Axe Does Lebanon

I'm off to southern Lebanon for a couple weeks in order to check up on the U.N. force (including the bad-ass at left) that's supposedly keeping an eye on Hezbollah and intercepting Syrian infiltrators and Iranian weapons. With pro-Hez demonstrations only growing in Beirut, it seems that the U.N. force is at best ineffective and, at worst, an irritant to local Shi'ites. My job is to check out the U.N. forces' weapons and technology for Defense Technology International, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for other stories too. And I'll blog the trip once my boss at DTI, the fabulous Sharon Weinberger, gives me the all-clear. You can help underwrite my travels by buying my new book, ARMY 101, coming soon from University of South Carolina Press. Okay, enough whoring. Wish me luck!

--David Axe

Labouchere of Arabia

"He's gone totally native," one British officer at Basra Air Station said of the maverick commander of the Queen's Royal Hussars battlegroup. He's the subject of my first feature for Defense Technology International, where I am the new military editor.

Lieutenant Colonel David Labouchere commands 500 soldiers in three squadrons scattered across the dry expanse of Maysan province on the Iranian border. His mission: to intercept illegal weapons and foreign fighters slipping across the old minefields and hulk-dotted former battlefields left over from the Iran-Iraq war. As many as 3 million people died here from 1980 to 1988 in what was just the bloodiest chapter of a long bloody history. Maysan is entirely Shi'ite, deeply tribal and hostile to all foreigners -- defined as anyone not from Maysan. That means Sunni insurgents and terrorists don't last long here. On the other hand, British forces aren't terribly welcome either. It didn't help that, until August, British forces in the province operated from a former Ba'ath prison called Abu Naji. The base became a magnet for mortar and rocket fire. After one particularly intense barrage in May, Labouchere decided it was time to rethink his tactics. He found his inspiration in history.

Nearly a century ago, British Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence -- a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia -- raced across North Africa the Middle East on horseback, uniting warring tribes in the fight against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence combined tactical brilliance with a deep respect and sophisticated understanding of Arabs and Islam. Labouchere does the same. Where elsewhere in Iraq, coalition commanders fret over every violent act perpetrated by one Iraqi on another, often intervening in a way that just escalates tensions, Labouchere accepts a certain amount of bloodshed in his province ... as long as it's in line with traditional ways of resolving conflicts. Observing one recent firefight between tribal fighters and Iraqi cops, Labouchere chose not to step in. By Iraqi standards, he says, it was simply a "conversation".

Like Lawrence, Labouchere relies on speed and agility. He travels light in just a dozen vehicles per squadron, mostly trucks and speedy Land Rovers but including a handful of Scimitar light tanks armed with 30-millimeter cannons. At night he bivouacs in depressions or nestled between hills to shield him from prying eyes. By day he sorties to patrol the border, show the flag in remote towns and hold court with Iraqi cops, local army troops and the tribal leaders who are his eyes and ears and his allies in the fight against smugglers and foreign fighters. He and his troops shit in ditches, shave with bottled water and eat foil-packed rations. They sleep under the stars on collapsing cots. They live simply and waste little, all in an effort to stay light and to ween themselves from slow, vulnerable ground convoys.

Most resupply is by air. Every couple days a Merlin helicopter arrives with water, food and fresh troops and carries away soldiers in need of rest. For bigger spares and lubes, a Hercules will airdrop a dozen pallets ... or the battlegroup will clear a desert airstrip for a quick landing. For diesel fuel -- the heaviest and most vexing of Labouchere's logistical needs -- he tries to buy tanker services from a trusted local contractor.

Staying light means doing without many of the high-tech whizbangs other coalition commanders take for granted. Periodically, Labouchere's superiors send him some fancy new gizmo on a Merlin. More often than not, he sends it right back. A couple weeks ago they sent him a Raven drone and its operators. In a rare act of indulgence, Labouchere let them demonstrate the tiny drone. But when it crashed into his Merlin, putting a dent in the prized $30-million chopper, Labouchere sent the operators packing. Who needs a drone when you spend most the day racing across the desert, scanning the horizon with your own two eyes? Labouchere eschews networked comms and navigation in favor of old-fashioned radios and paper maps, prefers alert troops to radio jammers for avoiding roadside bombs and refuses weapons heavier than a 7.62-millimetere machine gun, If he gets in a pickle, his battlegroup is stacked with forward air controllers and the U.S. Air Force is just 15 minutes away. A low-level flyby has always sufficed to defuse a bad situation.

Accustomed as I am to heavy, bristling, techy American methods in Iraq, I was shocked and little bit unnerved by Labouchere's "keep it simple" philosophy. But when I saw it working ... when I saw the way locals had warmed to his presence ... when I saw how much ground he covered and how quickly ... I declared his methods "revolutionary". "This is actually quite an old way of doing things," Labouchere countered. I saw his point: overlooking for a moment the vital presence of the sophisticated Merlins, there's no new technology in the battlegroup. We're talking diesel engines, machine guns, radios, maps and canvas cots. What's novel, in the context of this war, is Labouchere's confidence in tradition and basic principles. But he's right. Delicate communications networks can't replace a friendly local populace. Billion-dollar support contracts to firms such as Halliburton don't boost Iraqi confidence in their government and armed forces -- and they certainly don't kill foreign fighters sneaking across the border. Heavy tanks and massive fixed bases just draw fire and sprout huge convoys that also draw fire ... and that require escort, which only leads to more forces operating from fixed bases requiring still more convoys, and so on. An American base housing a thousand troops might generate a dozen small patrols per day. Labouchere does twice as much work with half the force -- and he does it more cheaply and with a proportionally smaller footprint that's far less irritating to Iraqis.

But could a force like Labouchere's survive in an urban jungle like Baghdad, where coalition forces have turned to heavier and heavier vehicles for protection against rockets and roadside bombs? "Why couldn't it?" Labouchere asks. He points to another historical lesson, this one from Northern Ireland, where British heavy vehicles just pissed off the natives and provoked a proportional response. If we went light in Baghdad, Labouchere's argument goes, it might help defuse some of the tension. And it would certainly be cheaper.

It's a bold proposal, but one with firm grounding in history ... and one getting an early test run on Maysan's sandy wastes.

Imagine a Stryker brigade adopting Labouchere's model. Imagine what we could accomplish combining American resources with Labouchere's no-nonsense methods. Now imagine that American commanders had half his guts and smarts.

--David Axe

UPDATE 11:16 EST: David Axe here. Folks have responded pretty violently to this post, especially to that last sentence. Let me clarify. There are plenty of brave and smart U.S. commanders, especially at the battalion level and below. But it's telling that none have adopted Labouchere's model. Here's why I think that is: Labouchere's methods are risky. His constant worry is that he'll get caught in a firefight against a superior force and get massacred. But that's a risk he's willing to accept in order to operate the way he does, in order to win. Most coalition forces in Iraq are, by Labouchere's estimation, hampered by an obsession with static force protection, a fortress mentality. While it's great to take care of your troops, if taking care of your troops means you handicap your own ability to operate -- thus prolonging the war and, as a result, incurring further casualties on your force -- then something's got to give.

UPDATE 11:25 EST: David again. Not to get carried away with the updates, but I gotta respond to one criticism. Folks are saying that the recent takeover of a city in Maysan by a Shi'ite militia proves that Labouchere has failed in his mission. I have addressed that very point here at Defense Tech and in a piece over at World Politics Watch. My basic point: several of the militias in southern Iraq represent law and order, and police do not. So a militia takeover is actually a good thing. I believe Labouchere would concur.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army ... A Good Idea?

Reasonably well-led, adequately armed with light weapons and competent in a stand-up fight, yet constrained by internal and external factors, the 10th Division is typical of Iraqi Army formations - and its progress over the years parallels that of non-police Iraqi forces in general. Since the total disbanding of the Iraqi Army in 2003, coalition trainers have painstakingly recruited and trained up more than 129,000 Iraqi troops in 10 divisions, slowly transforming a slouching mob into an army that, by regional standards, isn't half bad.

So begins my profile of the Basra-based Iraqi Army 10th Division over at Military.com. Between the lines is this controversial claim: that the total disbanding of the Iraqi Army in the wake of their 2003 defeat wasn't the critical failure that others have claimed.

The best treatment of this debate remains Michael Gordon's 2004 piece in The New York Times, in which he calls the decision to disband "one of the most contentious issues of the post-war."

Mr. [Walter] Slocombe [an aide to Paul Bremer] argues that the move was necessary to establish an Iraqi military that was not tainted by corruption and was acceptable to ethnic groups that had long been repressed by Saddam Hussein's military. He also says that it was the only possible course because so many Iraqi soldiers had fled their posts and drifted back into the population and military bases had been picked clean by looters.

I agree. These days, the Iraqi Army is our best ally in the fight against insurgents, criminals and terrorists in Iraq. The army is only this good because they're not the army we defeated in 2003.

(The Army's counterparts in the police force are very nearly insurgents themselves, they're so corrupt and inept. Note that the police force never got disbanded and rebuilt the way the army did.)

On the other hand, the time it took to rebuild the Iraqi Army was a window for the insurgency to gain strength. And, as Gordon explains, the move had a moral effect:

"It was absolutely the wrong decision," said Col. Paul Hughes of the Army, who served as an aide to Jay Garner, a retired three-star general and the first civilian administrator of Iraq. "We changed from being a liberator to an occupier with that single decision,'' he said. "By abolishing the army, we destroyed in the Iraqi mind the last symbol of sovereignty they could recognize and as a result created a significant part of the resistance."

I see Hughes' point, but I remain convinced that disbanding the Iraqi Army was the only way to ever have a good Iraqi Army.

What do you think?

--David Axe

Iraqi Forces Don't Suck ... Entirely

Despite what you might have heard from other media, the Iraqi Army does not suck. In fact, by regional standards, it's a fine little army: well-armed, well-led and capable of defeating terrorists and insurgents in a stand-up fight. It wasn't always that way, but the coalition's clean-sheet approach and years of hard work by training teams has really paid off.

But the Iraqi Army has two major weaknesses. First, its units are locally recruited, like the U.S. National Guard. This combined with Iraqis' overriding allegiance to tribe over nation means that most of them refuse to deploy when ordered to do so by Baghdad. Those units that have agreed to deploy, such as the highly disciplined Kurdish battalon sent to the Shiite town of Balad early this year, have been besieged in their forward operation bases by xenophobic locals.

But even if they were willing to deploy, most units are incapable of sustaining themselves far from their major bases for very long. This is the second major weakness. I go into detail in a new National Defense feature:

The [Iraqi] 10th Division is capable of planning and executing its own missions, but usually operates alongside British forces. The division, a light infantry formation, has four brigades each with two line battalions of 800 troops apiece, plus engineer and bomb disposal companies. Small divisional attachments including signals troops and military police are just now standing up with foreign assistance. There are currently no organic logistics troops.

This is consistent with the overall structure of the Iraqi Army. No more than 15 percent of Iraq’s 120,000 soldiers are involved in logistics, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Gerald Ostlund told the Associated Press. By contrast, Western armies feature more logisticians than combat troops.

"What you see is what you get," [British Army Lt. Col. Tim] Barrett says, referring to the 10th Division's infantry-heavy structure. While the battalions are adequately equipped with light arms and machine guns, there is a "desperate need" for vehicles, Lateef says. Currently, a handful of Russian-built medium trucks comprise the division’s major motor assets.

A dearth of vehicles plus a broader lack of logistical support means the 10th Division is incapable of sustaining operations away from its bases for more than a few hours, according to Barrett. This effectively limits it to urban operations in Basra and short sorties from a handful of rural installations.

What all this means is that the Iraqi Army will, for the time being, remain a local defense force. A good local defense force, mind you, but local nonetheless. So when Baghdad goes to shit, as it did a couple months back, the national government has few options for boosting the number of troops in the city. All it can do is try to recruit more troops locally ... and call for U.S. and British help.

--David Axe

Policing the Iraqi police

British-led forces in Basra are speeding up an effort to reform the city's troubled police force with a heightened awareness that they are running out of time, as I explain in yesterday's The Washington Times.

Operation Sinbad, begun in August, has seen as many as 1,000 British soldiers backed up by 2,000 Iraqi troops "surge into Iraqi police stations and raise standards," said Brig. James Everard, senior commander of coalition forces in southern Iraq.

To prepare the ground in this sweltering, hostile city, first British and Iraqi engineers launch small reconstruction projects in a target neighborhood. These, plus ongoing employment generation schemes managed by officers including Captain Steve Morte, are intended to win some short-term consent that should buy time for the police reformers to do their jobs.

Weeding out the most corrupt police and death-squad members means first conducting a census of a force that, in recent years, has eluded the oversight of outnumbered and overstretched coalition forces. Just 8,000 coalition troops, most of them British, are responsible for four southern provinces with a combined population of more than 5 million.

On the morning of Oct. 1, a small team led by Royal Military Police Cpl. Stacey Jackson, 27, visited a Basra police station to register 300 Iraqi officers and their weapons and to administer a written test intended to measure literacy and knowledge of basic policing.

Two Iraqi officers sat side by side on an exposed bed frame, openly reading each other's answers, their brows furrowed in confusion. A grinning Cpl. Jackson explained that, anticipating efforts to cheat, she had prepared 10 different versions of the exam.

Police reform has taken on greater urgency in the wake of recent events in nearby Al Amarah, where militia forces took on the corrupt police force, killing around a dozen people in a two-day battle -- and demonstrating that if Western forces can't reform the cops peacefully, militias will do it their way.

--David Axe

Iranian invasion? Probably not

Shi'ite militiamen have seized control of Al Amarah, the largest city in the southern province of Maysan, according to The L.A. Times:

Police barricaded themselves inside their stations and fought off the attackers, but eventually fled after running out of ammunition. The militiamen, affiliated with Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, then stormed the stations. At least 15 people were killed in fighting today and 90 people were injured. Another seven were killed the previous day.

Here's why you shouldn't worry. The police in Al Amarah are some of the most thuggish and corrupt in all of Iraq -- and that's saying a lot. For most Al Amarah residents, militia control might be an improvement.

But it's not those poor Iraqis most pundits and politicians are worried about. It's Iran. And to those who paint Iraq in broad brush strokes, Shi'ite Iraqis and their militias are just fronts for Tehran, which slips agents and weapons over the porous border in the bottoms of Marsh Arab fishing boats.

It's a little more complicated than that, as I explain over at World Politics Watch:

For 4,000 years the [Shi'ite] Marsh Arabs have inhabited what is now southern Iraq. For much of that history they were ignored by the various governments that rose and fell in the region. The result is a xenophobic, deeply traditional society where tribal leaders are the highest authority -- and where political borders are largely irrelevant.

Not that those political borders are always clear. Maysan's marshes are a shifting landscape devoid of permanent features. [British commander Lieutenant Colonel David] Labouchere says it's difficult to mark a border in such a place. "The division between Iran and Iraq is, at places, fuzzy," he says. So fuzzy that, two years ago, eight British servicemen were briefly detained by the Iranian military after accidentally crossing into Iranian waters while delivering boats to the Iraqi Navy.

If British troops can't tell where Iraq ends and Iran begins, how can anyone expect illiterate Marsh Arab fisherman to know and care -- especially when, from their shared point of view, borders are matters of tribe and marriage, not politics and international agreement?

Bottom line: militia seizure of Al Amarah doesn't entail an Iranian invasion of Iraq any more than Marsh Arab fishermen are Iranian agents.

--David Axe

Flying Iraqi Air (Force)

A team of U.S. Air Force personnel at Basra Air Station in southern Iraq is working to rebuild an air force that the U.S. military spent more than a decade destroying, as I note in today's The Washington Times. Former test pilot Lt. Col. Kelly Latimer and her team of five pilots and maintainers are partnered with 70 Squadron of the reborn Iraqi air force, which three years ago had been grounded by 12 years of attacks and sanctions.

The squadron's 15 Iraqi pilots and 39 other personnel operate four light aircraft donated by coalition countries -- two bulbous Seekers powered by a single pusher propeller and painted bright yellow, as well as two single-prop CH-2000s sporting a more conventional engine-in-front layout and gray paint. Both types carry infrared and daylight cameras for monitoring power and oil infrastructure and for spotting targets for other branches of the Iraqi military.

This year, the squadron has spent 900 hours in the air, usually flying about five sorties a day. An American pilot rides along on all flights. This close partnership isn't likely to change anytime soon, given the Iraqi Air Force's limited capability. The Air Force Association's Daily Report notes:

Lagging behind Iraqi ground forces is the buildup of the Iraqi Air Force, which [defense analyst Anthony] Cordesman says is "at best a small cadre of forces with token reconnaissance and air transport capability." The chief problem being "difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates." He does say that Iraq plans to at least double the current 750-man force by the end of 2007. Of course, he also notes that the Iraq Ministry of Defense has not developed plans to procure its own combat aircraft. All of which makes last year's prediction by outgoing USAF Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper that the US Air Force would still be in Iraq long after US ground troops have pulled out seem right on the mark.

--David Axe

Patrolling the Shatt

Iraq has just two ports, Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr, in the south near Basra. Combined they generate 97% of the nation's revenue. Both are connected to the Persian Gulf by the polluted Shatt Al Arab waterway, which in lawless recent years has become a major artery for smugglers sneaking weapons, livestock and crude oil to and from Iran.

Cracking down on these smugglers is a major priority of coalition and Iraqi forces. To this end, the Iraqi Navy patrols the Gulf end of the waterway in Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats and Fast Aluminum Boats -- that is, when they've got enough diesel fuel and spares for their boats' motors. British Army Royal Engineers attached to 20 Armored Brigade employ similar craft to patrol the waterway between the coalition's two major downtown Basra bases, while infantry conduct foot patrols and man observation posts along the banks to spot smugglers' mooring points.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the U.S. military -- having abandoned so-called brown-water warfare after Vietnam -- has found itself ill-prepared to conduct these kinds of waterway patrols, leading to ad hoc measures like arming engineer boats normally used for emplacing ribbon bridges. The Navy's new riverine force, recently stood up at Little Creek, Virginia, will eventually take over from units pressed into river patrol duty, hopefully with the positive results you'd expect of a dedicated force.

It's just another example of relearning in Iraq lessons we forgot after Vietnam.

--David Axe

Axe Does BBC

Armed with just a $100 Mp3 recorder and sheer recklessness, I braved mortar fire and blood-thirsty scorpions to report in southern Iraq for BBC radio. The results are now live. Enjoy.

--David Axe

Santa Claus Wears Kevlar

Thirty-nine-year-old British Army Captain Steve Morte rides into the tense, sweltering city of Basra in the steel belly of a Warrior armored vehicle, wearing a Kevlar helmet and toting a rifle. But when his patrol arrives at a downtown orphanage and Morte dismounts the Warrior, the helmet comes off and the rifle disappears behind his back. He extends one meaty hand and grins broadly as he greets Fadil, a tall Iraqi man wearing slacks and a dress shirt.

"Salaam alaikum," Morte says. Peace to you.

"Alaikum salaam," replies Fadil, a 39-year-old local construction contractor with a $56,000 contract, issued by Morte using U.S. reconstruction funds, to shore up the orphanage's ceilings and build new bathrooms. It's just one of more than 200 projects that Morte oversees. Officially, his title is Civil-Military Cooperation expert. Unofficially, he's like Santa Claus to the thousands of Baswaris who rely on him for employment and the hundreds of thousands who benefit from their labors.

"Buying a little consent in the area, showing them the way," is how Morte describes his mission. For eventually the American money will dry up and the 8,000 British troops will leave. When that happens, contractors such as Fadil will be on their own.

"That's a problem," Morte stresses, adding that hopefully the contractors he has set up in business will work for the Iraqi government as it assumes more responsibility for reconstruction in Basra.

Read the rest at Military.com.

--David Axe

Merlins Work Their Magic

As British forces consolidate at fewer and fewer bases in southern Iraq -- and as the threat from IEDs grows -- air transport is becoming more important. Choppers and airplanes operating from Basra Air Station haul supplies and troops, monitor tribal troops and religious militias and spot smugglers sneaking across the Iranian border. Perhaps most importantly, helicopters are on call to evacuate casualties from far-flung mobile forces. Thanks to their choppers, British troops are never more than an hour away from the surgeons who might save their lives.

Like their U.S. counterparts, British aerial medics will make do with any helicopter available, whether it be a cramped Army Lynx or a larger Royal Marines Sea King. But their favorite platform is the Royal Air Force Merlin, at least five of which are deployed with the Joint Helicopter Force at Basra Air Station. The Merlin "is much bigger inside, has got more room and got longer legs," says medic Sergeant Nichola Underwood, adding that the three-engine bird boasts "a smoother ride" too. That's an important when you're trying to treat a casualty while flying at 160 knots over hostile terrain.

The Merlin's not just a kick-ass air ambulance. Mobile forces operating in the southern Iraqi deserts prefer the Merlin for resupply missions, as it can get to you quicker and has a more voluminous hold than its stablemates. While the best hauler is the twin-rotor Chinook, those massive birds are all deployed to Afghanistan where their powerful engines and long range are vital. For flatter, less remote Iraq, the Merlin is perfect. Commanders' only complaint is that there aren't enough of them. With one usually assigned to the medics and at least another in maintenance, just two or three are available for new taskings.

The Brits aren't the only ones in love with the Merlin. The Marine Corps is buying an American-made version for its new Presidential Helicopter. And the so-called US.101 model is a strong contender for the Air Force's 141-plane competition to replace the ageing HH-60G Pave Hawk.

--David Axe

Two Down, Two to Go

This summer, British forces in southern Iraq returned the first two of Iraq's 18 provinces to native control. Another handover is imminent. But it's anybody's guess when the most important of the Brits' four provinces might go.

Muthanna province was the first and easiest. This remote province is sparsely populated, deeply hostile to foreign fighters -- in fact, to any foreigners -- and firmly ruled by its dominant sheiks. The only reason coalition forces were there at all was to look after a Japanese team building a new power plant. When the Japanese finished up and headed home this summer, their 500 Australian minders moved north to neighboring Dhi Qar province, relieving an Italian force redeploying to Lebanon for peacekeeping duty.

Dhi Qar, another barren desert province, itself was in the process of transitioning to Iraqi control. The Aussies remain under a Memorandum of Understanding with Baghdad. Their job: to sit, wait and watch Muthanna and Dhi Qar. In the event extremists try to turn the provinces into Al Anbar-style insurgent havens, the Aussies will swing into action in their Light Armored Vehicles.

Further north, the Brits have begun a staged withdrawal from the border province of Maysan, population 900,000. Once upon a time, a British battlegroup was based at Camp Abu Naji near Al Amarah, Maysan's biggest city. The base, a Saddam-era prison, was a symbol of the occupation to Al Amarah's proud, xenophobic and impoverished people. It became, in the words of British Lieutenant Colonel David Labouchere, "an indirect-fire magnet". In May, Labouchere and his battlegroup from the Queen's Royal Hussars endured a 10-minute, 100-round, middle-of-the-night barrage that rattled even this seasoned officer. He recalls cowering naked under a table with the base's pet goat Ben, who "pissed and shit everywhere" in panic. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

After the attack, Labouchere came up with a plan to speed Maysan towards Iraqi control. He would shut down Abu Naji and take to the desert with a small, light mobile force resupplied mostly by air. With this force he would patrol the porous border with Iran, conduct diplomatic missions into tribal areas and check up on Iraqi troops and border cops. The idea was to remove the double irritants of a permanent facility and the large road convoys that supply it and focusing on the most critical mission -- border security -- while leveraging a reduced presence to encourage Iraqis to pick up the slack in security.

Labouchere shuttered Abu Naji in August. Today he rides through Maysan like a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia, uniting the province's tribes under the banner of Iraqi control. He hopes the formally hand over the province in a matter of months. Ideally, his battlegroup will win permission from Baghdad to continue patrolling the Iranian border even after the handover.

Maysan's transfer will leave just Basra province, home to Iraq's second city Basra, with a growing population pushing two million. Basra is dominated by Shi'ite clerics including Moqtada Al Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia is more powerful by far than the city's corrupt cops. Half-hearted and heavy-handed attempts to pacify the militias over the past three years, plus a decaying infrastructure and police misbehavior unfairly blamed on the Brits, have eroded local consent to the point where most Baswaris are loudly calling for British troops to leave, often with rockets, mortars and bricks. But Basra sits atop most of Iraq's oil and generates 97 percent of the country's revenue. It cannot be abandoned until local institutions are robust and security is air tight.

So the Brits have a plan. They call it Sinbad after the legendary hero who is said to have begun his voyage from Basra. British troops, reinforced by the top-notch 10th Iraqi Army division that normally patrols the city's marshy outskirts, will push into Basra one neighborhood at a time, flooding police stations with advisors while also patching up infrastructure and identifying opportunities to spend $80 million in American reconstruction funds. With the cops reformed and the streets clean, Baswaris might feel better about their British occupiers and grant them the space to continue rebuilding local government.

It's a bold plan, and outnumbered coalition troops must execute it while under murderous indirect fire that, on October 1, killed one British soldier, injured another and blew up the trailer I had left just five minutes earlier. Basra's a rough town -- but one that's critical to Iraq's future. Fortunately, the British-led force here is at the top of its game, with new equipment and tactics and a growing recognition that a functional Iraq won't look like Britain or the U.S, but is still worth fighting for.

Check out pics from my current Iraq trip at Flickr.

-- David Axe

Axe in Iraq, Take Seven

So I'm off to Basra in southern Iraq to hang out with the British Army. Basra province, once a sideshow in this drama, has become a main act in recent months. Iranian influence is on the rise. The Shi'ite militias exert increasing control while Iraqi government authority wanes. Attacks on coalition forces are at an all-time high and casualties have skyrocketed. But it's not all bad news. The Brits have just turned over two provinces to Iraqi control, with more pending. I'll be filing from Iraq whenever I can. Wish me luck.

--David Axe

Moonlighters Take the Prize

Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 "Moonlighters" flying Boeing F/A-18D Hornets out of Beaufort, S.C., has won the Corps' annual prize for best fighter squadron, beating out 16 other Hornet units, Marine Corps News reports:

The Moonlighters' list of achievements is beyond compare, and includes becoming the first Marine tactical jet squadron ever to surpass 100,000 mishap-free flight hours in 2005. While deployed to Camp Al Asad, Iraq, from July 2005 to January they continued to build upon this record.

I was embedded with 332 during their stint in Iraq, and I can vouch: they really are the best. Over Al Anbar province they flew dangerous missions at low level dropping bombs and firing guns to rescue Marines from tight spots. Just a couple weeks back I got an email from one Marine who begged me to help him get in touch with the unit. He had been one of their "customers" in Iraq and was convinced the Moonlighters had saved his life.

But there's more to the story than the Marine Corps public affairs machine allows. Due to a shortage of airframes and delays to the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning (formerly Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF), 332 is decommissioning in March 2007, as I reported in National Defense Magazine:

“Obviously [JSF introduction] is a moving target, but it has slid to the right [past 2010],” [Navy Lt. Cmdr. Marc] Preston says. “Every time it slides, it affects Marine aircraft more than it affects Navy. Their issues are a little harder than ours because the Navy bought [Super Hornets] and Marines didn’t with anticipation that the JSF would be on time.”

That little article got a lot of people riled up -- especially a couple of retired Marine generals too old and grumpy to play politics and too much in love with Marines to just sit back and watch Corps aviation waste away. Here, an excerpt from the least profane of these generals' missives:

It looks to me as though the architects of the disastrous [plan], the overly ambitious "always faithful" rotorheads and Harrier mafia -- who these days dominate Marine aviation and are always sucking up to the Marine grunt-dominated selection boards professing that their monumental vision of "vertical" was always the coziest, closest possible air support, the grunt's ace in the hole, just a snap of the fingers away over there hiding behind the hill ready to strike at any time, and in the infantry's very best and only interest -- are now frantically talking to themselves!

In other words, the brass in charge of Corps aviation are too close to the problem to see it clearly ... and to care. And the problem is that Marine Corps aviation has put all its eggs in the F-35 basket. Now the basket is late and getting later while the demand for eggs keeps on rising.

--David Axe

Still the Best Weapon

The last couple of months have been especially rough for American grunts' image in Iraq. First, there were allegations that U.S. Marines massacred Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November. What followed was a flurry of further allegations, as described by the Associated Press:

* On Friday, a Pennsylvania National Guard spokesman said two Guardsmen were being investigated in connection with the shooting death of an Iraqi earlier this year.

* On Wednesday, seven Marines and one Navy corpsman were charged in the April shooting death of an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. Charging documents claim the man was taken from his home, forced into a hole, shot and left with a stolen AK-47 near him to make it look as if he fought the troops.

* On Monday and Wednesday, three Soldiers and a noncommissioned officer were charged in the May deaths of three unarmed Iraqis in military custody in Salahuddin province. A Pentagon official told The Associated Press that the detainees were shot while trying to flee.

Finally, this week paratroopers confessed to raping an Iraqi woman and killing her and her family in March.

The number of alleged incidents is disturbing enough ... that they've all surfaced around the same time is doubly worrisome. Something's going on here. Perhaps former Marine Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, is right in saying that three years of war has so worn down U.S. forces that they can't be trusted to think clearly and act right any more.

My experiences in Iraq don't corroborate Rieckhoff's theory. I don't see the American war effort flagging -- at least not on account of individual soldiers' weariness. No, the troops I've embedded with are as motivated and reliable as ever.

I can't explain all the recent allegations -- and I eagerly await investigations' findings. In the meantime, on this beautiful 4th of July, let's remember that a few criminals and psychopaths don't represent the entire U.S. military. And the best weapon in the nasty little war is still the young grunt on the ground.

To honor U.S. servicepeople in Iraq on the anniversary of our nation's independence, I'm reposting my final journal from Iraq:

The Best Weapon

On Feb. 2, M-1 driver Cpl. Walter Howard, 35, was maneuvering his tank against insurgents near the town of Balad when an IED exploded, killing him instantly. At his memorial service today, officers and soldiers wept and held each other. A general, colonels and sergeants major clapped shoulders and doled out hugs. An entire battalion and their brigade leadership poured out their hearts. It was hard to watch.

Howard, a former Seabee with a wife and a daughter, is the first fatality suffered by Alpha Company, 1-8 Infantry, which since December has occupied a crappy little FOB called McKenzie, where MREs pass for food, the mud is ankle-deep and the mood is plain glum. Theirs is the bad side of Balad; almost every day they take fire from disaffected Sunnis in the city's suburbs. IEDs are a constant threat. And while everyone hopes that Howard will be the only KIA here, most know better.

Still, every day Alpha Company rides out in their Humvees, M-2 Bradleys and tanks. Every day they walk the area's filthy streets, knocking on doors or kicking them down, following leads, rounding up bad guys and doing what they can to win the hearts of these poor, untrusting people. Every day they face death side by side, motivated in part by patriotism, duty, pay, their desire to help Iraqis or a lack of anything better to do, but mostly by their love for each other and their refusal to let each other down.

Never mind radio jammers, armored vehicles and drones. Never mind multi-billion-dollar programs like FBCB2 and Blue Force Tracker. The real secret weapon of this nasty little war is the young grunt on the ground, the guy who faces Iraq's million little problems with a million little solutions of his own, every day for a year at a time, and who -- while folks back home decry the monetary cost of this war -- bears the true cost, in his blood.

Happy 4th of July, America.

--David Axe

Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War

This war in Iraq was launched on a theory: That, with the right communication and reconnaissance gear, American armed forces would be quicksilver-fast and supremely lethal. A country could be conquered with only a fraction of the soldiers needed in the past.

During the initial invasion in March 2003, this idea of "network-centric warfare" worked more or less as promised -- even though most of the frontline troops weren't wired up. It was enough that the commanders were connected.

But now, more than three years into the Iraq conflict, the network is still largely incomplete. Local command centers have a torrent of information pouring in. For soldiers and marines on the ground, this war isn't any more wired that the last one. "There is a connectivity gap," a draft Army War College report notes. "Information is not reaching the lowest levels."

And that's a problem, because the insurgents are stitching together a newtwork of their own. Using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts, these guerrillas rely on a loose web of connections, not a top-down command structure. And they don't fight in large groups that can be easily tracked by high-tech command posts. They have to be hunted down in dark neighborhoods, found amid thousands of civilians, and taken out one by one.

David Axe -- recently back from his 6th trip to Iraq -- and I have a special report in this month's Popular Science, on "Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War." Give it a read. And see how this network-centric ideal is playing out, for real.

Axe Grades Iraq Tech

David Axe has been to Iraq six times, now. So, as part of our big Popular Science feature on the technology of the Iraq war (more on that in a sec), he put together a report card on the U.S. military's ten most important systems in the combat zone.

Check out his grades for everything from the Apache Longbow helicopter ("C") to the M-14 sniper rifle ("A") to the M1A2 Abrams tank (another "C"). And leave your own reviews down below.

Axe does Hedgecock

Hey all, I'll be on the Roger Hedgecock radio show at 4:00 Pacific time on Wednesday, talking about Iraq, I think. For those of you who don't know, Hedgecock is a big-time conservative host in San Diego and a regular sub on Rush Limbaugh. Well, Hedgecock is out for a while and some guy named Valentine is filling in. I'll be sure to hit him with some of my trademark political ambivalence. Go to the show's site to listen live.

--David Axe

Generals Gone Wild!

Today on CNN, retired Army Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. "I think we need senior military leaders who understand the principles of war and apply them ruthlessly, and when the time comes, they need to call it like it is," the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division said.

Swannack joins former Central Command boss Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste -- all retired -- in demanding that Rumsfeld step down.

Batiste, like Swannack, joined the fray relatively late, in an interview with CNN's Miles O'Brien on Wednesday. The interview opened with Batiste slamming Iraq's potential for democracy: "Iraqis, frankly, in my experience, do not understand democracy. Nor do they understand their responsibilities for a free society."

The interview continued:

O'BRIEN: So, you're suggesting a wholesale house cleaning [of Defense Dept. leadership]?

BATISTE: I didn't say wholesale. I said new leadership in the Pentagon, a fresh start. You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense.

O'BRIEN: What is going on that is -- what is it about that climate that is leading to difficulties, leading to trouble, leading to -- as you put it -- perhaps unnecessary bloodshed?

BATISTE: I didn't say unnecessary bloodshed. But when decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision making, sound planning, then we're bound to make mistakes. When we violate the principles of war with mass and unity of command and unity of effort, we do that at our own peril.

Ahem.

I met Batiste a year ago when he was commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq. We spoke for an hour about the insurgency, the Iraqi Army and the upcoming January election for an interim national assembly.

The difference between Batiste's attitude then and his attitude now is suprising. Last year, he said the insurgency was "not an impressive effort", insisted that Al Qaeda was behind the worst attacks in Iraq and predicted that everday Iraqis would soon turn against insurgents. And the kicker -- he described the chunk of the World Trade Center that he kept in his office to remind himself why we had to invade Iraq.

From the safety of retirement, and with his buddies watching his back, Batiste has lashed out at Rumsfeld. But Batiste is guilty of lapses in judgement just as gross as Rumsfeld's. The only difference is that Rumsfeld ranks higher, so his lapses have greater consequences. I'm not defending Rummy. But if Batiste were Secretary of Defense instead, I doubt we'd be much better off.

Below are excerpts of my interview with Batiste:

Q: What is the insurgent strategy?

BATISTE: I haven't seen an insurgent strategy. I've seen disparate efforts. A piece of me says that we give them too much credit.

Q: What is the gravest threat [in the 1st Infantry Division area of operations]?

BATISTE: Al Qaeda.

Q: How are Iraqi security forces shaping up?

BATISTE: The enemy ... he's a coward, is what he is. It's not an impressive effort, and these great Iraqi security forces are figuring that out.

Q: What does a successful election mean for Iraq?

BATISTE: A good election is a huge victory. Our challenge is to give Iraqis an alternative to an insurgency. You know, I carry a piece of the World Trade Center ... to remind me why we're here.

Q: Why are we here?

BATISTE: To end radical Islamic fundamentalism.

Q: But wasn't Saddam Hussein's regime hostile to radical Islamists?

BATISTE: We could argue about that all night.

[end of interview]

--David Axe

Free Press in Kurdistan, Final Act

Twice since December I've posted on the subject of northern Iraq's struggle to build a real democracy ... and a free press. This week Worldpress.org posted my latest (and probably last) take on the subject:

During the struggle against Saddam Hussein's regime, Kurdish peshmerga fighters sought refuge in the mountains surrounding the northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. From here the peshmerga launched raids against Iraqi forces. Often accompanying them were the guerilla propagandists of the dominant Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or K.D.P., and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K.

Plying the countryside with crude newsletters, the propagandists, or "mountain journalists," were a decisive force in rallying Kurds to the insurgent parties. "The Kurdish people at that time was confronting a giant tyrant," says former mountain journalist Dilshad Mustafa, now editor-in-chief of Khabat, a K.D.P.-funded newspaper in Erbil. The journalists' goal, Mustafa says, was "to instigate [the Kurdish people] to do their national duty" — to join them in the mountains resisting the government.

A decade after the Kurds won their fight for autonomy, mountain journalism is no more. The guerillas are now family men with nine-to-five jobs in Kurdistan's burgeoning economy. Their officers are politicians. And the mountain journalists have become the editors and reporters of the region's expanding media.

Read the entire article here.

-- David Axe

The Softer Touch

In north-central Iraq, battalion by battalion, the Army is shifting its tactics. Recognizing that the consent of the local populace is the foundation of progress, battalions are taking pains to make friends.

This means talking (and listening) to local leaders, keeping armored vehicles out of crowded cities, handing out goodies like pencils and medicine and generally treating Iraqis with the same respect you might treat a fellow American. And that means not shooting at them unless you have to.

Some battalions have a softer touch than others. In a recent issue of Spokane's The Inlander newspaper, I profiled Echo Company, 1-8 Infantry, a unit that has taken a softer approach than most:

"It's been suggested that the reason we don't get hit as much is because we're nicer to people," [Echo Co. 1st Lt. Derek] Austin says. Other units shoot up the countryside to test their weapons -- and as a show of force. But not Echo. "We don't do test fires. You don't know where that round's going to go." He says the unit that Echo replaced accidentally shot an Iraqi woman during a test fire.

While Echo has fired warning shots at cars that get too close to their convoys, they've done so as a last resort -- and only twice in two months. Austin says one of the key tenets of Echo's strategy for winning the support of everyday Iraqis is that "we just don't shoot at them.”

Read the article here.

-- David Axe

I'm a Coward

Sherry Ricchiardi from American Journalism Review interviewed me for a story on the dangers facing reporters in Iraq. Kudos to Sherry: the story's great and features one of my personal heroes, John Burns from The New York Times, and friends of mine such as Monte Morin from Stars & Stripes. But I came off sounding like a real coward:

For freelance journalists operating in Iraq, the stakes are even higher. Most enter the country with little logistical support, such as a safe ride along the dangerous road from the Baghdad airport or lodging in a hotel with proper security. They bear their own expenses for an interpreter, car and driver. The high cost and serious risks cause some, like David Axe, to opt out.

Back home in Columbia, South Carolina, Axe says he has no plans to return. "To be honest, trying to get there just isn't worth it anymore. Except for a handful of major media, journalists are getting out," says Axe, whose stories have been published by the Washington Times, the Village Voice and Salon.

The final blow came when Axe had a run-in with the military over information he filed on a blog, www.defensetech.org, that deals with technology. The report had to do with a radio jammer called Warlock, used to thwart remotely detonated IEDs, one of the chief killers of U.S. soldiers. That got him evicted from his embed and caused him to rethink staying without security. In Iraq, "angry looks and whispered words can be a prelude to death," Axe wrote in a January 20 piece for Salon. He went to cover the war, he said, because "it is the biggest story in the world ... but I also don't want to die."

Read the whole story here.

-- David "Scared to Die" Axe

Everybody is E.O.D.

A shortage of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts in Iraq means that engineers and infantry often end up tackling Improvised Explosive Devices themselves.

New equipment including tougher vehicles and simple ground robots make this possible, as I explain in an article in the April National Defense Magazine:

Armored vehicles originally designed to clear mines are used to sweep roads of bombs. Patrols travel inside the protective bubbles of sophisticated radio jammers that intercept the signals that detonate explosives. And engineers are refining the use of small ground robots to identify and destroy IEDs.

Read the entire article here.

-- David Axe

UPDATE 9:49 AM: Noah here. As you can imagine, the guys who spend a year training to become bomb squad technicians aren't exactly thrilled by the newbies who think they handle their jobs, just because of a few new toys. This isn't just a matter of guarding turf (although there is some of that, for sure). There's a pretty major safety issue involved here, too.

Quick example: a group of combat engineers near Baghdad were all fired up about their new, bomb-grabbing Buffalo armored vehicle, which they used to sift through roadside junk piles for IEDs. These guys would dig up an explosive with the Buffalo's spindly claw. And then, they'd be so proud of what they found, they'd want to snap a quick picture of their prize. So they'd use the claw to bring the bomb right up to the Buffalo's cab. And then, the IED would go off. A bad thing, of course. And the kind of thing that happens when folks aren't properly trained in bomb-handling.

UPDATE 10:07 AM: Of course, being an EOD pro doesn't make you bomb-proof. In an incident I barely missed, UK Captain Peter Norton lost a leg and part of an arm to an IED. Yesterday, he was awarded one of the British military's highest honors, the George Cross. Only 21 others have received it since 1945. His citation reads, in part:

"Captain Norton was the second-in-command of the US Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell (CEXC) based in the outskirts of Baghdad. The unit has been in the forefront of counter Improvised Explosive Device (IED) operations and is plays a vital role in the collection and analysis of weapons intelligence.

At 1917 hours on 24 July 2005, a three vehicle patrol from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Regiment of the Georgia National Guard was attacked by a massive command initiated IED in the Al Bayaa district near Baghdad. The ensuing explosion resulted in the complete destruction of a 'Humvee' patrol vehicle and the deaths of four US personnel. Due to the significance of the attack, a team from CEXC, commanded by Captain Norton, was tasked immediately to the scene. On arrival, Captain Norton was faced with a scene of carnage and the inevitable confusion which is present in the aftermath of such an incident. He quickly took charge and ensured the safety of all the coalition forces present. A short while later he was briefed that a possible command wire had been spotted in the vicinity of the explosion site. With a complete understanding of the potential hazard to himself and knowing that the insurgents had used secondary devices before in the particularly dangerous part of Iraq, Captain Norton instructed his team and the US forces present in the area to remain with their vehicle while he alone went forward to confirm whether a command wire IED was present.

A short while later, an explosion occurred and Captain Norton sustained a traumatic amputation of his left leg and suffered serious blast and fragmentation injuries to his right leg, arms and lower abdomen. When his team came forward to render first aid, he was conscious, lucid and most concerned regarding their safety. He had correctly deduced that he had stepped on a victim operated IED and there was a high probability that further devices were present. Before allowing them to render first aid, he instructed his team on which areas were safe and where they could move. Despite having sustained grievous injuries he remained in command and coolly directed the follow-up actions. It is typical of the man that he ignored his injuries and regarded the safety of his men a paramount as they administered life saving first aid to him. It is of note that a further device was found less than ten metres away and rendered safe the following day. Captain Norton's prescience and clear orders in the most difficult circumstances undoubtedly prevented further serious injury or loss of life.

(Big ups: JQP, LB)

No Army of One

Ethnic and religious divisions in Iraqi Army and police units are undermining efforts to hand over security to native forces.

This is the story I was chasing when I got unceremoniously evicted from Iraq by the U.S. Army in February. I managed to finish the story, however, and it ran in yesterday's Washington Times:

Firefights, mortar attacks and roadside bombings attributed to a combination of Sunni insurgents and disaffected locals continued unabated in and around Balad in the wake of the transfer of control, leading to the reassignment of the Kurdish battalion from the relative security of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The large Sunni minority living around Balad has protested the Kurdish unit's presence, said U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Coffey, a member of an ad hoc military transition team that is helping train the Kurdish battalion.

He said the residents have resisted the presence of the Kurdish battalion with such force that commanders are afraid to let the soldiers leave their base, which is adjacent to a U.S. compound outside the city.

Read the full article here.

-- David Axe

High Tech Versus Low

On a night in early February, I'm standing on a berm at an Iraqi Army base with Army Sgt. Erik Morrow, watching a $4.5-million M-1A2 tank zero its machine gun in preparation for a mission. Tracers lance into the darkness, striking the target with perfect precision. The tank's accuracy is amazing, even at night. But Morrow just shrugs. Yeah, the A2 is the best tank in the world, hands-down. But, he says, for this war, he'd prefer an older, simpler model that's easier to maintain and starts up faster.

These days there's a lot of tension between proponents of the latest uber-lethal whiz-bang weapons and folks who say that modern conflict demands lots of grunts on the ground with simple tools applying smart tactics. Me? I love me some high-tech, but my experience in Iraq tells me the latter party is probably right.

In two pieces in the latest Sea Power, I explore both ends of the technology spectrum: airborne datalinks on one end and hammers and shovels on the other.

The Seabees piece sums up my position neatly:

It’s not a glamorous war the Seabees are fighting. It’s a war of hammers, nails, two-by-fours and improvisation in difficult conditions. Despite the occasional incoming mortar round or sniper fire at [Naval Mobile Construction Battalion] 133’s detachments, there’s not a lot of shooting in their war.

But without the Seabees, the lives of the soldiers and Marines pulling triggers in western Iraq would be a lot more difficult, even impossible. Besides, the United States is trying to bring some civilization to Al Anbar, by force if necessary, and civilization means concrete and security. Success in this desolate province requires concrete plants, runways and huts as much as it does killing bad guys.

--David Axe

Axe, Out of Iraq, Explains

As many of you know, David Axe spent the last few months reporting regularly from Iraq for Defense Tech and other publications. Then, two weeks ago, those reports abruptly stopped.

In the online edition of Editor & Publisher, David explains why:

In early February, I was embedded at a remote Iraqi Army training base, and interviewing a U.S. officer about the development of Iraqi security forces when a sour-faced U.S. Army sergeant pulled up in a Humvee. He ordered me to put away my cameras and get in.

"You're in violation of regulations," he said. I thought it was a joke. So did the officer. But the sergeant persisted. So I apologized to my interviewee, stowed my gear and climbed into the Humvee.

Over the next 36 hours, I was shuttled from base to base and finally to Kuwait -- under armed guard for all but the final leg. I never got an official explanation for what was happening. From my guards and others, I gleaned that I had published supposedly sensitive information on my blog at www.defensetech.org, thus allegedly endangering U.S. forces and disqualifying me for a military embed.

The Best Weapon

On Feb. 2, M-1 driver Cpl. Walter Howard, 35, was maneuvering his tank against insurgents near the town of Balad when an IED exploded, killing him instantly. At his memorial service today, officers and soldiers wept and held each other. A general, colonels and sergeants major clapped shoulders and doled out hugs. An entire battalion and their brigade leadership poured out their hearts. It was hard to watch.

Howard, a former Seabee with a wife and a daughter, is the first fatality suffered by Alpha Company, 1-8 Infantry, which since December has occupied a crappy little FOB called McKenzie, where MREs pass for food, the mud is ankle-deep and the mood is plain glum. Theirs is the bad side of Balad; almost every day they take fire from disaffected Sunnis in the city's suburbs. IEDs are a constant threat. And while everyone hopes that Howard will be the only KIA here, most know better.

Still, every day Alpha Company rides out in their Humvees, M-2 Bradleys and tanks. Every day they walk the area's filthy streets, knocking on doors or kicking them down, following leads, rounding up bad guys and doing what they can to win the hearts of these poor, untrusting people. Every day they face death side by side, motivated in part by patriotism, duty, pay, their desire to help Iraqis or a lack of anything better to do, but mostly by their love for each other and their refusal to let each other down.

Never mind radio jammers, armored vehicles and drones. Never mind multi-billion-dollar programs like FBCB2 and Blue Force Tracker. The real secret weapon of this nasty little war is the young grunt on the ground, the guy who faces Iraq's million little problems with a million little solutions of his own, every day for a year at a time, and who -- while folks back home decry the monetary cost of this war -- bears the true cost, in his blood.

God bless the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

-- David Axe

The Amazing, All-Purpose, Styrofoam Drone

"I get paid by the Army to fly remote-controlled planes," says Sgt. Nathan Wyatt from 3-29 Field Artillery. From his post at LSA Anaconda, he operates the three foot-long Raven unmanned aerial vehicle. Almost every day, he hand-launches one of his three Kevlar and Styrofoam birds into the skies over north-central Iraq. Wyatt controls the Raven with a handheld console while, ideally, an assistant monitors flight parameters on a separate console. Each operator has a screen showing what the Raven sees. With a range of up to 15 miles and both day and night sensors, that amounts to quite a lot. The imagery is beamed straight to a display in the tactical operations center.

At nearby Camp Paliwoda, 1st Lt. Peter Postma from 1-8 Infantry describes how his battalion decided to give a three-bird Raven set to each of its companies as well as to its scout section. That way company commanders can send Ravens to support individual patrols instead of having to ask battalion. "It's working well for us," Postma says.

"It's all GPS-driven," Wyatt says, singing the Raven's praises. All he has to do is punch coordinates into his console and the Raven goes there.

But the Raven hates bad weather. A few days ago, one of the year's worst winter storms downed power lines and left Anaconda and Paliwod ankle-deep in mud. As the storm was brewing, one of Wyatt's Ravens crashed onto the roof of an Iraqi house. A patrol promptly retrieved it, and Wyatt come into the S-1 shop cradling his busted-up bird in his arms. The Raven is designed to pop apart on impact, making repairs pretty straightforward. And lucky for Wyatt, Anaconda hosts the only Raven repair shop in all of Iraq. You just trade in your broken bird and sign out a new one.

Raven also hates Warlock, the radio jammer used to thwart remotely-detonated IEDs. If a Raven flies over a patrol with a Warlock, it might get jammed. If that happens, the Raven tries to fly home, but computers being computers, sometimes it just crashes instead.

-- David Axe

To Armor or Not to Armor? That is the Question

The Army's pie-in-the-sky Future Combat Systems will make brigades more easily deployable by replacing vehicles like 70-ton M-1 Abrams tanks with much lighter alternatives. To match the survivability of the older systems, FCS will rely on superior communications, new surveillance equipment and forthcoming electromagnetic shields.

That's the fantasy. The reality might turn out quite differently. For while many of the communications and surveillance tools of the future force are already finding their way into service in Iraq, the Army isn't getting any lighter. In fact, it's only getting heavier.

The North Dakota National Guard's 164th Engineer Regiment has got to be one of the best-equipped Guard units in Iraq right now. They ride in factory-fresh M-1114 up-armored Humvees and a whole circus of new vehicles originally designed to clear mines: the Buffalo, the Meerkat, the Husky and the RG-31. Every day, they roll out to sweep Improvised Explosive Devices from the highways around Logistics Support Area Anaconda.

The Buffaloes are heavily-armored six-wheeled Mack trucks with an articulated arm used to pick up and shake suspicious objects. The Meerkat and its larger cousin the Husky are spindly four-wheelers with X-rays for spotting metal bombs. The RG-31 is a tall mine-proof vehicle that more or less duplicates the Humvee's gun-truck role and carries the 164th's Warlock IED jammers. All the vehicles are equipped with the Forward Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) battlefield internet, one of the lynchpin systems of the lighter future force.

But does the FBCB2 make the 164th any more survivable on Iraq's IED-infested roads? If the answer is yes, why all the expensive new armored trucks? The 164th is heavier than ever, and has all this armor to thank for its safety. They've been blown up many times; one Buffalo is scorched from nose to waist from a massive IED blast. But no one has died.

"Our vehicles take good care of us," says 164th Staff Sgt. Colin Thompson in his North Dakota accent. Note that he doesn't single out the FBCB2 for doing the same. For while information is a great enabler, it won't magically root out every homemade IED tucked inside the carcass of a cow -- and it won't save your sorry ass when that IED blows up under your vehicle.

--David Axe

Eyes on Balad

Logistics Support Area Anaconda, 50 miles north of Baghdad, is the major supply hub for all military operations in Iraq. All day every day, Army CH-47 Chinooks and Air Force C-17 Globemasters crisscross the sky. Every night, Army transportation companies sortie mile-long convoys to every corner of the country. The passenger terminal is the second busiest in the entire U.S. military. The bottom line: Anaconda is really, really busy and really, really important -- and just a few well-placed mortar rounds could put a lot of kinks in a lot of plans here.

The tedious, dangerous job of policing the surrounding countryside and the nearby Shiite town of Balad has fallen to the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, now on its second rotation in Iraq. A task force built around 3rd Battalion of the brigade's 29th Field Artillery Regiment is responsible for the countryside while the 1st of the 8th Infantry's task force keeps an eye on Balad proper. That's a combined 1,500 soldiers overseeing an entire city and hundreds of square miles. "Spread thin" is an understatement.

But these are a new breed of task forces. Between deployments, the 4th ID reorganized from three to four brigades, or so-called "Units of Action", adding dedicated reconnaissance battalions and picking up a lot of neat new toys, including Raven aerial drones, the Forward Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) battlefield internet, a bunch of new armored vehicles and new sensors. Plus, both task forces here benefit from the Air Force, Army and even Marine Corps surveillance assets -- RC-12s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Predator drones, etc. -- based at Anaconda and other nearby airbases.

On a patrol with 3-29 on Feb. 2, Staff Sgt. John Lohnes navigated using the FBCB2's touch-screen digital map while AH-64 Apaches and OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters swooped overhead and Ravens droned invisibly in the distance. "It basically makes it easier to track my own position," Lohnes says of FBCB2. But it does so much more. Every FBCB2-equipped patrol is visible as an icon on the map. Simply by touching the screen, Lohnes can pull up imagery of particular points of interest. And he can send and receive secure Instant Messages from the task force command center, where a bunch of officers sit in front of plasma screens displaying imagery from Predators and tower-mounted sensors called "J-Lenses".

The Army of the future is on display here in muddy north-central Iraq. I'm embedded with 3-29 and 1-8 for the next couple of weeks. Stand by ...

-- David Axe

Hunting IEDs from 10,000 Feet

The F/A-18D Hornet handles a lot of jobs in Iraq, these days – including bomb-hunting. Two two-seater plane looks out for improvised explosive devices with its nose-mounted Advanced Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance System, a bank of downward-looking cameras that replaces the Hornet's standard 20-millimetere cannon.

A ground station at Al Asad air base is equipped with a new workstation that allows analysts such as Sgt. Elizabeth Zakar to lay two day's imagery side by side to isolate the differences. This way they can spot disturbed earth, suspicious objects, piles of debris and other telltale signs that insurgents have planted a roadside bomb.

It's not easy work, but there's a full-time civilian expert named Kevin White on hand to help. White is my roommate here at this sprawling air base. Besides being a great guy, he's a hard worker too -- for a full year he's worked late nights and long morning in the analysts' tiny little trailer on the compound of the Marine Fighter Attack community. The Marines are making an effort to keep one of their six F/A-18D squadrons in Iraq at all times, and the ATARS is a major reason why.

Here at Al Asad, the chowtime talk is all about Ralph Peters, the Army officer-turned-columnist who loves to rail against the Air Force and its budget-hogging ways. A recent Weekly Standard piece by Peters took the Air Force to task for spending billions on a handful of F-22s when less money invested in simpler platforms would, he claims, pay far greater dividends. The fliers of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 agree wholeheartedly, pointing to their bargain-bin Hornets and their huge quiver of weapons and sensors.

I'm not quite convinced that the Air Force needs to abandon the cutting-edge of air supremacy. A few Marine aviators here have indirectly sided with the Air Force with tales of getting schooled in air-to-air exercises by aggressive Thai F-16 pilots.

--David Axe

UPDATE 02/02/06 3:02 PM: There have been a heap of interesting comments on this post. One of the best (as usual) comes from Joe Katzman, who asks:

Why are we using Hornets, that cost thousands of dollars per hour to fly, so we can wear down a fleet that would be useful in a more serious war and deplete US forces down the road (fighters have lives measured in hours put on the airframe)?

For the job they're doing, you could use a Cessna. Yeah, the same ones that do traffic reports here at home. Same job, just add cameras and communications. Heck, Cessnas can even be given small gun pods if they feel a need to be able to shoot up a convoy of terrorists in the middle of an IED instalation operation.

How expensive do you think that would be to buy? To fly? How easy to transfer the aircraft to Iraqis without a lot of difficulty?

Heck, we could even buy Schweitzer's dedicated reconaissance aircraft for that job at a couple million per, and get something that not only has a ton more station time, but is SILENT from observation height so people can't hear it coming. Paint it correctly, and it would be hard to see from the ground as well.

Cheap, devastatingly effective, could be bought in numbers and drive the rate of IED attacks (and hence deaths) down.

Perhaps someone out there can kindly explain why $40 million ($55-60 million replacement cost) jet fighters are doing this job instead? That was excusable in 2003 when the operation began. In 2006, it's just waste.

Airplanes are People, Too

It's funny the way aviators talk about their airplanes. Every flier's got his favorite jet, the one he's most comfortable in and which behaves best for him. "Every airplane is different," explains one maintenance sergeant here at Al Asad air base in western Iraq.

Each of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332’s dozen F/A-18D Hornets has a slightly different combination of sensors and systems, which partially explains their unique personalities. But even jets with the same equipment tend to have different temperaments.

In any squadron, the maintainers know the airplanes in ways the fliers don't. After all, they're the ones turning wrenches, pumping lubes and banging their shins on panels 12 hours at a time to keep the birds in the air for three or four hours every other day. And maintainers will tell you: sometimes there are jets that just refuse to cooperate. "Hangar queens", they're called.

332 is lucky. It doesn't really have any hangar queens. And the hard work of successive generations of maintainers, plus a careful cadre of pilots, has achieved a notable distinction: in early 2005 the squadron marked 100,000 hours without crashing a jet, one of the best safety records of any Marine Corps jet squadron. This long streak of good fortune has made everyone a little superstitious, and the last jet that crashed, A-6E Intruder no. 05 back in 1978, haunts the ready room like a ghost. "Nobody talks about 05," says one officer.

Jets are like diesel engines: the more you work them, they more reliable they are -- to a point. 332 is wringing more flight hours out of its jets than ever, thanks to the relentless pace of operations in Al Anbar province. At some point in the near future, there will be a reckoning. The flying here is not terribly taxing, just a lot of medium-altitude cruising, but still... most fast jets are good for only around 8,000 hours, and the Hornets here have eaten up just under ten percent of that total in the past seven months alone. Worse, the Marine Corps' single-seat birds will be swapped out for Joint Strike Fighters sometime after 2012, but no one's postulated a replacement for the hardworking F/A-18Ds.

--David Axe

Hercules' Newest Labor

The war in Iraq requires a lot of aerial refuelling and moving a lot of stuff between crappy little airstrips. No airplane is better at both tasks than the venerable C-130.

After 40 years of building first-generation Hercules for dozens of customers all over the world, in the mid-1990s, Lockheed Martin switched to the new J model, which was supposed to be faster, longer-ranged and capable of carrying more cargo and fuel. But J customers have complained that new plane just isn't as capable or reliable as the older models. The Air Force took almost a decade getting its Js into battle, and now the Marines are following suit. Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 252 has deployed its KC-130J tanker-transports to Al Asad airbase in Iraq's Al Anbar province, the type's first foreign mission in Marine Corps service, and the news is good.

The fighter pilots of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 rely on the KC-130s to extend their legs over western Iraq. So far, 332 has no complaints. The refuelers has been on time with the gas, which is more complicated than it sounds. Tanker crews have to be flexible and efficient to meet the fast-movers when and where they can -- and in unpredictable weather.

Still, the C-130J was threatened with shutdown when the Defense Department went cost-cutting last December. Congress came to the rescue, but the Pentagon's classified Mobility Study might try again to cancel future buys. Meanwhile, the market for second-hand first-gen Hercules is white hot, and the Lockheed Martin facility in Greenville, S.C. is working full-time to recondition retired C-130s for resale to customers like Poland and Pakistan. Only time will tell if the J model wins the same loyalty.

--David Axe

Prowling Over Al Anbar

At noisy Al Asad air base, the noisiest jets belong to Marine Electronic Attack Squadron 1. It's hard not to notice the squadron's EA-6B Prowlers, but don't get caught looking. While touring the hangars of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332, my escort and I walked past the Prowlers and caught the evil eye from some aircrew returning from a mission.

What exactly the Prowlers are doing in Iraq is classified -- and even 332's fliers don't know for sure. My feeling is that it's got something to do with improvised explosive devices or communications intelligence. The Prowlers are packed with sensitive radio receivers and carry electronic noise jammers under their wings.

If the EA-6Bs are indeed jamming IEDs, they wouldn't be the only U.S. aircraft doing so. The EC-130 Compass Call has also been pressed into fight against IEDs. On one March patrol with the 25th Infantry Division in Qayyarah, I watched the Compass Call make a pass overhead, wiping out all radio reception in its path.

Replacement of the 30-year-old Prowlers -- the only fast EW platforms in the U.S. inventory -- is a top priority. The Navy has picked the EA-18G Growler, a development of the F/A-18F Super Hornet to replace its EA-6Bs, but the Marines have yet to name a successor. There have been rumors [ confirmed – ed.] of an electronic warfare suite in the Marines' version of the Joint Strike Fighter, the vertical-landing F-35B . But it might prove hard adapting a single-seat jet to a mission currently performed by a jet seating four.

-- David Axe

"What Else You Got?"

"We're here to support the guys on the ground," says 1st Lt. Kevin "Ace" Lampinen, a back-seater in Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 "Moonlighters", deployed to Al Asad air base in cold, muddy western Iraq.

In Ar Ramadi, Hit, Fallujah and other contested cities in Al Anbar province, Marines and soldiers fight daily battles with Sunni insurgents and foreign fighters slipping across the porous Syrian border. When the going gets tough, the tough call in air support. On one memorable November mission, Ace, his pilot and another crew in their two-seat F/A-18D Hornets dropped below some low clouds to drop 500-pound satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack munitions and laser-guided bombs on insurgents laying siege to some Marine snipers.

"What else you got?" asked the forward air controller.

With their bombs expended, Ace's flight fired their 20-millimeter cannons until they were out of ammo. They handed off to another flight, zoomed home to Al Asad, refueled, rearmed then headed right back to the fight.

But it's not all bombing and gunfighting, and in six months of daily flying, the Moonlighters have dropped only a hundred thousand pounds of ordnance. Their bread and butter is surveillance using their new Litening AT targeting pods and reconnaissance with the Advanced Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance System, or ATARS. ATARS provides high-res targeting-quality imagery on magnetic tape that's analyzed post-flight, while the Litening pod can send lower-res imagery realtime to forces on the ground. Their capabilities overlap some, but between the two systems, the Moonlighters can perform the full range of tactical recon tasks, making them essential to the urban fighting in Al Anbar, where the bad guys hide among innocents.

The sky over western Iraq is crowded with Marine air. The entire southern side of Al Asad is packed with F/A-18Ds, EA-6Bs, AV-8Bs, KC-130Js, CH-53Es and UH-1Ns. I'm embedded with the Moonlighters for the next week. More to come.

--David Axe

Laugh Off Those Bombs

I convoyed to Ramadi with the Army's 46th Engineer Battalion. My driver was a young soldier who'd fought the Mahdi Army in Al Kut two years ago and was back for his second tour. Before SP-ing ("Start Point"), a lieutenant briefed everyone on the latest Improvised Explosive Device threat.

It seems an insurgent cell out here in Al Anbar has been building sophisticated IR tripwire-activated IEDs disguised as rocks and apparently employing shaped-charge warheads -- hardly improvised at all, if you ask me. Three or four of these things have gone off in the last month, inflicting a number of casualties. Normally in a briefing like this the presenter would detail any countermeasures, but this time he just went, "Umm ... " since there are no countermeasures to an IED like that. You can't tell it from another rock and you can't jam it.

This wasn't my first convoy. Nor was it the first time I've heard scary briefings on insurgent super-weapons. Still, I admit I was a little unnerved. But the 46th troopers just grimaced and shrugged. What are you gonna do?

We rolled out two hours late due to a broken-down Humvee. It was a two-hour drive to Ramadi, and my driver and his crew passed the time munching Chips Ahoy cookies and joking on the intercom. They run these missions almost every day against an evolving range of threats. There are only so many precautions they can take; after that's it's up to God. "Inshalla," my Arab friends would say: "God willing." The non-believers in the crowd can take comfort in the knowledge that, statistically, they're highly likely to survive any given mission.

Still – shaped-charge IEDs disguised as rocks?!

--David Axe

The Meanest Little Chow Hall in Al Anbar

Back in late 2004, an attack on a chow hall at a U.S. base in Mosul killed 22 people, including Seabee Joel Baldwin. More than a year later, the attack still keeps U.S. commanders awake at night. At Ramadi, where mortar attacks are a weekly affair, the Seabees of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 are putting the finishing touches on a fortified chow hall that Chief Michael Romero says is intended to make sure the Mosul tragedy never happens again. For Romero, a friend of Baldwin's, it's personal.

I had breakfast in the new chow hall this morning. It's weird. Rather than the wide open bays of chow halls in less dangerous areas, this one has several narrow hallways criss-crossing each other. The walls are wood. Behind the walls are several feet of wire mesh and dirt -- enough to keep out all but the biggest mortars. The ceilings are earthen too, and capped with concrete to keep out water and rats. The place bears an eerie resemblance to pictures I've seen of the Maginot Line, that doomed underground defensive network meant to keep the Germans out of France.

The food, by the way, was pretty good: eggs, ham, toast and black-sludge coffee that'll kick you right in the head. I always eat better in Iraq than I do at home.

-- David Axe

The Dead Bombers of Halabja

In the 1980s, the city of Habbaniyah in western Iraq was the site of one of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons plants. With the Kurds in northern Iraq in uprising, in 1988 Saddam ordered Iraqi Air Force units to drop chemical weapons on the rebel town of Halabja. Weapons were trucked from Habbaniyah to nearby Al Taqaddum air base. The subsequent gas bombing of Halabja killed 5,000 people.

I've been to Halabja. I've seen the massive cemetery and the recently-built memorial and I've talked to attack survivors and people who lost friends and family there. Now I've seen Habbaniyah, from a distance, and Al Taqaddum close-up. In a remote corner of the air base, now a Marine Corps logistics hub, there is a row of derelict Soviet-built Il-28 Beagle bombers from the former Iraqi Air Force, quite possibly the very bombers that attacked Halabja 18 years ago.

I'm a huge aviation buff, and the Il-28 with its clean lines and anachronistic rear turret is one of my favorite Cold War aircraft. Under any other circumstances, I'd be thrilled to see these museum pieces and appalled at their neglect. But with Halabja on my mind, I feel only a sense of justice -- and anger -- entirely misdirected at these lifeless pieces of metal.

In the first Gulf War we bombed the snot out of Habbaniyah and Al Taqaddum. Twelve years later we occupied the air base and found its resident aircraft either buried in sand or, like the Beagles, abandoned. Their pilots were dead or, at the very least, no longer pilots. Their engines were rusted out. Their windscreens were clouded over. Their turret guns drooped.

The machines that killed Halabja were dead.

--David Axe

Machines, Ancient and New

The decades-old Sea Knight helicopter has a few new tricks, these days: infra-red countermeasures, night-vision-goggle-compatible cockpit lighting and uprated engines. But it still looks and feels like a Vietnam-era machine.

The copter is so slow that the Marines fly routine passenger flights only at night. The Sea Knight's ramp doesn't fully close, so flying low over Baghdad at night, the cold wind sweeps in and chills my feet blue. Wobbling towards the Al Taqqadum air base, I can look out the back over the million lights and red gas flares of the hellish city.

The helicopters aren't much to look at, either -- like anemic gray Chinooks is the best description -- but the 200 Sea Knights made for the Marines have performed well, lately. Attentive maintenance and prudent upgrades mean their reliability rates are better than ever. They've even been pressed into service as medical evacuation choppers, contributing to the multi-service medevac plan in battles like that for Fallujah. With their replacement, the troubled V-22 Osprey, due for a big budget cut, some Sea Knights might very well see 50 -- making them among the longest-serving helicopters ever.

The Marines are infamous for using weapon-of-yesteryear, and the Sea Knights are among the most ancient. But on the ground at Al Taqqadum, the Corps' newest machines are on display. Outside a rec center I spotted an immaculate Buffalo IED-clearing vehicle parked next to a brand-new Cougar, one of at least two potential Humvee replacements alongside the Ultra AP. Marines swear by the Cougar. One story circulating Al Taqaddum is that one of the Cougar got blown up a few weeks ago by an IED big enough to take out an up-armored Humvee. While the Cougar took some damage and eventually got shipped out for study and repair, all four Marines inside survived.

Just goes to show you: old weapons are adequate if you take care of them, but sometimes new ones are better than adequate. Sometimes they even save lives.

-- David Axe

Combat vs. Construction

Western Iraq is tougher than the rest of the country. Desolate Al Anbar province is poor, sparsely populated and, this time of year, bitterly cold. Not to mention dangerous, with native malcontents and foreign fighters taking potshots, planting bombs and periodically getting organized into honest-to-god small units for street firefights.

The Seabees of Mobile Construction Battalion 133 know all about this. They got detachments all over the province, at Al Taqaddum, Ramadi, Fallujah and a God-forsaken border outpost called Rawa. Most of the Seabees stay on the bases doing construction work and dodging the occasional mortar round, but some run dangerous convoy escort missions. Four from 133 got hurt a few weeks back in one attack on a convoy.

I embedded with 133 here at Al Taqaddum airfield. Over the next week I'll pay visits to Ramadi and Rawa before ending my tour with the battalion at Al Asad air base. Anticipating my night in Rawa, Senior Chief Bob Crandall from the Al Taqaddum detachment advised I borrow a blanket or two. Facilities are primitive and the weather is cruel. But it's not weather I'm worried about.

At Al Taqaddum, a small Seabee detachment plays housekeeper to a population of several thousand soldiers and Marines. The Seabees can do just about any civil engineering or construction job you can imagine. Here, they put up buildings, repair old decaying Iraqi wiring and plumbing, and patch up the battered runway where Air Force C-130s, Marine Corps helos and Army Sherpa airlifters deliver a constant stream of men and material.

But, according to Crandall, their most rewarding missions are always the ones that get them into the local community, building schools and repairing infrastructure and winning hearts and minds. That's what 133, which is based in Mississippi, was doing stateside in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But here in Iraq, Crandall's detachment rarely leaves the protective nest of Al Taqaddum; the threat level's just too high. Which is a shame, since the nearby town of Habbaniyah sure could use their expertise.

This is the story in much of Iraq – but especially here in the western part of the country. Security is deteriorating, putting an end to serious reconstruction projects and creating an atmosphere in which day-to-day interaction between coalition troops and Iraqi civilians is impossible. There's a spiral effect. The alienation creates distrust which leads to further alienation and only makes security even worse. In such an environment, the only feasible operations are combat operations.

-- David Axe

War Journos Under Fire

David Axe's Salon.com article on the increasingly rotten situation for the Baghdad press corps is now up. Go check it out: You'll dig the juicy quotes from one of America's leading war reporters. Below is a sort of rough sketch of that story -- looser, more opinionated than the finished Salon piece.

The abduction of 28-year-old Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll in Baghdad on Jan. 7 has had a profound effect on the city's Western press corps. More so than ever, unembedded media in Baghdad are fortified in a handful of besieged hotels that are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Few Western reporters ever leave these hotels, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories. And some reporters are finally throwing in the towel, forever abandoning this relentless and unforgiving city.

I'm on assignment for Salon.com to report on the worsening security environment in Baghdad and its effect on media coverage of the war. Of the long list of experienced Baghdad correspondents that I've contacted, only three have responded at all to my queries -- and only one has been willing to talk. Off the record, Baghdad journos describe a place where fear and frustration make their jobs almost impossible. Now, their fear and frustration is making my job almost impossible too.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson has some sound theories about the insurgents' media strategies. While stressing that he "can't speak for insurgent groups," Col. Johnson says these strategies "boil down to influencing the media environment ... to get attention away from progress."

Whether there is much progress in Arab Iraq is certainly debatable, but it's apparent that the increasing inability of media to cover ANYTHING, much less coalition successes, is hurting the war effort. Iraq is a big, complicated problem, and as media flee or hunker down deeper in their hotel fortresses, the Western world's understanding of Iraq can only suffer.

There is a workable solution, and it's called embedding. No one protects journos as well as the U.S. and British militaries, but many media refuse to embed because they fear losing their objectivity. This is a valid fear, one even U.S. officers acknowledge, but what's better: slightly biased coverage? Or no coverage at all?

THERE'S MORE: Xeni points out this eerily prescient story that Carroll wrote for the American Journalism Review last year.

The sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S. drove me to move to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began. All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent, so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that...

It isn't easy to fulfill such a lofty mandate when people are out looking for foreigners to behead. The days are long gone when car bombs and attacks on military convoys were so infrequent we could keep track of the date and place of each one.

Iraq became terrifyingly dangerous almost overnight last spring. Everything changed during the U.S. Marines' siege of Fallujah the first week of April 2004 and the simultaneous Shiite uprising led by firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It wasn't safe for foreigners to walk the streets, and car bombs became an almost daily occurrence.

The anger and violence have only gotten worse since then, and a new terror has been added: kidnapping.

The Kirkuk Question

When the Kurds drove Saddam's army out of their homeland in the early nineties, they didn't quite make it as far as Kirkuk, the southernmost city that's predominantly Kurdish. Which for the Kurds was a shame.

Kirkuk sits atop 25% of Iraq's oil and pumps out a million barrels a day. So valuable is Kirkuk that Saddam launched a program in the 1980s called Enfal to shift the city's demographics in favor of the regime by forcibly removing the city's Kurds and paying Arabs to settle in their places.

Now, with Kirkuk just outside the de facto border of Kurdistan, and with the Kurdish region richer and more powerful than the rest of the country, the Kurdistan Regional Government and its lackeys in Baghdad are plotting to redraw Kurdistan's unofficial but very real borders to incorporate Kirkuk.

It's a two-pronged campaign. One effort encourages Kurds to move back to Kirkuk and file suit to reclaim their old properties from Arabs. The other, recently realized, revolves around Article 136 of the new Iraqi constitution. That article, which was pushed hard by President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, requires a referendum in Kirkuk in 2007 asking residents if they want to be part of autonomous Kurdistan.

If the KRG can persuade enough Kurds to move back to the city (which is currently only 40% Kurdish), then the referendum should pass in favor of joining Kurdistan, and Kirkuk's million barrels a day will fund Kurdish schools, roads and security forces instead of Arab schools, roads and security forces.

KRG assembly speaker Adnan Mufti told me the other day that the Kirkuk question is his number one concern. What he didn't say is that it's just step one in the KRG's long-term plan to officially break away from Iraq, a move that Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria anticipate and that the rest of the world dreads, as it could mean war on many fronts.

Up in Flames

Life ain't easy for many Kurds. And for Kurdish women, death ain't easy either. Suicide rates are high among rural Kurdish women. But in a place where only the men have guns, there aren't any tall bridges and pills are too expensive, the favorite method of suicide is self-immolation using household materials like cooking fuel and matches. Every year, dozens of Kurdish women burn themselves.

“Here in Kurdistan, there is a lot of violence against Kurdish women,” says Layla Ali. She blames “men, of course." "Husbands, brothers, fathers, managers. All men.”

Layla is the program director at ZEEN, an Erbil radio station that broadcasts programs spotlighting suicide and other women's issues. She and other Kurdish women's advocates say that Kurdistan's culture of machismo breeds domineering and abusive husbands and vengeful, honor-minded fathers and brothers. In conservative areas, Kurdish women are kept indoors from the moment they show signs of sexual maturity until old age robs them of that same sexuality. Meanwhile they marry young and have kids, lots of them – as many as a dozen is common -- and mind the men in their lives. That most Kurds are Muslim only fuels this dynamic. And that Kurdish women all have access to satellite TV, where they can see marriages that aren't so exploitative, makes their shackles all the more unbearable. Hence the self-immolation.

Even the government -- a boys' gun club if there ever were one –- is cognizant of the problem. Regional Speaker Adnan Mufti is calling for education programs to advocate later marriage and discourage domestic abuse.

In the meantime, women like Layla keep fighting the flames.

-- David Axe

Free Press in Kurdistan, Take Two

So I tracked down the staff of Hawlati, the only independent newspaper in Kurdistan, to get their take on press freedom in this country so utterly dominated by two powerful political parties. Editor Faisal Khalid says that only Hawlati will tackle stories related to government corruption, of which there is a lot in Kurdistan. In retaliation, Hawlati staff have been threatened and, in a few cases, bribed by the government to become informants.

If the Hawlati staff believes an employee's loyalty is wavering, that employee is promptly fired. Recently three Hawlati reporters were jailed for covering corruption stories; all three are out on bail awaiting trial. What makes this legally possible is the absence of Miranda Rights in Kurdistan and a law prohibiting loosely-defined "slander", which editors have told me might include criticism of the major political parties.

Incredibly, even the courageous Hawlati staff cows away from certain subjects. "Past the red line," is how Khalid describes them. When I asked what subjects were past the line, he refused to answer, saying only that everyone knows what subjects are absolutely taboo. If government corruption is fair game in this place where government is worshipped, what in the world is off-limits? My cynical Western mind suspects that these subjects are related to sex and religion. More on that later.

-- David Axe

On Growing Old (and Being Young) in Kurdistan

There are few things rarer than an old Kurdish man. Decades of oppression, poor nutrition and medical care, war, flight and starting over have taken their toll. The low life expectancy of Kurdish men goes a long way to explain why the survivors are so revered.

More than most, Kurdish culture is patriarchal and personality-worshipping. And no patriarchs' personalities are more worshipped than the Barzanis. In every office, shop and home hang portraits of Mustafa Barzani, the deceased Kurdish revolutionary, and his son Massoud, the current head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant party in Erbil and, with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan based in Sulaymaniyah, the heart of the Kurdish coalition that has been kicking ass at the polls since January.

Extremely high birth rates -- an artifact of Kurds' obsession with nuclear families -- mean that despite historically high death rates among men, Kurdish population is exploding. All Iraqi peoples have very very young populations. (That many Arabs have multiple wives contributes to this.) High birth rates aren't all good. Feeding, clothing and educating all these kids is a real challenge. At the public hospital in Shaqlawa, a resort town north of Erbil, Dr. Bestum Ali is doing all he can to keep thousands of kids healthy. That means up to 50 innoculations per day and aggressive childrearing education for new mothers. Ali says things are getting better, especially since the fall of Saddam. Medicine, personnel and expertise move more freely, international aid is up, and expatriate doctors like Shaqlawa head of pediatrics Dr. Yusef are returning to Kurdistan from places like Zurich. The result of all this and of Kurdistan's new era of peace, hopefully, is that old Kurds will one day be as common as young ones.

-- David Axe

Merry Christmas, Iraq

At the Erbil Ministry of Culture's media hall, the Iraqi-Kurdistan Symphony Orchestra has just struck the final chord of the Kurdish national anthem, and the audience -- Kurdish Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Turkomens, maybe even an Iraqi Jew or two, all in black ties and gowns -- bursts into loud applause, foot-stomping and cheers. It's Christmas Eve in the oldest city in the world, and the city's million-and-some residents are in a pretty good mood. Maybe it's the successful election they had just two weeks ago.
Maybe it's the Christmas cheer of the city's sizeable Christian minority rubbing off on everyone else. Or maybe it's just that Kurdistanis love being Kurdistanis.

Sure, Iraqi Kurdistan's got troubles. Corruption hamstrings the economy. Intense security limits civil rights. A dearth of natural resources has ministers begging for foreign investment. But despite all this, and against the backdrop of a country descending into an Arab civil war, Kurdistan is prospering. People are making money, raising their kids, going to school, travelling abroad, making plans, dreaming and enjoying life.

This is it folks, this is what a peaceful, democratic, multi-ethnic and religiously-tolerant Iraq looks like. The Western media's myopic focus on Baghdad and Arab Iraq means it's missed a quarter of the story, the northern quarter, where five million people are building the Middle East's first indigenous democracy from scratch. Every day Kurds thank me, believing I represent all Americans. They thank me for freeing them from a murderous tyrant. They thank me for saving their lives and their families' lives. They tell me that they understand we went to war for many reasons, some quite bad. Still, they say, no American has died in vain here, for even if there were no weapons of mass destruction, even if Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11, there is at least one good reason to fight and die in Iraq.

In fact, there are five million.

Merry Christmas, America. Merry Christmas, Iraq.

--David Axe

Corruptistan

Kurds talk big when it comes to democracy, but old undemocratic ways are hard to shake, and Kurdistan is very very old. Corruption here isn't as bad as in, say, Baghdad, a city built on closed-door deals and dead Kurds. But it's still pretty obnoxious.

Take the multi-million-dollar four-lane highway being built near Erbil that doesn't seem to connect any major population centers. It doesn't make much sense until you realize that the highway begins at the regional prime minister's house and ends at his office.

Most corruption isn't so grand. At the Erbil airport, my co-camerman David burch got shook down for $80 by the customs guys despite having everything he needed to get into the country: a precious Iraqi visa courtesy of His Honor Ambassador of Iraq to the United Kingdom Dr. Salah Al-Shaikhly and an American passport. Fortunately, Kurdish bureaucrats are as inept as they are corrupt, and David simply smiled and hurried through the shakedown line without paying, and nobody noticed.

Outside Erbil, at Kes Nazan, the Kurdish Regional Government is building a $50-million, 3,000-unit apartment complex with oil revenue provided by Baghdad. (How much of that revenue winds up in Kurdish ministers' pockets, I'd love to know.) The complex is intended for poor families being displaced from Erbil by new commercial construction, but sources tell me that many of the units have already been assigned to wealthy powerful Kurds using fake names.

It's a shame, made all the more shameful by an accute historical irony. The land around Kes Nazan is flat and featureless, not because no one has ever lived here, but because it used to be populated by conservative rural Kurds until Saddam swept in, killed a bunch, rounded up the rest, put them in camps then bulldozed their homes. Their graves still dot the area. Some of these surviving displaced peoples are returning to the area, soon to find their land occupied by the local upper class -- a newer, more familiar oppressor, albeit a less cruel one than Saddam.

-- David Axe

Iraq's Beautiful Trash

I was having my morning chai at the Shahan Hotel in downtown Erbil when, out the window, I saw something very exciting. A garbage truck, stopped at the curb, and garbage collectors tossing in boxes and bags. I was so amazed that I lunged for my camera like I'd just spotted Bigfoot. That's when I saw another garbage truck rounding the corner. I snapped photos on the fly like a paparazzi tailing Tom Cruise.

In five trips to Iraq totalling five months, these are the first garbage trucks I've seen -- and they're the best evidence so far of the development of civil society -- if not in all of Iraq, then at least here in Kurdistan. Elsewhere, garbage including animal parts and discarded food piles up in big festering heaps on the streets until somebody with a pickup truck volunteers to haul it to the city limits, where it gets dumped in sprawling fields of waste 30 years old and hundreds of acres in size. The garbage is so dense in places that during hot summers, it spontaneously combusts, fueling putrid garbage fires that burn uncontrolled for days. The upside of garbage fires is that they keep down the populations of vicious wild dogs that live in the garbage, venturing into the cities at night to terrorize pedestrians and domestic animals.

What Iraq needs, more than any election or military campaign, is basic civic infrastructures like garbage collection. There's little sense of public good or public ownership in most Iraqi cities, which contrbutes to the lack of security. If you don't care enough to keep your streets clean, how in the world are you going to muster the enthusiasm to ward of terrorists and foreign fighters, both public nuisances that, unlike garbage, can kill you?

-- David Axe

In Iraq, Free Press (Kinda, Sorta, Maybe)

Everyone in Kurdistan is proud of saying that there's no censorship here, that their media is free and independent. But poking around the edges of some small-time magazines in Erbil, I discovered something strange. From the smallest fry to the biggest fish, almost all media in Kurdistan is government-funded.

When I asked Karwan Abdula, editor of Caravan literary magazine (and a former communist) if government funding shaped his mag's editorial ethos, he said no, of course not. But then, he added, we would never think of publishing anything critical of Kurdistan's two major parties.

I ran this past the media bigwig in Erbil, Minister of Culture Sami Shorish, and he explained that while there are no laws restricting free speech, there is one important law restricting speech that isn't free and never should be. "We provide freedom to media, provided the media doesn't act in a slanderous way."

And would criticizing the ruling parties entail slander? I asked Abdula.

Yes, he said.

In all of Kurdistan there is only one privately-financed newspaper, Hawlati, which has been an on-again off-again affair. Its editors come and go with shocking frequency. Sources tell me that there's a lot of pressure on Hawlati on account of its independence. I'm trying to get in touch with the current editor to get his take.

To the Kurds, it seems, censorship ain't censorship as long as you call it something else.

-- David Axe

The Muftis of Kurdistan

Here's the second of David Axe's dispatches from the electioneering in northern Iraq.

Kurds have become relentless self-promoters, pitching for aid and recognition with characteristic unity. But two brothers, Adnan and Kanan Mufti, play the public relations game a whole lot better than most.

Kanan Mufti is the Kurdistan Director of Archeology and a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. He's also an unofficial ambassador of Kurdistan. He receives journalists, academics and foreign dignitaries in his well-appointed two-story home in Erbil. Listen to what he told me on Dec. 14: “The Kurdish people is the only people in the Middle East with respect for other nations. We used to cohabitate in a brotherly fashion with Jews. Now we have the district of Ankawa populated by Christians. Kurds have been oppressed, but they oppress no one.

You might wonder where this is going. After a drag on his cigarette and a sip of chai, he asked off-handedly why Kurdistan, with such a great human rights record, couldn't have independence.

Because it would tear Iraq apart and invite a Turkish invasion, is why. But Kanan's not the only person wondering. Kurds everywhere dream of independence, consequences be damned.

Kanan's brother Adnan is a big wig in the rival Kurdish political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. He's currently speaker of the regional assembly.

Adnan Mufti isn't as blunt as Kanan. Taking a break from a press conference with local journalists on election day, he tells me that the elections are important because they will mean a new government and new laws that will reinvigorate the U.S.-Iraqi partnership. “To struggle together against terrorists and terrorism and to have a new Iraq federation respecting human rights … that’s why our people suffered, to have this one day.”

In my experience, “human rights” is Kurdish code for “Kurdish rights”. Adnan Mufti is too clever not to couch his regional patriotism -- and his desire for more U.S. involvement in Kurdistan -- in federal Iraqi terms.

Mufti, by the way, means "powerful". You can bet that the opinions expressed by Kanan and Adnan shape those of millions of Iraqi Kurds.

-- David Axe

Election Day in Erbil

Defense Tech superstar correspondent David Axe made it to Iraqi Kurdistan, just in time for the elections. Here's the first of his reports for the site. (The pics are his, too, sent by satphone.)

There's a party in northern Iraq, and everyone's invited.

While the insurgency in north-central Iraq enters its third year, the Marines root out foreign fighters in the western desert and southern Iraq becomes increasingly aligned to Islamist Iran, northern Iraq is peaceful, secure and relatively prosperous, thanks to an uneasy alliance of two rival Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

The Iraqi Kurds had been fighting for independence since Iraq's inception in the wake of WWI. In the wake of Desert Storm, with Saddam Hussein's army in ruins, the Kurds went on a massive offensive and carved out an autonomous province with two capitals: Erbil the west under the KDP and Sulaymaniyah in the east under the PUK. From 1994 to 1997 the two parties fought each other until M. Albright intervened. When U.S.-led forces invaded in 2003 the Kurds increased their hold and cemented their truce, fielding a single slate of candidates in both the Jan. elections for an interim assembly and today's election for the first permanent assembly. During these years of peace between the parties, the Kurds have built a regional elected assembly, highways, industry, an army, police, a judiciary and airports. They've welcomed back former expatriates, including sizeable minorities of Jews and Christians. Kurdistan has grown and prospered and diversified.

But cracks are showing. More Kurds and demanding that their control extend south to oil-rich Kirkuk, which would alienate the Arabs that form 60 percent of the central government. Others want formal independence, which would piss off pretty much everybody, especially Turkey which has its own Kurd problem. And while the KDP and PUK have stayed tight, they have a new Kurdish rival now, the radical Islamic League of Kurdistan. While most Kurds are Muslims, few are radical, and the ILK threatens to upset the moderate progressive atmosphere. Recent weeks have seen riots at ILK headquarters. Everyone is blaming everyone else.

Today's elections were typical of the votes in Jan. (interim assembly) and October (referendum). With my interpreter and driver we toured three polling places, chatted with workers and voters and cops and found everything in order. It appears the KDP-PUK coalition will sweep. Tonight, with polls closed, Kurds are dancing and singing in the streets. So the peace holds ... for now.

I'll be in Erbil for two weeks, exploring local politics and getting a feel for how Kurds are balancing their growing aspirations against the concerns of their neighbors and countrymen. Stay tuned.

-- David Axe

UPDATE 11:39 EST: Word has it there's been voter fraud in Kurdistan. Big deal.

It's Friday evening in Erbil. Election Day euphoria is fading. Walking the market with my C-SPAN co-cameraman David Burch, we find an internet café with blinking fluorescent lights and a chugging generator powering some ancient hardware. Everyone's smoking cigarettes at their stations.

"How much?" I ask in bad Kurdish. The proprieter shrugs. We settle on a dollar per hour.

I log on and see that NPR is reporting voter fraud here in cheery Kurdistan.

I'm not surprised. Earlier David and I hailed a cab ("How much?" I asked in back Kurdish. The driver shrugged.) and dropped in on our Norwegian buddy Per Thorsdalem at the high-security Sheraton hotel -- with working toilets!

Per is a businessman. He's here as an advance party for some Norwegian firm. He figured, hey, I'm in Erbil. Why not be an international elections observer?

He told me this morning that he witnessed two types of fraud: family voting, where fathers dictate their childrens' votes; and multiple voting. The former is an inevitable artifact of a patriarchal society. The latter is no surprise in the Middle East, and easy to perpetrate, what with the red-dye-and-finger method of preventing it.

But neither Per nor I is as scandalized as NPR apparently is. The elections here went off without a hitch. No bombs. No violence at all. Quiet. As orderly as things get in Iraq. And, man, were the Kurds ever thrilled to vote. Per told me that in one rural village outside Erbil, info on registration procedures never got out, and hundreds of villagers were turned away from the poll. They were devastated. Democracy is life to these people -- or, as one Kurdish Christian named Jacob told me: "Democracy is the best religion for mankind." He meant that, and most Kurds agree with him.

There will always be fraud and corruption in Iraq. (In one desperate moment, a cabbie here charged me 1000 times the normal rate for a short trip!) Nevertheless, these elections have been a resounding success.

-- David Axe