May
17
2009
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Mistaking Technology for a Strategy |
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Written by JD Johannes
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Monday, 18 May 2009 |
"We can't kill our way out of this," Brigadier General Mark Gurganus told me in the early summer of 2007.
Gurganus, a larger than life character was the embodiment of the warrior general. At the time he commanded the Ground Combat Element of Coalition Forces in western Iraq. I first met him 2005 when he was Colonel on a dusty patch of asphalt north of Fallujah after his humvee was blown up by an IED.
His orders were pretty straight forward that morning--find those SOBs and kill them. A few hours later the IED team caught in the act and a team of snipers dispatched them.
Gurganus' statements in 2005 and 2007 may seem contradictory in isolation, but in 2005 he saw clearly that the solution to the IED threat was not more technology but the elimination of the insurgency.
Later in 2005 his Regiment conducted one of the first and largest census data collection operations of the war. The only technology needed was a digital camera, GPS unit, clip board, pen and an access database. When Marines know who is who and who is supposed to live in a house or village, it is very hard to hide in plain sight.
By late 2007 nearly the entire Euphrates river valley had been photgraphed and listed in a database. There was no where to hide from the Marines and the Son's of Anbar didn't even need the database--they knew if you didn't belong in an area on sight.
You didn't need to spend a lot of time doing targetted raids or tracking and chasing high value targets if you had a really good list--the targets couldn't move and were quickly trapped in the net.
In today's New York Times , David Kicullen and Andrew McDonald Exum make a similar point about the use of drones to carry out precision strikes in Pakistan.
"The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error — our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing “high-value” targets — not to mention the bounties placed on their heads — distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets — Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence. Killing Mr. Zarqawi bought only 18 days of quiet before Al Qaeda returned to operations under new leadership.
"This is not to suggest that killing terrorists is a bad thing — on the contrary. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and over-emphasizing it wastes resources. The operation that killed Mr. Zarqawi, for example, was not a one-day event. Thousands of hours of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were devoted to the elimination of one man, when units on the ground could have used this time to protect the people from the insurgency that was tearing Iraq apart."
During my trips to Iraq I saw entire High Value Target lists captured or killed only to replaced by more vile targets. This does not mean that High Value Targets should not be pursued and dealt with, but that in warfare resources are scarce and have alternative uses. Resources should be used for what yields the maximum gain and that is eliminating the insurgent's ability to operate rather than trying to eliminate insurgents one or a few at a time.
The strategies and tactics that led to the reduction of the IED threat were the ones that restricted the ability of the IED team to operate, not technologies that countered individual IEDs.
The true solution to the IED threat was to get off the roads and out of vehicles, live in the village, know everyone in the village, protect the locals, provide some essential services and kill or capture the insurgents when they popped up--in that order.
Hellfire missiles from a drone are the exact opposite. The Soviets ravaged entire valleys with helicopter gunships but the Mujahadeen multiplied. The Soviets tried killing their way out of an insurgency and proved that it is impossible.
The drone strikes in Pakistan will prove just as futile.
The battle in Afghanistan will be won much in the way the British did in Malaya. Units moved deeper and deeper into the jungles setting up small outposts and gaining the trust of the villagers by protecting them. Then the next step was to provide things the insurgents could not like medical care and commerce.
The remote villages of Afghanistan, like the villages of Malaya decades before, will reject commerce at first. It is change and humans universally dislike change, until they see the personal benefits of it.
The communist insurgency of Malaya was, ironically, beaten by the human desire for profit. The Taliban will be undone by the most basic of human emotions--greed, not hellfire missiles.
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