Then the article adds this:
Operation River Gate was notable for the strongest participation this year by Iraqi troops — U.S. commanders said hundreds were involved — at a time of deep concerns about their readiness.
Excuse me? At a time of deep concerns about their readiness? After several years of war are the reporters and editors truly so ignorant about military affairs that they are seriously making a big deal over the so-called news that there is only one Iraqi battalion at the top readiness level able to conduct independent operations and not the three Iraqi battalions previously reported? Do reporters truly think this is important?
It should not be a mysterious secret to reporters that units unable to provide logistical and fire support are fully capable of fighting as long as we provide those capabilities to the Iraqis. By doing this, we get lots of Iraqis into the fight faster.
If we focused on building up the Iraqi military so that it could handle every single military task including logistics, planning, intelligence, and fire support, we wouldn't have 80 or so Iraqi battalions in the fight right now. These units are perfectly capable of fighting even though they need our help in the capabilities they lack.
It takes a long time to create the logistical tail needed to support the teeth that we take for granted. If the insurgency wasn't a problem, we would have built the Iraqi army this way. Indeed, we spent the first year trying to do this before we decided to focus on teeth and supply the tail ourselves.
And imagine if you will the savage press reaction if we were still trying to build a fully capable Iraqi army while the need is for light infantry out in the field. I can see it now, complaints that we were trying to build a little replica of the US Army would have been banner headlines. Barely literate critics would wonder what foreign invasion are we preparing the Iraqis to defeat?
Sometimes the press is so ignorant of military matters that I despair of ever getting more than a general sense of what is happening from their reports.
Truly, this is a time of deep concern for the readiness of our news organizations. Is even one capable of taking the field and reporting accurately?
UPDATE: General Petraeus attempts to provide what should be basic information about building the Iraqi security forces to the reporters assembled and even addresses the tooth-to-tail issue I mentioned. The key summary:
There are now over 197,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces. As folks have noted over the past week, that should be close to 200,000 by the referendum in the middle part of this month. There are over 115 police and army combat battalions in the fight. Most -- about 80 -- are assessed as fighting alongside our forces. That is level three, by the way, in this discussion of levels of readiness. Over 36 are assessed as being "in the lead" -- that's the term for level two -- including the one that is assessed as needing no coalition assistance whatsoever; i.e., fully independent. That does not mean, by the way, just fully independent operations, it means it doesn't need anything from the coalition. And again, it is not surprising that there are very, very few of those. Of those 36, a substantial number -- some seven just in Baghdad alone -- have their own areas of operation and, of course, that obviously includes a large number of level two units.
Yet still the reporters asked idiotic questions. There was still a certain fixation on the top category units and a failure to understand that a large portion of our troops in Iraq are support forces and not frontline battalions. The question of one about how 30,000 Iraqis (just under 40 battalions) could replace 140,000 Americans was really indicative of ignorance. The general went into the tooth/tail discussion here. Let me just say that one of our normal divisions has ten line battalions. So having 40 line battalions in the field would require a good 70,000 troops just for the divisions and then add the supporting units above division level.
I wish these briefings indicated the names of the reporters. If the transcripts did, perhaps the reporters would do a little more homework before opening their mouths.
