A Stepson of Chechnya A Study of Asymmetrical War in the Modern

A Stepson of Chechnya
A Study of Asymmetrical War in the Modern Era
by
Conor Tucker
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Preface
There are many shortcomings in the following paper, not the least of which is my
inexperience as a researcher and writer in military history. I would like to thank all of the
interviewees for taking time out to meet with me and share their knowledge, documents,
and experiences. I am indebted to Joe L’Etoile for his careful tutoring and reading
suggestions, as well as his patient willingness to teach me the history of insurgency and
counterinsurgency via email. Lieutenant General Richard Natonski suggested David and
McKlendin’s Ideas as Weapons, an edited volume which was essential to my
understanding of Information Operations. General James Mattis took the time out of his
busy schedule to follow up on an email question by personal phone call. Beyond that,
almost every Marine I have had the pleasure to talk to has suggested readings or offered
documents, efforts above and beyond their requested participation in interviews. Any
strength that this paper shows in the areas of military theory and counterinsurgency
doctrine is indebted to their analysis and advice.
I would like to thank Professors Stan Brubaker and Matt Leone and other
members of PPE board at Colgate University for their financial support through the
Lampert Fellowship. I would like to thank Professor Nancy Ries for her early mentorship
on the peculiarities of studying the military and violence, both in her class CORE 322
Weapons and War and through her office hours. I need to thank Professor Janel Benson
who, without knowing me, pointed me towards Charmaz’ Constructing Grounded Theory
– a book without which I would not have known how to conduct interviews. Professor
Emilio Spadola took time to converse with me via email about the difficulties of studying
war from an academic perspective. His advice on narrowing my questions and his
suggested readings have been indispensible. Lastly, I need to thank Professor Andy
Rotter for reading drafts of this paper.
That being said, analysis and opinions herein contained are those of the author
alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of any of my interviewees,
professors, Colgate University, Colgate’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), the Institute
for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, or the board of directors for the Lampert
Fellowship. Mistakes are mine alone.
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Table of Contents
Preface.………………………………………………………………………………….... i
Table of Contents .……………………………………………………………..………...ii
List of Abbreviations …………………………………………………………...……… iii
Introduction .………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Stepchildren of Chechnya . ………………...…………………………..….… 7
Chapter 2: The Two Battles for Fallujah ……………………………………………… 38
Conclusions: The Complexities of Four-Block War...……………….………………… 72
Supplementary Material:
Appendix 1 ……………………………………………………………… ……………81
Appendix 2 …………………………………………………………………………… 93
Bibliography ……..………………………………………………………...………….97
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A Partial List of Abbreviations
1MARDIV – First Marine Division.
4GW – Fourth generation war.
AO – Area of Operations.
AQ – al-Qaeda.
AQI – al-Qaeda in Iraq.
COIN – Counterinsurgency, or counterinsurgency operations.
CPA – Civilian Provisional Authority.
DoD – Department of Defense.
DoS – Department of State.
HUMINT – Human Intelligence.
IED – Improvised Explosive Device.
IO – Information Operations.
MEF – Marine Expeditionary Force
Military Rank Abbreviations (in order of ascending superiority):
Maj. – Major. USMC unless otherwise noted.
Lt. Col. – Lieutenant Colonel. USMC unless otherwise noted.
Col. – Colonel. USMC unless otherwise noted.
BGen. – Brigadier General (one star). USMC unless otherwise noted.
Maj. Gen. – Major General (two star). USMC unless otherwise noted.
Lt. Gen. – Lieutenant General (three star). USMC unless otherwise noted.
Gen. – General (four star). USMC unless otherwise noted.
MNF-I – Multi-National Force, Iraq.
MOOTW – Military Operations other than War.
NCO – Non-Commissioned Officer.
OpsO – Operations Officer.
RCT-1 – Regimental Combat Team 1.
RCT-7 – Regimental Combat Team 7.
RoE – Rules of Engagement.
SIGINT – Signals Intelligence.
SIED – Suicide Improvised Explosive Device; Suicide bomb.
UAV – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.
USMC – United States Marine Corps.
USA – United States Army.
USAID – United States Agency for International Development.
VBIED – Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device; Car bomb.
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Introduction
The United States can assume that in the foreseeable future all wars conducted against it
will be either asymmetrical or hybrid wars. These wars are complicated by multiple
interrelated actors and forces, such as the media, the military, the weaponization of
political opinion, the rise of non-state actors, and the information revolution. Unlike in
conventional war, the actors in asymmetrical war are more closely tied and do not operate
in their conventional roles. The media is at the same time the public’s “way of knowing”
about the war as well as a weapon which both sides will seek to influence the perception
of those watching the news. The military is not only an organization dedicated to the
kinetic (physical) destruction of the enemy, but also must utilize and integrate other
aspects of non-kinetic national power into the battlefield, including cultural awareness,
economic assistance, diplomacy, rule of law, and force building. Political contests
become the center of gravity in the struggle, as the asymmetrical actor seeks to influence
the preponderant power through political, moral, and economic means. This means, first,
that political opinions can easily become weaponized in the battle for perceptions. It also
suggests that political opinions and decisions have a disproportionate effect on the battlespace. Non-state actors, increasingly, have access to more and better weaponry and are
demonstrating increasing independence from state structures and nationalisms. This paper
is a study of how the United States Marine Corps (in the words of David Kilcullen,
author of The Accidental Guerrilla) completed “the difficult but essential task of
integrating military and civilian actions into a viable political strategy under the archlight
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of scrutiny of the international media” while engaged in “the ‘viscous medium’ of ground
combat, with its fear hatred chaos and friction.”1
The narrative structure of this paper is one of a failure turned into a success by the
hard work and intelligence of the Marines who fought in al-Anbar province during the
twelve months that followed February 2004. I focus on two battles fought by the 1st
Marine Division (1MARDIV) in April and November, 2004, for the control of the
budding insurgency’s physical center of gravity. But, the uplifting story-arc should not
fool the reader, for the subtext is one of stress and friction between Washington officials
(including some in the Pentagon) and some Marine units fighting in Iraq. The central
argument of this paper is that, during 2004, the Bush Administration failed to grasp the
complexity of the war it started. In al-Anbar, a concerted and conscious
counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy set in place by General James N. Mattis,
Commanding General of First Marines, was abandoned by direct and unwarranted
interference by the Bush Administration. The argument of this paper should not be read
as a critique of politicians inserting themselves into the operational and strategic
planning-process of the war. Indeed, the most successful American war-time politicians
were not afraid to make such decisions themselves. The argument, here, is that the Bush
Administration misunderstood not only the war on which it had embarked, but also the
role it needed to play in this new complex, interdependent environment.
I will not discuss the evolution of the “Shock and Awe” tactics favored by the
Bush Administration. However, this paper intends to show that such tactics were unsuited
1
David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.
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for the form of war in which the Administration mired itself. Part of this inadequacy of
rapid dominance stems from the fact that the tactics are best suited for conventional war
where the center of gravity of the conflict is physical control of the ground, key
leadership apparatuses, and institutional infrastructure. Another part of the inadequacy
stems from the philosophic underpinnings of the tactics themselves, which presuppose
the ability to affect the will of the enemy. In asymmetrical war with non-state actors, this
presupposition doesn’t hold. The asymmetrical actor expects to be dominated on the
physical battlefield (and therefore would not be psychologically impaired by rapid
dominance), yet seeks to use moral and economic pressure to affect the withdrawal of
troops. The center of gravity, in such a case, is not physical and thus such an enemy’s
will cannot be affected by taking away his physical sources of security.2 In fact, “shock
and awe” can backfire by appearing to be excessive force.3 Excessive force could turn the
preponderant force’s domestic audience against the political objectives of the military
action as well as lose the support of the local population by appearing aggressive,
imperialistic, or occupational. The presupposition that an enemy’s will is linked to his
physical security is similar to effects-based operations (EBO), which has recently been
2
This does not mean that asymmetrical actors do not need physical sanctuary, but rather that astute
asymmetric leaders avoid physical contests and seek to utilize non-kinetic fires to attain their aims. Indeed,
in the Second Battle of Fallujah the insurgents misunderstood this and were goaded into a physical,
conventional, fight. The importance of sanctuary for insurgencies is also not disputed, and therefore any
COIN campaign must remove these physical sites of interest. The point here is that while physical
sanctuary is important (and perhaps necessary), the struggle is not for that physical space, but the
psychological space known as perception.
3
The paradoxical relationship between the amount of force used and the moral consequence of said force is
explained well in William Lind, “The Power of Weakness,” in Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception
in Modern Warfare, eds. G.J. David and T.R. McKeldin (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009): 35-38.
See also “Draft FMFM 1-A: Fourth Generation War,” http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/2008/08/12/new-draft-offmfm-1a
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repudiated in Joint Forces Doctrine.4 To assume that any actor does not have an
independent will, or that that will can be changed through calculated physical action
alone, is the height of hubris. Contests in the modern era driven by ideologically
motivated, non-state actors with sufficient military potential to upset political ventures in
domestic and international arenas are inherently wars for perception. At the same time,
counterinsurgency operations are man-power intensive, a fact which Rumsfeld’s original
plan completely missed.
This paper explores the context and evolution of this new complex battle-space
and then constructs a history of two battles in Iraq in 2004. This paper is written from the
perspective of the Marines who fought in al-Anbar. My interviews were all with Marines
at various levels of the command structure during Operations Vigilant Resolve and alFajr, including my father, Colonel Craig A. Tucker (USMC, Ret.). In accordance with
IRB requirements, I did not mention that my father was Col. Tucker unless specifically
asked by the interviewee. However, most of the interviewees put two and two together.
While my access to these interviewees is indebted to my father, it is also one of the
primary strengths of this paper. The interviews were varied and dealt with concerns
ranging from the strategic and operational goals in the two Fallujah battles to the platoonlevel tactics of house-clearing. This paper draws on interviews of Information Operations
Officers, battalion, regimental, and divisional commanders, divisional and regimental
operations officers, forward artillery operators, among others. The interviews provide a
wide-angled view of Operations Vigilant Resolve and Al-Fajr not available in books
4
See James N. Mattis, “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-Based Operations,” in Joint Forces
Quarterly 51 (2008): 105-8.
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alone, and this advantage far outweighs any selection bias presented by my connection
with the Marines.
There is a considerable pro-Marine bias in this paper. However, I believe that my
bias has been produced by the research and analysis of the interviews and has not been
imposed upon the evidence. The Marine Corps has a history of small wars and since the
1990s has been transforming itself into an organization which can fight “Three [Four]
Block Wars” – or wars combining complex urban conflict, humanitarian aid, and
diplomatic engagement under the intense pressure of the international media. General
Mattis’ Commander’s Intent from Operation Iraqi Freedom II and his “Letter to All
Hands” (Appendix 2) clearly show attempts to construct a viable counterinsurgency
strategy in Iraq that focused on responsible government, rule of law, and economic
assistance. In 2004, the Marines understood their position in this interdependent milieu.
The Bush Administration slipped on the learning curve and misstepped a few times in
2004 – the consequences of which are the subject of the present paper. The Media, by
most accounts (and especially from those within the institution), is still grappling with its
role as both the “Fourth Estate” in the U.S. and its own weaponization by both sides in
the current conflict. In 2004, the Marines in al-Anbar understood their position while the
other two actors were still grasping for their purpose.
This paper is split into two chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter seeks to
provide context for the short history of the two battles of Fallujah that follows by
analyzing the causes of asymmetrical war, the specific actors and strategies found in Iraq,
and the interplay between the military and the Media. The second chapter contains a
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narrative of the two battles for Fallujah, Operations Vigilant Resolve and al-Fajr. In the
conclusion, the author explores the complexities of the four-block war we know as Iraq.
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Chapter 1
Stepchildren of Chechnya
In the late 1990s, the then-Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Charles Krulak,
made a startling prediction: Desert Storms are over, Operation Overlords are over – the
wars of the future will be “stepchildren of Chechnya.” In this new war, moral and
political authority was the high-ground and perception was the primary weapon. The
longest boot camp in the world got longer, half of Marine Corps artillery was scrapped,
and two new airplane designs were not completed. It wasn’t a popular decision, but it
seems to have been correct. Many – both civilian and military – in the Pentagon rejoiced
about the revolution in military affairs, the new world order, and the clear cookie-cutter
victory in Desert Storm. The Marines prepared for another Somalia. In the words of
General James Mattis, Krulak “had taken the Marine Corps apart on its view of war and
put it back together… The whole idea was that you change your view of war, you change
your equipment, your organization even.”5
While the Pentagon lavished its dream victory in Desert Storm, the Marines began
a long slog through a nightmare. Wars of the future would be, in Krulak’s terms, “Three
Block Wars.” On the first block, the Marines would be engaged in multi-directional,
5
Unless otherwise noted, quotes and opinions of Marines are taken from interviews done by the author and
will not be cited individually. All interviews are in the possession of the author. Due to IRB requirements,
the original voice recordings have been destroyed. However, full transcriptions are available upon request.
Certain opinions will not be sourced to the Marines who hold them due to professional promises made by
the author to his interviewees or if the opinions raise ethical questions on the part of the author because the
Marine is still active duty and may, some day, come under the command of someone with a different
opinion.
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intense urban combat. On the second block, Marines would be handing out humanitarian
supplies. On the third block, Marines would be keeping warring factions apart. James
Mattis and Frank Hoffman, in the early 2000s, conceptualized of a fourth block. On that
block, Marines were dealing with domestic and international media.6 This view of war is
filled with uncertainty, cruelty, complications, and contradictions. It is a war that was
difficult to teach Marines and dangerous to wage. It is a war that required taking
acceptable risk, not placing fixed security on the flanks of platoons, and waiting to take a
casualty before engaging the enemy. It is a war that that requires Marines to hand out
humanitarian aid, knowing full well that at any minute they could be embroiled in intense
three hundred and sixty degree urban combat, and that media is watching their every
move. According to Lt. Gen. Joseph Dunford, U.S. success is based on the flexibility of
the troops: “I can think of several stories where Marines were in a close fight, very
intense urban combat, and yet came upon innocent civilians and were able to turn on and
off, you know, the killing of people at almost a moment’s notice.” In many cases, though,
the situation was more nightmarish. In the four-block war we call Iraq, Marines made the
decision to use live grenades instead of a flash-bangs, or non-lethal explosives designed
to stun, in house entries – and killed civilians in the process. In the next house, they made
the decision to use flash-bangs, and Marines were killed or wounded because the nonlethal weapon barely stunned the machine-gunner dug into the back wall. At each step,
the media was constantly questioning: Why did you not use flash-bangs to protect
civilians? Why did you not use grenades to save your comrades?
6
James Mattis and Frank Hoffman, “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars” U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings 131 (11) (Nov. 2005): 18-19.
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The primary feature of the current and future U.S. battle-space is increasing
complexity. The increase in communications technology, editorial and commercial shifts
in the U.S. media, the backlash against increasing economic, social, and military
globalization, the rise of non-state actors with sufficient military potential to upset state
and international political goals, and the preponderance of U.S. military force contribute
to the complex international arena in which the United States conducts foreign policy.
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the factors which contributed to the rise of the
stepchildren of Chechnya, and discuss the specific instances of these factors in Iraq.
Context
The precursor to that[operational planning] is
getting the context right, or what is called
design. The first thing you do is identify the
problem.
- - General James N. Mattis
The most important task of any military or political leader, if I am allowed to extend
Clausewitz’ military thought to politics, is to define the war on which they are about to
embark and not mistake it for, nor assume it to be, something it is not. This section will
set up the context for Iraq in early 2004, when then-Major General James Mattis,
Commanding General of the First Marine Division (1MARDIV), arrived in Iraq to take
over command of the al-Anbar Province. This section will define the key aspects of the
context in which the U.S. is conducting war and the key processes which have
contributed to the rise in asymmetrical strategies and tactics and the broad responses
developed by the Marines to such strategies and tactics.
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First and foremost, the modern era is characterized by the sharing and spread of
information. This sharing happens in great quantities and at high speeds through the
internet, on cell phones, across airwaves, and through inter-personal contact due to the
increased ease of tourism and travel enabled by cheaper and faster flights. The rapid
expansion of the internet (which from 1993 to 2000 increased in size from 50 to
5,000,000 websites)7 the increase in numbers of people with access to the internet
(currently approaching 2 billion), and the decreased cost of hosting and sending
information have created an environment where the cost of entry is low and the potential
audience is enormous. Cell phones have become a staple of modern life, even in third
world countries. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi cell phone market survived and
patchy service was available. In the United States, this information-sharing is regulated,
in a large part, by the main-stream media, an important factor which the last section of
this chapter will address.
The internet amplifies the effect of globalization while at the same time
contributing to the phenomenon. Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist, suggests that
there are three types of globalization: economic globalization, social globalization, and
military globalization. Economic globalization is the most familiar and is characterized
by the increasing economic integration of countries. Social globalization is the spread of
cultures, peoples and ideas.8 Since this form of globalization follows closely on the heels
of economic globalization and is enhanced by the communications revolution, the
primary message of social globalization is American. While the United States has no
7
Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42.
8
Nye, 83.
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formal mechanisms to control its cultural output,9 the central message is still branded as
“American.” David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency (COIN) expert and
special advisor to General David Petraeus during the Surge, believes that a backlash
against economic and social globalization explains pieces of al-Qaeda’s (AQ) general
philosophy and appeal. Regardless of whether or not globalization is a form of American
Imperialism, it is perceived as American cultural and economic imperialism.10 This
perception of American Imperialism contributes to the formation of anti-American nonstate actors in two ways. First, it motivates recruits. Second, the preponderance of U.S.
force encourages non-friendly states to resort to non-state pressure to attain political
aims.
Military Globalization complicates this situation even more. After the end of the
Cold War, there was a short trend of military deglobalization, as the distant proxy wars
died down.11 However, with the rise of social globalization, terrorism and humanitarian
missions undertaken by military forces have become new mutations of military
globalization. U.S. intervention in humanitarian disputes is known in U.S. Joint Forces
Doctrine by the unwieldy phrase Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW).12
These operations include intervention, counterterrorism, and humanitarian missions.
However, the intent of MOOTW can easily be misinterpreted, in light of perceived
economic and cultural imperialism, as imposition of American will, or a physical
manifestation of American Imperialism. MOOTW in foreign countries can be easily
9
Nye, 72.
David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla, 9.
11
Nye, 87.
12
Joint Vision 2010. For a more in depth, and much more critical, treatment of the topic, see Cols. Qiao and
Wang, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America, trans. by Al Santori, (Panama City,
Panama: Pan American Publishing Company, 2002), 36-44.
10
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manipulated as American Imperialism by non-friendly (although, not necessarily
“enemy”)13 actors. In some ways, the United States’ attempt to provide humanitarian
assistance may complicate the attainment of its foreign policy goals. Operations
undertaken with the intent of alleviating humanitarian crises may be portrayed as
imperialist land-grabs unless a sufficient media campaign is undertaken as a supporting
operation. Terrorism and other forms of non-state actor violence is also an important
feature of military globalization. Nye conceptualizes terrorism as the “privatization of
violence.”14 Such a distinction is helpful in understanding why individuals ideologically
connected to sub- or supra-state organizations would engage in “irregular” war in order to
attain political or ideological goals. Without the recourse to or the resources of a state,
and with access to information and materiel, non-state actors are able to further their
political or ideological goals through “private” violence, rather than the more expensive
and more constrained “public” violence of police forces and state militaries.
The last century has seen a rise in the number and power of non-state actors. Nye
defines non-state actors broadly – containing anything from the United Nations to multinational corporations, to banks, to terrorist groups.15 Each non-state actor has varying
powers and are only linked by the fact that they owe their allegiance (either financially or
ideologically) to something other than a “nation-state,” yet may have drastic effects
(either positive or negative) on said “nation-state.” Such actors have always been around,
13
This is an important distinction, as all “non-friendly” actors are not necessarily “enemies.” For instance,
an Iraqi farmer may be upset with American Marines driving their tanks through his field or scaring his
goats, and may express his anti-American sentiment very loudly. However, this does not mean that he is an
“enemy” of the U.S. He would perhaps not build an IED, but he would throw his shoe. He does not “hate”
Americans so much as he “hates” their direct effect on him, and the most-popular way to express that is
through anti-Americanisms.
14
Nye, x.
15
Nye, 43.
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but in the modern era they exercise increasing autonomy from states.16 For example, it is
now easier for multinational companies to relocate headquarters to tax havens (and
therefore drastically change GDPs) and factories to states with less stringent labor laws
(and therefore change unemployment rates). At the same time, groups who wish to
combat perceived American Imperialism can do so through private means, or terrorism.
The growth of non-state actors must be seen in the context of the falling incidence of
reliance upon and loss of legitimacy of certain nation-states and nationalisms. When a
group is unable to have its needs fulfilled by a state, it can turn to non-state tactics to
attain its desired ends. These non-state actors with sufficient military potential and
independent ideological or political goals are who the U.S. military is fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The internet has facilitated the growth of non-state actors. T.X. Hammes, an
American military theorist, has pointed out that the internet provides a forum for “free
association across boarders.”17 The internet, in its current form, is a neutral conduit. It can
easily be used to link and organize the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines (which
was, after all, started on and continues to grow via the internet). At the same time, the
same internet can be used to spread AQ’s takfiri18 ideology of Islamic civil-war and state
overthrow. These free associations may hold more ideological sway with their members
than national affiliations. This makes them difficult to negotiate with and dangerous if, as
16
For a short history of the growth of autonomous non-state or supra-state organizations, see Martin van
Creveld, “Technology goes International,” in The Rise and Decline of the State (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 377-394.
17
T.X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004),
40.
18
A takfiri belief system is a radical, fringe-of-the-fringe Islamic ideology which is repudiated by the
majority of Islamic holy men and scholars. For a contemporary American analogy, think of the Westboro
Baptist Church.
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the Department of Defense feared in the 1995 Joint Vision 2010, they gain “sufficient
military potential” to disrupt national and international political agendas.19 It is this
feature, the non-state actor with “sufficient military potential,” that is the most visible and
dangerous force in the 21st century international environment.
The rise of non-state actors and the use of asymmetrical tactics must also be
understood in the context of the preponderance of American military force. The United
States military has no equal in the world. With nuclear weapons, the United States can
destroy any nation it wishes. Without nuclear weapons, U.S. airpower could bomb any
city into Carthaginian dust. The United States military yearly invests billions of dollars
into training and retraining its officers and enlisted soldiers to think faster, organize
quicker, and kill better than any other national force in the world. Thus, it is no surprise,
says Kilcullen, that no one fights them mano y mano.20 Instead, opponents of the United
States adopt asymmetrical or hybrid warfare. Asymmetrical warfare requires that the
enemy shift the center of gravity21 of the war into the political, economic, or moral arena.
Such opponents may bleed the military through its logistical lines with high-profile
attacks or attack civilian targets or any other form of high-profile violence in order to
convince those making political decisions (in this case, the Federal Government and the
U.S. populace) that what they want is not worth the price they will have to pay for it or
the time it will take to win. Hybrid warfare is warfare which General Mattis and Frank
Hoffman call an “unprecedented synthesis,” a method of merging different types of war –
19
Joint Vision 2010, 10.
Kilcullen, 22.
21
The U.S. Department of Defense defines “center of gravity” as “The source of power that provides moral
or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act.”
20
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terrorism, irregular, guerrilla, conventional, etc. – and a selection of techniques and tactic
appealing to the fighter.22
Non-state actors may utilize asymmetrical strategies to force state actors to bend
to their will, and state actors may financially sponsor certain non-state actors to attack
preponderant forces (such as the United States). Mattis and Hoffman explain the
phenomenon thus: “Our [American] conventional superiority creates a compelling logic
for states and non-state actors to move out of the traditional mode of war and seek some
niche capability or some unexpected combination of technologies and tactics to gain an
advantage.”23 As in conventional war, the point of asymmetric war is a “violent clash of
interests” where political power is the central issue.24 However, while asymmetric war is
conducted through violent means, the center of gravity of the conflict is not physical, but
rather political, social, or economic. Asymmetrical warriors realize that they cannot
defeat preponderant powers physically, so they apply indirect pressure on their enemy’s
political, moral, and economic support with the hope that they will be able to compel the
removal of their enemy’s forces without a conventional contest. In conventional war, the
defeat of an army signals the defeat of a political mission – thus, the defeat of Napoleon
at Waterloo signaled both his political demise and the demise of the political system he
put in place. Asymmetrical war is different. In 1940 the U.S. Marine Corps published the
Small Wars Manual – a manual built on almost half a century of Marine expeditionary
action against asymmetrical enemies, including actions in the Phillipines, Nicaragua,
22
Mattis and Hoffman.
Maddis and Hoffman.
24
U.S. Army and Marine Corps, The Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24;
Marine Corps Warfighting Publication NO. 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1-2.
Henceforth, Counterinsurgency.
23
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Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.25 Asymmetrical war, the Manual explains, is not won
by destroying an army. Asymmetrical war requires the combination of “physical and
moral means.”26 Strategies and tactics found in the Manual were employed by First
Marines during 2004 in al-Anbar.
Some people have mistaken this shift in strategic focus for a shift in the nature of
war. T.X. Hammes, in his book The Sling and the Stone, advocates a “generational view”
of war – in which the nature of war shifts in accordance to political, economic, social,
and technological changes.27 Hammes believes that we have entered the Fourth
Generation of War, or 4GW. 4GW is characterized by an enemy who “uses all available
networks – political, economic, social and military – to convince the enemy’s political
decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the
perceived benefit.”28 I think that Hammes is confusing methods with purpose; confusing
shifts in strategy with shifts in the fundamental principles governing the Nature of War –
which has always been about compelling another actor to do your will through violent
means. In WWII (and I would argue in almost all wars since the beginning of time) all of
the networks mentioned above were indeed geared toward the war effort at some level or
another. The U.S. mobilized political will (a Declaration of War against Germany and
Japan), economic power (industrialization and government purchasing power), social
consciousness (through a concerted propaganda machine) and military action (in North
Africa, Europe, and the Pacific) to compel Germany and Japan to accept the political
25
For a full discussion of each of these campaigns, and their contribution to the institutional knowledge
contained in the Small Wars Manual, see Col. Stephen S. Evans, U.S. Marines and Irregular Warfare,
1987-2007: Anthology and Selected Bibliography (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2008).
26
The Small Wars Manual (USMC, 1940), I-V, 7.
27
Hammes, 16.
28
Hammes, 2.
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goals of the United States (unconditional surrender and the restoration of American
Allies’ territorial integrity). The U.S. attacked Axis political will (through bombing
civilian centers), social consciousness (through propaganda), economic power (firestorm
bombing of industrial cities), and military (in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific).
What Hammes is describing is not a shift in the nature of war, but a shift between
different types of warfare which have different natures. These shifts are not evolutionary
in nature, but result from a process of selection. General Mattis explained it this way: The
enemy has an independent will, and “will always move against your point of perceived
weakness.” Those wishing to violently contest American political aims cannot do so with
the tools of conventional war, so they switch to the tools of asymmetric war. Hammes
would have us believe that the hammer evolved from the saw, when in fact they are
simply different tools with different purposes.
The Actors and their Strategies
A gun gives you the body, not the bird.
-- Henry David Thoreau
In this section of the chapter, I will focus on the conflict in Iraq circa 2004. Here, I will
explore the key actors in Iraq in early 2004, their strategies, and the responses of the U.S.
military. This study was done without access to the insurgency’s personnel and
documents, and therefore is dangerously heavy with U.S. evidence. Part of the purpose of
this section is to shed light on perceived strategies of the insurgency, to look at the two
battles in 2004 with their strategy in mind.
First, as a caveat, I would like explain a few choices in terms. I will refer,
throughout, to anti-American actors, both state and non-state as “insurgents” even though
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some of the actors are Iraqis and no monolithic “insurgency” exists. I use the term
“insurgents” for two reasons. First, almost everyone will understand if I describe
“insurgents” in Iraq, even if nuances between the groups have to be explained. Second,
Kilcullen fears that the way language describes the conflicts and actors Americans find
themselves engaged with (irregular combat with nonstate actors employing
unconventional tactics)29 shapes American political response, shapes the way Americans
communicate their actions and the actions of their opponents, and shapes the way the
public views these actors. It is true that from the standpoint of westernized military
doctrine, nation-states, nationalisms, and laws of war they are dealing with “irregulars,”
“non-state actors”30 and “unconventional tactics.” But, the negative prefixes only serve to
cloud understanding of combat with new actors employing very old tactics. Their tactics
have been around since before Thucydides31 and will be around long after Al-Qeada in
Iraq (AQI), Osama bin Ladin, Muqtada al-Sadr, and followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
are gone. Calling the war irregular or unconventional clouds more than it clears. It is for
this last reason that I will also refer to the conflict as “asymmetrical,” rather than
“guerrilla” or “irregular” war.
The violence in Iraq in 2004 was, and still is today, complex and difficult to
understand. By most accounts the political aim of the insurgents in the Iraq conflict is
29
Kilcullen, 295.
The term “non-state actors” is very difficult to purge from this paper, however. Its descriptive power is
such that in certain instances I find it justified to use the term “non-state actor,” even though it, perhaps
unnecessarily, contributes to the confusion of the legitimacy of the claims of the actors. There are two
instances where I will use the term “non-state actor” freely, when I am referring to the general class of
“institutions acting in the international arena but without the formal authority, duties, responsibilities, and
trappings of a state” or to the specific class of “sectarian militias with no legal authority to exercise
violence.”
31
For a good treatment of insurgencies through history, see Robert Asprey War in the Shadows: The
Guerrilla in History, 2 vol. (New York: Doubleday, 1975).
30
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confused.32 Multiple actors produce multiple layers of political aims that range from the
re-establishment of Sunni Ba’athist control to the establishment of an Islamist Caliphate
in Baghdad to anarchy as a smokescreen for criminal activity to local family or tribal
political aims. At the same time, much of the violence in this conflict was civil and
sectarian in nature. The blurred lines between what was “anti-Coalition” or “antiAmerican” violence and what is “anti-Sunni” or “anti-Shia’” or “anti-Kurd” violence
makes this conflict hard to describe as an insurgency – even though it still retains the
characteristics of asymmetrical war. Indeed The Counterinsurgency Field Manual
(henceforth, Counterinsurgency) mentions that elements of civil war will be present in
almost any asymmetrical campaign.33
The insurgents in Iraq are varied in composition, ideological commitment, and
strategies. In 2004, they broke down, broadly, in to three categories: Former Regime
Elements (FREs), Sunni Islamists and Takfiris, and criminals. These three categories will
be most important to understanding insurgent politics and strategies in al-Anbar province.
FREs were comprised of Saddam loyalists and former army officers. Before Saddam
Hussein fell, his army set up weapons caches around the country in order to prevent the
capture of all of their equipment by the U.S. Military.34 It is possible that he or his army
consciously planned to wage an asymmetrical war against the United States after the
conventional failure. FREs, at least until mid-2004, were the main instigators of violence.
32
This has been the majority opinion of most of the Marines in positions to speak about insurgent
composition. Also, see Anthony Cordesman Iraq’s Insurgency and the Road to Civil Conflict (Westport,
CT: Praeger Security International, 2008) vols. 1 and 2.
33
Counterinsurgency, 2. Although, students of Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare (trans. Samuel Griffith (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1962)) will realize that this is detrimental to any guerrilla or insurgent
campaign: civil struggle prevents “internal purity” – which should perhaps be read as “unity” - among the
ranks of the guerrillas or insurgents (Mao, 48).
34
Cordesman, 51.
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Their goal was the return of political control to the Sunni minority Ba’ath Party. They
were well armed, fairly well organized (although not hierarchically), and had money to
pay for mercenaries and contract attacks (such as Improvised Explosive Devices, IEDs,
and Suicide/Vehicle-Borne IEDs, S/VBIEDs). Their main strategy was to destabilize or
delegitimize the American military, Civilian Provisional Authority (CPA), and any Iraqi
government that the previous two elements propped up.
Sunni Islamists and Takfiris were comprised of foreign fighters (including alQaeda in Iraq) and radical Islamist Iraqis. They introduced S/VBIEDs into Iraq and were
the first to start targeting Iraqi civilians in order to seed civil discontent.35 They were
dependent upon Syria as a staging ground for attacks and logistical lines into Iraq. This
made al-Anbar Province in general and the cities of Husaybah/al-Qa’im, Hadithah, and
Fallujah in particular, strategic as both logistical supply lines and as the insurgents’ center
of gravity.36 At the same time, Iranian monetary support, if not direct physical support,
was showing up in the form of advanced weapons and IED manufacturing.37
Criminals comprise the last of the broad “insurgent” species. The city of Fallujah
had been a smuggling haven for centuries, and was a lawless sanctuary for smugglers and
criminals under Saddam Hussein.38 This made Fallujah and its environs a center of
criminal activity in Iraq. A period of lawlessness followed the American conquest of
Baghdad, which increased the number of Iraqi citizens participating in the Iraqi criminal
35
Cordesman, 54.
Cordesman, 55. Interviewees have also confirmed this finding.
37
Interview, Lt. Col. Phil Zeman.
38
John Ballard, Fighting For Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing
Group, 2006), 3-5.
36
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network.39 This final section of the insurgency was willing to make marriages of
convenience with any group or faction willing to turn a blind eye to its criminal activities.
As such, they supported the destabilization of law and order.
These three categories are not all inclusive and leave out the sectarian
organizations which contend against each other as well as U.S. military forces. Various
Sunni, Shia’, and Kurdish militias are responsible for sectarian violence, further clouding
the complicated pattern of violence in this ever-shifting non-state conflict.40
Insurgent strategies are complex and varied. They vary by commander and are an
art more than a science. Inventive insurgent leaders continually rethink their strategies
and innovate to keep one step ahead of their counterinsurgent enemies. Broadly, they rely
on sanctuary (either external or internal), disorder (both political and physical), support
from the populace (to retain their sanctuary or operations), and media attention (the
conduit though which they influence their enemy’s political resolve). In the words of
Mattis and Hoffman, the insurgent strategy is to “accumulate a series of small tactical
effects, [and] magnify them through the media and by information warfare, [in order] to
weaken U.S. resolve.”41 Three AQ tactics prove very effective at achieving these
strategic goals. First, AQ provokes retaliation from a larger power with a spectacular
attack. 9/11 was designed not to inflict irreparable harm on the United States, but to elicit
an over-reaction. Second, intimidate local leaders, government officials, and civilians into
39
Cordesman, 57.
How, for instance, are we to classify Sadr’s Madhi Army? He is Shia’, and therefore not truly an FRE
(who are mostly Sunni). He is religious, and preaches a violent theology to justify his actions, but he is not
Sunni Islamist. But he is not, necessarily, a criminal. He is most accurately described as a religious Iraqi
nationalist – a category which spans the divide between FRE and Sunni Islamists – but not assimilated into
the national government (at least not in 2004).
41
Mattis and Hoffman.
40
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support for AQs goals and methodology. Third, prolong the conflict, hoping to create a
protracted engagement that drains its attacker physically and economically. The United
States has spent approximately $1.4 million in Iraq and Afghanistan for every dollar that
AQ spent on the 9/11 attacks.42 The successful application of these tactics (provoke,
intimidate, protract) produces what David Kilcullen describes as the “Accidental
Guerrilla Syndrome:” AQ moves in, intimidates the populace, provokes an attack by an
outside power which forces the local populace to accept and support AQ (either that or
become an American Imperialist’s puppet), focuses the population’s anger against the
aggressor, and protracts the conflict.43
By 2004, the American military had proven itself to be the strongest conventional
force in Iraq. After conquering Baghdad, however, a series of strategic mistakes were
made in the regions of conflict termination, stability, and nation building.44 The mistakes
made by the military and the CPA at the national strategic level in the later months of
2003 would lay the foundation for the insurgency in years to come. Lack of stability
operations, lack of effective police force, the inability to recruit and stand up a legitimate
Iraqi government, the failure to create an effective police force, the dissolution of the
Iraqi military, the lack of coordination between aid organizations and the military,
insufficient numbers of military personnel to secure key pieces of infrastructure, the
inability to prove their causus belli, lack of effective civilian leadership and expertise
within the CPA, and the inability to foresee the emergence of guerrilla opponents all
42
Kilcullen, 274.
Kilcullen, 34-37.
44
Cordesman, 6. See also Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York:
Penguin Books, 2007). Ricks traces the evolution and consequences of these strategic failures in the early
years of the war.
43
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contributed to the growing insurgency and shrinking ability of U.S. forces to deal with
it.45 Many of these failures rose from the Bush Administration’s planning process in the
run up to the war,46 but some of them were built into the national command apparatus.
For instance, the inability to provide effective aid and effective civilian leadership is
institutional. In terms of personnel, Defense is 210 times as large as State and USAID
combined. When compared monetarily, the ratio of Defense to State and USAID funding
350:1.47 In real terms, this means that the civilian teams sent to run Iraq had no
experience running organizations as large as Iraq and weren’t funded as well as the
military to do their jobs.
One lesson learned from this period, and one which is now doctrine in
Counterinsurgency, is that “Military efforts are necessary and important to
counterinsurgency efforts, but they are only effective when integrated into a
comprehensive strategy employing all instruments of national power.”48 In 2004, the
United States was not doing that job very well. Historically, there has been much tension
between the various branches of the Armed Forces. This tension is especially evident
between the two land-based infantry combat branches, the U.S. Army and the U.S.
Marines.49 The U.S. military establishment has done a very good job of integrating across
the military branches. The military, however, has not been as successful in integrating
45
List can be found in Cordesman, 13-15. See also Ricks, Fiasco, and Ricks The Gamble: General David
Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
46
For broad overviews of these failures, see Ricks, Fiasco and Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2004).
47
Kilcullen, 286.
48
Counterinsurgency, 53.
49
A good summary of the post-WWII interservice clashes can be found in Matt Matthews, “Interservice
Rivalries,” in “Operation Al-Fajr: A Study in Army and Marine Corps Joint Operations” (Combat Studies
Institute Press: Fort Leavenworth, Kansas), pp. 5-9. A pdf is available at
www.cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/csi.asp
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other elements of national power with war efforts. Part of this oversight is due to key
leadership personalities. Thomas Ricks reports that even through May 2006, thenSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was unwilling to provide security for the State
Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT). One Pentagon official remembers
thinking “Well, you fucking idiot, that’s your ticket out of Iraq.” 50 There are many
reasons that Rumsfeld would not have wanted to secure the PRTs. First, U.S. forces were
spread too thin to spare too many forces for security details. Second, the military was
trying, very hard, to contract local Iraqi labor for construction projects. The main reason,
and the main theme of Ricks’ newest book The Gamble, is that the political leadership in
Washington had mistaken the kind of battle that the military was fighting.
Yet this anecdote alone, to a certain extent, misses the larger point. If the State
and Defense Department objectives and operations were properly aligned on an
institutional level and reinforced through joint training, the question of whether Rumsfeld
would provide protection for Rice’s PRTs would never have been an issue. In 2004, a
military built for dominant maneuver, precision engagement, and full-dimensional
protection found itself besieged by an insurgent force using low-tech, high-profile/lowprecision attacks. In Lt. Gen. Natonski’s opinion “too often we try to put too much on the
backs of our military.” The trends were downward and it looked like we had asked too
much: conquer, secure, rebuild, police, grow the economy and govern – and do it quickly.
Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies are just as complex as insurgency strategies
and vary from commander to commander and AO to AO. The Small Wars Manual is a
good place to start when studying COIN tactics and strategy. Early in the volume a clear
50
Thomas Ricks, The Gamble, 38.
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warning is laid out for practitioners of small wars: “The application of purely military
measures may not, by itself, restore peace and orderly governance because the
fundamental causes of the condition of the unrest may be economic, political, or
social.”51 Any coordinated COIN strategy must therefore integrate economic, political,
and social reforms while selectively using military force in such a way as to not harm the
economic, political, and social progress. In small wars, unlike conventional wars, the art
of political engagement has not been abandoned. Thus, the political or diplomatic
objectives of the nation must remain paramount, and all military operations must support
diplomatic, political, and economic goals. This is why the Small Wars Manual advocates
the close integration of the DoS into any military campaign.52 The center of gravity of the
conflict is the local populace. Therefore, cultural understanding is invaluable and
tolerance, sympathy, and kindness should be the “keynote” of any civilian/military
relationship.53 Counterinsurgency has inherited and adapted many of these lessons. For
instance, it instructs that COIN commanders needs to apply political, military, economic
and social elements of national power,54 while insisting that COIN commanders must do
everything in their power to “address legitimate grievances.”55 The mutations of this
strategy are many, and the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency56 contained in
51
Small Wars Manual, I-IX, 15.
Small Wars Manual, I-XVIII, 33.
53
Small Wars Manual, I-XVII, 32. The professional and ethical questions raised by the “mobilization” of
culture are dealt with by Roberto Gonzalez, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human
Terrain (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
54
Counterinsurgency, 2. Or, more verbosely, military efforts are “only effective when integrated into a
comprehensive strategy employing all instruments of national power” (53).
55
Counterinsurgency, 18.
56
The Paradoxes are a Zen exercise in military theory and are an important part of the Field Manual. They
include the following: Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure they are; sometimes, the
more force is used, the less effective it is; the more successful COIN strategy, the less force is used;
sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction; the best weapons for COIN do not shoot; tactical success
52
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Counterinsurgency should be studied for their tactical relevance, but the central strategic
theme must be create a secure environment, give the locals a stake in the environment,
and work to improve the economic, social, and political environment. 1MARDIV, under
Maj. Gen. James Mattis, adapted these strategies in al-Anbar province with the phrases
“No better friend, no worse enemy. First, do no harm.” This simple, understandable, and
flexible phrase communicated to all levels of the Division the Commanders Intent and
made action in complex situations by inexperienced Marines reactive rather than
reflective. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, the actual application of this
maxim is difficult and the environment is filled with obstacles which vary from IEDs to
AQI to American politicians to the media.
means nothing; many important decisions are not made by generals; a tactic that works this week, in this
province might not work next week in any province (38-50). See also David Kilcullen’s “‘Twenty-eight
Articles:’ Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency” in G.J. David Jr. and T.R. McKeldin III
Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in Modern Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books,
2009): pp. 389-402.
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Ways of Knowing and the Battle for Perceptions
The media serve a strategic function. We just
don’t know what the tactical requirements of
that strategic function look like.
-- Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jeffery Eby
You know, the U.S. media is not beholden to the
U.S. government, so they can report the way
they see it. They’re not in the role of
conducting IO for us either.
-- Lt. Col. Nick Vuckovich (Ret.)
The last part of this chapter is dedicated to the complex interactions between the military
and the media. This section intends to underscore the tension between the two
institutions, but also will serve to introduce the concept of Information War and
Information Operations, both of which are important to understanding certain actions and
their implications within the narrative of Fallujah contained in the next chapter. In the
context of Iraq, the rise of non-state actors, free associations, the death of “message
unity,” and the use of the internet for both planning attacks and the spread of ideas,
“perception” is all that matters. In asymmetrical war, it is “soft power” – or the ability to
co-opt rather than coerce a populace – that is paramount. In this type of war, it is
possible, Retired Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman reminds us, that “perception may matter more
than results on the physical battlefield.”57 In asymmetrical war, both sides rely on
projecting the image that their policy objective is morally superior to the policy objective
of their opponent. Both sides rely on the narrative that they are fighting the “just war” or
57
Frank Hoffman, “Maneuvering Against the Mind,” in Ideas as Weapons, 109.
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that they are supporting the “right” side. Battles are fought over the moral high-ground of
an action or operation, and the primary weapon in this battle is the media. Therefore, it is
very important that a critical study of the media accompany any discussion of modern
asymmetrical war. It is to their function as a ‘way of knowing’ for a populace, the ability
of that ‘way of knowing’ to affect the perceptions of a populace, and the methods that
both sides in Iraq use to wage that battle that this chapter now turns.
The media, as a group of individuals and institutions, is responsible for providing
a “way of knowing” what is going on outside the viewer’s or reader’s individual
experience. The modern American media establishment is a very complex organization
not easily distilled for the purposes of analysis, but I will address a few characteristics
important to the context of Iraq in 2004 here. First, the media is both a product of and a
contributor to the communications revolution. The rise of the internet, which brought
with it a very low cost of entry into the public sphere of ideas, has made “message unity”
impossible, i.e. it is impossible for almost any organization to have a monopoly on the
story. As an example, take the inability of Iran’s government after the 2009 presidential
election to prevent the spread of YouTube videos and Twitter posts which challenged the
official story. Even China, which has made multiple deals with Google to prevent
“subversive” search results, was not able to prevent stories and videos of unrest in the
Xinxiang Province from being posted online.
Many of the major cable media networks and print media sources underwent
editorial and financial changes in the last two decades. During the 1990s, there was a
severe decline in the number of reporters stationed over-seas to cover international
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events.58 This has resulted in a decrease in the coverage of international events and
reporters who have expertise in foreign affairs. There are a few second- and third-order
effects that arise from this shift in focus. The first is that the media, as a whole, have a
difficult time reporting on foreign affairs.59 Claims made by those well-linked to the
foreign-policy apparatus are very difficult to verify in time to meet editorial deadlines.
Because claims are difficult to verify, the media has come to trust evidence presented by
officials in the federal government – ostensibly because the officials have access to better
intelligence and evidence. This causes a dependence on official sources for evidence and
claims which reinforces the phenomenon of “indexing” – or, the process though which
opinions and analysis produced by main-stream media outlets mirror the debates of and
evidence presented by public officials.60 This process produces what W. Lance Bennett
and Steven Livingston call a “Semi-Independent Press:” A press which is not controlled
through any official mechanism, but which implicitly bounds its discussion to opinions
held by those in power.61 The parameters of discussion in the “semi-independent press”
are further restricted by what David Dadge calls the “fairness doctrine,” or the belief that
professionalism in reporting comes from telling “both sides” of the story (even if one has
less merit than the others) rather than providing context and analysis. Indexing and the
fairness doctrine give a lot of power to government officials, who can “simultaneously
58
Philip Taylor, “The Fourth Arm and the Fourth Estate: Psychological Operations and the Media” in
Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds.), War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900-2003,
(New York: I.B. Taurus, 2005), 260.
59
For a more in depth description, and ethical questions raised by this fact, see Dadge, The War in Iraq and
Why the Media Failed Us (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 10-11.
60
See W. Lance Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States,” Journal of
Communication 40 (2), Spring 1990: 105-125.
61
W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, “Editor’s Introduction, A Semi-Independent Press:
Government Control and Journalistic Autonomy in the Political Construction of News,” Political
Communication 20 (2003): 359-362.
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stimulate news coverage and regulate the discursive parameters of that coverage.”62 New
technologies, such as the satellite phone and expansion of the internet, have loosen these
“discursive parameters,”63 but it still remains easier, cheaper, and safer to report official
versions of the story.
At the same time, two other editorial choices were being made in response to
financial demands for “ratings-driven, high-profit content.”64 The first concerns the
presentation of the news. From the mid-1980s to 2003, multiple scholars of media
noticed a marked rise in “sensationalism, scandal, political games, government waste,
infotainment, celebrity, gossip and personal profiles.”65 At the same time that you have
less reporting and expertise on international issues, the reporting that is being done is
often sensationalized and competes with more popular infotainment stories. Since the
1960s, the increase in the revenue from commercials (from $10 billion in 1963 to $200
billion in 1998),66 has forced the media establishment to make editorial choices based on
ratings and the numbers of viewers. A good example of this is the coverage of Micheal
Jackson’s death, which lasted for weeks and eclipsed human rights abuses and election
fraud in Iran and the launch of missiles by North Korea. The second deals with the
production of the news. “Event-driven” news, a movement within the media industry
dubbed the “CNN-effect,” is a method of gathering news in which the media institutions
wait for something to happen and then rush a camera crew or journalist out to the scene
62
Scott Althaus, “When News Norms Collide: New Evidence for Press Independence,” Political
Communication 20 (4), p. 381. Althaus questions the controlling nature of indexing, suggesting that some
reporters seek out and report on non-official opinions more than most scholars admit. However, the framing
is still done in terms of policy debates within the government.
63
Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, “Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology
Altering the Construction of News?” Political Communication 20 (2003): 363-380.
64
Bennett and Livingston., 359.
65
Bennett and Livingston, 359..
66
Dadge, 46.
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to report on it.67 The “CNN-effect” has two byproducts. First, they are sensationalized:
“A tsunami struck south-east Asia today, millions feared dead,” reads the announcer as
pictures of wreckage play in the background. Second, they are left without context: “Four
Blackwater Contractors killed in Iraq Today,” reads the headline with pictures of three of
the burnt corpses hanging next to the article which contains no mention of the fact that
the contractors were operating in the city in violation of policy, regulations, and orders.
The sensationalism and lack of context can combine to produce emotional over-responses
and pictures of ‘what is going on’ which are more constructed than they are concrete. In
such a case, the media fails at their task of providing their viewers and readers a “way of
knowing,” as what the viewers and readers “know” might be substantially different from
what actually happened or the constructed news narrative might differ from the historical
one.
The evolution of the modern media establishment has a few important
implications for the study of war. First, there is tension between the military and the
media. Nick Vuckovich, a retired Marine Corps Lt. Col., is “cynical” about how the
media reports the war: “It’s more of a blow by blow, anxiety, keep this perpetual anxiety
going to maximize viewers sort of thing.” Lt. Col. Bill Vivian feels that the media doesn’t
understand combat operations:
The bottom line with the media is that they, you know, they touch the elephant
we call war or combat operations in a very, very general way. So they touch the
leg, and they all go away and explain what that thing is based on the touch of the
leg of the elephant. Whether they have an agenda that they’re trying to get
across or not, it’s almost irrelevant. It’s such a narrow scope of looking at issues
that they can’t hope to put it in context. And they, quite frankly, don’t.
67
See Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, “Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News.”
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Second, since the media is the electorate’s “way of knowing,” and what and how they
“know” something affects the perception of that object or action, the media becomes a
weapon, wittingly or unwittingly, in the battle for the perceptions. Consider the
implication of this “way of knowing” in the context of sensationalized reporting. Lt. Gen.
Dunford explained it this way: “You know, there is an expression they [reporters] used
with me a couple of times: ‘If the house isn’t on fire, its not news.’” But this bias towards
the sensational creates the appearance that the house is on fire a lot. The second
implication, that the media is a weapon, was a fact that surprised the establishment in the
1999 conflict with Kosovo, when they found out that the military had been using them in
a war of perception. Some reporters became angry at the use of the media as a weapon by
the US government. But according to Rutgers History Professor Susan Carruthers, their
righteous anger is a little bit misplaced, because they were used in the same way by
Milosevic. The third concerns the image projected of war to the U.S. electorate. In the
wake of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, the media cultivated the idea of a “humanitarian”
war,68 or what David Welch calls the “humane war:” successful wars with few American
casualties.69 This has produced a culture where the populace is increasingly
unsympathetic to the use of force.70 Because of this, the American military public
relations campaigns focus on what Roberto Gonzalez calls the “myth of a ‘gentler’
counterinsurgency.”71 A gentler counterinsurgent approach may use Information
Operations (IO) to downplay violence as necessary and acceptable, when it may not be.
68
Susan Carruthers, “Missing in Authenticity? Media War in the Digital Age,” in Connelly and Welch:
236-250.
69
Welch, “Introduction,” in Connelly and Welch, xvi.
70
Mark Laity, “Straddling the Divide – Spinning for Both Sides,” in Connelly and Welch, 281.
71
Gonzalez, “The Myth of a ‘Gentler’ Counterinsurgency,” in American Counterinsurgency, 1-24.
Tucker 33
There is an incentive, if the purpose of Information Operations is to generate support
through perception management, to “spin” violence using Information Operations.
The last effect of the media on war is the power of images. “Seeing is believing”
is the old fallacy. News that is “seen” as fact has actually been edited many times. First,
someone had to direct a camera at point A instead of point B, which means that the image
itself is coordinated to show a specific fact. Such “framing” is not necessarily the only
fact or the whole truth. Second, this raw footage is edited for the audience, depending on
how long the segment is and what the analysis of the story will contain. Third, it may be
picked up by other news stations in the process, who edit it further. Fourth, all viewers
take from news what they are specifically looking for at the moment, so a form of
“editing” occurs in the mind of the viewer, who tags this piece of news in a way that they
will remember it and which corresponds to their social, political, intellectual, or personal
identity. What should we think about the “artillery shells” footage in Vigilant Resolve,
the occurrence of which General James Mattis disputes?
Al-Jazeera broadcast (supposedly) falsified images of artillery shells destroying
houses in Fallujah. These images were picked up by the American media and played a
large role in the eventual ceasefire in April, 2004. If it was false imagery (and I’m
inclined to believe Mattis), then even though I may have “seen” artillery shells falling on
“Fallujans,” it doesn’t mean that it happened. Who’s responsibility is this lie? Is it the
insurgent leader who decided to re-release previous film to discredit American actions, or
al-Jazeera’s for running it first, or the American media outlets for re-running it without
verifying it, or the viewer’s for believing it without context? The answer is that the
responsibility is everyone’s, but not any one’s. All four can blame the others, because
Tucker 34
they cannot (and perhaps should not) be wholly at fault. But, it is a particularly vexing
situation which annoys U.S. military men and women who command troops in combat –
especially if such an information operational failure costs the lives of some of their
troops. Images have the power, in the modern age, to affect the course of wars. As Major
Jon Dunne, who served as an Information Operations Officer in Iraq, recounted, “Just the
very image of a mosque in rubble, even if its justified, is a powerful tool [in the hands of
the insurgents].”
The U.S. military quickly realized that it had to have a way to fight the battle of
perceptions. Hoffman points out that “ideas and grievances are the seeds of most irregular
war.”72 It is very difficult to wage an insurgency when the society is not divided, services
are run well enough to be tolerated, the government is thought of as legitimate, and the
non-elites are philosophically in line with the elites. The point of Information Operations
is to gauge which of the above issues is out of line and counter it, either through physical
operations (building schools, fixing electricity services, paving roads, etc.) or
psychological operations (convincing the populace that one side is the “legitimate” side
for reasons x, y, z). Information Operations must effectively integrate the physical with
the psychological in order to, in Mattis’ words, “Dry up the swamp” of discontent.73
Information Operations is a “new” component of the military contained in a large
branch of military theory known as “non-kinetic operations,” or better conceptualized by
Chinese Colonels Qiao and Wang in Unrestricted Warfare as “non-military operations in
war.”74 The discipline has not yet coalesced into an easily-definable entity, and is still
72
Hoffman, in Ideas as Weapons, 99.
Quoted in Hoffman, in Ideas as Weapons, 105.
74
Unrestricted Warfare, 38.
73
Tucker 35
much more of an art than a science. Major Dunne described the process at the Regimental
level: “You need the ability to generate leaflets: meaning a camera, a printer, and a
Marine with a cleaver idea.” Up and down the chain of command, IO also includes
broadcasting messages, political and diplomatic contact, key leadership engagement, and
media spin – although few officers will admit it. The discipline isn’t “new” in the sense
that it was just invented, however. According to Dunne, “If you study history you’ll see
that Information Operations have been conducted since the beginning of time. But it’s
something that has really gained some traction and emphasis by not only the Marine
Corps but the Department of the Defense.” In fact, the US already had an institutionalized
IO agency: U.S. Information Agency. The Cold War bureau was headed, at one time, by
Edward Murrow and was considered a way to leverage the philosophic advantages of a
capitalistic, democratic system against Communism in a war of ideology.75 Programs
included cultural exchanges, Radio Free Europe, and key leader visits to regions.
Information Operations, in broad terms, is the method of fighting the war for
perception. “In simple terms,” says Dunne, “it’s the application of ideas or information to
reinforce an operation. It could be as simple as pamphlets or leaflets dropped out of a
plane or key leadership engagement. It could be something as complicated as computer
network attacks, electronic warfare, so on and so forth.” Army Colonel William M.
Darley defines it as a “focus on influencing perceptions or attitudes as opposed to
destroying things or seizing terrain.”76 One scholar of the media has described IO as an
“umbrella term” for military communication, offensive and defensive, in the information
75
The full story of the agency is told by Dizard, who served in it. Wilson Dizard, Inventing Public
Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004).
76
Darley, William M., Col. USA, “Clausewitz’s Theory of War and Information Operations” in Ideas as
Weapons.
Tucker 36
age.77 IO has even been likened to “marketing” of DoD ideas – selling the best ideas in
the marketplace of perception.78 USMC Major E. Lawson Quinn has likened IO to
“perception management,” in a perhaps too unsavory phrase.79
Information Operations (or perception management, or marketing) must be
coordinated with actions that reinforce the constructed narrative, otherwise it will be
ineffective. Inability to prove one’s claims decreases the legitimacy of future claims. In a
certain sense, it restricts the ability of the information warrior to lie about empirical
actions. While spin can be applied to certain actions, excessive spin may also reduce
legitimacy. The inability to coordinate actions with Information Operations can lead to
strategic failure, which may be a sufficient check on the military’s tendency to overly
“spin” something for an advantage. Take this example, narrated by Col. Craig Tucker, of
an information operations failure in 2003:
A lot of the Iraqi army did not fight, because we told them in our Information Operations
campaign that, if they didn’t fight, once we had overthrown Saddam Hussein the army
would remain a functioning institution in Iraq. And we broke that promise. You can argue
how you want whether or not at the tactical level, even operational level, that you can’t
lie in your propaganda (We call it IO now, but it’s a combination of propaganda and
psychological operations). But, they did what we asked and then we disbanded the Iraqi
Army. Now, all of a sudden you have this very macho society, male society, that has the
same levels of pride and sense of self and sense of accomplishment that any other person
has in terms of being able to provide for their family, and have a job, and be treated with
respect by the Iraqi people. All this was very much a part of being in the Iraqi army. You
disband that and all of a sudden now you’ve got a large group of trained, disgruntled, and
betrayed individuals who are now unemployed and know where all the weapons caches
are and all the ammunition caches and have all the expertise to use them. They are now
amenable to the terrorist elements. They started recruiting and they started forming
alliances.
Lying, it turns out, comes back to bite you. A similar process happened when RCT7 was
called from al-Anbar to support Vigilant Resolve. Individual Iraqis who had cooperated
77
Taylor, in Connelly and Welch, 260.
Stoney Trent and James Doty, “Marketing: An Overlooked Aspect of Information Operations,” in Ideas
as Weapons: 163-170.
79
E. Lawson Quinn, “Tactical Information Operations in West Rashid: An Iraqi National Police Battalion
and its Assigned U.S. Transition Team,” in Ideas as Weapons, 307.
78
Tucker 37
with the Marines (such as builders for projects, tribal sheikhs, a boy who sold Coke to
Marines) were tortured and killed, because the Marines – who said that they would stay
and protect the populace and grow the economy – had left. Perhaps the most important
aspect of any information operation, according to Quinn, is that “the character of physical
operations was itself information operations.”80 It matters that a Marine knocks on a door
before searching, or that Marines enter mosques with boots on, or that an entire class of
Iraqi society is told a lie. Information Operations is what you say, but it is also what you
do.
This overview of asymmetric war, the actors in Iraq, and the friction between the military
and the media should provide the essential context of the narrative that follows. The
twelve months following February 2004 saw the emergence of a sophisticate strategic
information war between the United States military and the insurgency in Iraq, as well as
some of the most intense urban combat since Hue City in Vietnam. This study does not
focus on the “human” element of the battle, but intends to provide a short history,
highlighting the key aspects of the battle, for an academic audience.
80
Quinn, Ideas as Weapons, 313.
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Chapter 2
The Two Battles For Fallujah
You are going to write history, my fine young
sailors and Marines, so write it well.
- - General James Mattis
“Letter to All Hands,” February, 2004
In March, 2004, the Marines of the First Marine Division (1MARDIV) relieved the 82nd
Airborne from duty and took over control of al-Anbar Province in Western Iraq. AlAnbar is the size of North Carolina with a population of 2 million Iraqis. In the next
twelve months, the province would experience tremendous violence – from the
infiltration of radical Islamists across the Syrian border, to suicide bombers, to intense
urban combat, to public murders of teenagers, and the destruction of cities by the most
powerful conventional force in the world. The history of that year starts – and perhaps
forever will start – with a particularly ghoulish, but otherwise unremarkable, spat of
violence.
On 31 March, less than a month after 1MARDIV took over al-Anbar, four
American contractors from Blackwater Security were driving without authorization or
support down the main highway in Fallujah, Highway 10. They were ambushed by
insurgents and surrounded by a mob seized by a bloody muse. The bodies were burned,
spat on, beaten with shoes, dragged across the city, and hung from a bridge. Bing West
reports then-Col. Joseph Dunford calling it a “scene from Somalia.”1 Dunford was the
Division Chief of Staff at the time, responsible for running the Division in accordance
with the Commander’s Intent on a day-to-day basis. James Mattis, then a Major General
1
Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (New York: Bantham, 2005),
4.
Tucker 39
in command of the Division, was furious, but decided not to order units into the city.
UAV feeds saw no signals of struggle or life from the contractors, and the only thing that
extracting the bodies by force could accomplish was collateral damage. The Division had
sympathizers in the city, so Mattis wanted to go through them. “OK, no problem. Get a
hold of our people inside the city. Tell them we want the bodies back, and we want them
back right fuckin’ now,” he remembers thinking. “And I want to know who did it, and
you tell us or you’re going to pay a price.” Ramping up the violence wouldn’t help
anyone in this situation. “Don’t go charging in there, that’s what they want us to do.”2
No better plan, no worse timing
After the initial fight up to Baghdad in 2003, Mattis wanted to communicate to his troops
that the war had changed. There had been a shift in tempo. They needed to turn off the
killing instinct and turn on the humanitarianism. Mattis recycled his maxim from
Afghanistan with an added phrase: “No better friend, no worse enemy. First do no harm.”
He circulated the slogan through his Division, making sure that every Marine from his
Privates to his Colonels, understood this commander’s intent. And in the six months after
the initial invasion, out of 12,000 men under his command, one was killed and 55
wounded. Amazing numbers, which Mattis attributes to sound COIN strategy: “We were
trying to cycle the violence cycle down – that’s where the ‘First do no harm’ comes in –
and it worked. It worked very well.” Mattis and 1MARDIV pulled out of Iraq in late
2
This chapter is composed almost entirely of interviews between the author and Marines at various levels
in 1MARDIV and documents given to the author by those Marines. All interviews and documents are
available upon request. Unless otherwise stated, quotes come from said interviews and will not be
individually cited.
Tucker 40
2003 and were replaced by a Polish-led Division. However, Anbar began to heat up and
by November, Mattis knew he was going to have to go back in to Iraq.
With the success of the combination of Sulla’s epitaph and the physician’s oath,
Mattis devised a measured approach to the Anbar. Even though it was defined as an
“economy of force” area, or an area where forces were there simply to prevent back-slip,
Mattis thought he could “flip it.” Mattis’ Commander’s Intent,3 issued in January 2004,
provides a look at the strategy and end-state envisioned:
My aim is to make common cause with the Iraqis, providing security until
Iraqi forces are fully manned, trained and equipped to assume the mission,
in order to restore civil administration. […]
Through presence, persistence, and patience, our endstate [sic] is a
functioning Iraqi civil administration with Iraqi security forces replacing
USMC security elements.
Dunford described the Division’s strategy in March of 2004: “Our approach was to
conduct COIN operations, to provide that persistent presence, to secure the population,
grow the Iraqi security forces, grow governance in each of those key areas we had
identified.” To compliment this strategy with a cultural and situational awareness, Mattis
established an “intel fusion center” in order to bring MEF information down to the
Division level and better inform his operations. He assigned “understudies” to each
battalion under his command. The “understudies” were enlisted Marines with language
and cultural skills assigned to monitor each battalion’s region and, if they thought
something was out of the ordinary, alert the battalion commander.
Enacting this strategy would be difficult. Mattis, in a bluntness and with foresight
which characterizes the general, acknowledged as much in a letter to all hands: “This is
3
Appendix 2 contains three letters from Mattis and Natonski, respectively, to 1MARDIV in full.
Tucker 41
going to be hard, dangerous work.” Along the Syrian border, the twin towns of al-Qa’im
and Husaybah were going to be problems. The towns were smuggling havens for foreign
fighters. Before 1MARDIV arrived, the area had been patrolled by armored vehicles,
with very little interaction between the soldiers there and the locals. Ramadi was also
going to be a problem. Before 1MARDIV rolled into town, the city had been patrolled by
an Army National Guard MP (Military Police) Battalion. They had kept close to their
base, and not patrolled on foot off of the main roads.
Mattis knew that Fallujah
would be a problem. The city of
Fallujah is situated on the eastern bank
of the Euphrates River almost half-way
between Baghdad and Ramadi. The
map to the right4 provides an aerial
view of the city. From the west, there
are only two ways into Fallujah – over
two bridges that cross the Euphrates from the peninsula. The main road, Highway 10,
runs east-west. A few weeks before they assumed control of the AO, the MEF
commander – a 3 star general – had been shot at while walking through Fallujah.
1MARDIV had a plan, though, which Mattis explains:
We knew it was going to be tough, so our plan was to turn on the lights in a nearby town,
get the power going. In another town, make sure that the water-treatment was better. In
another town, come in with money and hire kids with jobs – day laborers – trying to give
them something to do. And all around things would start getting better around Fallujah.
4
http://images.military.com/pics/FallujahOverhead2.jpg . See also Key Terrain slide in Appendix 1.
Tucker 42
The basic plan for the Division was this: Address the legitimate grievances of the
populace, and they will trust the First Marines. The center of this conflict was not
physical, but economic, social, and political. Physical contests in the city were planned
and executed very quietly. If there was someone Mattis needed taken care of, they would
use intelligence sources to find them, and then send in Special Operations Forces to kill
or capture them. Collateral damage was minimized and they worked around tribal
loyalties. “We’d keep doing that until we created hell inside the city for them [the
insurgents].” Fallujah was not going to be won by physically controlling the city. Fallujah
was going to be flipped by the people, who would see what was going on around them
and invite the Marines, or Iraqi Security forces, or Iraqi Government, in to do the same
for Fallujah. It would take a long time. But it doesn’t appear as if Mattis minded, or as if
he was going to let himself be provoked into a fight.
In any case, Fallujah was a small fish to fry. By the end of March, 2004,
1MARDIV had bigger problems: “We didn’t expect, though, the supply lines south
through our area and south out of Baghdad to get cut,” says Mattis. The insurgents were
moving against the perceived point of American weakness, their supply lines. Baghdad
ordered Mattis to secure the roads and bridges in his AO, which meant sacrificing troops
for road sweeps and bridge-building.
Then on 31 March 2004, four Blackwater employees drove across the bridge into
Fallujah. The pictures of their charred remains hanging from a bridge with smiling Iraqis
waiving shoes towards the cameras instantly became headlines. Almost all of the major
newspapers and all of the major media outlets pick up the story. In the White House,
Tucker 43
President Bush was infuriated by the images.5 At a fundraiser in Washington that night,
President Bush vowed that “America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins.
We are aggressively striking thugs in Iraq.”6 The American political establishment was
appalled. Rumsfeld ordered the Marines to take the city and “get those responsible.”7 The
insurgents had provoked the President of the United States, and he was not going to back
away from the fight. For an Administration ideologically committed to rapid dominance,
or “Shock and Awe,” the logical step was to rapidly deploy, display the dominance of
U.S. ground forces, and thereby destroy the will of the enemy.
The order came down to Mattis, who protested: “No, no, you don’t want me to do
this. This is not a good idea. That’s what they want us to do, and let’s not do what they
want us to do. Just give me some time, we’ll get the bodies back, and we’ll kill the people
who did that.” Mattis didn’t want to “go off [his] game” for multiple reasons. First, he
was spread very thin. He had too few troops to hold the border, al-Qa’im, Walid, Ramadi
and also secure the supply routes, let alone isolate and assault a city the size of Raleigh,
N.C. Second, there were rumblings of insurgent activity in Ramadi and al-Qa’im. Third,
he didn’t want to be dragged into a conflict he thought was ill advised. Col. Craig Tucker,
Commanding Officer of Regimental Combat Team 7 in the al-Qa’im/Syria region which
would be called in as a supporting operation for Vigilant Resolve, summed up the attitude
of the commanders at the time: “The incident with the four contractors, first action, led to
an emotional, in my mind, strategic action – you know, ‘Go in there and spank the crap
out of the Fallujans, the people who did this.’ That’s not a mature national strategy.” But
5
West, 6.
Reported in Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War Part III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 297.
7
West, 7.
6
Tucker 44
the politicians had spoken and it was national policy. The Bush Administration made an
operational decision which would set the tone for conflict in al-Anbar over the next year.
“At that point, there’s no more pushing back,” recalls Mattis. “I said, ‘Just give me the
orders in writing and don’t stop me.’”
“It was a huge disaster,” recalls Col. Tucker, now retired and blessed with freer
lips. “It was an operational disaster, it set the tone. The decision to go in there and exact
retribution, it set the tone for 1MARDIV operations over there. It created a tremendous
propaganda triumph for the adversary. And, they almost shut us down.”
An “Entrepreneurial” April
Within days of the Blackwater incident, attacks on American military forces in al-Anbar
province increased dramatically. In al-Qa’im, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi let loose his best
men. Zarqawi would ally himself with al-Qaedi in Iraq in October 2004 and was a
seasoned criminal and insurgent, having spent years fighting Saddam’s regime.8
According to Mattis, “basically all hell broke loose.” In the first hours of fighting, the
Americans lost a company commander and five NCOs. The First Lieutenant took over
and was reinforced by another company, but the insurgents kept the pressure on the
Marines in the city for over 72 hours. Ramadi was also heating up. In the next few weeks,
Mattis would tell Lt. Col. Buck Conner “You just hold Ramadi. I don’t give a damn what
it costs you, you just hold Ramadi.” The National Command Authority had designated
8
Ironically, it was Zarqawi’s existence in Iraq which led the Bush Administration to claim, in Secretary
Powell’s address to the UN, that Saddam had connections to al-Qaeda. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, 371.
Tucker 45
Fallujah as a priority, al-Qa’im and the Syrian border were on fire, and the supply lines
still needed to be protected. Mattis didn’t have any men to spare to help Conner in
Ramadi. “But he knows what he’s gotta do,” said Mattis. “It turned into something like
Stalingrad before it’s over.”9
Taking a step back, the attacks in April look like a coordinated offensive. There
were sustained attacks in Fallujah, Najaf, Tikrit, Baghdad, al-Qa’im, and Ramadi. The
insurgency was organized in networks, however, with no large command and control
apparatus. Such a large offensive would have been difficult to organize, but not
impossible as communication between insurgent groups was easy with cell-phones and
the internet. “At some point, I believe they [the insurgents] were going to strike,” said
Col. Tucker.
It could be as loosely organized as ‘Sometime in May we’re going to strike’ or as highly
organized as ‘At 0600 on May 1 we’re going to hit them.’ Someday we may know. But
what I don’t know is in their minds, whoever ‘they’ is in this amorphous alliance of nonstate actors, if they were prepared and ready when Fallujah flashpoint hit and the
contractors were killed or if they had to respond pre-maturely.
Regardless of the preparation level or coordination of attacks, April’s violence in alAnbar appeared to have an “entrepreneurial effect” on the insurgency. The phrase is
Dunford’s, and he goes on to explain: “When violence occurred in one place, it inspired
or motivated people to be violent in a different place, but not necessarily with
coordination…. We were seeing three, four, five different enemy dynamics that all kind
of occurred simultaneously, or near simultaneously.” The destabilization of supply lines,
offensives in Ramadi and al-Qa’im, and now an order to have “sustained U.S. Marine
presence inside the city within 48 hours” put Mattis in a difficult position. He was facing
9
The battle for Ramadi is dealt with in much greater detail in West “The Tipping Point,” No True Glory,
74-88 and Campell, Donovan Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and
Brotherhood (New York: Random House, 2009).
Tucker 46
a series of offensives around al-Anbar province and was being ordered to attack a city
with more emotional than strategic importance. But, it was an order.
Mattis didn’t have enough troops to take the city. He wanted to be able to seal off
the city, in order to prevent the escape, resupply, and free communication of insurgents,
but he couldn’t. RCT-7 was engaged in al-Qa’im and patrolling the Syrian and Jordanian
borders. Conner was engaged in Ramadi and about to be up to his ears in insurgent
violence. The rest of Mattis’ force was engaged in supply-line protection. There were
some sections of the AO that didn’t have any troops in them at all. Karma, a city slightly
north of Fallujah, was an insurgent safe-haven and the Lake Tartar region was “all enemy
territory. You go up there, you’re going to fight every time.” He could move two
battalions, at high risk, into the city: 1st Battalion, 5th Marines (1/5) and 2nd Battalion, 1st
Marines (2/1). 1/5 and 2/1 started thrusting into the city from opposite directions, making
jagged progress. The insurgents hadn’t had time to stockpile weapons or build bunkers,
they were not ready for the Marines. Progress was being made, but it was barely tangible.
Then the 1st Armored Division, which had been in Iraq for over 13 months, halted its
preparations to go home and relieved Mattis’ battalions, 1/23 and 2/2, from their task of
securing supply lines. With two more battalions, Mattis sealed off the city to the south
and west. “At that point,” Mattis believed, “we had ‘em.”
Asymmetrical combat in heavily populated urban areas is always a 360 degree
battle. As soon as the troops moved into the city, attacks on Marine unit’s flanks and
rears and around Fallujah increased. IEDs and VBIEDs effectively crippled the supply
lines into the city. At one point, the Division’s stockpile of supplies for operations in
Fallujah was down to one day’s worth of water, food, and ammunition. Lt. Gen.
Tucker 47
Natonski,10 the man who would take over command of 1MARDIV in August, put the
problem this way:
There were certain people in the military that used to believe that we should model our
supply system after, say, WalMart: Just In Time logistics. What that means is if WalMart
runs out of CocaCola on their shelves, they get on the phone or send an email and within
18 hours an eighteen-wheeler full of Coke is coming to that shop and it’ll be on the
shelves on the next day of business. WalMart doesn’t contend with ambushes and IEDs.
Mattis sent an order to RCT-7, operating out of al-Assad and engaged in al-Qa’im: “Be
prepared to move several hundred miles with your main forces, but make sure to hold the
borders. And hold what you can.” Pulling almost all of his forces from their positions in
Western al-Anbar to deal with Fallujah was a risky move. Nick Vuckovich, a retired Lt.
Col. who served as RCT-7’s Operations Officer, remembers that the order specified a
turn-around time of 72-96 hours after Mattis said “Go.” Of the four Battalions attached to
RCT-7, 3/4 was already engaged in Fallujah and 3/7 would remain engaged in al-Qa’im.
Moving the rest of RCT-7s combat strength, including 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance
Battalion (LAR), to Fallujah would leave a platoon of Marines to guard 605km border
with Syria and less than a company in Hit and Hadithah. “No doubt in my mind,” recalls
Vuckovich, “high amount of risk leaving behind a low level of combat power in alAnbar.”
This move was risky for two reasons. First, such a low foot-print of troops would
provide an opening for insurgent advances in territory and recruiting. One result of this
was that the local populace was without protection, as Dunford explains:
We knew that when we went into an area, provide security for the people, establish a
relationship of trust, and then we leave those areas – we knew that we would be exposing
the Iraqi people who had cooperated with us to a fear and intimidation campaign by the
insurgents when we left. That, in fact, happened in many cases. People were punished for
having cooperated with us, and we weren’t there to protect them.
10
Then Major General.
Tucker 48
The second- and third-order effects of this dynamic form the second reason that this
move was risky. The U.S. Marine Corps, which had come in promising security,
protection, and economic advancement, now proved itself a purveyor of false promises.
Rebuilding that trust would take years.11 Yet Mattis, in a sense, had his hands tied. The
NCA had ordered an assault on the city. At the cost of operations elsewhere in the alAnbar, Mattis complied. RCT-7’s supporting operation and the reorientation of 1/23 and
2/2 saved the operation, but endangered the strategic balance of power in al-Anbar.
Mattis ordered Tucker to sweep south of Fallujah, through southern Baghdad, and
then back north of Fallujah. The idea was to disrupt insurgent communications, supply
lines, and psychological support. With RCT-7 taking the pressure off of the Marines in
Fallujah, Mattis said that the “Enemy was on the ropes.” They are running out of ammo,
Marines are capturing insurgents so hopped up on methamphetamine that they can’t stop
shaking, their command and control element had left the city, and Marine snipers were
the terror of the insurgents. And then Bush, under pressure from media reports of
atrocities in the city and politicians in his own party and abroad, halted the operation with
a unilateral ceasefire. I asked Mattis how long, if Bush hadn’t implemented the unilateral
ceasefire in Fallujah, it would have taken him to take the city. “Forty-eight hours,” he
said without hesitation. The insurgents were out of ammo and had no place to hide. They
11
It would also take self-sacrificing actions by individual U.S. Marines. Lt. Col. Joe L’Etoile, then Division
OpsO and later Battalion Commander in Iraq, recounts a story of a Marine sacrificing his own safety after a
car bomb struck his post in order to give medical attention to a small Iraqi girl who had also been wounded.
Disregarding his own safety and life, the Marine called in a helicopter and flew the girl and her family to
the nearest hospital. Shortly thereafter, the local Sheikh came to L’Etoile and told him that there would be
no more attacks on “his” (the Sheikh’s) Marines. Attacks stopped. This author has come across no better
illustration of the principle of “moral high ground” in his interviews. There is no bomb yet invented, no gun
yet manufactured, that can match the power of this human moment to shape the course of wars.
Tucker 49
were ill-prepared. “But then we get stopped, for information reasons. Information war
stops us and eventually we have to pull back.”
Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz (USA), in a 2006 article in the Military Review, claims that
Vigilant Resolve failed because “operations in the information domain were not
integrated into the battle plan.” 12 Mattis, who advocated “wrapping” kinetic operations
in Information Operations in his February 2004 Commander’s Intent, here became a
victim of the insurgency’s propaganda machine, American politicians’ meddling, and the
global media’s strategic, operational, and tactical effects on war. There are two levels
where insurgent information war was able to turn Mattis’ tactical and operational victory
into a strategic failure. The first level, of local Iraqi domestic leaders, was never fully
supportive of the operation – perhaps because they didn’t see the logic of such a violent
operation. Mattis spent his days with the commanders of those battalions engaged in the
operation, assessing their needs and adjusting accordingly. He spent his nights doing
“key-leadership engagement” – or, having dinner with tribal sheikhs and local politicians.
Key-leadership engagement is a integral part of any IO campaign, because it serves to
assure the local social and political elite that kinetic operations are necessary. Mattis was
also talking to media representatives, many who were embedded in the front lines,
making sure that they understood the situation as well as the operational and strategic
importance of Vigilant Resolve. The second level was the arena of the international
media. The inability of the Marines to gain the advantage here allowed political pressure
to build on the White House, which would eventually order a unilateral cease-fire.
12
Thomas Metz, with Mark Garret, James Hutton, and Timothy Bush, “Massing Effects in the Information
Domain: A Case Study in Aggressive Information Operations,” Military Review May-June (2006), 106.
Tucker 50
Since the media has the greatest effect on this U.S. Information Operations defeat,
and since it was the media that legitimized the complaints of Iraqi political leaders, I will
start my explanation of the unilateral cease-fire there. Perhaps it was because he knew the
damage he could do, or perhaps it was because he knew that the operation would be
unpopular, but when Mattis told his superiors “Don’t stop me,” he was delivering them
the implicit warning to shore up political support and whether the storm. In discussing the
“lessons re-learned” about Vigilant Resolve, Dunford remarks that “when you decide to
conduct an attack, and you have a clear end-state in mind, you oughtta think through all
of that at the beginning and not change your mind in-stride.” The implication easily
drawn, although probably not meant directly by Dunford, was that when the Bush
Administration inserted themselves into the war at the operational planning level, they
should have made sure that they wanted what they sought. But with the cameras running
and the guns firing, things were bound to get ugly. Vuckovich explains that politicians
were “not thrilled when the offensive kicked off and the world witnessed the amount of
damage a Marine Division does to a city. No surprise to us [Marines], but if you’re going
to unleash a Marine Division on the offensive in the city, that’s what you’re going to
get.” It is very hard to paint yourself as a ‘liberator’ rather than an ‘occupier’ if the
images are showing intense urban combat in a heavily-populated city. At the same time,
reports of collateral damage were making their way onto the internet and into the mainstream media. The Iraqi political establishment was not happy about such a violent
display of U.S. force on its soil, and in a teleconference with President Bush told him that
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continuing an assault on Fallujah would tear the Governing Council apart.13 With the
transfer of sovereignty scheduled for 30 June, such a political melt-down would be
disastrous for the country and Bush’s re-election campaign. The country would not have
a government and Bush had made the 30 June handover and Iraqi sovereignty the
“cornerstone of his Iraq policy.”14
Questionable stories had begun surfacing in the media. One concerns the use of
footage, released by insurgents to al-Jazeera and then run in the United States, of artillery
shells used in 1MARDIV’s offensive. General Mattis claims that no artillery was fired
into Fallujah during Vigilant Resolve, and that the insurgents used footage of artillery
fires from other cities with false timelines. The author cannot independently verify the
veracity of either claim at this stage, but the veracity of the claims is almost beside the
point. In an era of images and sound-bites, the footage had many more viewers than the
protestations of the General. The house isn’t burning if the Major General was correct
and the artillery shells story was falsified. But it is news if artillery shells were killing
civilians.
An even more disturbing situation would catch the Associated Press publishing a
blatant falsity. On April 7, AP reporter Abdul-Qader Saadi reported:
A U.S. helicopter fired three missiles at a mosque compound in the city of Fallujah on
Wednesday, killing about forty people as American forces battled Sunni insurgents,
witnesses said. Cars ferried bodies from the scene, though there was no immediate
confirmation of casualties. The strike came as worshippers gathered for afternoon
prayers, witnesses said. They said the dead were taken to private homes in the area where
temporary hospitals had been set up.15
13
Woodward, State of Denial, 299.
Woodward, State of Denial, 299.
15
Quoted from Ben Connable, “The Massacre That Wasn’t” in Ideas as Weapons, 342.
14
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Whether Saadi attempted to verify the “witnesses’” claims or not, we don’t know. The
story was picked up and extrapolated upon by the BBC, which reported that Saadi was
present and personally witnessed the attacks, and Agence France-Presse attributed the
story of the massacre to “a Marine officer.”16 The problem with this story, and its
mutations, is that it didn’t happen. The Marines in question were engaged in an hourslong fire-fight with insurgents holed up in the mosque. They had called in a helicopter to
take out the minaret, and when it missed they called in two 500lbs bombs to breach the
wall for an assault. That much of the story was true. An UAV was watching the mosque
the entire time, and declassified Defense Department pictures show no crowd and no
dead or wounded after the attack. Marines who took the mosque minutes later report
seeing nothing suspicious, not even blood on the ground.17 The proliferation of UAVs in
Iraq has made, according to Jeffery Eby who was RCT-7’s Marine Weapons Officer, the
veracity of DoD or insurgent claims easier to verify: “We have better cameras now….
You’re recording it, capturing it as evidence which can be used in Rule of Law arrests.”
Stories like these, whether true or false, and other media reports, including the
alleged use of white phosphorous and mounting civilian casualties, exerted political
pressure on Bush to call off the offensive in Fallujah. A unilateral cease-fire was instated,
halting the U.S. Marine progress along a ragged line. Mattis was furious about the
decision. By the end of April, U.S. forces had pulled out of Fallujah and left security to
the Fallujah Brigade – a militia which Mattis had no faith in. Over the summer, Fallujah
would become a safe-haven for insurgents, complete with bunkers, command and control
16
17
Connable, 344-5.
For a full analysis of this episode, see Connable.
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nodes, IED and S/VBIED factories, torture chambers, and brain-washing centers.
“Eventually we have to go back,” said Mattis, “and lose hundreds of men, killed and
wounded, to retake the city.”
Summertime, and the (Insurgent) livin’s easy
The unilateral ceasefire stalemated Operation Vigilant Resolve. The Marines holed up in
the houses they had occupied and for days took pot-shots at any insurgent who displayed
positive hostile intent. Mattis told the Marines “to do whatever they had to do. They
couldn’t go on the offensive, [but] make damn sure that no one is a threat around them.”
The 4x scopes were an advantage to the stalemated Marines. In the days that followed the
ceasefire, Mattis met with the leaders of the insurgency in the city, tribal elders in the
region, and Iraqi government officials to negotiate the fate of the city. “The first thing
they asked me every day was ‘We want you to pull your snipers back.’ I said ‘No, I don’t
think so. You just live with it.’ They were scared to death of the Marine rifleman. They
thought they were all snipers.” Mattis was blessed with a retired Iraqi General as his
adviser in the negotiations, “He would sit on the opposite side of the table as me amongst
the enemy, but he and I had a very good understanding.” It was this retired general who
warned Mattis that the Fallujah Brigade – the Iraqi force who was given control of the
city – would simply flip sides to the insurgents, with all of their men, guns, supplies, and
uniforms. Mattis was uneasy when he pulled his troops out of contact and left the city to
the Fallujah Brigade: “There’s only one way I can retire ‘em [the Fallujah Brigade], and
that’s to kill them.”
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The unilateral ceasefire and eventual Marine withdrawal was a propaganda boon
for the insurgents. They painted the operation as a defeat for the Marines, who hadn’t
been able to take the city and were scared of taking casualties. Natonski was certain that
the Marines’ withdrawal was a recruiting tool for the insurgency: “They thought they had
beaten the coalition in Fallujah in April. It became a call for foreign fighters from the
Middle East to come in and join the Jihad.” In a war where perception is more important
than physical results, the insurgents “won” in April 2004 because they were able to
convince various audiences (American domestic, Iraqi domestic, international Islamist,
etc.) that they had succeeded. That success gained them respect, recruits, money, and
sanctuary – elements essential to the survival of an insurgency.
By the time Natonski took control of 1MARDIV in August, “Fallujah had become
a sanctuary.” Fallujah became a center of insurgent activity. IED and VBIED factories
were built, bunkers were constructed as mutually reinforced defensive positions, attacks
were launched from there into Baghdad and Ramadi, hostages were taken to the city and
executed, torture chambers were set up to intimidate the local populace, and AQI set up
headquarters there. Fallujah was pumping IEDs, VBIEDs, suicide bombers, and
coordinated attacks into al-Anbar and Baghdad, a phenomenon which Anthony
Cordesman was able to document.18 Natonski witnessed the same thing: “The enemy was
launching attacks from there into Baghdad and throughout the al-Anbar province. And
then they would come back to Fallujah and they would re-arm, re-fit, and they would rest.
It was literally a sanctuary.”
18
Cordesman, 110-1.
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There were no pretensions of civil authority in Fallujah. From the insurgent’s
standpoint, the best use of Fallujah would have been to provide safety, civil services, and
order – as a method of contending the central government in Baghdad’s legitimacy. Sadr,
before his eventual fall from grace in the face of increasing U.S. pressure, would attempt
this in Sadr City with the Medhi Army. This was not the strategy used by the insurgents
in Fallujah, however. “What they wanted to do was take over so they had an operating
base,” recalls Mattis.
They weren’t really that eager to put out the services like Hezbollah in southern Lebanon,
where they come in and provide electricity, and police, and courts, education. There was
none of that. These guys were out for one thing, and that was to use it as a base for
military operations against us: take over, regain control, and then use this as a location in
a globalized insurgency that adds to the al-Qaeda suite.
The relationship between insurgent groups inside the city (FRE, AQI, criminals) was
stressed, to say the least. The internationals were not interested in protecting the populace
– for them destruction was destruction and it eroded the legitimacy of the central
government.
But “terror always has a half-life,” says Mattis. AQ made some “fundamental
mistakes” in their campaign in al-Anbar which started with their behavior this summer. In
Ramadi, they cut off the heads of three or four 13-year-old boys and left them on the
steps of the government center as a warning. They also killed a neutral sheikh (“he wasn’t
really on our side either, but he wasn’t for AQ,” recalls Mattis) and left his body to rot in
the August heat. One particularly disturbing phenomenon, recalls Mattis, was the 24-hour
Marriage. AQ members would come to a sheikh or citizen and request a 24-hour
Marriage with his daughter – “that’s rape in most people’s mind,” says Mattis, “if the
lady didn’t want to be in a 24-hour marriage.” Denial of such arrangements could be
death for the refusing party. In this climate of terror, the Marines began cultivating a
Tucker 56
relationship with the Abu Nimr, one of the larger tribes in al-Anbar. This relationship
would eventually snowball into the Sunni Awakening. But in 2004, the tribes were still
engaged in an uneasy 24-hour marriage with AQ.
By September 2004, however, the drum-beat of IO from the Marines (“You
bought in with the wrong guys, we’re your last best friends, we’re the Marines, we’re the
only guys you got on your side”) began to wear on the Iraqi central government and
people at the political-strategic level in Iraq like General Casey and Iraqi Interim Prime
Minister Allawi, were discussing the need to go back into Fallujah. While, strategically, it
made sense to take out the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, it would require that the
politicians in both countries had enough political capital to expend on the operation.
Allawi eventually seemed to be convinced of the need to take out Fallujah. Free elections,
scheduled for January 2005, had very little chance of succeeding in al-Anbar (or
providing a sense of legitimacy to the new government) if the stronghold of Fallujah was
left uncontested.
This time, the decision to take down Fallujah was not hurried or emotional. This
time, First Marines had almost two months to plan the operation, plenty of time to shape
the physical and psychological environment in their favor. MNF-I commanders had
secured the support of Interim PM Allawi (so much so that he refused to order the
operation to halt when family members were kidnapped by insurgents). Natonski initiated
a whispering campaign to get the residents of Fallujah to leave the city. Leaflets were
dropped into the city and humvees with loudspeakers were used to broadcast messages.
Natonski knew that he would not be able to achieve operational surprise – he was moving
over 12,000 men into position outside the city. At the same time, the IO leaflet drops
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were telling everyone in the city that if they were seen in possession of a weapon, they
would be treated as a hostile target and engaged. Throughout the summer, AC-130s
engaged any vehicle that appeared weaponized.19 Lt. Col. Carroll, the Assistant OpsO for
the Division, remembers that they weren’t even thinking about operational surprise: “We
had 12,000 U.S. forces and between 12-1700 Iraqi Security Forces – they were coming
from all over the country. The hardest thing we had, first, was just to bed down everyone
– where are we going to put them?!”
The insurgents holed up in the city and waited for the Marines. Eby, who fought
in the city, recalls that “they were snuggling up to create as much casualties as they could
without having a plan of escape, so it tells you its kind of a suicide defense. They knew
they couldn’t escape from it.” Perhaps the insurgents thought that they could win another
IO battle. Perhaps they had bought their own propaganda and believed they could defeat
the Marines. Perhaps this simply was a suicide mission. But neither side, this time, was
going to back down. American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld added to the
pressure by publically announcing that a cease-fire was no longer an option,20 an amount
of political support that Mattis would have preferred in April 2004. This was going to be
a conventional fight. “We were not trying to secure territory, we were not trying to win
the people over,” says Natonski. “It was enemy on enemy in the conventional sense.” The
insurgents felt the same way. While their leaders escaped, the foot soldiers remained in
the city, dug into the walls of houses, with no hope of escape. They were going to take
Marines with them, when they went.
19
20
West, 260.
West, 256.
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Even the name of the operation had IO importance. Commanders in MNF-I gave
the operation the name Phantom Fury. “You know, it’s a manly name,” said Natonski,
“but Prime Minister Allawi didn’t think it was sending the right signal, so he named it
‘The New Dawn,’ or ‘al-Fajr.’”
Preparation is half the battle
“This operation will be critical to the future of Iraq,” opens a letter from Natonski to his
men. Natonski went on to explain that this will be a conventional fight, that the Marines
will rely on “the professionalism of our troops, our superior firepower, and our
technological edge.” The assault must be quick, so the Interim Iraqi Government can
“return Fallujah to the Fallujans” and so that, in “this era of political spin” the fight will
not become a protracted campaign open to attacks by insurgent IO. The letter concludes
by stressing the coalition nature of the fight, that each Regimental Combat Team will be
assigned a number of Iraqi battalions, and that commanders should be mindful of the
rebuilding which will follow the battle. The Marines would be ready.
With two months to plan, the Marines did everything that they could do to prepare
battlespace to their advantage. Dunford, now a Brigadier General and serving as Assistant
Division Commander, remembers being fearful of repeating the mistakes of April. First,
in order to prevent an entrepreneurial insurgency uprising, the Division implemented
Operation Roundup. Coalition detention policies allowed suspected insurgents to be held
for 15 days at local and 30 days at regional detention centers while evidence was
gathered against them. 1MARDIV, in the weeks and days leading up to al-Fajr, began
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scooping up suspected insurgent leaders and detaining them. “We thought that if we
could take them off the streets for two weeks or a month,” Dunford explained, “it would
allow us to set the conditions and allow us to have the initiative… for us to be successful
and mitigate the risks of violence elsewhere.” Second, 1MARDIV scrapped the WalMart
logistical strategy. Instead, the division created the Iron Mountain, literally a mountain of
supplies. Fifteen days of food were stockpiled, including 22,250 Halal meals for the Iraqi
soldiers. Fifteen days of ammunition for all American weapons and Iraqi AK47s. 800,000
gallons of fuel was stored for combat vehicles. Also included in the Iron Mountain were
“high use” spare parts.
Third, 1MARDIV increased in size to about 30,000. RCT-1 would lead the
primary effort into the city. They would take the Jolan district in north-western Fallujah,
a densely populated section of the city suspected as the command and control center for
the insurgency inside the city. RCT-7 would provide a supporting operation in the eastern
half of the city. Since RCT-7 would require its full force in the city, Natonski brought in
the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (31st MEU) to take over RCT-7’s AO in al-Assad and
along the Syrian border. While their footprint would be small, they engaged in aggressive
maneuvers to appear as if a larger force was present. 2nd BCT 1st Cavalry, also known as
the “Blackjack Brigade,” was sourced from Baghdad to seal off the city from the south
and conduct supporting operations in the Fallujah environs. At the same time ten Iraqi
battalions were added to RCT-1 and RCT-7 as assault troops. The 36th Iraqi Commando
Battalion would conduct supporting operations on the peninsula west of the city and
secure the two bridges crossing the Euphrates. With this many troops, a full scale
rehearsal was required to move from Camp Fallujah (to the east of the city) to the final
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attacking positions (to the north of the city). Such a rehearsal might alert the enemy to the
plans, but Natonski thought it was necessary: “When you’ve got thousands of soldiers
and Marines and tanks and track vehicles and humvees moving – it could be the beltway
around Washington D.C. at rushour.” One mistake in coordination could have severely
hindered the operation.
Fourth, the Division conducted a series of feints and shaping maneuvers in order
to throw the insurgents off guard. Natonski conducted fake attacks into the city from the
south, the east, and the north, but mainly from the south and east. Natonski wanted the
insurgents to think he was coming from that direction so that they would concentrate their
defenses there. In order to discover command and control nodes, Natonski sent SIGINT
vehicles in behind his feints in order to pick up, record, and trace insurgent cell phone
conversations. In this way, Natonski used operations to drive intelligence gathering to
drive subsequent operations – a clever inversion of the standard maxim that intelligence
drives operations. Lt. Col. J.J. Carrol, who was the Assistant OpsO for 1MARDIV recalls
that the tactic worked: the majority of the defenses were built up in the southeastern
section of the city. In the days before the assault, Natonski used humvees with speakers
attached to play fake tank noises in the south of the city in order to throw the insurgents
off even further. Fifth, Natonski used “Shawanies” in order to generate HUMINT and
map out the insurgent defenses. General Mohammed Shawany was an Iraqi General on
the outs with Saddam in 2003. When Saddam fell, Shawany offered his troops, elite Iraqi
Army troops, to the U.S. Marine Corps. These individuals would infiltrate into Fallujah
and report back insurgent information. They were a welcome asset to Natonski who was
fully aware of the personal danger they placed themselves in: “They were in jeopardy if
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they were caught. They would have been beheaded. They would have been murdered on
the spot.” Between the feints, PSYOPS and Schawanies, 1MARDIV had a “little
snapshow of how the city was laid out” and a “pretty good feel” for the situation inside
Fallujah, as the Fallujah Threat Overview (October 2004) in Appendix 1 shows.
Sixth, Natonski implemented air and artillery support plans for indirect kinetic
fires into the city. The innovative air plan was developed by the Division Air Officer
Gary “Static” Kling. Kling was responsible for integrating the kinetic fires of fixed wing
aircraft, helicopters, and the intelligence feeds of UAVs. He spent the majority of the
summer developing a plan for Fallujah which integrated Navy craft on carriers in the
Gulf to Marine craft in al-Anbar. Without the ability, as the Air Force would have liked,
to track every aircraft individually, Kling opted for what he calls the “upside-down
wedding cake” keyhole template. At three different altitudes and with three different radii
around the center of Fallujah he stacked helicopters, UAVs, and fixed-wing aircraft.
Kling didn’t think that the Air Forces’ template would work in Fallujah, as there would
be too many aircraft, from too many different commands. Instead he relied on the
individual pilots to stay in assigned quarters of the airspace and strike when needed. At
lower altitudes, helicopters could come right up the to edge of the city and provide direct
support in the form of kinetic fires and medevacs. It was the middle altitude which caused
the problem. The UAVs would be filming as pilots (above them) dropped bombs into the
city. Some people feared that bombs would destroy UAVs. Kling didn’t think so: The
UAVs were too small and the area was too large. Plus, they didn’t have the ability to
track every aircraft, every UAV, and the flight-path of every bomb. To do it would slow
down support of the Marines on the ground. Kling’s plan allowed helicopters to come up
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to the edge of the city and fire, UAVs to continue filming, and fixed-wing aircraft to drop
bombs, both “smart” and “dumb” (guided or unguided), through the UAVs all while
leaving enough space for artillery to fire into the city. It was simple, it was effective, and
it was deadly.
Because the city of Fallujah sat below the water-level of the Euphrates, the
artillery fires had to be specially planned and coordinated. Maj. Jon Dunne was RCT-7’s
Fires Support Coordinator and remembers spending “an exorbitant amount of time
looking through target packages” trying to decide if they should be prosecuted or if they
were “authorized legal targets.” There are also difficulties using indirect fire in urban
areas, explains Dunne. First, indirect fires are “devastating to infrastructure.” Second,
“facts are facts, but sometimes the GPS round doesn’t operate the way the GPS round is
supposed to” and collateral damage ensues. This is particularly dangerous if there are
civilians around or water pumps, which prevent the city from flooding, are destroyed.
The key, and this was true of al-Fajr says Dunne, is proportionality: “Can we take care of
this using an M-16 rifle, or do we really need artillery fire?”
Seventh, the IO campaign worked well for 1MARDIV. The insurgents in Fallujah
made 1MARDIV’s job easier, but the whispering campaign’s success at depleting the
city of civilian residents allowed the Marines more freedom in kinetic operations. At the
same time, the key leader engagement piece of IO secured the political flanks of
1MARDIV, both in the U.S. and in Iraq. Also, the intel that was gathered by SIGINT
teams, HUMINT inside the city, and stories coming out of the city of torture and
terrorism made a very good case to the media that action was necessary. With the media
geared up, explains Eby, “We had nothing to hide. They were filming and we didn’t think
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it could go negative on us.” Prime Minister Allawi forbid al-Jazerra from reporting inside
the country and warned all other Arab stations that they would only be granted access to
Fallujah with coalition troops.21 While it was impossible to predict, another IO windfall
awaited the U.S. military: Yasser Arafat’s death-throws. The Palestinian leader’s
“prolonged and orchestrated drama” took Arab media attention away from the battle.22
The U.S. military had the moral high-ground and firm control in the IO realm. The
insurgents had Fallujah.
Into the Breach
1MARDIV’s original plan was to take the city of Fallujah from the north. The slides
named Phase III-A in Appendix 1 graphically represents the battle formation and plan. DDay was 7 November, when the 36th Iraqi Commandos would assault up the peninsula,
take the hospital, secure the two bridges across the Euphrates, and seal off the city from
the west. This was done for three reasons. First, it demonstrated confidence in the new
Iraqi Army. Second, it would have tremendous IO impact – as this operation would be
kicked off by Iraqis. “The first thing you saw,” explained Natonski, “was Iraqi soldiers
knocking down the door to the hospital.” Natonski’s letter to 1MARDIV leaders was
explicit: “Be proactive in highlighting the actions of the Iraqi forces and reach out to
incorporate them into your operations.” This would start at the highest level. Third, the
hospital had been used as a base of operations for the insurgents in April and controlled
21
22
West, 256.
Woodward, State of Denial, 360.
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the peninsula to the west of the city. Controlling it would deny a safe-haven for the
insurgents and seal off the city from the west.
On D-Day plus one, at 1900 hours, RCT-1 would assault into the Jolan district in
the northwestern section of the city and then clear the district. RCT-7 would assault into
the northeastern section of the city, proceed south of Highway 10, codenamed MSR
Michigan, before swinging southwest and clearing the southern half of the city. 2nd BCT
would seal off the city in the south and conduct supporting operations around the city.
The Marines had reinforced a raised railroad bed with a large wall of soil along the
northern section of the city, sealing the insurgents in. This had to be breached, which was
a particularly difficult operation and eventually accomplished with a mixture of D-9s
(armored bulldozers) and indirect fires from airplanes and artillery. The attack started at
night to maximize the technological advantage of the Marines, who had night-vision
equipment. “We did, I think, achieve tactical surprise,” remarked Natonski. The
rehearsal, two days before, had been treated like another feint. The insurgents were not
able, in the ensuing two days, to move the majority of their defensive works from the
southeastern section of the city to the northern sector.
The Marines’ path had been shaped with indirect fires. Sometimes, these fires
were easy to prosecute, such as a weapons cache in the southern half of the city. Natonski
remembers watching the attack on suspected cache:
The bomb hit the target, the target started to blow - secondary explosions from the
ammunition and weapons in the cache. Then right after that we saw sympathetic
explosions on the street adjacent to that cache. For about two blocks, we saw IEDs going
off at intervals across that entire street. This is all on Predator footage. And then the next
thing we saw on the next street over the same thing. IEDs spaced out along two blocks.
The insurgents had booby-trapped the streets with lines of IEDs to catch and cripple
platoon-sized units. Luckily for the Marines, Natonski ordered that no one was allowed
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across the bridges until both sides were secured. A similar booby-trap had been set up
across the bridges. Other positions were more difficult to attack, as there was ambiguity
as to whether they were legitimate targets. “Its very, very difficult decision making,”
recalls Col. Tucker. “You’re sitting there with a lawyer right here and a fires guy right
there, and the lawyers giving you advice. It’s still the commanders decision, but the
lawyers giving you advice.” Tucker recalls sending a Recon team to place 24-hour
observation on a house which he knew contained a large reinforced bunker system, but
who’s occupants had not yet demonstrated hostile intent. The team waited and,
eventually, was shot at: “As soon as that happened: Boom!”
Regimental Gunner Jeffery Eby remembers the battle of Fallujah in three different
phases. The first phase was very kinetic, very intense. Here, Marines used indirect fires to
shape the conditions for movement into the city. The first phase lasted until the Marines
got a few blocks into the city. Once they had their foothold, phase two kicked in: “nonkinetic patrol.” Here, Marines patrolled out in the open, only returning fire when they
were fired upon. In Eby’s words, they were “trying to secure with your muzzles and not
your bullets and waiting to draw fire.” Once Marines drew fire, they would assault the
building. Instead of trying to kill all the insurgents, the front lines were trying to get
depth, trapping the insurgents behind their lines, to be dealt with by following forces.
This phase lasted all the way through the city, until the Marines turned around to start
clearing the city. The original plan was abandoned for a branch plan,23 when RCT-7 met
more resistance than expected. Instead of having RCT-7 sweep to the southwest, RCT-1
took responsibility for the southwest and RCT-7 took responsibility for the southeast.
23
PHASE III-A and PHASE III-A Branch Plan are available in Appendix 1.
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The third phase of the battle, according to Eby, was the most dangerous. This was
the door-to-door fighting that characterizes urban combat: “This fighting was extremely
dangerous, because our initial tactics were those of high-intensity war. Fragmentation
grenade into the room, step in, shoot everything in the room, then search. That’s how you
live through those types of engagements.” However, this tactic didn’t work very long.
Within the first few blocks of house-clearing, some Marines killed a family (adult men
and women, no children, says Eby) who had been hired by the neighborhood to protect
the houses from looting. “Very traumatic for the individuals who fragged that room and
killed those individuals,” says Eby. “It forced us to stop what we were doing, reissue
some non-lethal hand-grenades – exploding rubber balls.” While these new tactics would
produce less civilian casualties, it increased Marine casualties. Those “exploding rubber
balls” wouldn’t faze an insurgent dug into the wall, or waiting behind a mattress with a
machine gun to kill the first Marines through the door. Then, says Eby, “it would turn
into an eight-hour fight trying to get the Marines’ bodies back out.” This phase was
psychologically stressful for young corporals and officers making the decisions: “Do I
frag the room and save my own men, at the expense of those who are hired, who didn’t
listen to our calls to get out of town? Or, do I endanger my men by using some nonleathal, non-useful method – trying to look through the house instead of clear the house?”
“What people forget,” says Tucker, “is that we fought that fight under peace-time
Rules of Engagement [RoE].” In a truly conventional campaign, says Tucker, “If an
enemy combatant is taking a leak behind a tree over there, I can shoot and kill him.”
Under peace-time RoE, there must be a positive identification of hostile intent. During alFajr, a positive identification of hostile intent included “weapons carried openly” or
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(some) vehicular movement.24 The insurgents knew this since it had been printed on the
IO leaflets. This meant that insurgents cached weapons and would walk down the street
unarmed, jump into a cache house, grab a weapon, fire on Marines, drop the weapon, and
run away. Other insurgent tactics included false surrender and faking death.25 There was
also an important distinction between the way RCT-1 and RCT-7 interpreted the RoE
communicated by Natonski. According to Eby:
If you look back at the division order was issued once but understood separately by two
different regimental commanders. Col. Tucker, who had the eastern-most section of the
city, he understood it as “While on the attack, treat it like a defense.” You can only
counter-fire against those specific points that you receive fire from. Once you declared
troops in contact you could reengage that specific point. “That specific point” was
translated as “that specific door, or that specific window.” On the western side, where 1st
Marines were at, it was translated differently as “that building” or “that city block.” And
the difference between the definition meant different response of fires.
In RCT-1s “real estate,” the use of indirect fires created more damage which, again in
Eby’s words, “you’re going to end up spending tax dollars to rebuild.”
The momentum of the Marines was relentless. The pace even wore on some
Marines. “By the time I was done [for the night], I typically felt like I had run 10 miles. It
was nerve-wracking. It’s what all Marines prepare themselves for – varsity level-game
day,” recalls Lt. Col. Bill Vivian. Vivian was RCT-7’s Senior Watch Officer, Night Shift.
His job was to deal with current operations, coordinating kinetic fires into the city,
medevacs, emergency supplies, and adjusting operations to deal with events as they
occured. The majority of his night was spent in a room the size of a small Starbucks, with
screens all around displaying units, logistics, communications, and internet chat-rooms.
The majority of the communication between units was done via internet chat-rooms over
the Secure Internet Protocol Router, or SIPR-net. Marines on the front lines were given
24
25
A partial list of RoE is contained in Appendix 1
A partial list of insurgent “Violations of the Law of Armed Conflict” is contained in Appendix 1
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Mounted Digital Communications Terminals, or MDACTs, where are just glorified
texting platforms. Texting was faster and clearer than voice communications, and
Vivian’s job was to integrate all of the communications in RCT-7’s AO, synthesize
information, and source material during combat. The USMC reliance on this texting
platform caused some logistical and communications problems between the Marine Units
and the Army Units.26
Al-Fajr continued into December, when pockets of die-hard resistance kept
springing up. However, the operation was a resounding U.S. success. Enemy Rule of War
violations, the discovery of torture-chambers and suicide bomb factors, the insurgent
tactic of taking and executing of hostages, and the insurgent’s proclivity to “play dirty”
all projected a negative view of the insurgency in the international press. “It only went
negative that one time over in that one mosque in the 1st Marines’ area,” recalls Eby. The
incident he referred to concerns a Marine who, entering a mosque, shot to death an
insurgent who was trying to surrender. It was caught on video by the embedded reporter
and broadcast a few days later. The Marine was pulled out of the area and an
investigation was launched, but wasn’t completed until after 1MARDIV returned to the
states. “That Marine acted under his RoE,” says Natonski, who had the final say in the
matter. “The Marine had acted under good faith, in fear of his life, and especially in light
of all the incidents that had occurred with the flags and the playing dead and shooting
Marines. He acted in what he thought was a threat to his life. He was absolved.” The
incident didn’t make as negative an impression as Saadi’s AP report had in April, even
26
See Matthews.
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though it was true. Col. Tucker explains why: “We had the strategic advantage because
we had control of the message. And you can’t underestimate that.”
A time to tear down, and a time to build up
By December, the planned repopulation of the city was underway. The infrastructure in
the city was seriously crippled. The majority of the water-pumps had been destroyed and
there was flooding, electricity had been cut to the city before the attack, entire blocks had
been demolished, IEDs were still built in to some buildings, and the roads were barely
navigable. Even so, the Marines were repopulating the city – even while some fighting
was still going on.27 The MEF had a contingency plan for refugees prior to the operation,
but most Fallujans went to relative’s houses in Ramadi, Baghdad, Tikrit, or elsewhere in
al-Anbar. The resources (tents, blankets, food, drinking water, etc.) were used by the
repopulation teams to feed the citizens as they came back. The central government in
Baghdad had made a promise of reconstruction money, but it was not forthcoming.
“Remember, now, that Fallujah was in a Sunni province and a Sunni city and in Baghdad
they were Shia’,” says Natonski. “But people like Senator Clinton helped free up and
pressure the Iraqi government to let go of those funds so that people could rebuild the
homes that were destroyed.”
The Marines did what they could, offering a $200 allowance to heads of
household. The average Iraqi was making between one and two dollars a day and this
money would have gone a long way, but it was still pittance for those who had lost their
27
See repopulation graphic, Appendix 1.
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entire house. The elections in January went well in Fallujah, with no incidents of
violence. This, however, could be a result of the fact that Fallujah was still severely
depopulated. Lt. Col. Zeman, who served as 3/4’s Executive Officer (XO) while they
were stationed in Fallujah during February 2005, recalls that people were rebuilding and
pieces of the insurgency were coming back, but with much less gusto than before.
Natonski, who went back in 2006, observed that the city was coming back to life: “There
was glass in the windows and buildings that had been rubbled were rebuilt and now the
city of Fallujah was in the hands of the Fallujans, the way we had envisioned back in
2004.”
Anthony Cordesman, in Iraq’s Insurgency, claims that the Second Battle of
Fallujah and its aftermath exposed the inability of the central government in Baghdad to
assume effective political control of the country.28 Rebuilding, despite the optimism
recorded by Ballard in Fighting for Fallujah, was slow and painstaking and may even
have heightened sectarian tensions between al-Anbar (Sunni) and the government
(Shia’).29 Even Ballard admits that it took years for Fallujah to return to its previous
economic output.30 It would take a shift in strategy at the political level, in both the U.S.
and Iraq, and the persistent effort of generals like Mattis and Petraeus to reform and reinstitute COIN doctrine, before the war in Iraq would begin leaning in the American’s
favor.
The Second Battle of Fallujah was made necessary by the failed first attempt. The
first battle of Fallujah was a misunderstanding, at the political level, of the nature,
28
Cordesman, 112.
Cordesman, 113.
30
Ballard, 116. Although, it appears that Ballard believes that the primary industry in Fallujah was crime,
and that the reduction in crime because of Al-Fajr caused the reduction in income.
29
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strategy and tactics of counterinsurgency that allowed an emotional political decision to
turn into a resounding strategic defeat in April which took months to repair physically
and years to repair psychologically. I do not like engaging in counterfactuals, but in this
instance it is difficult not to imagine what if, in April 2004, the United States had not
“done what they want us to do” and instead just kept turning the lights on here and
cleaning the water-supply up there.
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Conclusions
The Complexities of Four Block War
The second battle for Fallujah was an unqualified success for the United States military.
The integration of U.S. Marine and Army forces with Iraqi Security forces was a success
and while the rebuilding process was slow, it proved a learning ground for the U.S.
Military in the integration of non-kinetic operations. According to Lt. Col. Vivian, the
USMC has gone as far as to replace some of its artillery battalions with engineering
battalions in an effort to smooth over the transition from kinetic operations to rebuilding.
In the words of Lt. Gen. Natonski, the war in Iraq over the next few years became an
“increasingly interagency” operation. General Mattis took the lessons of Fallujah I with
him to Quantico’s U.S. Marine Corps University after leaving 1MARDIV. There, he was
instrumental in the production, with General Petraeus, of Counterinsurgency. Within a
few years, Counterinsurgency doctrine, such as the integration of other national power
assets into the war effort and emphasis on IO rather than kinetic operations, was being
enacted.
This paper will conclude with a short discussion of the complexities of the fourblock war. Two categories are defined below to make better sense of this complexity.
“The Media” include print and visual news programs in the United States and Arab world
as well as movies, TV shows, blogs, social networking sites, the internet as a conduit for
information, and radio programs – essentially all the possible “ways of knowing” about
events that did not occur within one’s own experience. “The military” can be understood
as those persons engaged in the physical, psychological, or information warfare. On the
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U.S. side of the conflict, “The Military” also includes representatives from the
Departments of State, Agriculture, Transportation, and Energy as well as the Peace Corps
and USAID – people who are fighting the political, economic, moral, or social side of the
war, rather than the physical. On the insurgent side of the conflict, this node includes the
support networks of the insurgency – such as the farmer who digs a hole by the side of
his farm for an IED or the street vendor who knowingly sells dangerous chemicals to a
known insurgent leader or the apathetic neighbor who doesn’t inform the local Englishspeaking Captain of the Algerian-accented foreigner lurking around the village. While
technically part of the military apparatus of the insurgents, killing or detaining them does
not further U.S. goals.
In four-block wars, or asymmetrical wars, the multifaceted media and the
expanding duty of the military (including non-military war operations and non-war
military operations) complicate the battlespace. As has always been the case, the nature
of the war is the furthering of a political or ideological policy objective. Clausewitz said
that war was simply the continuation of policy by other means and Michel Foucault
replied that politics is simply the continuation of war by other means. There is no
contradiction between the two. The use of military force to compel one’s enemy to
submit to one’s political will and the use of negotiation to co-opt one’s enemy into one’s
political will attain the same end (although the first, usually, requires the killing of more
people). The political/military relationship should perhaps be conceived of as a spectrum,
with pure politics (diplomacy, non-violent resolution of conflicts, etc.) on one end and
pure violence (thermo-nuclear war) on the other. All political interaction fits somewhere
in between the two ends. Depending on where a conflict is in a spectrum, the usefulness
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of kinetic fires or information operations varies. The closer one is to the global
thermonuclear war side of the spectrum, the more kinetic fires will further the policy
objective. The closer one is to free, fair, open elections, the more Information Operations
will further the policy objective.
The graph to the right was
developed by U.S. Army Colonel
William Darley to describe the
relationship between politics, the
military, the varying levels of violence,
and the effectiveness of Kinetic/IO
tactics.1 If either end of the
political/military spectrum mistakes
the nature of the war on which they
have embarked, it can have disastrous consequences. Politicians who only see war as a
series of kinetic actions2 will invariably miss the importance of this graph. Vigilant
Resolve is a textbook example of how this mistake could be made. Bush, in ordering the
assault on Fallujah, was requiring that the military utilize kinetic fires to further a policy
objective. Since the situation in al-Anbar and Fallujah was one which could be located on
the right-hand side of the above spectrum, the application of kinetic fires backfired on the
Americans, resulting in an operational and strategic success for the insurgents. The
insurgents were able to use the leaking of stories, the fabrication of stories, and the
1
Darley, William M., Col. USA, “Clausewitz’s Theory of War and Information Operations” in Ideas as
Weapon.s
2
This is reinforced by the media, who see and represent “the military” as a monolith rather than a complex
kinetic/non-kinetic organism.
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exploitation of the appearance of wonton American aggression in an information
operation which led to the withdrawal of American troops from the city without a
conventional contest. The kinetic operations of the Americans simply reinforced the
insurgent’s constructed narrative.3
In four-block wars, the media plays a large role in the battlefield. The Arab media
is primarily political and patronage based, with various levels of state control exercised.4
Main-stream American media is subject to the “indexing” of opinions to those of
government officials (this includes both military and political leaders) while the
American political establishment is effected by the Media’s treatment of issues. The
American political establishment is dependent upon the Media as its constituents’ “way
of knowing” what is going on. In the Arab Media, the political nodes of the insurgency
can find audiences in establishments such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiaya. These
connections do not, necessarily, demonstrate an adversarial relationship between the
stations and the United States. However, the insurgent’s political nodes are dependent
upon the media to reach their domestic and international audiences while the media relies
on insurgent leaders for stories. At the same time, both political nodes are dependent on
the Media for knowledge of the battlefield. It is well known that some U.S. politicians
complain that CNN works faster than the CIA and NSA.5 At the same time, Zarqawi was
3
Or, perhaps, the narrative which emerged benefited the insurgency’s goals. This paper, without access to
insurgents or their documents, cannot speculate on the validity of either claim over the other. In both cases,
however, it was information war which turned the tide of the battle. That information war was at least
partially and consciously constructed by the insurgency, but it is for future scholars to determine to what
extent that construction was conscious.
4
In the interest of space and simplicity, I have left out a detailed discussion of Arab newspapers. See
Mamoun, Fondy (Un)Civil War of Words: Media and Politics in the Arab World (Westport, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 2009).
5
A key White House adviser once suggested that CNN was a better analyst of intelligence than the
intelligence community itself. Woodward, State of Denial, 259.
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known to gauge the success of his attacks based on the number of news agencies which
covered them.
Combined with the tendency for sensationalism and “event-driven” news, the
media is the organization which often breaks battlefield stories to the President and
political leaders before the military can. This short-circuit could bring to light
disreputable information (such as Abu Ghraib) before the military has the ability to
construct a narrative. But the experiences of April 2004 bring to light another, disturbing,
product: The President learned of the contractor’s deaths visually and viscerally, in a
sensationalized manner and without context. Had the information gone through the
military pipes, it may have been tampered, contextualized, and Mattis’ warning may well
have been heeded: Don’t go in there, that’s what they want us to do. At the same time,
such “tampering” could lead, as Gonzalez notes in American Counterinsurgency, to
cover-ups and the subversion of truth to a military’s strategic goal. In such a case, the
media plays a very important role within a democracy as a “way of knowing” for
concerned citizens. The “lessons leanred” here are that politicians should be careful to
temper media reports with, sometimes, calmer military assessments, and vice versa.
The media and the military have a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship.
First, the Media (both American and Arab) is dependent upon the military for access to
the warzone (and therefore access to the story). This is usually accomplished through
embedding, which some media scholars believe makes the media simply the propaganda
arm of the U.S. Military. The Military is dependent upon the Media as a weapon in the
battle of perceptions. Since the Media is the public’s way of knowing, the Military needs
to get the story it wants told out before the other side does. However, sometimes the
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“other side” wins the Information Operation battle, getting their story told first, or most.
As explained in Chapter 1, the tense relationship between the media and the military
causes expressions of mistrust on both sides.
There is a cynicism which causes friction in this relationship. One of the major
causes of this friction is the way that the Bush Administration treated and used the press.
The mistakes in reporting that lead up to the war in Iraq have caused a crisis in
professional journalism, and for an institution which likes to see itself as the independent
“Fourth Estate” the reaction has caused some bad blood. The military needs to actively
court the good favors of the media, through embedding, access to battlespace, and
increased transparency. The media also has problems in its conceptualization of the
military. As Taylor wrote, the “subtle internal differences between PSYOP, CMA and PA
are frequently lost on the media which tends to see the ‘military’ as one monolithic entity
– and one, when it gets into the business of communication, which is trying to
‘propagandize.’”6 There are two important implications to this analysis. First, the media
needs to do a better job of differentiating between the services and their various
functions, a responsibility which requires more context and analysis than soundbites
allow. Second, all efforts to communicate and all actions are not meant to be a form of
‘propaganda.’ The media is a vital weapon in modern asymmetrical war, and within the
institution there needs to be discussion about what to do about this weaponization. But, as
the situation stands, both sides of this relationship need to cultivate a mutual trust.
“They’re [the Media] part of the battlefield,” says General Mattis.
They’re an imminently winnable constituency… some of them will have their minds
made up before they get to you, but most of them will be swayed by the reality of what
6
Taylor, in Connelly and Welch, 260.
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you’re doing. If you can maintain the good order and discipline of your own troops, if
you can trust them to do the right thing when your back is turned… then they’ll stay
strong. But it takes a very, very persuasive commander who realizes that the media is one
audience, to get to the world audience, your own internal message should be the same.
This complex relationship, that relies on the media as a way of reaching the world
audience but relies on a good commander to keep his troops honest, is very difficult to
pull off.
In asymmetric warfare the media is weaponized by both sides as a way to “gain
the high ground” in the realm of public perception. This raises a few ethical questions. If
the media is being used by one side or the other, and if it is impossible to actually be an
apolitical, neutral observer, should the media take sides? If they should, doesn’t that
simply relegate them to a position “propagandist” rather than reporter? If they don’t pick
sides, or if they believe they can remain apolitical and neutral, how should viewers react
when the media is responsible for deaths on the battlefield? If the media is a Fourth
Estate, who is their check and balance? These questions are beyond the scope of this
paper, but it is in their answers that we shall find the limits of a democracy engaged in
asymmetrical war.
In four-block wars, the Military has to contend with the problem of “strategic
corporals” – enlisted soldiers with only a few years of experience making tactical
decisions that, because of the modern media and speed of communication, have strategic
impacts in the Information Operations domain. What is rationally or morally acceptable
at one level (shooting a suspected insurgent because one fears that he is an aggressor) can
be broadcast to the world in vivid imagery and with hindsight (well, he had no weapons
and was surrendering). Such a situation, according to the Law of War which reserves the
right to utilize deadly force if a Marine, sailor, or soldier feels threatened, is acceptable.
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But when it is broadcast to the world with the full benefit of hindsight the action gains
moral signifiers and strategic import.
Politics, the traditional region of policy setting, becomes the center of gravity for
the war. The Small Wars Manual astutely observes that in small wars, the art of politics
has not been abandoned, and thus all kinetic operations need to support diplomatic goals.
In conventional wars, this is not the case. The turn-around in Fallujah had to wait until
the political node realized the necessity of disrupting the insurgent sanctuary in Fallujah.
Only then was the second operation possible. In a very similar way, Mattis’ original
strategy of making “common cause” and addressing the legitimate grievances of the
populace in order to establish a legitimate Iraqi government kept his kinetic operations
subservient to the political goals of both the Iraqis and the Americans. The
Administration’s logic behind Vigilant Resolve assumed that the only response to the
April 2004 Blackwater incident was physical. This was a mistake both of the nature of
the war in Iraq at the time as well as a misunderstanding of the force of politics and
diplomacy in modern asymmetrical war. It is the failure of politics which creates
conventional wars. In asymmetrical wars, politics must still continue and play an astute
tactical, operational, and strategic role. This means that the actions of politicians have
tactical and operational, as well as strategic, affects on the battlefield.
Modern asymmetrical war requires commanders with an astute knowledge of their
position within the interdependent system. Actions may have political importance which
influences the populace on which the politicians rely for a job. The military must be
conginzant, at all times, of the effect of its actions in the current political debate.
Politicians should not insist on the separation between “military necessity” and “politics,”
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as the Bush Administration frequently alleged. The position occupied by the current
conflict between Global Thermonuclear War and Free, Fair and Open Elections, the
tactical, operational, and strategic repercussions of their reporting will change.
Commanders must pay close attention to the media/political pressure during
asymmetrical operations because such pressure will determine the extent to which the
Military is able to conduct kinetic fires and MOOTW when necessary (or be compelled to
conduct kinetic fires when unnecessary and MOOTW when unproductive). From the
Military’s perspective, it is necessary to engage in the correct action at the correct time.
For the United States, this meant avoiding contest and building alliances and economic
assistance programs. For the insurgency, this meant not engaging in a conventional fight
with the U.S. Marines. The first mistake was made in April and the second in November,
2004.
This paper will end with one last point about leadership in modern war. The complexity
of modern war requires a more sophisticated leader at its head. Clausewitz wrote, in On
War, that “a cannon shot could not be fired in Europe without all the cabinets having
some interest in the occurrence. A new Alexander must therefore try the use of a good
pen as well as a good sword.” In a similar way, the generals of the future must be
diplomats, aid workers, cultural experts, and warriors.
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Appendix 1
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Appendix 1
contains ten slides from a presentation used
by Lt. Col. JJ Carroll when he taught a class on
Operation al-Fajr.
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Appendix 2:
Maj. Gen. James Mattis’ OIF II Commander’s Intent
and February 2004 “Letter to All Hands.”
Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski’s Letter “To the Leaders of the 1st Marine Division”
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Interviews
Dunford, Joseph. Lieutenant General, USMC. July 30, 2009.
Dunne, Jon. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC. May 29, 2009.
Carroll, JJ. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC. June 15, 2009.
Eby, Jeffery. Warrant Officer (CWO-5), USMC. July 27, 2009.
Kling, Gary “Static.” Colonel, USMC. July 29, 2009.
L’Etoile, Joe. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC (Ret.). June 19, 2009.
Natonski, Richard. Lieutenant General, USMC. July 28, 2009.
Mattis, James. General, USMC. July 29,2009
Tucker, Craig. Colonel, USMC (Ret.). June 17, 2009.
Vivian, William. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC. June 15, 2009.
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Vuckovich, Nick. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC (Ret.). July 23, 2009.
Zeman, Phil. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC. July 30, 2009.
Personal and Official Papers
Carroll, JJ. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC.
Kling, Gary “Static.” Colonel, USMC.
Natonski, Richard. Lieutenant General, USMC.
Mattis, James. General, USMC.
Tucker, Craig. Colonel, USMC.
Vuckovich, Nick. Lieutenant Colonel, USMC (Ret.).