All Alone in the Night

A court-martial gave Sergeant Paul Cortez a 100 year sentence for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family. [Although he'll be eligible for parole in ten years, apparently. I must agree with Joe Miller at Catallarchy: ten years for four murders and a rape seems ridiculously light.) According to SGT Cortez, he and three of his squadmates conspired in the rape and murder, and SGT Cortez will have to testify against his squadmates when their cases reach trial. Cortez expressed remorse for his actions and his defense attorney argued that combat stress played a role in his actions. The prosecution, correctly in my view, argued that stress did not excuse rape and murder, and the jury agreed.

While I do not think American troops are raping Iraqis as frequently as Riverbend seems to think, once is too many. When any large group of people is assembled, the odds are that some fraction of them will be prone to criminal behavior. When those people are placed in a situation where many of the normal rules of human behavior are not enforced, such as a war, some of them will act as if none of the rules of human behavior apply. It is largely for this reason that militaries work so hard to instill discipline in soldiers. No matter how much training is done on ethical behavior, however, it is almost certain that the effects of combat will leave some soldiers with the belief those rules do not apply to them, and the result is atrocities.

One hopes that the American military will adjust its training program to try and reduce the chances of such incidents in the future, but I do not believe that any amount of screening and training can prevent all such occurances. War is such a massive deviation from the norms of human society that it may not be possible to predict how otherwise normal people will react. That does not mean the military should not do everything it can to screen out anyone who might do such things, only that we cannot count on screening and training to prevent such events.

Therefore, we should do everything in our power to avoid creating such solutions in the first place. War always have brought atrocities with it, and it always will. Deciding to go to war should include the knowledge that not only will innocent people die through good faith attempts to hit the enemy, but innocents will be raped and murdered by our own soldiers. That is part of the price of war. We would do well to read what they can about people like SGT Cortez and Sabrine Al-Janabi now, and remember those names the next time they we deciding whether or not we should go to war.

Kay Steiger at TAPPED points to a second rape case in Iraq, this one somewhat more solid as the soldiers in question have apparently confessed. Steiger argues that the U.S. presence in Iraq will not protect the women of Iraq from still more rapes.

She may be right. As I have noted, American soldiers' hands are not clear on this matter either, and even assuming that American soldiers on average are more likely to prevent than cause rapes, there simply aren't enough U.S. troops in country to ensure rapes don't occur, as the United States has a far more well-policed society, yet rapes continue to occur there as well.

A more difficult question, however, is what might help to protect Iraqi women from the threat of rape. At the risk of appearing culturally insensitive, Arab culture does not have an impressive record regarding women's rights. Rape victims often suffer worse punishment than their attackers. U.S. troops continued service in Iraq may not make Iraqi women any safer, but it seems implausible that the U.S. leaving is likely to make them any safer either.

As is the case with the Iraqi people as a whole, it seems likely that Iraqi women are unlikely to do well regardless of what America chooses to do in Iraq.

Have you heard the latest from Baghdad? Probably not, since it hasn't been bad enough of late. Here we are, a couple weeks into the "surge," which at this point is a primarily Iraqi operation (we only have an additional brigade on the ground so far), and the current reports indicate that we are having an effect.

First, the number of attacks is down by nearly 50%. This is significant, although the nay sayers will complain that there are still attacks happening. Yes, we have not yet eliminated the insurgency, but we weren't really expecting to, especially not in just a couple weeks. However, it is clearly becoming much more difficult for insurgents to operate in the city - many of the attacks that have been reported so far have occurred at Iraqi Army or Police checkpoints, when vehicles or individuals have been stopped for inspections. Deprived of the soft, spectacular targets they hoped for (markets, schools, etc.), the insurgents have chosen to kill themselves in the hopes of at least taking a couple of Iraqi soldiers with them - not exactly a winning strategy for the insurgents, as they depend on the spectacular attacks for their media efforts.

Second, as Omar at Iraq the Model reports, the populace of Baghdad is responding to the operation. Displaced families are returning to their homes, mosques are reopening or being returned to their original owners, some Sunni and Shia congregations are holding joint services - generally, the people seem hopeful about the success of the operation, and the fact that Iraqi and American troops are demonstrating that they intend to stay in the city, rather than withdrawing to secure bases outside it, has generated a huge increase in the number of anonymous tips about insurgent hideouts.

Oh, and the round up of the Mahdi Army continues, with nearly 500 arrested so far. Seems their will to fight has lessened significantly since their leader took an extended vacation...

Of course, its still too early to call this one. The major problem with counter-insurgency warfare is that it takes a long time. To quote the Army's new manual on the subject, the average time it takes to win this type of fight is 12 to 13 years. But it only takes 9 to lose it - people just give up and let the enemy win in the end.

So the hard part, really, is sustaining our will to fight. The current operation in Baghdad is a good start, and I'm sure Gen. Petreaus will build on it if it should continue to be fruitful.

You never want to be the only person still standing when the music stops, and it appears that Major General George W. Weightman found himself in that position yesterday. As those who have been following the news are doubtless aware, MG Weightman was the commander of the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, which has recently been in the news due to some abysmal conditions there for soldiers convalescing after being wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But MG Weightman appears to have been only the latest in a long line of commanders who failed to take care of the troops in their care, and Lieutenant General Kevin C. Kiley already has served as commander of WRMC and did nothing of note to deal with these problems in the past. He may fix them now that they're news, but firing Weightman while keeping Kiley on sends an interesting message to generals: it's ok to screw your troops, as long as nobody finds out about it.

Relief has been a measure long lacking in this war. In the United States' successful wars, commanders have been relieved regularly. Abraham Lincoln went through six commanders of the Army of the Potomac until he settled on Grant (although Meade actually retained command of the Army through the end of the war). Commanders at all levels were fired if they couldn't get the job done during World War II. Under those circumstances, the situation in Iraq would surely have led to generals being relieved, yet instead the first general to lose his job is one who commands a stateside hospital.

This is what tends to give the lie to claims that the Iraq war holds some unique importance for us. If it really mattered, we would be willing to go to far greater lengths to fight it. Instead we have shuffled along with half-measures and, while I do hope that the surge does work, if we do succeed in Iraq it will be despite, not because of our leadership.

(And I realize this is a short entry, but I'm on vacation, so don't expect much for the next few days at least.)

Dan Froomkin rightly points out that the President is not entirely correct in his claims that the enemy will follow the U.S. home if it withdraws from Iraq. Certainly very few, if any, of the enemies the U.S. currently faces in Iraq will turn their attention to attacking the United States once the U.S. leaves. It's possible a few members of Al Qaeda in Iraq may try to do so, but the vast majority of those fighting the United States in Iraq will be quite happy to turn their attention to more immediate issues, whether that is killing Kurds/Shia/Sunnis to improve their sect's chances of controlling Iraq, trying to drive out the foreigners who have been fighting the U.S. in Iraq, or simply returning to a civilian life.

It will not end there, however. America's enemies are watching Iraq carefully to see what happens next. If the United States is seen as fleeing Iraq because it is unwilling to sustain the level of casualties it has seen over the past four years, America's enemies will be encouraged to challenge the U.S. in other areas, thinking that America is weak. Nations like Iran may be more inclined to press the U.S. even when it doing so may lead to war on the assumption that the U.S. either will not go to war because it's gun-shy after Iraq or that the U.S. will not follow through with war and so the risk is acceptable. Nations rarely go to war against countries that appear strong; most wars are the result of nations believing that their enemy is weak and will fall easily. If America's enemies draw that perception from Iraq, the U.S. may see itself challenged more often on the world stage in the future.

This is not an argument for continuing the war indefinitely. Regardless of how the U.S. leaves Iraq, it has already gained a number of new enemies among Arabs and other Muslims who believe the U.S. made war on Iraq to go after Islam or to keep the Arabs down, causes which have inspired we-don't-know how many jihadis to take up the sword. Whether or not the war in Iraq has killed terrorists faster than it has created them is an open question, but even if the math is in the U.S.'s favor, the terrorists it is creating outside Iraq will remain a problem long after the U.S. has left Iraq. It may be that an attack on the U.S. ten years from now will turn out to have included terrorists who decided to attack America on the basis of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, a sad turn of events that will, if we aren't careful, lead to yet another war that inspired new grievances.

Most of those who will follow the U.S. back to the western hemisphere have already been inspired to do so. But how the U.S. leaves Iraq will have some impact on the number of people willing to go great distances to kill people. Whether it is the Bush administration or whomever takes over for him, the President who orders the U.S. to leave Iraq needs to think long and hard about how that is accomplished to minimize the damage it will cause in terms of inspiring still-more hatred towards the U.S.

This seems like an opportune moment to introduce myself, since it gives me an easy starting point for my first post. It's not something I really like to think about, but it is much on my mind right now.

I am an officer in the U.S. Army. I am preparing to go to Iraq for a year or longer as part of a Military Transition Team or MiTT. Our purpose will be to support a battalion of the Iraqi Army, helping them to become more effective soldiers so that they can secure their own country. I will be leaving sometime in late June or early July after I complete training at Fort Riley, Kansas. I have been in the Army in some capacity for almost 19 years, although I still have almost six years until my retirement. I have served as a tank platoon leader, tank company executive officer, company commander and in more staff positions than I would care to count ending most recently with a tour as a battalion executive officer. Now I will serve as a team leader for an eleven-man team.

I'm sure everyone can imagine the reaction to the news about extending combat tours to 15 months. That's a tough blow, as it means that we'll all be away from our families for about 18 months when you add in our training time here at Fort Riley. We'll see divorce numbers going up, although I don't know what this will mean for retention. The assumption would be that people will be more likely to get out, but people don't always react the way we would expect. Since I'll be down to about four years until retirement, I certainly won't get out over this, although I do hope it won't cost me my marriage. But it's going to be a real hardship on soldiers and their families.

Conversely, this may help the war effort, as one of the keys to counterinsurgency is knowledge of the enemy, and the twelve month rotation policy meant that people were generally only getting truly comfortable with their area of operations about the time it came for them to leave. I don't think it's a coincidence that we haven't really won a real war since we started sending soldiers into combat for a tour rather than for the duration. People have a very different outlook when they know they don't go home until they win, although that's a challenging thing to ask of soldiers in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan. But it's something to think about.

In any case, I'll be talking about my experiences here, both in training and once I get into theater. I can't promise to tell the whole truth here; certain details will be omitted for security reasons. But I do promise that what I do say will be the truth as I see it. I hope people will take advantage of the opportunity to hear about what we're doing in Iraq, as I don't think this is the kind of story the media is good at reporting, primarily because it is a slow process and therefore doesn't fit the normal story templates. Feel free to ask questions and I will answer what I can.

Monday we start our real training for Iraq. The last two weeks we have been doing preparatory training, so I'm going to take a little time to talk about that.

When we arrived at Fort Riley, we were put up in barracks on Custer Hill, which is the part of Fort Riley where most units work, including the one responsible for preparing us for training. They are accustomed to having large groups come in to be trained, which means that their schedule was too expansive for our smaller class; there was a lot of open space on the schedule, which meant a lot of time where we didn't really have anything to do. There's not much the unit can do about that directly, but it would have helped had we known that going in so we could have done a little more work preparing opportunity training for our teams during dead space in the training.

One of the things that make this training much more challenging and I think useful is that we have a lot more responsibility for our training. Most Army schools involve a lot of being in receive mode: students all have roughly similar experiences, the program of instruction is very precise and the classes are designed to ensure that everyone comes out knowing what they need to know. But for the MiTT mission we are bringing together 10-15 soldiers from across the Army with varying degrees of experience. So the instruction can't be designed as one-size-fits all, because the types of soldiers being trained are too diverse to allow for a simple training solution. Instead the Army determines what people need to know as minimums, and it is the responsibility of the team commander to figure out where they need to focus in order to get to that point, plus to identify other areas where the team needs to train in order to be as successful as possible with the mission. It's a challenge, but that makes being a team commander a lot more fun because you are ultimately responsible for deciding how to train your team.

Having said that, it would have been helpful to know that going in so we could have set up some training for quiet moments so we could have taken advantage of the slack time in the training. It can be rightly argued that I should have figured that out on my own, but it would have been nice to have some one point that fact out to me anyhow, since even the best of us drop the ball from time to time.

Still, I was impressed with the efficiency of the process. We drew a lot of equipment for the trip: uniforms, boots, body armor, helmets, elbow and knee pads, eye protection, ear protection, gloves, weapons...three-plus duffel bags full of gear, to be precise. That could have been a very painful process, but the draw was laid out very intelligently and we were able to execute each draw about as quickly as anyone could expect. Having been through more than one equipment draw that was far more painful than necessary, this experience has been a pleasant surprise.

The one disappointment I have had has been the mandatory training. There are a number of classes that every soldier must take before going into theater, from Equal Opportunity/Prevention of Sexual Harassment (this may sound dumb, but this is particularly important going into a combat zone because when other restrictions are lifted, some people forget that others need to stay in place) to country briefings and lots of information on how to address the IED threats. The briefings were all conducted with a large number of soldiers in a theater environment using what we call 'Death by Power Point': one briefer standing at the front of the room reading slide after slide after slide. Most of the instructors were pretty good, but the amount of real learning that takes place in that environment is pretty low. The training would have been a lot better if we had simply been given the slides and a place where we could go through them as teams. This would have allowed us to conduct group discussions drawing on our experience and knowledge and would have resulted in a lot higher level of learning for all concerned. But it would also have required a lot more resources: rooms, computers to show the slides, etc., so it's not overly surprising they did the training the way they did.

Friday we moved from Custer Hill to Camp Funston. Camp Funston dates back to World War I. It's where American troops trained prior to heading to Europe to help the French and British win the First World War. Now it's also known as FOB (Forward Operating Base) Army Strong, and it's where all MiTT teams live and train prior to deploying to theater. It allows us to get some of the experience of living on a FOB in Iraq, and also provides a lot of space for training to be conducted. We'll be here for two months, and by the time we leave the team will be a lot better integrated and ready to deploy to Iraq. It promises to be an exciting ride, as we start out Monday with language training and cultural immersion training.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller

I note that quote as I realize that our first week of training is over and we're already about one-eighth of the way to jumping on a plane to Kuwait. And while a part of me looks forward to getting this training behind us so that we can get on to our mission, there is so much for us to learn in such a short time it is also mildly disturbing to know that the training is flying by so quickly.

We closed out the week preparing for qualification ranges on Monday and Tuesday. Friday night we hit the simulators and practiced firing our weapons for the first time wearing all of our body armor. It was an unpleasant experience. I'm quite happy to have the body armor, since I know it markedly increases my odds of surviving my trip to Iraq, but it is bulky and heavy and inflexible and wearing it for a full day is going to sorely test me. Saturday we conducted Preliminary Marksmanship Training, or PMI, which involves practicing firing our weapons, rehearsing the fundamentals of marksmanship, and preparing our various sights for live fire. Having grown up in an Army where iron sights were the only option, the new sights we have on our weapons make me feel like I'm suddenly fighting in the future. I won't get into the details, but suffice it to say we've come a long ways from iron sights.

Earlier in the week we spent three days on Iraqi language and culture. Arabic is a tough language and we only scratched the surface in our initial training, but at least we had an opportunity to start learning some basic phrases. The cultural training was more in-depth and should help to ensure that we avoid some of the more common mistakes made by newcomers in a foreign society. Although it should be noted that due to the Army's rotation policy and our ongoing presence in Iraq, the Iraqis are a lot more culturally aware than we are. Part of the training included a cultural immersion dinner where we all dressed up in dishdashas and ate some nominally Iraqi food (they substituted beef for lamb because lamb is too expensive) and conversed with some of the Iraqi-speakers the Army has working here.

I should mention those as well. The Army has contracted for a lot of Iraqi-speakers, most of them former Iraqis who since moved to the U.S., to actually live and work on the FOB with the trainees. They play Iraqi commanders, police, local nationals, and so on, and provide us with excellent opportunities to learn more about Iraqi culture and language. The best training we had all week came on Saturday afternoon with a meeting with two of them playing an Iraqi battalion commander and his second-in-command. A third played my interpreter and I had to role-play my initial meeting with my Iraqi counterpart. It was incredibly challenging; working with an interpreter requires a lot of concentration, and the flow and rhythm of the conversation is very different from what you're accustomed to in conversation with someone you share a language with. Add to that the cultural differences (I introduced my XO as an intelligence officer, forgetting that in Iraq 'intelligence' is associated with Saddam's internal security services) and it was a draining but very illuminating experience. We'll get seven more of those meetings, and I'm quite confident they will be a huge benefit in preparing for our mission, not to mention motivating me to learn more Arabic so I can rely less on my interpreter.

All in all it was a good week, albeit a very tiring one, and I'm quite pleased they give us Sundays off to try and recharge our batteries.

We started the week with weapons qualification. Every MiTT team member is armed with an M4 carbine and an M9 pistol, and some members also carry the M203 grenade launcher. Throw in our grenades and crew-served weapons and we're remarkably well-armed for our size, but since we travel on our own most of the time, we've got to be ready to take out anyone who decides to come after us alone until another force can come to our aid. It's therefore incumbent on each of us to learn as much as possible about our weapons and how to use them, even though if we do our jobs right, we won't ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Monday was the M4 range. It was a challenge for me because I hadn't shot an M4 in more than eight years. The first step for M4 qualification is zeroing your weapon, which is a miserable process. Zeroing involves moving your sights to the strike of the round. In other words, you fire the weapon, see where your shots are hitting, and move the sights so that when you aim at something, that's where the bullet goes. It isn't difficult in theory, but if you haven't fired in a long time, you may screw up and fail to maintain your sight picture, which means that your adjustments will be countered by aiming the weapon differently between rounds. Add to that the problem of firing in full body armor, something I'd never before done, and zeroing took a lot longer for me than it should have. Still, I got the job done and moved over to the qualification range.

That wasn't much more fun, as I still hadn't mastered the techniques of firing while wearing body armor. I did qualify, but only barely, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to reach out and touch the enemy at long ranges. Fortunately, a lot of my team members shot much better than I did, so at least I know that they're capable of getting the job done if we see a triggerman in the distance.

That evening we fired the night tables. These were actually easier than the day tables, first of all because our night sight was already zeroed so you could go right into the table. It also helped that you can fire the night tables from a seated position, which was far more comfortable and stable for me. I failed to qualify the first time because I fired from the kneeling position and because it took me some time to get used to the technique (it's markedly different from day fire). My second time I shot 36 of 40 targets, though, so I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to reach out and touch someone in the dark, particularly as we'll have better night vision equipment in country than we have here in training.

We got back from the range around 0100 Tuesday morning after offloading our vehicles and performing some maintenance, so it was less than four hours later we were getting up to head to the pistol range. Firing pistols is a lot easier than firing rifles for several reasons. They're lighter, so the fatigue factor is much less, and you don't try to engage anyone further away than perhaps 25 meters with a pistol, so the targets are much, much closer. (The Army's furthest target on the rifle range is 300 meters, and the Marines shoot out to 500 meters.) I hit 26 of 30 targets on the pistol range, and just about all of my guys did well with their pistols, including one of my Navy guys who shot 30 for 30.

Next up was the M203 range. The M203 fires 40mm grenades and is a huge force multiplier for a small team, as it allows us to engage targets who are difficult or impossible to engage with direct fire. Having the ability to rain high explosive grenades on enemies several hundred meters away is a big help. While my M203 gunners engaged their targets, the rest of us went back to the rifle range to get some more practice with our M4s. That was a very good idea, as we fired 80 more rounds, this time from more difficult positions, but shot better than we had the day before. As with anything, the more you do, the better you get, so we'll do a lot of weapons fire en route to Iraq to ensure we're as proficient as possible before we ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Thankfully, we closed out the M203 range around 1500, so we were able to get back to our barracks at a decent hour and get some good sleep that evening, recharging our batteries for the rest of the week's training.

For those who have been wondering what has happened to Zathras recently (yes, both of you), let me explain.

Zathras' master here in the Great Machine is a very demanding person. No matter how well, or how quickly Zathras performs his duties, it is never enough to satisfy him. Even when Zathras exceeds his requirements, or finishes faster than expected, he only sees that as justification to give Zathras more work, and less time to do it...

Stepping back out of character for a moment, I'll give you an example. Like another blogger on this site, I am in the Army. My current assignment is running part of a training site where we prepare Soldiers who are getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We take our mission here very seriously, because each of us knows that the training we give these young men and women could literally be the difference between life and death.

Unfortunately, our dedication and success to date may come back to haunt us. Because we have been able to handle a truly phenomenal number of Soldiers in the past couple of years, and because the units we have trained have had very few casualties in theater, the Army has decided that we should train even more of the units getting ready to deploy! Of course, the fact that last year's training load stretched us to our limits on manpower and resources is irrelevant - so this year we are getting twice as many Soldiers to train. As of yet, no one has explained to me where the additional 30 trainers I need will come from, or lacking that, where I can get another 20 hours scheduled in each day.

As always, we'll do our best, and work until we drop, because we do believe in this mission. But sometimes I fear we may reach the end of human endurance, and I'm not sure what will happen then...

Every day, we do more and more, with less and less. Soon, we will be able to do everything with nothing.

With the ranges behind us, we transitioned to a more sedate classroom pace for most of the rest of the week. Wednesday morning we got to go to the Leader's Reaction Course, a kind of obstacle course that requires each team to get through various obstacles while giving them odd limitations. For example, the last obstacle we had to traverse was a ~20 foot high cargo net with a six foot wide platform on top. We had to get the entire team across, plus a 'wounded' soldier (a dummy) on a stretcher. To do this we had a stretcher, a back board, and three ropes. That was a rather straightforward challenge: we tied the ropes to the stretcher and pulled the casualty up one side and lowered him down the other. Some of the others were more esoteric, requiring us not to touch the ground and so on. The purpose of the course is to help the team learn to work together while challenging them to be creative, and it worked pretty well. It was a good time.

Most of the rest of the week was classes on communications and various other technical systems. They're good classes, but the instructor-to-student ratio is so high that it's hard to get as much out of the classes as you should. Given the Army's current financial woes, it's unlikely things will get any better.

Saturday we had a great time, as we went out to a range to practice reflexive fire. As the name implies, reflexive fire involves learning how to fire your weapon rapidly. You start at 25 meters from the target and bring up your weapon as quickly as you safely can and put two rounds in the target before returning the weapon to the low ready. You do this while facing the target and while turned left and right from the target. Then you move in to 20 meters and fire from the kneeling position, still bringing the weapon up to fire two rounds and returning it to the low ready. Then the real fun begins: you walk towards the targets, stopping when a target is presented. We burned about 200 rounds per man and had a great time, as it's a lot more challenging than simply engaging targets on a qualification range. Better yet, we then took the rest of the weekend off, so I was able to spend a little time with Delenn.

This week is all classes. Yesterday we trained on calling for fire, including artillery, rotary wing, and fixed wing. I've done artillery before, but calling in air support is a whole new ballgame and the training was interesting and challenging. Explaining target location to a guy moving at at least 100 mph is a lot different from telling a fixed artillery piece to fire at a target, to put it mildly. Today we had two hours of Iraqi before moving on to personnel recovery, which helps to train you on what to do if you are cut off or captured. That's valuable training, but the execution was horrid. Hopefully the rest of this week's classes will be much better done.