I noted that the oil spot strategy called for by this author is really what we are doing minus one key component--going after the enemy. I wrote:
I find it hard to slam the author's suggestion about securing the population too much, since this is basically what we are doing. Except that the author apparently doesn't want us to go after the bad guys at the same time. Just sit in our defended enclaves, surrender the initiative to the enemy, and somehow expand the enclaves when the enemy can attack at will with only aerial attack a worry.Basically, give the enemy time to prepare to attack us.
Man, oh man. This is simply a prescription to have the enemy pounce on these oil spots. While offensive operations alone cannot work without securing the population, just sitting in the population centers won't work either.
Belmont Club addresses the situation much better.
Wretchard notes that an oil spot strategy requires us to keep the oil spots free of the enemy by controlling who gets into the population. Insurgents can't be allowed within the secured area. This is especially difficult in areas where the enemy has a sympathetic population. I wrote that we needed to sift the population and commented on our methods here. Wretchard reports on how we are doing now and highlights how a former exporter of terror requires the enemy to attempt to infiltrate the area to launch attacks.
Securing the people can't be done in passively and in isolation. Part of our strategy has to be going after the enemy to atomize the enemy, as I addressed most recently here:
Over the last two years, I've said that we need to atomize the enemy in Iraq. As long as the enemy can mass in company-sized units, they can overrun police stations. If they can mass in platoon strength, they can wipe out road blocks and patrols.
If Iraqi patrols, road blocks, and police stations can't hold alone, it is more likely that more sophisticated forces with tanks and artillery and air power will be needed to fight the enemy. Right now, that's US forces.
Make it so that the enemy can only gather squads or fire teams, and low tech Iraqi light infantry and police can fight the enemy effectively. Iraqis can provide reaction teams to reinforce threatened Iraqi units.
This is what is missing by the critics of our current strategy in the recent oil spot debate. It is not sufficient to just build walls and patrol secured areas as the spot activists want. For if the enemy roams free outside the oil spots, they will eventually hit the "secure" areas and then infiltrate them as the feeling of security is eroded by attacks on the enclaves.
The calculus of security is not merely dependent on one variable--beefing up our defenses. A good result includes reducing the enemy capacity to attack. Atomize the enemy and make them expend effort avoiding our attacks, and even partially trained defenders can handle the reduced threat. But let the enemy spend all its time planning and be free to mass when they want to strike, and we ensure that even American troops won't be sufficient to stop determined attacks from succeeding on occasion and providing propaganda victories for the enemy. Oil spots will shrink and be absorbed into the sands of Iraq with this strategy.
Wretchard also says that body counts are quite relevant because they kill experienced enemy forces and make them easier to defeat because the new crop is deprived of institutional memory of other insurgents and terrorists who pass down their knowledge.
I have to disagree here:
Sure, killing the active insurgents is a necessary component of defeating insurgents but it is not key. Look at the war from our point. Despite what opponents of the war call "heavy" casualties, our troop strength in Iraq has not dropped one bit. We replace our losses and keep fighting. The insurgencies (as Sensing notes) needed not to kill our army but kill our ability to send troops to Iraq. Attrition simply could not wreck our ability to send troops. Only killing our morale so we didn't want to send more troops could reduce our strength.Killing at high ratios is not the answer to insurgencies. While it is certainly important to kill off those fighting right now, the key is stopping the replacements. This is what the enemy recognizes. Why else do they count on our press to destroy our ability to replace losses? Killing relatively small numbers of Americans cannot ever defeat us militarily; but making the American people unwilling to send troops to fight in Iraq will defeat us. We killed the enemy at high ratios in Vietnam right up until when we had to pull out when our public tired of fighting. The enemy's willingness to keep dying was higher than ours.
Likewise with the insurgents. Kill off their fighters and they recruit more (through ideology, fear, or importation), and they keep fighting. Kill a lot and they simply hunker down until they recruit more. The key has always been drying up the recruits and support--draining the swamp.
We are doing this. Our non-military efforts from medicine to reconstruction to elections have made joining the insurgencies less appealing. On the military side we did not declare free-fire zones and create more insurgents than we killed by indiscriminate military actions.
Why is it difficult for people to grasp this simple fact? If kill ratios were the only important thing, we could declare free-fire zones across al Anbar and rack up the body count like nobody's business. Would anybody want to declare that they think this would lead to victory? When the jihadis use of free-suicide bomber zones has alienated more and more Iraqis, how would Iraqis react to our application of firepower in massive amounts?
If we killed a lot, the enemy would pull back and train; and come at us again when they felt strong enough. It may take more planning to conduct fewer attacks with less experienced insurgents, but the enemy can still pull them off with some luck and given enough time. As long as the recruits come in, the enemy can keep this up. Look at the Iran-Iraq War. The Iraqis killed the hopped-up Iranian jihadis in massive numbers (ok, it was only about a 2:1 ratio but lots died) but when the Iranians were hammered too much they pulled back until they were ready to go over the top again. The Iranians did this for years until the Iraqis attacked and broke Iran before troop morale could recover.
To recap, we can't secure population centers without atomizing the enemy which makes our Iraqi friends relatively more capable than the enemy and which keeps the enemy busy surviving rather than attacking. Further, good kill ratios are only important tactically. It helps to keep our losses down by being more effective but this is just a holding action. Stopping the recruitment of new enemy forces is the only way to defeat the enemy.
As Iraq builds better security forces and an effective government that pulls people into the new Iraq, recruits for the enemy will dry up. Only then can we stop our offensive actions and police the secure areas--which by then should be all of Iraq.
And once Iraqi forces are fighting the insurgents without our forces on the line, the insurgent and terrorist hope of getting Americans to tire of sending replacements will die--because the Iraqi government forces have nowhere to withdraw to and it will be victory or death. And with 80% of the population and the powers of the Iraqi state behind them, even if all the Sunnis resist the government, in time the Kurds and Shias will win.
And if the Sunnis are smart, they will take the opportunity provided by the jihadi invaders to join the government and earn a place in the new Iraq by fighting the invaders.
