King Midas turned everything that he touched into gold. Colonel Gentile turns everything that he touches into a COIN debate. He applied his Gentile touch to a recent thread at Small Wars Journal. The thread started out innocently enough. An article titled, COIN Toss: The Cult of Counterinsurgency was posted. David Ucko, who has his own book-length developed views on the issue, made a comment that was critical of the piece. Enter: Colonel Gentile, from whichever side of the stage where people are not holed up in their FOBs.

Gentile takes issue with Ucko’s assertion that there has been a “great amount of conceptual learning that has occurred since 200[5]” and demands an explanation. Ucko replies that, to him, “definite turning-points help to make sense of history” and “2005 is a useful reference point for the U.S. ground force's conceptual (re)learning of COIN.” That is where Colonel Gentile let loose with his re-summarization of his objections to the view that the tide turned in Iraq because we learned or relearned COIN late in the game. I am a bit concerned that this is where I might have inadvertently hijacked the thread, so I am picking up where I left off here, rather than eating up Dilegge's and Nagle's bandwidth.

Not being a strategic thinker or a historian, I took a different tact than Gentile. My question was not “why 2005?” My question was (paraphrasing), “wait a minute – why does anyone think that we can pin down the decisive factor in our (apparent) success as anything other than a change in the situation?” Specifically, I went on to ask, “[w]hat knowledge were we blessed with at this moment of COIN Pentecost in 2005 and why was it more significant than any of the factors [listed]?” Those factors listed, which I will rehash below, seem to get glossed over. It is difficult to compare operations throughout the years of OIF in a way that draws any significant lessons about what we learned, rather than what we had at our disposal. Ucko apparently likes to use 2005 as a turning point for the institutional change that allegedly occurred (which I dispute occurred). Most of us see 2007 as the moment with the mission was saved. I was in Iraq in 2005 and 2007. Given that I was also there in 2003 and this helps to round out the hasty analysis, I will hit on the major differences as I saw them in 2003, 2005, and 2007.

In 2003, “CERP” was nothing more than a non-existent word that rhymed with “terp.” The only money in my hands as a platoon leader in Baghdad was the money that I withdrew as an advance “casual pay” from the finance office in the middle of Baghdad. The only supplies that we got, other than intermittent class I and V, was what I procured on the local economy with those pay advances. (And no, I was not permitted to itemize it on my travel voucher). The plan for Iraq was essentially: Step 1. Invade. Step 2. ???. Step 3. Democracy. Our understanding of the culture was lacking. We had no intelligence sources and little to no surveillance assets. It was unclear what our goals should be because everybody assumed that we were going to invade and then leave, but the situation on the ground was quickly showing that to be a course of action that was unacceptable. Nonetheless, small units made good faith attempts to do thing that are now regarded as “COIN tasks.” We met with influential locals (school principals, doctors, heads of families/neighborhoods, etc) and organized them to re-open schools, distribute medical supplies (found in locked warehouses), attempt to establish neighborhood watches and empower households to protect themselves, and tried to get businesses established. Those efforts fell flat because there was no continuity between units, RIP/TOA was a monthly event, and we had no resources.

In 2005, we did similar things to slightly better effect. Why? Because RIP/TOA was by then a yearly event so we had more time. We had more resources (UAVs, EW assets, more vehicles, better equipment, and a functioning supply system). Our human intelligence assets were better than 2005, after two years of developing them, but certainly not good enough yet. We also had a clear mission, which was a nice change from 2003. But efforts still fell flat because there was a rush to hand off operations to the Iraqi Security Forces. My unit stood up an Iraqi Army battalion and spent a few months training them and doing joint patrols with them to provide on-the-job training. They were not nearly prepared to take over for us at the end of our deployment. Every O-6 and above in our Division even made a rare venture out of their palace to come down to our patrol base and ask us what would happen if the AO were turned over to IA at the end of the deployment. Our responses (from O-5 down to E-1) was pretty much unanimous: Hogan will not like what they do to his goat. This was painfully obvious. Nevertheless, somebody up higher thought that FOB consolidation made sense. Most of us at the small unit level did not. So we began to consolidate. As part of that consolidation, we were replaced by an IA unit with no organic logistics support, inadequate training and equipment, and a high desertion rate. This decision was not driven by the judgment of small units leaders. Even worse, that decision reinforced a widely-held perception that political pressure back home would force our withdrawal. There was little incentive for the people to risk their safety by allying with us.

In 2007, conditions were much more favorable. Any perceptions that we were on the verge of withdrawal were erased. We were doubling down. Furthermore, after an additional two years of steady-state operations, we had gathered more intelligence, developed greater understanding of the culture, our human intelligence network matured, our enemies had coalesced into networks that we finally understood after years of study and we could more logically target them. The ISF had also grown significantly, was better equipped, better trained, and was able to add to the number of counterinsurgents available. The government had seen multiple elections, ratification of the constitution, and the legislature and courts were now functioning. After the 2006 Samarra mosque bombing, the country erupted into a communal civil war. Not only had our adversaries coalesced into more coherent networks, but so did the population coalesce into ethno-sectarian communities. It is much easier to put your forces between two large groups of adversaries than it is to put your forces between hundreds of individual skirmishes, so population security was simplified. It is much easier to target a large network than it is to target dozens of unabombers, so intelligence and operations were simplified. Those tasks are easier still when the President gives you an additional five Brigades and your logistics system has been honed over the course of four years into a well-oiled system that can not only provide you with adequate parts, but also keep the FOB-dwellers supplied with Doritos and condoms. A clearer picture of the situation, a more favorable situation, more resources, more available indigenous forces, a mature logistics networks, the addition of five US Brigades, and a clear message that we are there until security is established. And we are to conclude from this evolution of the situation that the magic bullet was institutional knowledge?

I don’t understand how anyone can look at the fundamental shifts in the mission (clearer); troops available (far more); enemy composition (more coherent); time available (we no longer felt the need to be prepared for withdrawal); shifts in the civilian population (see an example here); logistical limitations (far fewer); better intelligence preparation of the battlefield (or whatever the new term is) through four years of area reconnaissance and a couple years of aerial surveillance… and then conclude that we turned the situation around by learning, or relearning, COIN. I think this is a case of someone setting out to prove that COIN doctrine was the answer and then fitting the narrative to the conclusion sought.

Note: I have not read Ucko’s book, so this is not an instance of an anonymous blogger trying to rebut, in two pages, what someone smarter articulated in a book-length treatise. This is just my reaction to the views aired on the thread that I linked to. I just wanted to make that clear.