The Shifting Strategies of War

The U.S. military strategy in Iraq has changed again and again since the spring of 2003, when the American military scattered the Iraqi Army and rained precisely guided cruise missiles on the power centers of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad. From facing an army, the U.S. was confronted with an enemy that preferred to strike from the shadows. And now American soldiers find themselves the virtual referees between Sunni and Shi'a militias as Iraq slides into a veritable civil war. American forces have had to shift from engaging with the populace to taking refuge behind the perimeters of secure military bases and, then, again to patrolling the streets. It has been a painful evolution, with many lessons learned, perhaps with the most important ones yet to come and perhaps too late.

Soon after the fall of Saddam, politics back in Washington meant that training Iraqi security forces — not inflicting defeats on the enemy — became the primary measure of progress in the war. Iraq was to be turned over to the Iraqis as quickly as possible. But the situation on the ground was changing rapidly. In early 2004, a unit of the North Carolina National Guard was still driving through a small town like Balad Ruz in unarmored Humvees with no doors. But already, the balkanized conditions of the country at large were present in the community. The mayor was a Sunni Arab while the police were mostly Shi'a. Meanwhile, the troops that the Americans were training, belonging to the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) were mostly Kurds. The ICDC was the first attempt at reconstituting the Iraqi armed forces after the Americans dissolved the Iraq Army in the spring of 2003. But in Balad Ruz as elsewhere, none of the Iraqi groups liked each other. And things would get worse from there.

Indeed, at the same time, the 82nd Airborne had also been training ICDC troops in Fallujah. But already the hardiness of the new Iraqi force was being tested — with questionable results. Spc. Dane Phelps, then 20, recalls an ambush in which insurgents with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades attacked his unit as they helped install concrete barriers in front of an ICDC headquarters. "Half the ICDC took off running when we took contact," Phelps recalled.

That was mid-March. By June 2004, the ICDC proved ineffectual as Fallujah and other towns were engulfed in chaos. (The North Carolina National Guard unit that had been training ICDC troops in Balad Ruz would be sent to Baquba to help out only to see its captain killed in an ambush.) There would be no quick hand-off to Iraqi forces. Furthermore, plans for a drawdown of U.S. troops would be repeatedly scrapped as American soldiers had to adapt to a kind of conflict they were never trained to fight: classic guerrilla combat. Instead of going into combat against an organized and uniformed enemy, the U.S. was up against small groups of men whose weapons of choice were mortars, roadside bombs, any weapon that allowed them to make a quick strike without presenting a target to the vastly more powerful Americans.

Political milestones would exacerbate the conflict. In January 2005, thousands more American troops reinforced those already in the field to secure Iraq for national elections. Tactically, the election was a success. The anticipated bloodbath — with insurgents carrying out their threats of car-bombing hundreds and driving the turnout down to nothing — did not materialize. But the promised political breakthrough did not take place. The results of the vote only further alienated the Sunnis; and the need for American boots on the ground increased. Artillerymen and tank crews — more valuable for the manpower they provided than the heavy weapons they operated — were deployed to do the work of infantrymen.

By the beginning of 2006, Marines in western Iraq were at the forefront of another change in the military's strategic thinking. Instead of seeking, endlessly, to track down and engage an elusive enemy, the military was turning to counterinsurgency strategy. For example, Marines in al-Qaim had moved off their giant and isolated main base and deployed to small outposts in the heart of the region’s towns and cities. They began patrolling on foot, chatting up the locals and behaving more like beat cops and less like soldiers. The strategy was to focus less on killing the enemy and more on denying the enemy access to the civilian population.

That approach is the foundation of the new security plan for Iraq. Today, in west Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood, the 1st Cavalry Division has set up the city's first combat outpost. Moved from their base at Baghdad’s airport, a group of American soldiers lives in a row of houses with an Iraqi Army unit. Lieut. Jake Furda, 26, says his unit is "doing what everybody thought was crazy — getting out of the vehicles and talking to people." The mission, he said, evolves constantly. "You're always changing it from Army to cop to civil affairs."

But as the counterinsurgency strategy evolved so, once again, did the nature of the bloodshed in Iraq. By last summer a Sunni-Shi'ite war was in full swing on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Iraq's security forces have grown in competence, but they are now part of the problem as sectarian violence replaces the insurgency as the bloodiest threat in Iraq. The Iraqi Army and Police are overwhelmingly Shi'ite, and the Americans rely on them as partners in its ongoing war against Sunni insurgents. But the military must also restrain those same forces from brutalizing and dispossessing Sunni civilians. Soldiers say many of their counterparts in the Iraqi Army owe their loyalty to Shi'ite militias, not some abstract concept of a unified Iraq. "It's like any part of the Iraqi government around here: they've been infiltrated," Sgt. Ray Sifford, one of the soldiers at the Ghazaliyah combat outpost, said of the Iraqi Army.

At the same time, maintaining a semblance of order amid the chaos of Iraq has led to a fresh surge of U.S. forces. That seems to have inspired a counter-strategy by the Mahdi Army and other Shi'ite militias, which have simply retreated further into the shadows as more American troops pour into Iraq. Soldiers and Marines know they must eventually leave the country, and they fear that their presence is only delaying the inevitable. "I give it a 95% chance that after we start pulling away from this, the violence will start again," Sifford said. Then it will be another lesson learned too late.