Posted on 03/31/2006 7:39:40 AM PST by Valin
THE success of PhD papers by Oxford University students is usually gauged by the amount of dust they gather on library shelves. But there is one that is so influential that General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is said to carry it with him everywhere. Most of his staff have been ordered to read it and he pressed a copy into the hands of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Baghdad in December.
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title taken from TE Lawrence - himself no slouch in guerilla warfare) is a study of how the British Army succeeded in snuffing out the Malayan insurgency between 1948 and 1960 - and why the Americans failed in Vietnam.
The thesis was written in Oxford more than a decade ago by John Nagl, now a US Lieutenant Colonel and senior Pentagon adviser. It is helping to transform the American military in the face of its greatest test since Vietnam.
Colonel Nagl was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford who served in the first Gulf War before returning to the university where he met his wife. At the time he was troubled by the conventional wisdom that the US's post-Vietnam doctrine of engaging in conflict only if it could use overwhelming force had been vindicated by Operation Desert Storm.
Instead, he believed, the swiftness of victory had shown future enemies the pointlessness of fighting the US through conventional means. "The Gulf War was a magnificent achievement by the American Army - and nobody will ever let us do it again," he said. "I concluded that our enemies would either go high-spectrum, and fight us with weapons of mass destruction, or low-spectrum and use the ancient arts of insurgency."
In Iraq, they chose the latter.
Colonel Nagl burrowed through the archives of the National Army Museum at Chelsea for the papers of Gerald Templer, the British commander in the now largely forgotten Malayan conflict. He was struck by how the British Army overcame initial setbacks by adapting to the "slow, messy and dangerous work" of countering insurgency with tactics he describes as "underwhelming force". Colonel Nagl believes that the British Army, lacking the US's resources, was "predisposed to innovation" and that the colonial experience made Sir Gerald more sensitive to local culture and advice. In contrast, by the time the US began adapting to the Vietcong's insurgency, it was too late.
His mission now, as a senior Pentagon adviser, is to ensure that the US learns quickly from its mistakes in Iraq. Last week, President Bush hinted at an emerging doctrinal revolution as he highlighted how Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq, had been mostly cleansed of insurgents with the help of the local civilian population and Iraqi security forces.
An article, which Colonel Nagl co-authored for next month's Military Review, sets out some of the principles in a conflict where the primary goal is establishing a stable government in Iraq. Action that does not consider the political consequences "will at best be ineffective and, at worst, help the enemy", it says. "It is futile to mount an operation that kills five insurgents if the collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more."
Sometimes the most useful reaction to provocation is to do nothing. Is the US learning to eat soup with a knife? "You're goddam right it is," he said, citing the example of training centres where they once prepared for tank battles, but that have now been turned into models of Iraqi villages filled with people speaking Arabic. Colonel Nagl spent a year conducting counter-insurgent operations near Fallujah, an experience he describes as "spilling soup on myself".
Even Malaya took "12 years to resolve", he said, so no one should expect any sudden outbreak of peace and harmony. Some of his criticism of heavy-handed US tactics echoes that made by British officers such as Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster who, in turn, has been denounced by American officers as an "insufferable snob".
The preface to
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife
Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
John A. Nagl
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/567702.html
Ah well, the old saying of hindsight certainly applies here as well. Hopefully we can get the right people in place to adapt, overcome, and win this conflict.
The French kept the Japanese Army to keep order in SE Asia after WW II.
Did we keep the German Army after WW II intact, or did we disband it, develop de-Nazification procedures and start again ?
Would you keep the Baathist army without finding out where each and every member's loyalties lay ? And, would you confine them under guard in barracks or let them go home and apply again for the new Army ?
Seems like you are a little short on the logistics and consequences of what you advocate.
What I do like about our Army is that they learn and adapt quickly. Cynically speaking, no peace time exercise can substitute for the real war experience. This "benefit" surely does not come cheap (in blood and money) but may become priceless later.
I typed my post while you did yours. Take a look. :^)
Neither you or I are able to speculate accurately as to logistics and/or consequences of these actions! However, I can say that I had tremendous respect for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Zinni, and Powell. Zinni and Powell had much different philosophies on post-war Iraq than did Cheney and Rumsfeld. Now, much of what Cheney and Rumsfeld have said has turned out to be completely wrong. This being the case, I am of the distinct opinion that Powell and Zinni had a better approach - which involved retaining 'some' baathists and keeping the Iraqi military to maintain order.
Gen. Georges Sada, in his book 'Saddam's Secrets', says that the Baathist officers should have been dismissed but the enlisted men retained. In his opinion, sending home 500,000 armed, unemployed men, did exacerbate the insurgency.
What Iraqi Army? They melted away and were not heard from again (Other than the ones who joined the insurgency) until we stopped paying them for not showing up!
Great minds think alike ? :)
No, of course we'll never know what would have happened 100% if we'd done something else, but...there are a few things on which we can reliably speculate.
1) Immediately securing the ammo and other military gear would have been more effective than worrying about the Army.
2)Zarquawi was already in the country and operating (as noted in some of the translated Iraqui documents), so you can bet the terrorists (sometimes erroneously called insurgents! ) were already planning mayhem. Additionally, Syria and Iran were already slipping agents over the Iraqi border - we should have paid more attention to the borders earlier in the invasion.
3)We could not trust anyone who worked for Saddam and his henchmen. In some ways, the speedy success of the "war" was detrimental to killing or capturing those who would later go on to cause us harm. Who would you have trusted to lead an Iraqi Army that was recently fighting on behalf of Saddam ? Putting our guys at the head of this army would have probably caused a large number of our officers to die by "friendly" fire.
We sent them home armed ? Or do you mean that they shed their unifoems, took their rifles and ammo, and slipped home to fight another day ?
And these guys, whose loyalty obviously is not to a better life after Saddam, should have been retained by us as the basis of an Iraqi Army ?
What did Gen. Sada say we should have done with them ? My opinion is, we should have used them, like we did the Germans, to clean up the mess caused by Saddam. Remove debris, do the grunt work necessary to create sanitation facilities and the like.
We disbanded the Iraqi Army. But we didn't confiscate their small arms. Sada said he asked for permission to take over security for Baghdad, using 40,000 of his own Iraqi Air Force guys. One US general agreed to hi plan, but it was overruled higher up.
This was a good read.
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