Abizaid's conundrum

The practical reality of what the Coalition is able to field and what the Iraqi insurgency is able to field is tipping the balance against the Americans, with ominous outcomes looming

by William Kay

Early in the 20 th century, British Admiral Sir Arthur Francis Turner refined the secret of combat to three principles: hit the enemy first, hit the enemy hard, and finally, just keep hitting the enemy. This is what the Iraqi War's US tactical commanders, a few dozen Colonels, know they must do. It is also what CentCom Commander General John Abizaid knows must be done, and it's why on April 9 he summoned two additional combat brigades.

"Hitting the enemy" means US armoured companies raiding and demolishing strongholds of the insurgency, killing or detaining the insurgency's leaders, and destroying its headquarters, arsenals and printing presses. "Hitting the enemy" means aerial bombardment of insurgent bases, and cordoning off and searching entire pro-insurgent neighbourhoods. Abizaid, his generals and their colonels, desperately know they must keep hitting the insurgents-and never let them rest.

Why the urgency? Partly it's because of the battlefield's massive "interior spaces." Historically, important battles have taken place on open fields, deserts, and beaches-venues affording ample visibility, intelligence, and targeting ability.

An urban terrain is radically different. On the outskirts of a city, visibility is limited to the first row of houses. Much fighting takes place indoors where visibility is further reduced. These are the battle's "interior spaces"-the impenetrable pockets of darkness inside hundreds of thousands of rooms, basements, sewers, culverts and urban groves which present a more menacing problem than did the jungle canopies of Vietnam.

Along with reduced visibility, military operations on urban terrain share another feature with jungle warfare-vehicular immobility. As an urban battle rages, not only do the often narrow, barricaded streets become pocked with craters and piled with rubble from demolished buildings, but the rubble itself becomes littered with tank mines and camouflaged, anti-armour ambush squads. This, coupled with the indoor fighting, leads unavoidably to infantry-centred, high-casualty combat.

Urban warfare, like mountain warfare, has a "vertical dimension" as was vividly demonstrated in the "Grozny layer cake." For a protracted period, Russian forces held the streets and the ground floors of Grozny's buildings while Chechen rebels held the rooftops and sewers, thus creating a bizarre two-front war with soldiers fighting up and down.

Urban warfare is thus tantamount to fighting in tunnel-riddled, mountainside jungles. This would be problematic enough, but the overwhelming dilemma facing Anglo-American war-planners in Iraq is all the non-combatants and heritage buildings on the battlefield. More than any other type of warfare, military operations on urban terrain require that field-commanders be restrained with highly restrictive rules of engagement. If the 1 st Armoured Division met Najaf's insurgents on a beach at noon, the battle wouldn't last 15 minutes. But alas for the Americans, the insurgents are amongst 500,000 civilians in a sprawling city salted with sacred mosques.

US urban warfare "doctrine" is spelled out in Joint Publication 3-06 "Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations" dated September 16, 2002. JP 3-06 is mandatory: "The guidance in this publication is authoritative; as such the doctrine will be followed except when, in the judgement of the commander, exceptional circumstances dictate otherwise." If the publication's date intrigues you, you will be more piqued to learn it's author is General Abizaid.

The Iraqi counterinsurgency is Abizaid's baby. As CentCom Commander, he's responsible for US military activity in the whole Middle East, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. John Abizaid was a 1973 West Point graduate nicknamed the "mad Arab" partly because of his Lebanese roots. His Arabic ancestry and fluency, a rarity in the US military, made him a natural for the job, but he is also a decorated Gulf War vet and renowned military academic, having received an Olmsted scholarship which he spent studying in Jordan. He has the full support of his superiors.

Abizaid's bosses are in two overlapping clusters. First, there is the four-man, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), notably JCS Chair US Air Force General Richard Myers, and Army Chief Peter J Shoomaker. Like all nine Joint Force Commanders, the CentCom Commander is formally subordinate to the JCS. Everything a Joint Forces Commander has to play with is on loan from the major services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), so the blessing and cooperation of chiefs of these services is vital to the success of any Joint Force project.

Secondly, at the policy level, Abizaid is supervised by the in-the-loop faction of Iraqi War boosters within the National Security Council, namely: Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, again General Myers, and lastly President Geroge W Bush. These seven constitute an activist "High Command." Even Bush regularly phones Abizaid.

Abizaid is running his war primarily through direct communications with the Major Generals in charge of the US Army's 1 st Cavalry, 1 st Infantry, and 1st Armoured Divisions and with Lt. General Conway of the 1 st Marine Expeditionary Force. These Generals each have geographic assignments for their beefed-up 25,000-soldier divisions to police. Each division is broken into several brigades. Prevailing opinion is the colonels in charge of the brigades should do the tactical decision-making. According to this strategy, each division sets up a headquarters under a major general who acts like a holding company executive dispatching resources as needed to his half dozen remotely stationed colonels. Utilizing state-of-the-art communications equipment, Abizaid, from his Qatari base, is in live-video contact with the major generals, and also with the colonels who are conducting this war hands-on with their 2,000 to 3,000 troop brigades.

On the other side of this war, the insurgency arose from the disintegrating Iraqi Armed Forces in May 2003. For months, the violence directed at US forces consisted of individual acts of outraged Iraqi soldiers and citizens. Then the insurgency congeled into squad warfare consisting of groups of three to five fighters bankrolled and organized by other small squads of former regime leaders including Sadam Hussein himself. Even at this time however, there were reports of platoon-level combat units with sightings of up to fifty men fighting in formation.

The clear shift to platoon and company level combat units began in February 2004. February was a deceptively quiet month because, even though the insurgency was maturing, it was targeting primarily Iraqi collaborators. In late March, the newly grouped insurgents shifted to attacking the Coalition directly with spectacular results. By May 2004, in Najaf and Fallujah, loosely organized brigade-size insurgent militias drove the Coalition out of town.

Half of Abizaid's conundrum is this: an army seeking to dislodge a well-armed force from an urban area must be better equipped and more numerous than its adversary. The Sunni militants in Fallujah and Sadr's followers in Najaf have home-field advantage and are fighting out of defensive positions. When Lt. Colonel Brennan Bryne (1 st Marine) took a 1,300-troop battalion into Fallujah in early April to avenge the killings of four US mercenaries, he was confident he could quickly rid the city of insurgents. However, after weeks of swirling twelve-hour street fights and incessant sniper and mortar fire on the Marine compound, Bryne and Major General Thomas Conway unilaterally suspended operations and, to the chagrin of the High Command, began cutting deals with their adversaries. When the Shiite insurgency broke, it took Colonel Petard over 36 hours just to get his "Duke" Brigade (4 th Infantry) from Baghdad to Najaf because of the blown-up bridges and ambushes. He arrived to find his exhausted 2,000 troops outnumbered by a well-armed militia in the process of fortifying Najaf's perimeter.

The colonels have woefully inadequate resources and lack the will to roust their adversaries. They need multiple, heavy-armoured divisions and massive air support. They need a world willing to accept the destruction of these small cities. (Joint pub 3-06 is clear: even if restrictive rules of engagement are applied, urban warfare will still lead to substantial destruction of civilian life and property.) They have none of the above. It is the civilian leadership (Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, and Bush) crying for bloody offensives against the entrenched urban insurgents, while the beleaguered major generals and colonels shake their heads and seek truces.

The other half of Abizaid's conundrum is that he simply cannot allow the insurgents to control even a small city. For in the interior space, far from the prying binoculars of the colonels at the gate, ominous activities are taking place. In the halls, parks, and classrooms, the insurgents are busy recruiting, training and organizing new fighters. Weapons are stockpiled, manufactured and repaired. Unless this process is disrupted, whole divisions may soon pour from Fallujah, Kufa, Ramadi or a score of other small cities Rumsfeld never heard of six months ago.

The CIA estimates there are 3,541,467 Iraqi men fit for military service, not to mention the women and foreigners now joining the struggle. Historically, popular insurgencies have activated between 2% and 20% of the able. At the lower end of this participation scale, Abizaid is merely confronting an insuppressible guerrilla army. At the higher end, the US forces become the guerrillas.

The Americans are in peril. Ninety percent of them are north of Najaf-hundreds of kilometres from safety and they are losing control of the highways. US forces are strewn over 100 bases, often sleeping in tents and cheap trailers affording them no protection from simple standoff weapons. If the insurgency graduates to divisional strength, the Americans could get annihilated.

Thus they must keep hitting the insurgents. The Coalition is conducting over 2,000 aggressive patrols per day. The colonels are hitting the enemy with forty to fifty air strikes a day. And in a typical twenty-four-hour period, twenty to thirty separate, heavily armed companies pile into armoured vehicles before thundering into Iraqi centres to hit suspected insurgent bases. Hitting and hitting and.

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