This is the essence of my position advocating local defense forces.
And this is what we did in Anbar by getting the tribes to fight al Qaeda with us.
So we want to expand it to other regions, including the Shia regions where Sadrist are the threat rather than jihadis:
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the militias appeared to be alienating the Shiite community with internal violence in the same way al-Qaida in Iraq caused Sunni leaders to turn against it.
"There are some signs that the Shia are perhaps beginning to have the same — get the same kind of wake-up call with respect to their extremists that the Sunnis in Anbar did," he said.
Since Karbala, Weems said he has attended a "flurry of meetings" with sheiks interested in ways they can use their formidable influence to help restore order.
"They are well aware of what's happened in Anbar province, the role that the tribes played in securing some of the less secure areas in that province," he said. "There has been a good deal of success with those, not just in Anbar but in other areas."
Army Capt. Majid al-Imara, who said he has been charged with establishing the new force, said each battalion will be made up of 350 men chosen by tribal leaders, and they will be armed and equipped by the Iraqi government and paid $300 monthly, he said.
Col. Peter Baker, the commander of the 214th Fires Brigade that took over Forward Operating Base Delta near Kut in June, also said the idea was for the tribal volunteers to act as an "auxiliary police force" that could provide security in an organized fashion but let the sheiks maintain control of tribal members.
Such a net of armed locals, who know who the strangers are, detects insurgents and terrorists and trips them up as they move about, allowing us to hit them with air strikes and ground forces.
Such local defesne forces are key to winning. They aren't that good as troops. But they are persistent because they live where they stand. And they are numerous because they are based on the population itself.
As the first line of defense, persistence and quantity count for more than skill.
