Australian and New Zealand troops deployed to East Timor, a tiny, impoverished country adjacent to Indonesia, patrolled around the clock to ensure peace and quiet for Monday’s presidential election.
Around 1,100 Australian and 150 New Zealand soldiers work alongside 1,500 U.N. police from more than 20 countries and native security forces to suppress gangs, quell political violence and hunt down a rebel army led by former police officer Major Alfredo Reinado.
East Timor, population 1 million, broke away from Indonesia in 1999 following a brutal 20-year occupation and formally declared independence in 2002. Australian troops entered the territory in 1999 to help suppress pro-Indonesian militias, and again last year when marauding gangs and rebelling security forces threatened to collapse the current government under President Xanana Gusmao.
The capital city of Dili has been mostly peaceful in recent weeks, with just a few outbreaks of violence. Gangs in the pay of the major political parties battled in the streets on Thursday, the last day of campaigning, but only a handful of injuries were reported. Australian army Corporal Steven Clacy, 24, attributed the relative calm to the stepped-up peacekeeper presence. “It’s been quiet the last few weeks because we’ve been flexing.” Clacy said he sleeps only three hours at a time due to his intensive patrolling schedule.
The boost to Australian and New Zealand operations included more vehicle patrols, foot patrols and surveillance flights by helicopters, according to Australian army Brigadier Mal Rerden, commander of the peacekeeping force. He added that his troops retained a “response capability” to deal with any unexpected crises. “This type of response can include deployment of a quick-reaction force, the deployment of armored vehicles as well as air support.”
Australian armored vehicles armed with heavy machine guns idled in downtown Dili on Thursday morning and, later in the day, a quick-reaction force in trucks speeded to a nearby neighborhood to help U.N. cops deal with clashes between young supporters of presidential frontrunners Jose Ramos-Horta, the current prime minister, and Francisco Guterres, whose party is headed by former prime minister Mari Alkatiri, ousted after last years’ riots. Authorities fired tear gas to disperse the combatants; several motorcycles were set on fire.
Dili was quiet for Monday’s elections. Timorese gathered in the shade at downtown polling stations, sipping soft drinks bought from street peddlers. Voters emerging from the polls wiped their ink-stained fingers on their pants. “It’s a good start to the nation-building,” Japanese ambassador Hideaki Asahi said while a touring one polling place near the site of Thursday’s violence.
Stability in Timor is critical to Australian plans for the region. In February Canberra signed agreements with Dili establishing a framework for joint oil exploration in the Sea of Timor. Royalties from Timorese oil are worth an estimated $20 billion to Canberra over several years; Dili’s share is somewhat smaller.
Northrop Grumman is developing a “biometric” intelligence system to help U.S. troops keep tabs on suspected terrorists and insurgents. The system, which identifies people by their fingerprints, iris patterns or other biological metrics, is meant to meet a need identified by U.S. forces in Iraq.
On February 5, 2006, soldiers from the Texas-based 4th Infantry Division, deployed to north-central Iraq since the previous fall, sortied from their base to set up checkpoints outside the town of Balad. The town was so bad that the Iraqi army had sent one of its crack Kurdish units, normally based in the peaceful north of the country, into an outpost downtown. But snipers had kept the Kurdish troops from even leaving the base. Balad was desperately in need of some spring cleaning.
But standing at their checkpoint on a road outside Balad, the soldiers realized they lacked the necessary tools. Army intelligence had provided them with a list including names, descriptions and in some cases outdated photos of known bad guys. The soldiers carried fuzzy color copies of the list in their pockets and compared every passerby to the descriptions. But the photos too grainy and the descriptions too vague: pretty much every Iraqi man has a moustache, black hair and brown eyes. As for names? Besides sharing a small number of popular surnames, Iraqis have a habit of tacking their father’s and grandfather’s name onto their own or even going by nicknames that don’t match their photo IDs at all, assuming they even have photo IDs. There was just no way for the American soldiers to reliably know if they had happened to ensnare a bad guy in their net. And on that February afternoon, they returned to base empty-handed and frustrated.
Stinging from failures like those in Balad last year, in January the Army gave Los Angeles-based defense firm Northrop Grumman $20 million to develop a biometric solution. The idea, says Northrop Grumman vice president Larry Schneider, is to “ingest disparate sources of military information worldwide, to establish a central repository that can be queried. So if someone shows up at one place and says his name is one thing, then shows up somewhere else saying his name is another thing, that can be identified and can be passed back to tactical land forces.”
Soldiers might register detainees’ biometrics using a portable scanner. That info, combined with a brief history of the suspect, would be fed into a central database back in the States and analyzed by algorithms endlessly searching for connections between suspects. If, during a future operation, the soldiers happen across any of the same suspects as before, the system would alert them. Over time, the system might accumulate enough data on suspects’ movements to begin drawing conclusions about behavior patterns, allowing intelligence agents to predict suspects’ activities and, if necessary, thwart them.
“People talk about how we’re disadvantaged in asymmetric warfare,” Schneider says, using the military’s favorite term for big industrial armies fighting elusive, low-tech insurgents and terrorists. Biometrics, he adds, “are an example of how our technology advantages us.”
With the Army and Marine Corps stretched to breaking in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy is scrambling for ways to contribute more to inland fights. One result is a new river boat squadron, second of its type, stood up two weeks ago. Riverine Squadron Two and its sister, Ron One, are part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, which gathers all the Navy's coastal and land forces under one banner and adds brand new capabilities.
NECC -- based alongside patrol boats (pics!) and amphibious ships at Little Creek, Virginia -- includes construction battalions, logistics troops, harbor patrol units, ordnance disposal teams and the new riverine squadrons, and is the subject of a story in the current issue of Defense Technology International.
"It was definitely the ongoing war that created the idea," says Captain Robert McKenna, NECC's 44-year-old training officer. "We realized that the Army and Marine Corps were nearing capacity and that there was more to be done. We were looking for ways for the Navy to contribute more. Then we started looking out and said, the Navy really is contributing. And the sailors contributing the most in theater are the ones wearing this uniform."
He gestures to his green and brown fatigues, the same ones worn by the Navy's 16,000 Seabees, 3,000 port cargo handlers and hundreds of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts -- all of whom have been busy abroad in recent years. "They had no type command that took care of their Title X functions: training, equipping, manning."
"We saw a need to put them into a coherent structure and better equip them," adds NECC commander Rear Admiral Donald Bullard, 55. "And then, all of the sudden, we began to look at other capabilities" including Navy civil affairs and riverine.
Riverine forces in nimble, heavily-armed boats played a huge role in the Vietnam War, but were run down after the evacuation of that country as the Navy shifted focus on deterring the Soviet Navy. In Iraq, a country crisscrossed by large rivers, canals and marshes, the U.S. and British militaries (pictured) found themselves chasing down waterborne smugglers and insurgents in jerry-rigged engineer boats until specialized forces could be reconstituted.
The U.S. Marines sent its new boats to patrol Haditha Dam, a major power-generating station in western Iraq, but wasn't happy diverting money and resources to a mission that once belonged to the Navy. By 2005, the Corps was ready to divest itself of the riverine mission. Then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark sensed this.
"Admiral Clark asked, Marines how can I help?" explains Lieutenant Commander Mike Egan, 44-year-old commander of Riverine Squadron One. "One of the ways was, hey, this riverine mission thing. That was the impetus that got the whole riverine thing rolling.”
NECC will have three squadrons, each with 224 sailors and, eventually, a combination of 39-foot Small Unit Riverine Craft, built by Raytheon, and smaller Special Operations Craft-Riverine, built by United States Marine. “The goal is to get 16 boats per squadron," says Ron One's Lieutenant Chris Cowart, 40. The total includes eight SURCs and at least four SOC-Rs. "The balance could be either."
Until enough boats are manufactured, the Navy is borrowing SURCs from the Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for training and plans to fall in on the Corps' boats at Haditha Dam when it first deploys a squadron to Iraq in 2007. Their mission in Iraq will be much like the Marines', patrolling waterways, landing Marines and Masters at Arms for raids or riverbank security, searching small boats to interdict insurgents and illegal weapons.
While the missions and platforms are the same, the Navy is adding high-tech capabilities to its riverine squadrons that the Marines have lacked. In addition to the usual bank of radios, Navy SURCs will feature digital network terminals in order to plug into the Army's command and control architecture. And, according to Lieutenant Christopher Farricker from Riverine Group One, the Navy is shopping for a small UAV that can boost a four-boat patrol's situational awareness. The idea, he says, is to get that "bird's eye view and give it back to the boat operator." The service hasn't down-selected types yet.
Defense Tech's David Axe was in Lebanon in December, reporting on the U.N. force there. His story has been embargoed. Until now ...
The weird thing about Beirut is all the bullet holes in buildings, road signs and overpasses. It’s not the bullet-riddled stuff, per se, that’s so strange, but the contrast with all the shiny new stuff. Fifteen years after the end of a decades-long and bloody civil war, Beirut is booming. This despite the interruption of last summer’s war with Israel.
Air raids during that conflict knocked out power, felled bridges, took out the airport for a couple months and blew the top off the lighthouse on the beach near the Jnah neighborhood. Some parts of the Shi’ite southern suburbs took a beating, but Beirut proper escaped mostly unscathed. No, most of the war damage in Beirut is left over from the civil war and testifies to the scale of the destruction in that conflict.
On December 14th near downtown Beirut, I’m in a battered silver BMW with my chummy fixer Hasham, a former police detective who has, in retirement, exploited his connections to become the city’s go-to man for international media. This guy knows everybody. Traffic is heavy this morning – “Everybody going to work,” Hasham says – and in the gridlock he waves to friends in nearby cars and passes notes through his rolled-down window. He greets hotel bellhops, government bureaucrats, passing policemen and street-corner baristas in the uniquely Lebanese mixture of English, French and Arabic.
Hasham says the war with Israel was like cold water on Lebanon’s hot tourism industry. In the year before the war, millions of tourists passed their holidays in Beirut and the picturesque south. Now the stream of tourists is just a trickle, and hotels are so desperate for lodgers that they’re giving away upgrades like candy. Still, this little slump is nothing like the prolonged misery of the old days. Most of the recent war damage has been repaired, international investment is flowing in, people are working and Hasham is quietly optimistic.
Even the mass demonstrations – and occasional rioting — by hundreds of thousands of super-religious Shi’ites and their Christian allies don’t get Hasham, a secular Sunni, too worked up – nor does the prospect of a second round with Israel. The pro-Hez demonstrations peaked in December with nearly a million people in downtown Beirut, all demanding that Iran-backed Hezbollah have more power in government. The crowds are smaller and usually quieter now. Even so, American pundits are calling the protests a harbinger of a violent coup. Hasham just shrugs. “Since 1973 we had shit,” he says. But even at the height of the civil war, he got up every day and went to work with the police’s counter-drug department. He got shot three times but kept on going.
There are a lot people – both Lebanese and foreigners – working on behalf of this storied little country, doing their best to make sure all those scars of war remain just that: fading signs of old wounds. Western and regional investment is pouring in. And 10,000 heavily-armed U.N. peacekeepers in the south swear they’re doing their best to keep the peace. That’s the subject of a news feature in the February issue of DTI:
Since the summer war, UNIFIL has added 8,000 soldiers and sailors to its original contingent of 3,000, and has quietly integrated artillery, heavy tanks, tank destroyers and patrol boats to its main body of light infantry, medics and engineers, while also boosting daily patrols from just a handful to around 200. The result, in the final days of 2006, is a new UNIFIL, one with an apparent growing will to fight–and the means to do so.
Check out my Lebanon pics here. And go on patrol with the UN below:
All the attention is on the army and police, right now. But Iraq's tiny air force is about to get a bit bigger, C4ISR Journal reports:
Working through the U.S. Air Force, Iraq’s nascent defense ministry has ordered six new Raytheon King Air 350 twin turboprop aircraft and related support services in a firm-fixed-price contract valued at $132 million. Disclosed by the Defense Department, the deal includes five King Air 350 Extended Range aircraft equipped for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and a single King Air 350 earmarked for the light transport role. Support equipment, spare and repair parts, training and technical data are included in the sales package.
The new planes will be operated, in part, by 70 Squadron based at Basra Air Station. In October, U.S. Air Force advisor Lieutenant Colonel Kelly Latimer showed me the squadron's modest fleet of single-engine Seeker and CH-2000 patrol planes, which she said could be outrun by cars. The King Airs are faster, can carry more surveillance gear and have longer legs but are still simple and robust enough for the Iraqi Air Force to keep flying.
$1 billion in arms sales to the Iraqi government, including the King Airs, helped the United States achieve record arms sales in 2006, as my boss Sharon Weinberger reported recently in Aviation Week:
[One] factor driving the bottom line is Iraq. Its sovereign government is now able to buy equipment directly from the U.S. [Jeffrey] Kohler, [director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency] says Iraq is allocating about $1 billion a year out of its own budget to purchase defense equipment--and about $800 million has gone for U.S. equipment this year alone. With Iraq expecting to allocate $1 billion annually to arms purchases, such large buys from the U.S. could grow.
The U.N. force in southern Lebanon ain't what it used to be. In the wake of the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, has grown from a lightly armed body of observers to a mobile armored force with real teeth.
In stark contrast to Western armies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, United Nations forces in southern Lebanon enjoy unqualified healthy relationships with native security forces and local residents. These facilitate intelligence-gathering and cooperation that boost the force's effectiveness.
... On December 18, a two-vehicle patrol from [Italian Lt. Col. Ciccarelli] Giordano's [cavalry] regiment descends from the regiment's hilltop base near the town of Chama and heads down a seaside road. Periodically, it stops and soldiers hop out of the armored vehicles to stand on the side of the road, making themselves visible to passing motorists.
"They stay here to observe and to report every kind of situation," says Lieutenant Livio Lombardi. "Sometimes [people] ask for us to intervene ... in medical problems or in the presence of bombs [leftover from the summer war]."
Cluster bombs, people. Hundreds of thousands of them.
In the wake of the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, southern Lebanon is pretty quiet. But every once in a while an explosion rolls over the region's seaside cliffs and green hills, testimony to the ongoing cleanup of ordnance leftover from the conflict. This is the subject of my latest piece for The Washington Times:
Lt. Col. Ciccarelli Giordano, commander of an Italian army cavalry regiment that belongs to a battle group based on a hilltop near the Mediterranean coast, is philosophical about the dangerous ground his troops tread.
"You know what happens after war," he said.
There are 11,000 troops -- including 3,000 Italians -- assigned to the U.N. force, up from 3,000 just six months ago. ... The Italian contingent is drawn from forces recently withdrawn from Iraq.
The Italian battle group's experiences in Iraq and in providing security for the 2004 Olympics in Athens have helped prepare it for the dangerous job of defusing or destroying unexploded munitions.
Italian EOD teams are modeled after their British counterparts. The Italians train in the U.K. and use mostly British-made kit, including Wheelbarrow robots. They ride in Puma armored vehicles tailed by trucks and ambulances. They dress in your standard bomb suits. And they stay very, very busy.
"Yesterday we found a new cluster bomb-contaminated area," bomb squad Capt. George Colombo said. Minutes later, a distant blast testified to another squad's work.
The U.N. estimates there are between 700,000 and 1 million unexploded munitions in southern Lebanon, some left over from the 1978 Israeli invasion.
Less than 15,000 have been destroyed thus far, said French Lt. Col. Jerome Salle, a U.N. spokesman.
Most of the stories from my stint in Lebanon are still embargoed by my boss at DTI. Expect a flurry of posts in a few weeks.
I knew it was going to be a bad day in Beirut when I got booted out of the breakfast buffet at the downtown Radisson.
I had been enjoying my hummus, green olives and nan with a pot of strong coffee when I made the mistake of putting down my fork so I could turn the page in the Patrick O'Brian novel I was reading. The waiter grabbed my plate without asking if I was done, and scurried off. I figured, hey, no problem, I can always get another plate. And besides, I still got my coffee. But then the waiter came back and took those too.
Now, I could've raised a fuss, but I was too tired to remember how to say, "stop," in Arabic. (I remember now: "kiff.") you see, I'm still on D.C. time so I couldn't sleep the night before. I was nearly delirious. And, on the radio, they were playing a Christmas rendition of the Macarena. (don't ask.)
Anyways, I had interviews -- I'm on assignment here for Defense Technology International. So a couple hours later I hailed a cab and headed out. By 4 o'clock, I was done with my interviews, even more exhausted and, what's more, starving. I needed some kebab bad. I tried to hail a cab but they were all full. I walked down a street, hailing cabs all the while, until I came to an army checkpoint. A soldier asked me, in Arabic, where I was going. I replied in french and we had a rather muddled conversation that resulted in him pointing back the way I had come and gesturing with his rifle. So I turned around ... And got turned around. I couldn't remember which way was home.
I finally got a cab. The driver spoke some french. He didn't know where the Radisson was, so it was up to me. I had no idea so I picked a direction and hoped I might eventually recognize something. But half an hour later, I decided we were going in the wrong direction. I admit, I blamed my cabbie. Beirut is his town; he should know where the Radisson is. So I told him to stop "over there" and I hopped out with a mind to walk a couple blocks then hail another cab with, hopefully, a smarter cabbie.
By now I could've killed and eaten a small Lebanese person. Perhaps a baby Druze.
I walked down a sketchy alleyway full of broken-down cars and greasy, dark-eyed mechanics who stared at me as I passed. I was feeling very American in a very bad way, so I waved down the first cab I saw and hopped in without looking at the driver. Then a voice said, in French, "number two?"
It was the same cabbie as before. And it was too late to refuse his service. He was already speeding down the road, assuring me that he had just remembered where the Radisson was.
(Lest you fail to appreciate the sheer enormity of this coincidence, let me stress: Beirut is crawling with tens of thousands of cabs, and in 10 minutes I had walked several blocks in a random direction from where I got dropped off. Hundreds of cars passed within sight, including scores of cabs. The odds of hailing the same cabbie a second time in that environment are astronomical.)
Hey, Macarena!
Half an hour later, I was at the Radisson and my cabbie was 20,000 livres richer. That's no fewer than eight kebab-equivalents. Speaking of which, I found the nearest kebab stand, politely refused some skewered lamb brains bobbing in olive oil and ordered two kebabs.
They were the most delicious kebabs I've ever had. And they haven't even made me sick (yet).
p.s.: the Lebanese army has stationed an M-113 armored personnel carrier with a .50-caliber machine gun at the McDonald's down the street, perhaps to guard the "McArab" chicken shawarma they serve there.
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!
"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.
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.
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 Defensefeature:
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.
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.
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.
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'sDaily 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NECC -- based alongside patrol boats (
Air raids during that conflict knocked out power, felled bridges, took out the airport for a couple months and blew the top off the lighthouse on the beach near the Jnah neighborhood. Some parts of the Shi’ite southern suburbs took a beating, but Beirut proper escaped mostly unscathed. No, most of the war damage in Beirut is left over from the civil war and testifies to the scale of the destruction in that conflict.
That transformation is the subject of my upcoming feature in 
In the wake of the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, southern 
Italian EOD teams are modeled after their 
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 
Nearly a century ago, British Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence -- a.k.a. 
Accustomed as I am to 
So begins my 
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 
British-led forces in 
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 
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.
Iraq has just two ports, Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr, in the south near 
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 
Thirty-nine-year-old British Army Captain Steve Morte rides into the tense, sweltering city of 
As British forces consolidate at fewer and fewer bases in 
The Merlin's not just a kick-ass air ambulance. 
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.
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.
I was 
* 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.
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.
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.
David Axe has been to Iraq six times, now. So, as part of our big