subscribe  |    email  |    print  |    continue the debate

Just one week after Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) launched its March assault to wrest control of Basra from various militias, the American media issued the first of a steady stream of assessments questioning the performance of the ISF.

In general, the criticism has been harsh. One newspaper claimed that the “failure of Iraqi forces to defeat rogue fighters in Basra has some in the military fearing they can no longer predict when it might be possible to reduce troops to pre-surge levels.” The same article quoted a senior U.S. military official in Washington who claimed, “There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up” on their own. One month after the start of the operation, Time magazine remarked that the Iraqis remain “plagued by desertion and sectarianism,” and “are frequently found wanting and often have to be rescued by U.S. troops.”

Are such assessments accurate? And if so, what are the implications for the U.S. military commitment in Iraq?

Before the Basra operation, evaluations of the ISF were typically reflections of metrics generated by Multi-National Force-Iraq, known as operational readiness assessments (ORAs). The ORAs offer trainers a relatively simple tool for measuring objective indicators of progress in the generation of trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers and police. The bottom line metric for each unit is a determination of whether that evaluated unit is capable of operating independent of coalition support. But as the Government Accountability Office concluded in a study last year, this tool fails to provide the subjective evaluations necessary to portray operational capability and will. Although this tool allows the evaluator to project the number of months until a unit transitions to the next level, critics generally focus on the snapshot assessment and thereby disregard a few critical factors to the analysis.

Basra provided a unique opportunity to observe a large Iraqi-planned and -led combat operation — what some consider the first true test of ISF capabilities. As a result, observers have offered a variety of criticisms, often based on statements made by military advisers deployed with the participating Iraqi units or at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. These testimonials seemingly lend credibility to the media reports, and many of the criticisms are indeed accurate. These criticisms, however, too often ignore fundamental considerations regarding Iraqi readiness to take over security responsibilities from the coalition forces. Likewise, the conclusions generally answer the wrong questions. This article, then, probes a fundamental question: How should we evaluate the Iraqi security forces?

One of the common criticisms leveled at the ISF during the initial combat phase in Basra was its reliance on coalition air support, particularly close-air support. But such reliance should come as no surprise because the Iraqi Air Force (IQAF) is not even scheduled to field its first such attack capability until this summer, when it will add air-ground rockets to IQAF MI-17 helicopters. This limited capability will be supplemented in early 2009, when the IQAF receives its first fixed-wing attack aircraft. Nevertheless, the IQAF did use a number of its aircraft during the Basra operation for a variety of missions, including hauling personnel, equipment and supplies; all of the medical evacuations; persistent surveillance and reconnaissance; and an air assault mission with Iraqi special operations forces. It wasn’t a lack of will or training that prevented the Iraqis from fulfilling this aspect of the combat operation.

Another charge leveled against the ISF is its continued reliance on coalition logistical support. Many critics, however, did not consider in their analyses the deleterious effect of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s sudden decision to throw out the military’s plan and move up the combat phase by months, and to then allow only a few days for the fledgling ISF to plan for, procure and move the required supplies for a major combat operation. The 14th Iraqi Army Division in Basra did not yet have an organic transportation unit, and so it took five to seven days for other divisions’ transportation units to deploy in support of this mission. Frankly, it would likely take our own forces several days to move the equipment, supplies and personnel for a U.S. brigade several hundred miles within the U.S. (excepting the normal alert units such as the 82nd Airborne Division) and expect that unit to fight upon arrival.

Many observers also criticize the Iraqi planning, but those same critics fail to place the planning system in context. We know that senior Iraqi staff officers can plan large deployments — they did so on several occasions during the Iraq-Iran war and they did so again in 1990 when they invaded Kuwait. Iraqi planning, like the efforts of Iraq’s regional neighbors, doesn’t occur with the same efficiency as that of the U.S. military. The U.S. military has the advantage of experience with the most advanced planning tools available and staff planners with extensive training in these techniques and procedures. That the Iraqis were able to mobilize as well as they did given their time constraint is remarkable. As much as we might desire the Iraqis to adapt our complicated planning and logistics systems, and manage logistics to U.S. standards, our transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis is not dependent on this course of action.

One additional Iraqi battlefield operating system that has come under fire in the press is the Iraqi use of intelligence. Certainly, much of the blame for the poor intelligence preparation of the battlefield in Basra must rest with the prime minister because he allowed so little time for collection, analysis and target development. Again, the 14th Iraqi Army Division did not have organic intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance assets and was not trained by coalition forces. So the division relied primarily on traditional means of intelligence, which typically consists of a network of paid informants, often reporting to the unit commander rather than the unit intelligence officer. Although this sort of intelligence can be useful for counterintelligence, the traditional concern of Arab armies, this system does not translate into the sort of actionable intelligence needed to conduct an urban assault. Generally, Iraqi tactical units are just beginning to develop Western-style intelligence staffs in which various types of intelligence reports are fused by specialized analysts. This is a widely recognized weakness, though, and a cadre of professional intelligence personnel is being trained for the ISF. In any event, the Iraqis actually seemed to do a fairly decent job, despite their constraints. They deployed their new aerial surveillance platforms to a degree not usually observed in the Middle East and had information developed on dozens of targets.

DESERTION IN CONTEXT

Several articles describe the ISF as being plagued by desertion and sectarianism. The issue of desertion, however, also needs to be placed in context. The number of Iraqi security personnel who sat out the battle was relatively small compared with the number deployed, and was mostly limited to a few units. The unit that suffered the largest number of so-called desertions in Basra was, again, the locally recruited, recently trained Iraqi Army brigade stationed in Basra. As already noted, this brigade was not trained by coalition personnel, nor were any coalition advisers with the unit. Likewise, members of the Iraqi Provincial Police in Basra are locally recruited, armed only with small arms and trained to do little more than direct traffic. Against this backdrop, one could expect these units to suffer considerable absenteeism when tasked to fight against brothers, cousins and friends, or the various militias that threatened the soldiers, police officers and their families in their own neighborhoods. There are numerous historical precedents that would point to this outcome, including our own Civil War.

This explanation of desertion does not negate the argument that sectarian loyalties, or perhaps party or clan loyalties, often trump national interests, but the additional context contributes to a more useful evaluation of the ISF. Since the battle in Basra, largely Shiite units have again gone on to battle other Shiites in Sadr City. In any event, the U.S. cannot resolve sectarian conflict in Iraq. The sectarian and/or political affiliation of a unit is a necessary, but not sufficient, indicator of an Iraqi unit’s capability to contribute to overall stability.

Additional historical and cultural factors do not receive enough consideration from observers or trainers. For example, the Iraqi Security Forces, like most security services in the region, are steeped in a tradition of centralized authority. In contrast, the U.S. military pushes authority with responsibility down through the ranks, and individual officers and soldiers focus on meeting their commander’s intent rather than lock-step execution of written orders. In Iraq, decision-making authority rests with the officer corps only, and then at much higher rank levels than would seem necessary to a Western officer. There are several explanations for this difference, but the practical effect is to slow Iraqi decision-making and cause confusion or dangerous inefficiency when operations stray from a plan. In the context of low-intensity conflict, as was the case in Basra, this inefficiency really doesn’t matter. Although some observers labeled the operation a defeat after only a few days, and others decried the intervention of coalition military support, the result might not have been much different without this support. Certainly, the coalition military advisers, brought in after just a few days of combat, contributed greatly to the success, particularly with their ability to call for and direct tactical air support. Perhaps, though, this combat multiplier simply hastened what was already a likely outcome. As I write this article, Basra is relatively secure, helped no doubt by the cease-fire enacted by Muqtada al-Sadr, but long-term stability is not assured. The military contribution to security has provided the al-Maliki regime a temporary window of opportunity to influence public attitudes in Basra toward the central government.

More importantly, the battle for Basra highlighted the political role of the ISF in the larger conflict between competing Shiite groupings. Despite the efforts of coalition forces, perhaps the ISF is reverting to a more traditional role as the ultimate internal political force.

To be fair, not all journalists have missed the mark on the Basra operation. In a nuanced April 3 article, The New York Times pointed out that the operation highlighted several positive developments with the Iraqi military, and that much of the blame for the early setbacks rests with the impulsive meddling of al-Maliki. The Times gave credit to the Iraqi military for organizing its forces and quickly deploying them to Basra. The article also noted that the nascent Iraqi Air Force played a prominent role in the operation. The criticism was not of the ISF, but rather that al-Maliki “overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance,” and the prime minister failed to give his military enough time to adequately plan or prepare for the mission. As a result, American and British officers were compelled to step in and provide planning assistance, as well as tactical assistance on the ground early in the operation.

FIND THE RIGHT MODEL

Conversely, U.S. military advisers and analysts too often view Iraqi tactics, techniques and procedures through their culturally biased perceptual lenses and, although completely understandable, this skews the analysis. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps are doing a better job preparing these trainers, but the U.S. military also needs to develop a more useful means of evaluating the ISF. There is no need to develop a NATO-style Iraqi military — we shouldn’t always measure Iraqi progress by American standards. Rather, we should look at comparable militaries in the region and attempt to judge Iraqi progress against those standards. For example, for many reasons, we will not succeed in developing a strong Iraqi noncommissioned officers corps in this generation. So although we should attempt to show the Iraqis a model for success, we should not needlessly waste time insisting on duplicating U.S. job descriptions with Iraqi rank equivalents. It is like trying to push a square peg into a round hole. As T.E. Lawrence famously advised, “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

And although we may decide to retain a small cadre of trainers in Iraq for years to come, perhaps similar to our programs in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, we also are not compelled to remain in Iraq in large numbers once the Iraqis have the minimal means necessary to ensure they can outgun their possible opponents. In addition to air power, the Iraqis need additional indirect firepower. Thus far, they have only a few mortars, and no artillery. There are other pieces of equipment in the pipeline which we know they must have in order to stand on their own, but that is now predictable. We also can predict when there will be enough trained personnel to carry out those tasks we now fill.

The operations in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul indicate that the Iraqis can, in fact, provide for their own security — perhaps not today, but not in the distant future, as so many pundits fear.