with regards to political and diplomatic goals, security requirements of the civilian population, political action, recruitment of local security forces and legal procedures possibly could have created an acceptable outcome in Iraq much earlier and with fewer US and Iraqi casualties.
[1] Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941. (Washington, D.C. Center of Military History, United States Army, 2004), 108.

[2] Ibid, 116.

[3] Ibid, 100.

[4] Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire; The United States Army in the Spanish-American War. (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 239.

[5] Ibid, 201.

[6] Ibid, 310.

[7] Ibid, 110-111

[8] Ibid, 113.

[9] Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941. (Washington, D.C. Center of Military History, United States Army, 2004), 113.

[10] Ibid, 129.

[11] Ibid, 129-130.

[12] Ibid, 116-117.

[13] Ibid, 125.

[14] Ibid, 124.