The Army is broken in more ways than one.
Colonel W. Patrick Lang (Ret.) is a man who knows something about “humint”, having been the first Director of the Defense Humint Service and an Arab speaker to boot.
He had an interesting post up a while back detailing one of the main reasons we are failing in Iraq.
He explains it this way….
Counterinsurgency war demands an ability to find among the population the individuals and small groups who are the actual fighters .
The exception to this judgment is the application by SOF forces of massive national intelligence collection means to the pursuit of a small number of “high value” takfiri insurgents like Zarqawi.
This SOF effort is only a small part of what the command in Baghdad is supposed to be doing with its forces. The troops that you see on television in Fallujah, Diyalah, the Triangle of Death,” etc. are not SOF. They are the main forces; the army Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) and marine regimental combat teams (RCT) who are carrying the main burden of combat. These forces are effectively “fighting blind” against insurgent gunmen, IED implanters and militia armies.
The reason that is so is that the US Army has no effective clandestine HUMINT capability in Iraq. There is no ARMY (as opposed to DIA or CIA) organization designed to provide information support to maneuver unit commanders. If asked, the Army MI establishment will say that they “do” HUMINT. No, they don’t. What they usually mean by HUMINT is talking to someone, often a prisoner. Prisoners are human, but talking to them is not HUMINT in the sense that is generally understood in this context. That is the use of CONTROLLED local human agents on their own ground to determine the identity and location of the true effectives among the insurgent enemies. The US Army is not doing that in Iraq. If pressed on this point, the Army and the MI establishment point to what they call Tactical HUMINT Teams (THT). These teams are, in reality, made up of counterintelligence people, not espionage operators and the mission of the teams is that of “force protection” for the particular US combat unit that they are part of and with whom they move from place to place.
big snip
General (ret.) Meigs’ IED Defeat Task Force is reported to have spent three BILLION dollars so far in trying to find an “answer” to the murderous toll that IED attacks are taking on US forces. His technical and other “solutions” destroy more IEDs all the time but the number of IEDs planted and the body count keeps going up.
The Army likes the present complete integration and homogenization of the MI into being just another part of the Army, a part that does not “disturb” the common peace in which army people can feel good about each other. The only problem with this is that this total integration and homogenization has failed to do acceptable work in a war that is not going well at all.
He ends with this…..
….Don’t tell me that locals will not spy for the United States or that such work is hard or dangerous. “been there, done that.” I also am not interested in the “now enough linguists” argument. It can be done. Not interested in the “gay rights” argument either…
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So, in Pat Lang’s eyes, “the usual suspects” stated above are only part of the story.
We all know that PNAC had been planning to overthrow Saddam since the end of the Gulf War……..
U.S. military action against Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein has long been a goal of members of the present Bush Administration. The PNAC report was based upon a 1992 draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance, which was prepared for then-Defense Secretary Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby. At the time Libby and Wolfowitz were part of Cheney’s policy staff.
And the Army had also been planning and training for this war for over a decade. …
THE U.S. MILITARY has not rested on its laurels since its success in Operation Desert Shield/Storm. The war is perceived as the benchmark against which to measure the most likely future conflicts. It also is seen as one that is likely to be repeated in the future. Military planners believe they will be called on to fight again, somewhere in the jurisdiction of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), in the not too far distant future. To that end, they not only are strengthening American presence in the region, but also are restructuring the entire U.S. military in order to be able to support the American forces better when they are called upon to intervene again.
So, how did we get it so wrong?
There are so many answers to that question….but one of the main ones has to be the outsourcing of critical military functions to profit based, bottom line, war profiteers.
We keep reading stories about how the Army is broke….and it is. But it seems to me that even if the war stopped right now, and we had 20 years to rebuild, we will be as unprepared for the next crisis as we were for this one unless there are sea changes in the fundamentally wrong thinking going on with many of the top brass.
As Wes Clark once said ……..
“We have to put that jack back in the box”
