Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan: The Patton of Counterinsurgency
[Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801-1805. Kimberly Kagan, the president of the Institute for the Study of War, is the author of The Eye of Command. Her reports and analysis of the Iraq war are available at www.understandingwar.org.]
Great commanders often come in pairs: Eisenhower and Patton, Grant and Sherman, Napoleon and Davout, Marlborough and Eugene, Caesar and Labienus. Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno can now be added to the list.
It's natural to assume that successful pairs of commanders complement each other's personalities (the diplomatic Eisenhower and the hard-charging Patton, for example) or that the junior partner is merely executing the vision of the other (Sherman seen as acting on Grant's orders). In reality, the task of planning and conducting large-scale military operations is too great for any single commander, no matter how talented his staff. The subordinate in every successful command pair has played a key role in designing and implementing the campaign plan.
History does not always justly appreciate such contributions. The role that Davout played in shaping operational plans for Napoleon is a matter for specialists. General Odierno deserves better. He played an absolutely essential role in designing and executing the successful counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. His contributions to securing Iraq offer many important lessons for fighting the larger war on terror. As he and his team return to Fort Hood, Texas, it is important not only to commemorate their achievement, but also to understand it.
Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno took command of Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I) on December 14, 2006. Iraq was in flames. Insurgents and death squads were killing 3,000 civilians a month. Coalition forces were sustaining more than 1,200 attacks per week. Operation Together Forward II, the 2006 campaign to clear Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods and hold them with Iraqi Security Forces, had been suspended because violence elsewhere in the capital was rising steeply. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) owned safe havens within and around Baghdad, throughout Anbar, and in Diyala, Salah-ad-Din, and Ninewa provinces. The Iraqi government was completely paralyzed.
When General Odierno relinquished command of MNC-I on February 14, 2008, the civil war was over. Civilian casualties were down 60 percent, as were weekly attacks. AQI had been driven from its safe havens in and around Baghdad and throughout Anbar and Diyala and was attempting to reconstitute for a "last stand" in Mosul--with Coalition and Iraqi forces in pursuit. The Council of Representatives passed laws addressing de-Baathification, amnesty, provincial powers, and setting a date for provincial elections. The situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed.
As is well known, General Petraeus oversaw the writing of a new counterinsurgency doctrine before being sent to Iraq. But the doctrine did not provide a great deal of detail about how to plan and conduct such operations across a theater as large as Iraq. It was Odierno who creatively adapted sophisticated concepts from conventional fighting to the problems in Iraq, filling gaps in the counterinsurgency doctrine and making the overall effort successful.
THE LEGACY OF 2006
The commanders who preceded Petraeus and Odierno had put a priority on encouraging the nascent Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to take responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people. The preferred strategy was to concentrate on training the ISF while using Coalition forces for "supplementing Iraqi Security Forces in ongoing operations--and striking at Al Qaeda in Iraq in particular."
The overwhelming majority of American combat forces were concentrated on Forward Operating Bases, from where they acted to reinforce Iraqi Security Forces and to patrol areas in which there was significant violence. U.S. military operations tended to be reactive rather than proactive, episodic rather than sustained. The insufficiently trained and equipped ISF had been pushed prematurely into the fight and, rather than conducting counterinsurgency operations, relied on ineffective checkpoints. As a result, security ebbed and flowed through neighborhoods and towns but was rarely lasting, and the presence of Coalition forces provided little sense of security for Iraqi civilians....
UNDERSTAND THE ENEMY A major assumption of previous U.S. commanders in Iraq had been that "kinetic" operations--the favored neologism for "combat"--were counter-productive, producing more resentment and more insurgents. They emphasized the need to win hearts and minds and to avoid alienating the population. While major combat operations generate resentment among the population, and may encourage indigenous forces to become dependent on outside assistance, Petraeus and Odierno recognized that such problems pale in comparison with allowing the enemy to control key terrain and attack targets at will.
Petraeus as he took command in February 2007 emphasized using combat forces to protect the population in major cities, establish and expand safe areas, and clear insurgent safe havens. It was Odierno's job to figure out how, exactly, to accomplish those tasks with the forces he had available. He came quickly to a counterintuitive conclusion: Securing Baghdad required large-scale offensive combat operations outside the city.
Previous American commanders had recognized that the violence in Iraq resulted primarily from the actions of distinct enemy organizations--rather than from any inchoate hatred between Sunni and Shia--and they had developed very sophisticated understandings of how individual enemy leaders interacted with each other and their subordinates. This approach flowed naturally from the military thinking of the late 1990s that conceived of conventional enemies as networks of technological systems (computers, communications devices, and power grids, among others). There are important nodes of a technological network that can be disabled to disrupt its functions, and, by analogy, there are people--those providing money, ideological guidance, and the human connections to disperse resources--who are the most important nodes of a terror network. Intelligence assets identified the key players, and Special Forces worked to kill or capture them in targeted raids.
According to this approach, the killing of AQI leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in June 2006 should have disrupted the al Qaeda network severely. But AQI rapidly regrouped after Zarqawi's death under a successor, Abu Ayyub al Masri. The American counterterrorism approach disrupted the network but did not eliminate it. AQI's ability to generate violence in Baghdad through its signature vehicle bombs actually increased in the months after Zarqawi's death, as did civilian casualties and Shia retaliatory attacks. The entire cycle of violence that attacks on the terrorist network were supposed to bring under control actually ramped up.
Just as Odierno took command, Coalition forces captured an AQI map depicting Baghdad as the center of the fight. AQI's main focus in 2006 was establishing safe havens in West Baghdad. The rise in power and ferocity of the Shia militias, however, forced them to establish bases outside of the capital from which to attack both Coalition forces and their Shia opponents. The map showed how AQI had divided the areas around the capital into regions, how it used these suburban safe havens (in Baghdad's "belts") as part of a complex system for moving weapons into the city, and how it carried the fight south of Baghdad.
AQI's approach--and Odierno's new understanding of it--made traditional military concepts like lines-of-communication, support areas, and key terrain relevant to the counterinsurgency strategy. Insurgents moving from the belts to the capital required access to particular roads. Maintaining that access required holding neighborhoods bordering the roads. Car-bombers needed factories in which to make their weapons. IED-users needed ammunition stores and ways of moving their IEDs from depots to frontline fighters. Leaders needed safehouses to allow their free movement in the city and headquarters outside the capital from which they could direct operations. Thinking of the enemy as a network, as U.S. forces had previously been doing, underemphasized the importance of geography and of controlling key terrain to the enemy's operations. Odierno prepared to take that terrain away.
ALLOCATE FORCES
Given the enemy's situation in Iraq, Odierno knew he would need more troops to make the counterinsurgency doctrine operational. He asked for them in December 2006, and President Bush announced the "surge" in January 2007.
The surge brigades made it possible to conduct multiple simultaneous operations rather than focusing on one problem or area at a time. U.S. forces within Baghdad would provide as much security as possible for the population, disrupt enemy groups operating from within the capital, and identify the enemy safe havens within the city. At the same time, Odierno planned to deploy troops into the belts around the capital to attack the enemy's support zones and lines of communication and to eliminate the suburban safe havens that were essential to the functioning of the enemy system.
Odierno worked with the U.S. Special Operations Forces under the command of Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal to make sure they kept up the pressure on key leaders within the terrorist network. Their precise and skillful attacks not only took out insurgent leaders but also provided valuable additional intelligence that Odierno used to refine his plans. And Odierno's operations to clear and hold key terrain would greatly facilitate the Special Forces' efforts by flushing key enemy leaders out of their safe havens. Odierno's kinetic operations developed a positive synergy with the more traditional counterterrorism approach, making both much more effective than either could have been alone.
The five additional brigades President Bush was sending to Iraq arrived gradually, at the rate of about one a month beginning in January 2007. Stemming the violence would require all the additional brigades, but they would not be completely available until June. In the five-month interval, Petraeus and Odierno conducted what the military calls "preparatory operations" to "set the conditions" for "decisive operations." Commanders do this by deploying their forces to the theater, establishing bases, supplying them, organizing command structures, reconnoitering the terrain, developing intelligence about the enemy, and creating maneuver corridors. These tasks often involve units in combat. Forces moving into areas that the enemy had controlled must often fight to establish their new bases. When units reconnoiter the new areas, they make contact with the enemy and fight skirmishes. In each case, the purpose of "preparatory operations" is not to fight and eliminate the enemy from an area, but rather to create the preconditions for successful "decisive operations" in the future that will destroy the enemy.
Petraeus and Odierno used these months to develop a sense of how long it would take a brigade to reconnoiter and master urban and rural terrain before operations could begin, and how fast a brigade could clear that terrain with the mixture of forces it had available. The protracted nature of the conflict played to America's advantage, surprisingly, as new commanders were able to learn from previous examples and personal experiences even as they adapted to a changing situation and a fluid enemy. Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, Odierno's immediate predecessor at MNC-I, had already recognized the need for a shift in approach and begun to reconnoiter the belts around Baghdad and areas within the city before he relinquished command in December 2006. When President Bush announced the change in strategy and surge of forces in January 2007, Odierno was already using the forces that he had, and those that were arriving, to shape the conditions for the large offensive that could not begin until June. He and Petraeus then sent the first two new brigades into Baghdad, and the next three to the belts....
Read entire article at Weekly Standard
Great commanders often come in pairs: Eisenhower and Patton, Grant and Sherman, Napoleon and Davout, Marlborough and Eugene, Caesar and Labienus. Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno can now be added to the list.
It's natural to assume that successful pairs of commanders complement each other's personalities (the diplomatic Eisenhower and the hard-charging Patton, for example) or that the junior partner is merely executing the vision of the other (Sherman seen as acting on Grant's orders). In reality, the task of planning and conducting large-scale military operations is too great for any single commander, no matter how talented his staff. The subordinate in every successful command pair has played a key role in designing and implementing the campaign plan.
History does not always justly appreciate such contributions. The role that Davout played in shaping operational plans for Napoleon is a matter for specialists. General Odierno deserves better. He played an absolutely essential role in designing and executing the successful counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. His contributions to securing Iraq offer many important lessons for fighting the larger war on terror. As he and his team return to Fort Hood, Texas, it is important not only to commemorate their achievement, but also to understand it.
Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno took command of Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I) on December 14, 2006. Iraq was in flames. Insurgents and death squads were killing 3,000 civilians a month. Coalition forces were sustaining more than 1,200 attacks per week. Operation Together Forward II, the 2006 campaign to clear Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods and hold them with Iraqi Security Forces, had been suspended because violence elsewhere in the capital was rising steeply. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) owned safe havens within and around Baghdad, throughout Anbar, and in Diyala, Salah-ad-Din, and Ninewa provinces. The Iraqi government was completely paralyzed.
When General Odierno relinquished command of MNC-I on February 14, 2008, the civil war was over. Civilian casualties were down 60 percent, as were weekly attacks. AQI had been driven from its safe havens in and around Baghdad and throughout Anbar and Diyala and was attempting to reconstitute for a "last stand" in Mosul--with Coalition and Iraqi forces in pursuit. The Council of Representatives passed laws addressing de-Baathification, amnesty, provincial powers, and setting a date for provincial elections. The situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed.
As is well known, General Petraeus oversaw the writing of a new counterinsurgency doctrine before being sent to Iraq. But the doctrine did not provide a great deal of detail about how to plan and conduct such operations across a theater as large as Iraq. It was Odierno who creatively adapted sophisticated concepts from conventional fighting to the problems in Iraq, filling gaps in the counterinsurgency doctrine and making the overall effort successful.
THE LEGACY OF 2006
The commanders who preceded Petraeus and Odierno had put a priority on encouraging the nascent Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to take responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people. The preferred strategy was to concentrate on training the ISF while using Coalition forces for "supplementing Iraqi Security Forces in ongoing operations--and striking at Al Qaeda in Iraq in particular."
The overwhelming majority of American combat forces were concentrated on Forward Operating Bases, from where they acted to reinforce Iraqi Security Forces and to patrol areas in which there was significant violence. U.S. military operations tended to be reactive rather than proactive, episodic rather than sustained. The insufficiently trained and equipped ISF had been pushed prematurely into the fight and, rather than conducting counterinsurgency operations, relied on ineffective checkpoints. As a result, security ebbed and flowed through neighborhoods and towns but was rarely lasting, and the presence of Coalition forces provided little sense of security for Iraqi civilians....
UNDERSTAND THE ENEMY A major assumption of previous U.S. commanders in Iraq had been that "kinetic" operations--the favored neologism for "combat"--were counter-productive, producing more resentment and more insurgents. They emphasized the need to win hearts and minds and to avoid alienating the population. While major combat operations generate resentment among the population, and may encourage indigenous forces to become dependent on outside assistance, Petraeus and Odierno recognized that such problems pale in comparison with allowing the enemy to control key terrain and attack targets at will.
Petraeus as he took command in February 2007 emphasized using combat forces to protect the population in major cities, establish and expand safe areas, and clear insurgent safe havens. It was Odierno's job to figure out how, exactly, to accomplish those tasks with the forces he had available. He came quickly to a counterintuitive conclusion: Securing Baghdad required large-scale offensive combat operations outside the city.
Previous American commanders had recognized that the violence in Iraq resulted primarily from the actions of distinct enemy organizations--rather than from any inchoate hatred between Sunni and Shia--and they had developed very sophisticated understandings of how individual enemy leaders interacted with each other and their subordinates. This approach flowed naturally from the military thinking of the late 1990s that conceived of conventional enemies as networks of technological systems (computers, communications devices, and power grids, among others). There are important nodes of a technological network that can be disabled to disrupt its functions, and, by analogy, there are people--those providing money, ideological guidance, and the human connections to disperse resources--who are the most important nodes of a terror network. Intelligence assets identified the key players, and Special Forces worked to kill or capture them in targeted raids.
According to this approach, the killing of AQI leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in June 2006 should have disrupted the al Qaeda network severely. But AQI rapidly regrouped after Zarqawi's death under a successor, Abu Ayyub al Masri. The American counterterrorism approach disrupted the network but did not eliminate it. AQI's ability to generate violence in Baghdad through its signature vehicle bombs actually increased in the months after Zarqawi's death, as did civilian casualties and Shia retaliatory attacks. The entire cycle of violence that attacks on the terrorist network were supposed to bring under control actually ramped up.
Just as Odierno took command, Coalition forces captured an AQI map depicting Baghdad as the center of the fight. AQI's main focus in 2006 was establishing safe havens in West Baghdad. The rise in power and ferocity of the Shia militias, however, forced them to establish bases outside of the capital from which to attack both Coalition forces and their Shia opponents. The map showed how AQI had divided the areas around the capital into regions, how it used these suburban safe havens (in Baghdad's "belts") as part of a complex system for moving weapons into the city, and how it carried the fight south of Baghdad.
AQI's approach--and Odierno's new understanding of it--made traditional military concepts like lines-of-communication, support areas, and key terrain relevant to the counterinsurgency strategy. Insurgents moving from the belts to the capital required access to particular roads. Maintaining that access required holding neighborhoods bordering the roads. Car-bombers needed factories in which to make their weapons. IED-users needed ammunition stores and ways of moving their IEDs from depots to frontline fighters. Leaders needed safehouses to allow their free movement in the city and headquarters outside the capital from which they could direct operations. Thinking of the enemy as a network, as U.S. forces had previously been doing, underemphasized the importance of geography and of controlling key terrain to the enemy's operations. Odierno prepared to take that terrain away.
ALLOCATE FORCES
Given the enemy's situation in Iraq, Odierno knew he would need more troops to make the counterinsurgency doctrine operational. He asked for them in December 2006, and President Bush announced the "surge" in January 2007.
The surge brigades made it possible to conduct multiple simultaneous operations rather than focusing on one problem or area at a time. U.S. forces within Baghdad would provide as much security as possible for the population, disrupt enemy groups operating from within the capital, and identify the enemy safe havens within the city. At the same time, Odierno planned to deploy troops into the belts around the capital to attack the enemy's support zones and lines of communication and to eliminate the suburban safe havens that were essential to the functioning of the enemy system.
Odierno worked with the U.S. Special Operations Forces under the command of Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal to make sure they kept up the pressure on key leaders within the terrorist network. Their precise and skillful attacks not only took out insurgent leaders but also provided valuable additional intelligence that Odierno used to refine his plans. And Odierno's operations to clear and hold key terrain would greatly facilitate the Special Forces' efforts by flushing key enemy leaders out of their safe havens. Odierno's kinetic operations developed a positive synergy with the more traditional counterterrorism approach, making both much more effective than either could have been alone.
The five additional brigades President Bush was sending to Iraq arrived gradually, at the rate of about one a month beginning in January 2007. Stemming the violence would require all the additional brigades, but they would not be completely available until June. In the five-month interval, Petraeus and Odierno conducted what the military calls "preparatory operations" to "set the conditions" for "decisive operations." Commanders do this by deploying their forces to the theater, establishing bases, supplying them, organizing command structures, reconnoitering the terrain, developing intelligence about the enemy, and creating maneuver corridors. These tasks often involve units in combat. Forces moving into areas that the enemy had controlled must often fight to establish their new bases. When units reconnoiter the new areas, they make contact with the enemy and fight skirmishes. In each case, the purpose of "preparatory operations" is not to fight and eliminate the enemy from an area, but rather to create the preconditions for successful "decisive operations" in the future that will destroy the enemy.
Petraeus and Odierno used these months to develop a sense of how long it would take a brigade to reconnoiter and master urban and rural terrain before operations could begin, and how fast a brigade could clear that terrain with the mixture of forces it had available. The protracted nature of the conflict played to America's advantage, surprisingly, as new commanders were able to learn from previous examples and personal experiences even as they adapted to a changing situation and a fluid enemy. Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, Odierno's immediate predecessor at MNC-I, had already recognized the need for a shift in approach and begun to reconnoiter the belts around Baghdad and areas within the city before he relinquished command in December 2006. When President Bush announced the change in strategy and surge of forces in January 2007, Odierno was already using the forces that he had, and those that were arriving, to shape the conditions for the large offensive that could not begin until June. He and Petraeus then sent the first two new brigades into Baghdad, and the next three to the belts....