AUSA Lemnitzer Lecture
The U.S. Army and the Arab Military—Lessons from Iraq
Speaker: Dr. Kenneth M. Pollack, the Brookings Institution
Rich Dunn’s Circulating Notes:
Colleagues,
Most military analysts attempting to come to grips with what really happened in Iraq face a fundamental question: are we really that good or are the Iraqis that bad? Yesterday evening I attended Ken Pollack’s lecture and found that it shed a lot of light on the Iraqi side of the equation. Now at Brookings, Ken was the principal author of the CIA’s postmortem on Iraq after the first Gulf War and has served twice in Middle East related positions on the NSC. He’s also written two books, one on Arab military effectiveness and the other on the case for invading Iraq.
The following points are derived from my notes. Please note that Ken prefaced his remarks by saying that his conclusions are based on very incomplete, initial reports and may change substantially in the future.
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The Iraqis proved to be as pathetic as they always have been and our soldiers were as amazing as always. Iraqis were horribly overmatched. They conformed to patterns of Arab military effectiveness of the past 60 years.
Arab militaries have four key problems: poor information management, weapons handling, command and control, and leadership.
Their problem is not a Soviet style system. Iraq is not a Soviet style military. Their doctrine is mostly British and their own. In the few cases where they have borrowed Soviet doctrine they have benefited.
The main Iraqi problem was politics and politicization in the military. Saddam was terrified of his own forces and did everything to keep them under control, especially through personnel policies. No one would tell Saddam that this war was a bad idea. He convinced himself he could either prevent the war or win it.
The Iraqis failed to fortify the approaches to Baghdad because they thought their Republican Guard divisions deployed along the Karbala-Kut line could hold. They didn’t expect our forces to punch through. Thus, there were no defenses when we got to Baghdad—not even a foxhole.
They also had a cultural problem. Arab militaries have great problems with initiative and improvisation at the lower levels of leadership. This is endemic in their culture. Initiative is not encouraged at lower levels of their hierarchical organizations. This is one reason the Israeli’s always win. When the Republican Guards tried to fall back to Baghdad, it was a mess because the lower level leadership lost control. The Guards fell apart so there was almost nothing left at Baghdad. Once 3ID got to the Baghdad airport, the Iraqi senior leaders were desperate and committed their remaining intact forces in penny packets.
Iraq also suffered from poor combined arms operations. Their mech infantry went into battle mounted and were ordered not to dismount until they reached a certain point on the battlefield. Until they got there, they would not dismount even under effective fire that was destroying their vehicles.
Poor weapons handling was another problem. The Fedayeen were incompetent. Even their heavily armed ambushes had little effect because they couldn’t make full use of their weapons. Most Iraqis understand machinery but the problem goes beyond that. They don’t train with their equipment and don’t do preventive maintenance.
Iraqi collapse in this war means that the Arabs aren’t improving—these problem areas continue to be decisive as they have been for 60 years. This also point out the impracticality of employing coalitions of friendly Arab armies.
There are several potential bad news areas for the U.S. and this latest war with Iraq should raise several red flags.
We could get complacent. All U.S. units expected this to be easy, like the first Gulf War. In fact some Republican Guard units had fought well in the first war—some soldiers refused to stop fighting even when mortally wounded. Under the right circumstances, Arab soldiers will fight extraordinarily hard. We need to draw a distinction between their ability to fight (which is poor) and their willingness to fight.
Asymmetric approaches to warfare are another red flag. Iraqi irregulars were one of the biggest problems. The problems experienced by their regular forces (as described above) don’t hold true for irregular forces. Politicization and lack of initiative do not show up among irregular forces, probably because they’re not governed by Arab cultural hierarchy rules. Thus they move faster with more initiative. Hizbollah really has it right and would be a big problem in Syria.
There was also a dog that didn’t bark. There are some trends on the horizon in conventional warfare that may reverse some of the Arab military effectiveness problems. For example, brilliant weapons will solve some of their weapons handling problems and increasingly automatic and effective C3 systems will allow much more effective centralized control, eliminating some of their lower-level lack of initiative problems.
The Arabs have produced some first-rate generals. If the RMA runs toward networked, brilliant C3 systems, centralized staffs could effectively direct lower-level leaders and do a lot of damage. The U.S. view of the RMA is that we see only ourselves benefiting from technological development and better leadership. Arabs with oil money could buy credible forces.
Question and Answer Session:
Q: What is the prognosis for Arab societal reform?
A: Maybe it will work long term. The Arab world has stagnated in all areas for 20-30 years. This leads to frustration, which is directed against the U.S. and Israel. Arabs are angry at us for not helping them as much as we’ve helped others, like the Japanese and Koreans. They believe we’ve left them to suffer under autocratic, repressive regimes. This creates terrorism threats as generations of young men who blame us provide fertile terrorist recruiting grounds. We can’t impose democracy. Changes only work when they’re home grown. The Arabs view “democracy” as Western cultural immorality, not free elections and markets.
Q: Where do we go from here in Iraq?
A: We got off on the wrong foot. We took down Saddam without having a force in place to prevent a power vacuum from developing and not having a replacement government on hand. “Political pygmies” all moved to fill the gap—this was entirely predictable. We needed to immediately replace Saddam’s government. It’s very important to show the Iraqis that we’re in charge and won’t allow the use of force for political motives. We need a plan to show how we’ll turn Iraq over to Iraqis.
Q: Why did a lot of Iraqi officers desert their troops?
A: More troops deserted their officers than otherwise. In some places units fought well. In some cases senior “political hack” officers bugged out.
Q: Did the Iraqis understand our tactics?
A: In some cases. They borrowed our tactics, they translated our manuals, especially for urban warfare—but they never practiced the tactics.
Q: Why didn’t they use WMD?
A: Saddam never really expected we would attack. He thought the UN would prevent the war. Thus, he didn’t prepare until the very end and may not have mixed a lot of chemicals. The Iraqis had bragged about having binary chemical weapons, but they actually had to mix the chemicals when they filled the warheads. The course of the war played out much faster than they expected. Thus we got inside his ability to mix and deploy chemical weapons.
Saddam’s strategy for winning was political. He thought we’d call the war off once we’d taken heavy casualties once or twice. He believed some of the CNN reports about “heavy casualties” and thought we couldn’t take it. He probably thought his use of WMD might cause world opinion to turn against him. Pollack is confident we will find WMD.
Q: Our handling of the media?
A: The military is getting better at it. Embeds made the American public comfortable that we were prosecuting the war properly. He was concerned that we gave away some operationally useful intel and some reporters bolstered Iraqi morale.
Q: Why wasn’t there an urban defense of Baghdad?
A: The Iraqis wanted to defend Baghdad like they did Basra and Nasiriya but on a much larger scale. Republican Guard commanders led their urban defenses in the south, and the Special Republican Guards were all over the plan to defend Baghdad. However, their defenses collapsed when the Karbala-Kut line collapsed. They were not ready to defend Baghdad. This is a primary example of the military fact that most cities that fall fall quickly before the defenders get set. We never allowed them to reorganize—and their problem was exacerbated by their lower-level C2 challenges.
Q: Is Saddam alive?
A: He may still be running around in the Sunni areas of Baghdad. It’s a pretty big city.
Q: Did we go in with too few troops?
A: Before the war, Pollack had said we had just enough to take down the government, although there might not be enough if we engaged in major urban combat. He also said our supply lines would be vulnerable. If we win fast, we would not have enough forces to keep a power vacuum from developing.
Q: Did religious and tribal differences contribute to the Iraqi defeat? Will these be a problem for us as we try to rebuild Iraq?
A: The Shia infantry were not interested in this fight. Ditto the Kurds. All who fought came from the Sunni western tribes. However, these problems are not insurmountable. Most Iraqis are urban, secular, middle class who get along OK together. New reports exaggerate religious differences.
