Hoffman to McMaster: not so fast, Bub

Wed, 01/14/2009 - 12:35pm

More troops doing the wrong thing wouldn't have helped in Iraq in 2003-2004, Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman says in response to my post yesterday about Col. H.R. McMaster's new article. McMaster, a consigliere to Gen. Petraeus, argued that because commanders lacked sufficient troops, they were forced to blim-blam around Iraq conducting raids that alienated Iraqi civilians.

Not so, says Hoffman, no intellectual slouch himself. "Great troop strength would not have significantly changed things," he says in an e-mail. "We were not forced to 'COIN Raid' by low troop strength." Indeed, he says, there were other approaches that could have been taken, such as "ink blotting" -- that is, securing only small areas, and then slowly expanding influence through local actors. Also, he says, "The force didn't have to be allocated over the area it was given....More troops doing the wrong thing in my view would have been more counterproductive." In fact, he says, having a bigger force early on in Iraq might have dug a deep hole even faster, because it "would have undercut the rotation base faster and deeper."

How to resolve this issue? Fairly simply: Had the U.S. military's civilian and uniformed leadership been more agile, more attentive to battlefield success, and less in denial about the situation in Iraq back then, then they would have looked to commanders such as Petraeus who were succeeding during that first year in Iraq and would have promoted them and ensured that their effective approaches were imitated. Ultimately that did happen -- but only several years later, after the United States had been fighting in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. In the meantime, we had encouraged a generation of Iraqi allies to surface and then been unable to protect them from the enemy.

Thomas E. Ricks | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register


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Did we really defeat Iraq's internal security network

by Bill Keller on Wed, 01/14/2009 - 3:41pm

"In the meantime, we had encouraged a generation of Iraqi allies to surface and then been unable to protect them from the enemy."

It would appear that the basic infrastructure of internal security allied to the Sunnis and what was created later by the Shiites has not been defeated, suppressed may be but not defeated. Like a chronic disease it went into a state of remission awaiting for a time when the pressure is released to regain virulence.

Afraid our warfighting perspective would blind us to the nature of its existence. Infections in Gaza and southern Lebanon that distrurb Israel may be of the same nature.

So other than creating a lifeless desert what becomes the solution?

Hoffman Comments

by JDShepherd on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 10:33am

Can you post Lt. Col. Hoffman's comments in full? I'd appreciate being able to read the entire message.

What kind of battle, what kind of war ?

by Walking Wounded on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 10:56am

Ditto on wanting to read Hoffman's full text, unless he specified otherwise.

McMaster's major point parallels "Fiasco". Under Rumsfeld, Franks' and Sanchez' war plans failed to realistically address Clausewitz' fundamental question: 'What kind of war is this one, here, now today...'

The 'so called surge' ops of 2007 successfully dowsed the civil war in Baghdad, at a cost of another thousand US KIA's, and maybe 12,000 wounded. But the MNFI PR gloss, that the US-paid Sunni Sawa was/is primarily aligned against Al-Q Iraq, raises the question of whether we have yet successfully achieved situational awareness. As a country, it would seem not.

Iraq was a war of choice, not a preemptive war. Rumsfelds internal target was anyone who informed the peoples Congress that this was a war of choice, and ultimately anyone speaking truth to power about the cost or nature of the occupation. Clausewitz speaks of the moral defeat of the enemy as the goal of battle. Rummy won his battle against the JCS and service JAG's.

Odierno's ongoing MNFI information ops are still directed at the home front, what Rumsfeld used to openly described as the strategic center of his war. While Gates takes a softer line, muscular PAO tactics indicate that voters (especially Congress) are still targeted, still expected not to know what we are voting on.

McMasters writes in Direlection of Duty of the US officer corps moral shortfalls in the unhappy war in Viet Nam, and now he narrowly applies those principles to Iraq. His boss Petraeus may have wondered out loud about how this war ends. But he still helped lead the march to Baghdad in 2003, his MNSTC-I provisioned the Shia half of a civil war in 2005, and he inherited a 2007 MNFI HQ practiced at misdirection on the home front.

I put it to Mr. Ricks and his readers that Team Rumsfeld always had it at least part right: the strategic center of this war was for the hearts and minds at home. The 'surge' didn't end an ongoing struggle in our democracy. By law, our military cannot legally turn its weapons grade infowar tools against the American people. We haven't regained Constitutional control of our military, of all its facets, to terminate infowar ops targeted at Congress and the people.

Perhaps Rumsfeld's leutenants and their allies in the VP's office understoood the kind of war this is. From my side, it's a war to determine whether the US voter can reassert our Constitutional right to know what we are voting on. The outcome of that strategic battle won't be determined in Baghdad or Kirkuk.

I await HR's "next book", as

by Farfarer on Sat, 01/17/2009 - 7:26pm

I await HR's "next book", as I assume does L.K.