I’m happy to announce that the Ohioana Library Association has named Baghdad at Sunrise a 2009 Ohioana Book Award finalist in the nonfiction category.
For anyone in Columbus on May 9, I will also be a featured author at the Ohioana Book Festival. See you there!
I have had the pleasure this fall of traveling coast-to-coast and talking to a number of audiences about Iraq, both the period covered in Baghdad at Sunrise (2003-2004) and the later period during the surge (2007-2008) when I served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus. You can catch some of the action at these links:
Tavis Smiley Show (Sep. 30): http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200809/20080930_mansoor.html
World Affairs Council of Houston (Nov. 5): http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=peter%20mansoor
Charlie Rose Show (Nov. 14): http://www.charlierose.com/view/6452
In the final chapter of Baghdad at Sunrise, entitled “Reflections,” I discuss the lessons learned during our first – and fateful – year in Iraq. The United States must learn these lessons and apply them, now and in the future. There is little doubt but that violent extremists will continue to challenge the United States and its allies via terrorism and insurgencies, at least until we manifest the capability to prevail in this type of war. One of the two Presidential candidates will soon inherit the Oval Office and with it a host of problems, foreign and domestic. Here is my bit of advice to them both.
America must learn how to persevere in long struggles, to fight for its vital national interests wherever and whenever it is necessary to do so, and to develop the capability to orchestrate more effectively all elements of national power.
We need to prepare to fight the wars we must fight, and not just the kind of wars we want to fight. The United States has successfully prosecuted counterinsurgency warfare in the past, and can do so now and in the future as well provided we jettison the mindset that all wars are short and sharp, fought at extended distances with stealth and precision, and do not require large numbers of troops or extended occupations.
Counterinsurgency warfare can only be won on the ground, and only by applying all elements of national power to the struggle. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are struggles for legitimacy, for competing visions of governance and the future. The side will win which can gain the people’s trust and confidence, or failing that, to control their movements and actions. To secure a population, forces must position among the people.
Counterinsurgency warfare is troop intensive. Although requirements vary by location and circumstances, a historically based rule of thumb is that successful counterinsurgencies require 20 to 25 security force personnel (army, police, territorial militia, etc.) per 1000 population. Although the requirement to sustain such large-scale forces for an extended period of time mandates considerable expansion of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to meet this strategic need, the best way to provide more ground forces is to procure them from the host nation. Advisor duty will become an essential task for many officers and noncommissioned officers.
Security is but one aspect of counterinsurgency warfare—and not necessarily the most important. Successful counterinsurgency operations require steady progress along all lines of operation: political, security, economic, diplomatic, and informational. Specialized military organizations such as civil affairs and psychological operations forces can assist in this regard, but a truly effective counterinsurgency effort requires civilian expertise, capacity, and resources. The United States must develop an expeditionary civilian capacity to prosecute counterinsurgency warfare in a successful manner.
The actions of military forces and civilian expertise must be united in design and purpose and directed via a coherent operational concept toward a clearly defined strategic goal.
Counterinsurgency is a thinking person’s war. It requires the counterinsurgent to adapt faster than the insurgent, and therefore requires an effective system for gathering, evaluating, and disseminating lessons-learned. A failure to adapt inevitably means defeat. In the future, U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers must spend as much time in the library as they do in the gym, or risk defeat in this kind of war.
Since counterinsurgency warfare is fought among the people, it is ultimately won or lost through human interaction and perceptions. We must fight and win the information war. The Internet itself has become a battlefield in the competition for public support, and we must contest this space rather than cede it to our adversaries. Military operations in a counterinsurgency war, regardless of their actual kinetic impact on insurgent forces, must in the end revolve around the public perceptions of their legitimacy and effectiveness.
To empower leaders who have the most immediate impact on the host nation population, assets must be decentralized and made available for their use. In counterinsurgency warfare, smaller and tailored is generally better than bigger and uniform. Overseas, as in the United States, the norm is that all politics are local.
If effective targeting is crucial to fighting insurgents without alienating the local population, then precise intelligence is the sine qua non of counterinsurgency operations. Intelligence structures must change or risk irrelevance in the counterinsurgency wars of this century. Satellite surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles, and signals intercept capabilities are crucial, but by themselves are no substitute for human intelligence and cultural understanding. Tribal structures, insurgent networks, sectarian divisions, and ethnic mosaics cannot be divined through technological means. As the United States commenced an intensive campaign of math and science education following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, so must it now pursue excellence in humanities programs such as languages, history, cultural anthropology, and regional studies.
The transformation of American power for the wars of the twenty-first century remains incomplete. Although bulky divisions have given way to smaller, modular, more easily deployable brigade combat teams, the units remain largely configured for conventional combat. Likewise, the culture of the U.S. Army must change, or the organization will be unprepared to fight and win the wars of the twenty-first century. Offensive operations to kill or capture the enemy must be balanced by defensive and stability operations to hold territory, protect civilian populations, and rebuild infrastructure, economies, and political institutions. While retaining the capability to conduct major combat operations, the Army’s culture must shift to embrace missions other than conventional land force combat.
The current personnel system, with its emphasis on rewarding technical and tactical competence at the expense of intellectual understanding and a broader, deeper grasp of the world in which we live, must adapt to promote those leaders with the skill sets and education needed for the wars we will fight in the years ahead. Effective leaders will be those who can think creatively, lead change, understand information warfare and the asymmetric battlefield, and who are flexible and adaptive.
Organizations assigned to foreign internal defense duty—the training and equipping of foreign military forces—must again become vital, resourced parts of our military establishment, as they were during the Cold War. Effective advisory and foreign internal defense organizations, combined with more robust civilian capabilities in the State Department, Agency for International Development, U.S. Information Service, and other parts of the bureaucracy, can help to reduce the chances that problems in foreign lands will erupt into full-blown counterinsurgencies. In other words, to win the fight against twenty-first century terrorists and insurgents, we must first adapt the organizational culture of the U.S. government and our military forces to the realities of twenty-first century conflicts.
We must go to war as a nation if we are to prevail in the extended conflicts of the 21st century. The support of the American people during the four decades of the Cold War shows the possibilities of American power, provided a bi-partisan consensus exists as to the ends of policy. In the current struggle, the American people must once again come together to defeat a grave threat to our nation and our way of life. America cannot long remain a superpower if we think that our wars can be fought solely by the small sliver of society that populates our professional military forces. Only when Americans decide on a shared vision of the future and then volunteer to support and defend the nation and all it stands for when it is threatened, will the Republic and its values endure.
In case you missed my appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS last Tuesday (September 30), the host began the program by showing me two clips from the first Presidential debate. Each candidate was asked what they had learned from the Iraq War. Senator Barrack Obama stated that we needed to go back to the reasons for going to war in the first place, to realize how big a mistake going to war had been. Senator John McCain stated that he had learned that you cannot win a war with a flawed strategy. Which candidate, Tavis asked me, was correct?
Well, they both are. The Bush administration decision to go to war in 2003 was deeply flawed and a strategic error of the first order. By toppling the Iraqi government, America released the strategic brake on Iran and invited a jihadist migration into Iraq. And strategic errors are difficult if not impossible to overcome with operational or tactical brilliance, as the Germans proved in two world wars during the last century. In fact, we had neither operational nor tactical brilliance (with a few exceptional cases) for several years, until General David Petraeus changed the strategy in 2007 and instituted counterinsurgency techniques that worked.
The adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy that placed the protection of the Iraqi people as the top priority has turned the security situation around and made possible political progress in Iraq. Whether political progress will be forthcoming is up to the Iraqi people to determine – as it should be. But the near total destruction of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was the result of the Sunni tribal rebellion and the offensive operations undertaken by American forces as part of the surge, is an accomplishment that has improved our strategic position in the region, despite the outcome of Iraqi politics.
So Senator Obama is correct in stating that the war was a mistake, but Senator McCain is also correct in stating that we could never win with a failed strategy. We are on firmer ground now, thanks to an improved strategy, inspired leadership, hard fighting by Iraqi and American troops, and Sunni tribal support in the battle to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq.
A couple of days ago General Ray Odierno assumed the command of Multi-National Force-Iraq from General Dave Petraeus, who deftly guided coalition strategy for 19 months during the surge period. Many have asked me what this change portends for the future of U.S. strategy in Iraq. The answer, in short, is “not much,” at least not until the next administration takes office in January. General Odierno was the Multi-National Corps-Iraq commander during the height of the surge, and he implemented the strategy devised by General Petraeus to great effect. It is likely that any changes that occur will be ones of style rather than substance, as command is a personal endeavor and General Odierno and General Petraeus have different styles. Furthermore, General Petraeus will keep tabs on what is happening in Baghdad from his new perch at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
The larger question is whether the Iraqi government will take advantage of the improvement in the security situation to craft a way forward politically. The number of security incidents in Iraq today mirrors the relative lull in violence that occurred in the first three months of 2004, as I describe in Baghdad at Sunrise. Back then, Ambassador Bremer and CPA failed to craft a political formula to bring the Sunnis back into support of the emerging Iraqi government, and the result was four more years of bloody conflict. It remains to be seen whether or not the current regime in the Green Zone goes down this same path, or blazes a new trail that brings all Iraqis into support of the way forward.
Last week I was in New York for a roundtable meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations. The session was hosted by Max Boot, and I was paired for the event with Bing West, author of the excellent book “The Village” about counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War, and more recently “The Strongest Tribe,” one of the many books about the Iraq War that are appearing in print as the surge winds down. Later in the day I interviewed with Charlie Rose for a show that should air sometime this week. During the session he asked me an interesting question, “What is the biggest misconception the American people have regarding the war in Iraq?”
Quite frankly, there are many. I have written about the misconceptions regarding the surge in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “How the Surge Worked” (August 11, p. B-7). But there is a larger set of misconceptions that have to do with American strategic culture. Based on recent conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Americans have a belief in short wars fought with high technology and limited in time, space, and effort involved. Any informed study of war would suggest that these types of wars are an aberration, and that the historical norm is that wars are most often long, messy, expensive, and full of fog and friction that defy rational analysis up front of the means and ends necessary to wage them successfully. I have tried to convey this sense in “Baghdad at Sunrise,” both in the analysis of what went wrong in 2003-2004, and, in the final chapter of the book (“Reflections”), what we can look forward to in the next several decades. It is a debate worth continuing as Americans consider the strategic direction ahead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
To honor the 24 members of the Ready First Combat Team who were killed in Iraq in 2003-2004, Yale University Press has given me 24 copies of my book to give away free.
I want to use these books to spread the word about “Baghdad at Sunrise” to a wider audience, so here’s the deal:
I’ll give a free book to the first 24 bloggers who agree to review “Baghdad at Sunrise” on their blogs. Just post a comment on this blog with your blog URL, your email address, and your snail mail address – domestic U.S. addresses only (including APO and FPO). Don’t worry; your post will not appear to the public on my blog, and I will not publish your personal information. I will add a link to your blog URL where your review of my book will be posted.
Those of you who will receive books will get a confirmation from my publisher that your book is in the mail. I look forward to your reviews of what I think is an important work on the history of the Iraq War.
When I deployed to Iraq in June 2003, I decided to keep a daily journal as a personal memoir for my family. This was, after all, my first experience in combat, and my experiences as the commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division (aka the “Ready First Combat Team”) would be a defining moment in my life. For 13 months I wrote faithfully in my journal every day (or, more usually, late at night), no matter how tired I was. When I returned home in July 2004, I considered expanding the journal into a book-length manuscript, albeit still with the idea to present it as a personal memoir for my family. After some reflection, I decided that a more expansive treatment of my experiences in Iraq could fill a broader need by explaining what went right and wrong during the crucial first year after the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
Currently, the Iraq War genre is filled with books written by junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers recounting their experiences on the streets and in the deserts of Iraq. Although a few of these works are quite good, on the whole they lack context at the higher operational and strategic levels of the war. Books written by reporters fill some of this void, but these works are written by those on the outside of the military peering into headquarters to which they did not belong. Memoirs by very senior political and military leaders are more or less self-exculpatory, and too often attempt to deflect blame for what went wrong. A significant void currently exists in the history of the war, one which I try to fill with Baghdad at Sunrise. By explaining the conflict from the perspective of a senior commander who served in Iraq, the book fills a critical gap in the public’s understanding of the war.
Beyond giving the public a better idea of what happened on the ground in Iraq in the war’s first year, the broader goal of Baghdad at Sunrise is to provide lessons for the future as the United States and its allies continue the struggle in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. A lot has been written about our political and strategic failings, but the story of U.S. Army operations in Iraq has been told mainly through the eyes of people outside the institution. My hope is that the book is also a good read – a story not just worth telling, but a story well told.
September 16, 2008
Prologue
Adhamiya, April 7, 2004
The team of eight soldiers waited until nightfall, then moved into position on the roof of a multistory building overlooking the eerily quiet streets below. Their mission was to scan for enemy activity, particularly the ubiquitous mortar teams that moved around the city at night despite persistent efforts to hunt them down. This was the heart of Adhamiya, a volatile Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad—a hotbed of anticoalition activity, where cold stares greeted American soldiers and where insurgents conducted nightly attacks. On this night tensions in the neighborhood ran high. Six days previously, in a scene reminiscent of Somalia a decade earlier, hysterical crowds in Fallujah had dragged the burned, mutilated bodies of four American civilian security contractors through the streets and strung two of them up from a bridge after gunmen ambushed their SUV with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades RPG. Many Adhamiyans had rejoiced along with their Sunni brethren to the west. Their elation would not last long.
A half-mile or so away from the team in the square near the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a large, unruly crowd of several hundred Iraqis gathered. Before hostilities had begun, Saddam Hussein had last been seen alive here. The square had also been the scene of fierce fighting ten months earlier when Ba’athist holdovers ambushed a group of American soldiers stationed in the area. On this night the mob, its emotions whipped to a frenzied pitch, loudly protested the Marine offensive into Fallujah in response to the contractor slayings. Armed insurgents fired a number of RPG toward the local police station. Iraqi police and American soldiers nearby returned fire and scattered the enemy.
The team of soldiers established their observation post OP and began to scan the neighborhood with night-vision devices. In the phosphorescent screens of the light-amplifying goggles, the area appeared muted in shades of green and black. The streets around the building seemed tranquil, but the stillness was deceiving. The team could hear the sounds of explosions in the neighborhood. No one expected the calm in the immediate vicinity to last. It didn’t. The American soldiers were not alone.
Twenty minutes after the team’s arrival, rocket-propelled grenades crashed into the building and automatic-weapons fire plastered the area. The soldiers dove for cover. The team leader, First Lieutenant Brady Van Engelen, fell with a severe wound to the head—a round from an AK-47 assault rifle had pierced his Kevlar helmet and fractured his skull. The team’s combat lifesaver, a soldier who had been given extensive first aid training, immediately went to work to stanch the flow of blood. The team, pinned to the rooftop by intense fire and with a seriously wounded soldier in their midst, made an anxious radio call to battalion headquarters for urgent casualty evacuation and assistance.
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Rabena, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery, immediately diverted the battalion’s Combat Observation Lasing Team platoon—the “COLT”—from another mission to extract the endangered team. With the situation unclear, First Lieutenant Eddy Quan cautiously led his platoon toward the friendly occupied building. Tense soldiers kept a vigilant watch for enemy on the rooftops and in the alleyways. Suddenly, all four COLT HMMWV (High Mobility, Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles) came under concentrated small-arms and RPG fire. In the lead vehicle, Quan pushed through the ambush but soon encountered obstacles that the insurgents had hastily erected to bar the way. Under heavy fire, lacking positive identification of the friendly position in the building, and unable to bypass the obstacles, the COLT temporarily withdrew.
Enemy fighters began moving toward the stricken observation post. As the commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division, I listened to the increasingly tense reports flooding into my tactical operations center from five miles away. Even though it would take thirty minutes or more for an armored relief force to arrive on the scene, I ordered tank and infantry fighting vehicle support from neighboring battalions. The team, threatened with being overrun, didn’t have thirty minutes to wait. Lieutenant Colonel Rabena directed a quick reaction force from B Battery, led by First Lieutenant Michael Vahle, to link up with the COLT platoon and ordered Lieutenant Quan to reengage. The reinforcements consisted of an M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzer, an M113 armored field ambulance for casualty evacuation, and an M88A1 heavy armored recovery vehicle for breaching obstacles. Each vehicle mounted a .50 caliber heavy machine gun, but the firepower would not be enough to overwhelm the well-armed insurgents with their RPG launchers, Russian-made RPK machine guns, and AK-47s.
Determined to retrieve their fellow soldiers, the reinforced extraction team, which now consisted of the COLT HMMWV and Bravo Battery’s tracked vehicles, stormed back into the kill zone with Lieutenant Vahle’s armored tracked vehicles leading the way. The insurgents were waiting. The convoy immediately came under heavy RPG and automatic-weapons fire. Tracer rounds streaked down the alleyways and ricocheted off the armored vehicles. The lead vehicle, the Paladin howitzer, took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade but continued to advance; several more RPG exploded against nearby buildings. American soldiers replied with machine guns and rifle fire. The heavy exchange lit up the area, which resounded with gunfire and explosions. Unable to penetrate the wall of lead coming at them, the extraction force again pulled back temporarily to regroup.
Enemy fire continued to pin down the OP team and prevent its withdrawal. The team, threatened with being overrun by attackers on foot, decided to withdraw on their own. Soldiers carried their wounded lieutenant down several flights of stairs in an effort to exit the building. Insurgents thwarted the escape attempt by directing a well-placed RPG into the doorway. The soldiers managed to establish a secure position on the second floor, but for Lieutenant Van Engelen, time was slipping away.
Lieutenant Quan reorganized the extraction team a thousand feet away at Antar Square, a prominent traffic circle. Realizing that the enemy would soon overwhelm the friendly position, he quickly devised a plan to divide his force and approach the building from different directions. “I know this sounds crazy,” Quan instructed Lieutenant Vahle over the radio, “but I need you to go back down where we just came from and into the kill zone. I’m going to take my guys around to the back side of the building and dismount them to pull out the OP team.” Given the intensity of the resistance, this was asking a lot of the B Battery soldiers. They would be magnets for enemy fire. The artillerymen knew the odds and were up to the challenge.
Knowing that his team’s diversion was critical to the success of the mission, Lieutenant Vahle led his tracks back into the gauntlet. Adrenaline racing, the GIs clutched their weapons and stared at the shadows, expecting any moment to come under withering fire. In the short time it took the convoy to regroup, the insurgents had again reinforced and shifted positions. As the armored patrol entered the kill zone, the enemy detonated a 152mm artillery round directly in front of Vahle in the lead vehicle. The huge blast momentarily knocked the crew senseless, but they quickly recovered and pushed on. The crew of the M88A1 recovery vehicle took a direct hit from an RPG, but the vehicle remained operable, and the crew fought its way through the ambush. The soldiers blasted away at the enemy with their machine guns. Astonishingly, the team remained unharmed and in the fight.
As Vahle was assaulting through the enemy positions, Quan quickly moved his gun trucks through the back alleys and into position to reach the observation post on foot. He carefully positioned his vehicles on the dark side of an alley, dismounted, and used an eight-foot wall to conceal the movement toward the observation post. Staff Sergeant Hugh Edinger moved to the head of the column and positioned his team to cover the platoon leader’s move to the building. Lieutenant Quan and his team bounded forward, and then dashed across the street under enemy small-arms fire to the building entrance. There they made contact with the OP team. Sergeant First Class Gary Bartlett, the COLT platoon sergeant, repositioned the wheeled vehicles forward to enable a quick withdrawal.
The insurgents would not allow the COLT to leave without a fight. Enemy forces continued to fire at the Americans with assault rifles and machine guns, but for the first time this evening they were outgunned. The COLT placed heavy suppressive fire on the enemy positions, which allowed movement back to the HMMWV by small groups in successive bounds. The soldiers carefully loaded the wounded lieutenant into a vehicle, stacked themselves into the four-gun trucks, and rapidly departed the area along with the armored quick-reaction force. Twenty-seven minutes after first coming under fire, all thirty-seven U.S. personnel and seven vehicles safely returned to their forward operating base along the banks of the Tigris River. This was the end of the evacuation, but it was not the end of the fight.
While Quan and Vahle were leading their men into the kill zone, I directed reinforcements to the area. This was the second night in a row that heavy forces would descend on Adhamiya. The previous evening an armed throng had converged on the Adhamiya police station and killed a U.S. soldier manning a machine gun in its defense. I had then ordered several units of the brigade combat team armed with tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and helicopters to counterattack. With sixteen insurgents dead, the enemy had faded into the dense warren of streets and alleyways to regroup. Tonight was the second round.
Radios hummed with cross talk as commanders determined routes, zone boundaries, and objectives. Minutes after the extraction of the OP team and its wounded lieutenant, the armored forces arrived on the scene. Eight M1A1 Abrams tanks and a company of combat engineers mounted in M113 armored personnel carriers, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Garry Bishop, moved from Baghdad Island across the Tigris River and south through the nearby district of Kadhimiyah, and then recrossed the river and maneuvered into Adhamiya from the west along Omar Street. Ten more tanks and four M2A2ODS Bradley infantry fighting vehicles carrying a platoon of infantry, under the control of Major Paul Kreis, moved up 20th Street from the south. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Rabena gathered a column of vehicles from his two other artillery batteries and descended on the area from the north. Together they would squeeze the insurgents in a vise. Adhamiya had become a magnet for American forces, which were moving at high speed to the sound of the guns.
The U.S. soldiers did not move cautiously as they had done before in so many reconnaissance patrols. With fellow soldiers at risk, courtesies to local traffic were no longer offered or granted. Cars veered for the shoulders as tanks and infantry fighting vehicles forced their way through the urban landscape. Gunners hugged their thermal sights, peering through the darkness for the enemy. Soldiers clutched their weapons and adjusted their body armor, knowing that tonight their arms and armor would mean the difference between life and death.
The movement did not take long. Arriving at the ambush site, the soldiers of the Ready First Combat Team aggressively attacked the enemy positions. Tank cannon boomed as big 120mm shells streaked toward enemy strong points, which crumbled before the weight of the high-explosive, antitank rounds. High-explosive rounds from Bradley 25mm electric chain guns slammed into insurgent positions. Machine gun and rifle fire peppered the area. Infantrymen dismounted from their Bradley fighting vehicles and cleared the area building by building, as Apache attack helicopters zoomed overhead to dominate the high ground—the key terrain of the rooftops. The enemy wilted before the violent counterattack, which left six insurgents dead, sixteen wounded, and eleven more taken prisoner. Lieutenant Van Engelen was the only American casualty of the night, and he would recover.
Adhamiya had paid a heavy price for its resistance, but the fight was not yet out of the insurgents who inhabited the area. Again they retreated into the urban jungle to lick their wounds and devise new strategies to take the fight to the Americans. The exhausted GIs returned to their bases for a few hours of fitful rest. They were supposed to be on their way home after a year in combat in Baghdad. It was not to be. Within twenty-four hours the tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and helicopters would return to Adhamiya to do battle again with the guerrillas. It was just another of many long nights in Iraq.
