COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

I recently received this email from an officer who was on the first brigade, 1st Infantry division ("Red Devil") staff at the same time we were there. The Red Devils arrived in Ramadi in August or so of 2003 and redeployed this fall after a year in Iraq. He had written to let me know he had recently discovered the blog, and I wrote him back asking why, from his perspective as someone who had supported both us and the USMC battalion who relieved us in Ramadi, why the Marine Corps was having a harder time?

I was hesitant to post it at first, because it airs some dirty laundry. And military guys HATE airing dirty laundry. But I think the lessons herein are valuable, and will hopefully provide some food for thought.

Actually, I posted it last night, but Blogger ate it. (grrrrrr!)

Here it is, almost verbatim (I altered some shorthand that wouldn't make sense to anyone who wasn't there, and concealed some of the names).

The question about why the Marines are getting beat up more than you did is a
good one. There are a lot of contributing factors. Things changed a lot when you
left. There was a two week gap between the Marines arriving and the Hurricanes
leaving. Quite a few bad guys took that opportunity to move into town. Also,
because of the Abu Ghurayb scandal, everyone you guys ever caught was released.
they came back better trained, better organized and more motivated. The bad guys
also shifted their reason for fighting to Islamic Jihad, so they were more
willing to fight toe to toe with us. You know, take a bullet for Allah.

Fallujah changed everything too. The political decision to pull out was a very poor
choice. It created a safe haven that was used to stage attacks on Ramadi. It
also emboldened the bad guys and made them think they could take the city by
force. Because of that, they shifted most attacks away from the rural areas and
into downtown Ramadi. The Iraqis, being the great rumor-mongers they are, spread a rumor that the Marines were not Americans (different uniform with no flag) and that meant they were easier to kill. this shifted attacks away from our guys (the rumor-mongers called us "blood patch" because of the red one) and onto the Marines.

On the equipment side, the Marines also showed up with no armor. You guys and our brigade did the same, but we all built our own pretty quickly. They took a couple of months to put something together.

[Note: Actually, the 1-124 went months with no armor add-ons to speak of. We finally started getting armox kits in earnest in December or so, after six months in country. Long time readers will remember some posting to this effect in November and December of 2003.--Jason]

In my opinion, though, the two biggest reasons were tactics and ability to work
with Iraqi local leaders. Their tactics at battalion and below are a lot
different than ours. We believe in fix and envelop, they believe in the frontal
assault. That is the simplest way to describe the difference between a soldier
and a Marine. They do not practice maneuver warfare as we understand it. We sent
out units in platoon-sized elements becuase that way they could deal with any
threat and have the ability to maneuver (counter-attack) or conduct a hasty
defense, depending on the situation. The Marine concept for counter-insurgency
is the "satellite patrol." These are squad-sized elements dispersed throughout
the battlespace with the intent of disrupting insurgent activities. What
happened in practice was the satellite patrols blocked traffic (yes, they had
squad patrols wandering down the middle of the streets of Ramadi everywhere, all
the time), the unit had very little situational awareness of where the squads were, there was very poor command and control of the
squads, there was no way to rapidly reinforce the squads (they sent them to the
far sides of Sofia and Shijariyah dismounted), and they were a very easy target
for IEDs and direct fire attacks.

In the big fight on 6 April, the satellite
patrols were easy pickings for the attackers. they all got cut off, the
battalion HQ lost command and control, and we ended up with Colonel Connors, the
BDE HQ element, and a couple of infantry companies fighting from one isolated
Marine squad to the next to reconsolidate them all. One squad (7 guys) was
completely destroyed and all of their gear stripped off. Because of the lack of
command and control, nobody knew about it for hours. There were a lot of killed
and wounded on those patrols aside from the big fight.

Also on the tactical side, Marines tend to have very junior guys in charge of units. Platoon sergeants are often E5s. The satellite patrols were general
ly run by a green 20 year old corporal and most of the squad members were
brand-new privates. Most fire teams were run by E3s. This often caused problems... [Passage describing the annihilation of a Marine fire team omitted. Bottom line: Check your people.]

Another (albeit minor) tactical issue was that they liked to move
Marines around with a squad in troop-carrier HMMWVs and didn't like to practice
the counter-IED TTPs your battalion developed. Every time a HMMWV was hit, up to
a squad was wounded or killed. It was rough.

The unit in Ramadi also did not do a good job of working with the Iraqis. They
thought LTC Mirabiles's "contracts for peace" concept was unethical, so they
threw it out. They thought paying cops for information and weapons was
unethical, so they stopped doing that as well. (guess who started paying off the
cops when U.S. forces stopped doing it?) They got annoyed with Chief Ja'adan
coming over to the battalion command post every day, so they told him to stop coming over. The battalion commander got in a fight with Ja'adan over "Sheikh" R. R_____ [One of our company commanders who operated in southern Ramadi. Never heard anyone call him Sheikh before. He is unorthodox and controversial, but he was, in my view, an extraordinarily effective counterguerrilla warrior.

The Marines found R____'s actions unethical. Ja'adan defended R____
as the best American he'd ever met. It turned into a shouting match. (guess who Ja'adan started working with full-time after being cut off by the battalion?) Lastly,
they wanted nothing to do with the sheikhs and generally ignored them. By May,
the cops were working with the Mujahideen, Ja'adan was providing money and info
to the Muj, the shiekhs went to the money and realigned with the Muj, Sheikh Majed fled the country, we were getting attacked in the Alwani
area of Ramadi (west Ramadi) for the first time since summer '03, the stadium
area and Sofia were worse than ever, and public relations in the city went in
the toilet.

Rough.

Not to say the Marines are bad. They aren't. They are good in a fight. Their
individual skills are probably better than those of individual soldiers. Their
Division HQ was a thousand times better than the 82d's and was the best of the 5
I worked with over the last year and a half. The battalion in Ramadi took down a
lot of bad guys, and things like Fallujah really made the mission a lot more
difficult than it was when you were there. They were probably going to lose
people no matter what, but their tactics and PR skills probably contributed to
additional casualties. I would be willing to bet that your battalion, in the
same situation, would have lost a lot fewer guys and kept better control of the
situation.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't think you can overstate the importance of the safe harbor in Fallujah, right down the road. And we got away with some things through sheer dumb luck. For instance, we had squads riding in the back of Humvees, too, just like the Marines did. On the very same roads. And while just about all our vehicles encountered an IED at one point or another, no one happened to have been killed. It may be that the Marines were encountering a more skilled and better equipped enemy, thanks to Fallujah's influence. I'll probably never know.

The "sattelite patrol" concept is interesting. I don't think it's a BAD idea per se. Just not well suited to the kind of insurgency we faced in Ramadi. We generally operated at platoon level. The difference between a platoon out there and a squad is huge. A platoon has a dedicated RTO, and a platoon sergeant to assist the platoon leader with decisions and to carry out supporting actions. A platoon also has a weapons squad with M240 B machine guns. Don't get me wrong, I love the M249 Squad automatic weapon. But the M240 B fires a 7.62mm round and the M249 fires a 5.56. It's a world of difference-especially when it comes to shooting THROUGH light masonry and the ubiquitous trash piles.

Also, we were usually able to attach a couple of Delta company hardshell Humvees at the platoon level. Which gave the platoon leader some even heavier firepower at his disposal - a .50 caliber machine gun or a Mk 19 40mm automatic grenade launcher. All on a mobile platform which could give chase to fleeing ambushers in a pinch, or quickly maneuver to a flank as a sort of micro cavalry. All these assets are available to the infantry platoon leader within moments of the first contact. Whereas it could take 15 minutes to an hour to get these assets to a detached squad leader in a tight spot on the other side of town-by which time the enemy will have slipped away, or the squad has been defeated.

The platoon also has a medic attached, which the squad does not. Also, the platoon is just a phone call away from the company commander, who has a section of 60mm mortars at his disposal - the 60mm is a superb weapon in the urban environment, thanks to its portability, rate of fire, and high angle capability. A squad operating dismounted and alone has to go through another layer of command before receiving fires.

The platoon headquarters also has a better ability to multitask, since it consists of an officer platoon leader AND a platoon sergeant, and a dedicated RTO. It's the RTO's job to fight the radio, so the PL can concentrate on making sound decisions and maneuvering his squads. The squad leader usually has to fight the radio battle himself.

That said, there's something to be said for the 'sattelite patrol' concept. You can run a lot more patrols with it. You can be almost ubiquitous on the street. You can make it very difficult for the enemy to lay a deliberate ambush, because he could see an American patrol coming around the corner at any time while he was trying to get set.

The Marine concept also puts a lot of authority and responsibility at very junior levels. They'll make mistakes in the short run. But in the long run, when these E5s become E7s, they'll be that much stronger for it.

Clearly, though, it didn't work in Ramadi. The insurgency was sophisticated enough by the time the USMC arrived that they were able to mass in sufficient force (platoon strength, and up) to isolate several Marine elements and defeat them in detail.

I suppose it's something the Marines inherited in their DNA from the 'small wars' era in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, when a squad of Marines could dominate a village.

The thing is, it doesn't work in Ramadi.


Splash, out

Jason