UK officer slams US Iraq tactics

[big bad john]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4603136.stm

UK officer slams US Iraq tactics 
By Matthew Davis
BBC News, Washington 



The brigadier said he wanted to help an institution he respects
A senior British Army officer has sparked indignation in the US with a scathing article criticising the US Army's performance in Iraq.
Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster said US tactics early in the occupation had alienated Iraqis and exacerbated problems for the coalition.

Officers displayed cultural ignorance, self-righteousness, over-optimism and unproductive management, he said.

The article, in Military Review, has drawn US criticism but also approval.

'Stiflingly hierarchical'

In it Brig Aylwin-Foster says American officers displayed such cultural insensitivities that it "arguably amounted to institutional racism" and may have helped spur the insurgency.

  Sometimes good articles do make you angry

Col Kevin Benson
School of Advanced Military Studies

While the army is "indisputably the master of conventional war fighting, it is notably less proficient in... what the US defence community often calls Operations Other Than War," the officer wrote.

Operations to win the peace in Iraq were "weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, predisposition to offensive operations and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head on", he added.

The British officer - who was commander of a programme to train the Iraqi military - says he wrote the article with the intent to "be helpful to an institution I greatly respect".

Yet the initial response from many US military officers was hostile.

'It made me upset'

Col Kevin Benson, commander of the US Army's elite School of Advanced Military Studies, said his first reaction was that Brig Aylwin-Foster was "an insufferable British snob".

"Some of this is pretty powerful stuff and it made me a little upset," the colonel told the BBC.

Col Benson, one of the lead planners for the 3rd US Army's early post-invasion operations, is writing a rebuttal to the Military Review piece.

"We paid a great deal of attention to the tribal interactions within Iraq and on making commanders in the field aware of the sensitivities," he said.

"And I certainly don't recognise what he says about the de-professionalisation of the US Army.

"But sometimes good articles do make you angry. We should publish articles like this. We are in a war and we must always be thinking of how we can improve the way we operate."

Earlier this month President George W Bush said US troop levels in Iraq would be reduced to several thousand below the pre-election baseline of 138,000 by Spring 2006.

Those cuts would come in addition to the decrease of 20,000 troops who were in the country largely to provide security during the December elections.

 

[DELTADOG13]

I've found this to be true on many deployments with US forces. In Kosovo and Afghanistan with US officers and Senior NCO's they had that, we are the best attitude towards the locals. I found this attitude in Afganistan especially with the Afghan Army. The mandate  was to provide advice and assistance. Most Americans just could not get culturally stuck in. They reverted to commanding vice mentoring the Afghans to do it themselves. We eventually figured that when the ANA realised we Canadians weren't going to do everything for them they jumped at the chance to work with excellent results. So i can see this Brit's point. Good on him for voicing it.

 

[teddy49]

http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/download/English/NovDec05/aylwin.pdf

There's the link to the actual article.  Pretty on the money, I think.

 

[tomahawk6]

Let me first state the obvious- I disagree. The article could just as well have been written about the British Army. The attitude reflected in the article is one that has galled many in the US Army. We heard this since late 2003 that the UK was was the superior way. They like to point to their AO. For quite some time I had been reading intelligence reports about the British AO which quite frankly were disturbing. Then late last year it blew to the surface when the Brits had two SAS soldiers arrested by the IP and then were held by the IP. The Brits mounted a rescue mission and recovered their personnel. The problem in Basra is that the Brits dont have the manpower nor the will to keep the al sadr gang from infiltrating into the IP. Their sector was quiet because they essentially took a hands off approach - a risk adverse strategy if you will. The Brits would not be in Iraq today if they had sustained the casualty percentage that we have. Another fact is that our problem comes from the Sunni triangle which benefited from and ran Saddam's regime.

We were disposed toward offensive operations because every Sunni town was in opposition to a democratic Iraq. Over time our strategy is showing success. We have a growing number of Sunni tribes that have decided to work for a political settlement because fighting the US is a losing proposition. One misconception the Sunni's have is they thought they were the majority within the country. For the Sunni's in the region a democratic Iraq is viewed as a threat which explains why the Sunni opposition has been a magnet for every fanatic in the region.

US troops operating in the field attempt to be friendly and obey local customs. Our battalion/brigade commanders meet with local elders on a regular basis to foster trust and to help the communities that they operate in.

 

[Cliff]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4603136.stm
While the army is "indisputably the master of conventional war fighting, it is notably less proficient in... what the US defence community often calls Operations Other Than War," the officer wrote.

My guess is that the experts in OOTW are Army SF who have performed remarkably in both Iraq and A/stan, from the little that has been published, it was the SF teams that softened up the Taliban and AQ targets and got the ball running in A/stan. I don't agree entirely with the author.

 

[big bad john]

http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/12/wirq12.xml&site=5

Why the US blundered in Iraq, by a British brigadier
By Oliver Poole in Baghdad
(Filed: 12/01/2006)

One of the British Army's most senior officers to serve in Iraq has written a scathing critique of the US military, accusing it of cultural insensitivity bordering on "institutional racism".

His former colleagues were self-righteous and showed a catastrophic inability to understand local values, said Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who spent a year as deputy commander of the team training the Iraqi army.

US commanders failed to understand that their men needed a knowledge of Arab culture and counter-insurgency techniques. This had helped to alienate the Iraqi people and probably helped to fuel the insurgency, he argued.

Instead of trying to win "hearts and minds" they saw "destruction of the enemy as a strategic goal in its own right", the brigadier said in an article in the US army magazine, Military Review. The objective should have been "to understand how to manage a population", he said.

His assessment has infuriated high-ranking US officers. The article was accompanied by a note from the magazine's editor describing it as written in a "constructive spirit".

Brig Aylwin-Foster's former commanding officer in Iraq, Lt Gen David Petraeus of the US army, insists many of his assertions are wrong. Col Kevin Benson, the head of America's Advanced Military Studies school, said the comments must have come from an "insufferable British snob".

 

Similar opinions to the brigadier's have been voiced in private by many British commanders. It is widely believed in the British Army that the best chance to win the trust of Iraqis was in the months after Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003 but that the opportunity was squandered.

They blame heavy-handed US tactics and incidents of American soldiers insulting Iraqi pride by not understanding local sensibilities.

What gives Brig Aylwin-Foster's criticisms such impact is that he spent 2004 serving with US soldiers and witnessed their behaviour. In the article, published this week, he said the overriding American attitude to the war was "kinetic" when a more softly-softly approach could have been more successful.

The reality is that "the quick solution is often the wrong one", he wrote.

If an insurgent stronghold was identified, it would be destroyed with maximum force even if such violence also destroyed surrounding buildings. According to the brigadier, such damage angered the locals and undermined what should have been the main aim: to secure local support to isolate the enemy.

The brigadier, now serving in Bosnia, said such misjudgments were compounded by "inadvertent" offence given in daily dealings with Iraqis. It is a common complaint of Iraqis that US troops do not respect their culture, for example by wearing shoes in mosques or by men searching women.

The tension was partly due to "cultural insensitivity" but also a certainty among US officers in the righteousness of their cause, which made it difficult for them to appreciate that, to others, an opposing viewpoint could be logical, the brigadier suggested.

The problem, he concluded, lies with the institutional mentality of the army itself. It had not adapted after the Cold War and still focused on fighting opposing armies with maximum force.

If it is to succeed in Iraq, the army must evolve and realise "mere destruction of the enemy is not the answer". It should instead introduce proper training so soldiers finally understand Iraqis' mentality and behaviour.

10 January 2006: General calls for Blair to face trial over Iraq


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