"They are compassionate. They genuinely care - not just about each other, but about Iraqis, too. I saw it again and again. They are compassionate young men and women."
Any surprises about our soldiers? "They've surprised me with their resilience. . . They continue to re-enlist, continue to perform. . . Both leaders and soldiers have shown incredible resilience in the way they've adapted" to the changing situation in Iraq. "And I realized how much we can trust our soldiers."
Indeed, for all the talk of our Left about the dehumanizing impact of war and their hyping of isolated cases of abuse by our troops, the amazing thing about the long fight in Iraq is how well behaved our soldiers have been. And because of them, we truly have won hearts and minds. Excepting Code Pink, of course. In that case, our enemies won their pink hearts and minds.
Odierno's assessment should be taken in light of his tour running the counter-insurgency campaign that put our troops out in the neighborhoods to interact with the Iraqi people 24/7, with lower ranking officers and enlisted personnel bearing a lot of responsibility to carry out the fight on their own. That is, we've known our troops are good at conventional warfare, but there has always been a belief by some military analysts that specially trained troops must be used for counter-insurgency. By that theory, our troops should have been more prone to abusing Iraqis rather than showing restraint and using an appropriate level of force when necessary. Instead of failing, our troops did the job when ordered to shift focus. And did it brilliantly.
Which shows why I've not felt it necessary to establish separate units to fight insurgencies. Our troops are of such high quality (in intelligence and training) that if properly led by officers who understand the type of war we need to fight, our troops can fight the full spectrum of enemies.
With this combat experience, our troops will excel at conventional warfare again when success in Iraq allows the Army and Marine Corps to rebalance our ground troops away from nearly exclusive focus on counter-insurgency training.
