The ISG Report: Why Didn't They Talk to the Grunts?
Amidst all the debate about Iraqification and troop drawdown, a couple of interesting details in the Iraq Study Group Report haven't gotten the attention they deserve. Here's a quote from page 7 of the report:
"There are roughly 5,000 civilian contractors in the country."5,000 contractors?
Any Iraq vet will tell you, that number's dead wrong. In fact, the Washington Post reported just last week:
There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield.
Unless I am missing something, that means the ISG was off by a factor of 20. At least.
Contractors on the battlefield are a serious and controversial issue. Despite questions about their accountability and cost-effectiveness, tens of thousands of contractors are in Iraq doing more than just laundry or preparing meals. They are fulfilling security roles that once would have been held by US troops, making significantly more money, and facing minimal oversight. It's no wonder there have been allegations of abuses.
How could the ISG miss such a crucial aspect of the battle environment in Iraq? I have no idea. It certainly didn't help that the ISG didn't talk to anyone who was serving on the ground below the rank of lieutenant colonel. (By the way, they also failed to talk to some key high-ranking people like George Tenent, Paul Bremmer, and Generals Sanchez, Myers, Franks, Eaton and Batiste).
This is a critical oversight by the ISG. Talking to lower ranking troops is important because most of the fighting (and dying) in Iraq is done at the small unit level. The people hit by IEDS, kicking in doors, handing out candy and otherwise testing our policy limitations daily are enlisted soldiers and junior officers. They know better than almost anyone the realities of life in Iraq.
My friend Cpt. Phil Carter just got back from a tour with the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He highlights the the lack of input from the grunts in a piece called "What About the Grunts?":
For all of the time they spent learning about America's war in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group failed to study the war at its most critical level: that of the grunts. Nothing makes this clearer than the report's appendix, which lists scores of men and women interviewed for the report, but none below the rank of lieutenant colonel. [...] It speaks volumes that the panel did not take the time to hear any of these grunt-level voices while in Iraq or back in the United States, or at least did not bother to list their names as authoritative sources for their report.
The ISG report is already being widely criticized by regional experts, by Iraqis, and by generals.
So the report has its flaws, but it is scathingly accurate in its assessment of how bad things have gotten in Iraq. Even a few weeks ago, the reality that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating" wasn't universally accepted in Washington or across the country. If the report does nothing more than open eyes to the grim reality of our position in Iraq, it will have served a worthwhile purpose. It is my hope that the ISG report will jumpstart a national debate that is about three years overdue.
But from the beginning, troops on the ground have been ahead of the policy wonks and talking heads on every issue coming out of Iraq -- from the body armor shortage to the rise of the insurgency to the civil war. If the wise
men of Washington had started listening to lower level troops back in 2003, then we would certainly be in a better position than we are today.
As the Iraq debate continues, there's still time to talk to the troops on the ground. America has heard enough from the Generals. The Armed Services Committee should hold new hearings, and invite a few grunts to testify, so we can all see what they think about the ISG report. As new Iraq plans emerge from top brass and politicians to great media fanfare, maybe they could get a couple of sergeants or captains to add their two cents.
I understood--perhaps erroneously --the WaPo report to be referring to total contractor personnel, albeit sloppily. Otherwise, 100,000 "contractors" each of which could have several employees (KBR alone must have 1000 plus just feeding military personnel) would mean that the number of contractor personnel would exceed military personnel many times over.
Thus, I do not see the two in conflict. 5000 contractors but 100,000 plus total personnel.
December 12, 2006 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was exactly the same in Vietnam. I arrived in 1970 as a 26 year old Captain in command of a company of Army engineers down along the II-III Corps border. Because I had the only significant construction equipment in the province, I had an ARVN interpreter assigned to help deal with local AID projects. I also had a 1Lt Platoon Leader who spoke fluent French.
After a number of meetings, I realized that none of the Vietnamese I interacted with ever spoke of North Vietnam or South Vietnam as seperate countries. Only Americans thought of the NVA as foreign invaders, and that we were helping the South Vietnamese protect themselves from a foreign invader. To them, what was going on was simply a continuation of a struggle for independence from foreign occupiers (Chinese, French, Japanese and American) that had been going on for almost 1,000 years. Once that sunk in, I knew we were going to lose big.
The truly key difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the Vietnamese saw themselves as part of a country that had existed for thousands of years in spite of foreign occupiers. There are few, if any, people in Iraq who see the country in which they live as anything other than an 80 year old artificial construct imposed on them by the British.
The key similarity is that the people in both places saw/see us as occupiers. How freaking hard is this to understand??
December 12, 2006 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Paul-
I assume your question is rhetorical.
The last time a "grunt" was allowed to speak openly to power, the reply came from Rumsfeld.
Something about scavenging armor......and the army that you have, not the army you want.
So as to not get the comments you have, but the comments you want, you talk to those with much more to lose- their military career. That ensures that the report comes out with what you want:
Grave and Deteriorating, not FUBAR'd.
Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
December 12, 2006 12:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
The ISG's failure to talk to lower ranking troops is a continuation of a decision making system that doesn't look for information from the bottom up and if it gets that information it fails to make it up the food chain.
There is no evidence that this is going to change.
Even if I make the outrageous assumption that the Administration's soon to be chosen "new way forward" is "correct" it will be outdated and less than optimal each day after that. I see no evidence that in the future on-the-ground reality will be sought out by decision makers nor is there any reason to believe that the decision makers will continually reevaluate the effectivness of the "way forward."
December 12, 2006 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, they shouldn't have talked to the grunts. When you are looking to make a strategic change, you talk to strategic thinkers and policy makers.
We all love the soldiers on the ground, but the soldier on the ground has about as much view as to what is happening throughout the country as an ant knows regarding the rest of the anthill.
What they should have done was spend a lot more time in Iraq, and talked to a lot more of those strategic folks.
December 12, 2006 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reason to talk to the grunt soldiers or the workers in other organizations is to get a feel for what is really going on. A politician or government official needs to keep a constant internaction with the folks as one input.
You make it sound like the idea of the ISG talking to the troops would mean that they were looking to the troops for strategic advice. That would make no sense.
However on the ground insight can provoke further questions for a top level rexamination of plans and execution. Back during the initial drive to Baghdad the troops found out that locals had changed into civilan clothering and started attacking American troops from pickup trucks [story from either Gordon/Trainor book, my memory]. Those stories did not make it up the food chain so the military operating assumptions and tactics were never adjusted for reality.
December 12, 2006 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
The grunts on the ground don't know what's "really going on." That's the entire point. They have a really good idea about what is happening right in front of them, and a good idea about what is happening in their area of operation, but as far as what is happening inside the government, in other areas of the country, and what is going on at command level, where strategic decisions are made, not so much. Do you suppose they would have recieved usefull information about what was happening in Anbar, if they talked to a grunt in, say, Kirkuit?
"You make it sound like the idea of the ISG talking to the troops would mean that they were looking to the troops for strategic advice. That would make no sense."
Precisely. The ISG team was there assesing the strategic direction, and trying to come up with a new strategic direction. None of that has a thing to do with guys in trucks, or adjusting tactics. It would make no sense to talk to them.
Believe it or not, information at the operational level travels pretty well in the military. That takes it about up to O5/O6 level, where the break between the guys kicking in the doors, and the guys deciding doors need kicked in happens, which is right about where the ISG went.
They talked to the right levels of people. I just don't think they talked to enough of them.
December 12, 2006 2:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Paul - if you did not see this article in today's WaPo you might want to check it out. I can see how it could well apply in your world of advocating for the troops.
Teaching Hospitals How to ListenOne Woman Struggled to Convince Administrators That Staff Responsiveness -- or Lack of It -- Affects Patient OutcomeDecember 12, 2006 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, it might have been nice to get the facts about the number of contractors close to right.
Tom
December 12, 2006 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I watched "Baghdad ER" on HBO last night and the one thought I couldn't shake was that these guys are there getting maimed and killed solely because Bush sent them there. They are defending the right of the commander/decider in chief to make war and they are paying the price. The IEDs are set off by Iraqi insurgents but only because Bush stuck a stick in the hornet's nest. The tens of thousands of casualties will continue until the troops come home. VIctory isn't possible by Bush's definition of it.
December 12, 2006 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen
Ivo's said so. I've said so, and it seems Paul's close to William Lind's assessment
"Last week, the Iraq Study Group Report burst upon a breathless world and proved to be an empty piñata. None of its recommendations has the slightest chance of reversing the course of the war in Iraq. Only those who just got into town on the last truckload of turnips expected anything more....If the Iraq Study Group Report is empty of content, the responses to it from the war hawks – more accurately at this point, the war vultures, because what they are feeding on is dead – were as clueless as a Marine at a meeting of Mensa....Senator McCain almost got it right. The Iraq Study Group Report is not a recipe for defeat, but an acknowledgment of defeat. Therein lies its value, and its function."
December 12, 2006 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is all well and good.
But why were the "grunts" cheering for Rumsfeld at the Army Navy Game a few short weeks ago???
Granted, Paul, you and your friends in the military are a breath of fresh air.
But there are enough servicemen and women in the military ready and willing to prolong the mess in Iraq simply out of their loyalty to Bush and the Republicans and some misguided notion of what it means to be a patriot.
If Jesus himself came down to earth and declared the war in Iraq a failure, these same soldiers would nail him to a cross all over again.
December 12, 2006 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
No one knows less about "the big picture" than those whose "strategic" view of it comes from the wrong end of the kaleidoscope they insist on holding up backwards to one or either of their two blind eyes. In Vietnam, no one knew less about "the big picture" than the fools at the top who never had to deal with what "strategy" means in "tactical" translation on the ground. You can't do a wrong thing the right way; and if those on the ground dutifully doing what the food chain tells them to do see the results of their dying achieving nothing, then that means the "strategic" "big picture" fools have FUBARed and SNAFUed themselves and everyone else into a bloody mess where no one can see anything clearly anymore.
In Vietnam, the self-serving, ticket-punching, fuck-up-and-move-up career lifers had their slogan: "Don't knock the war, it's the only one we've got." They didn't actually care how it came out, as long as it went on and on until their retirement with full pay and benefits. We draftees and bullied-into-enlisting types, on the other hand, had several slogans of our own, like: "We are the unwilling led by the unqualified, to do the unnecessary, for the ungrateful," and "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."
Nothing has changed about the Lunatic Leviathan. It still looks like Parkinson's Law meets the Peter Principle: Bungle in the Jungle meets Debacle in the Desert. IraqNam. Lyndon Baines Bush. Tricky Dick Cheney. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" exists, like Topsy, so that it can "just grow," not because it has any other purpose but its own perpetuation. 9/11/2001 proved how much good it does us when we really need it. It sees no "picture" big or small but its own demented dreams.
Anyway, the slate.com article by Captain Carter contains not so much of interest in itself, but does contain a useful link to Robert W. Komer's 1972 RAND Corporation study called "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing." Other than not properly wrapping up the devolving "advisor" uselessness in which I served for eighteen months (June 1970 to January 1972) it tells the Lunatic Leviathan's ongoing and hallucinogenic story fairly well. And if anyone living today thinks that those at the top of America's military/political "leadership" know their individual or collective asses from holes in the ground, then they should ask a pair of boots on the ground in Iraq for assistance in understanding the difference. No doubt our "bullet catchers" (or Ordnance Absorption Technicians) would happily supply the boot kicking their dumb asses into a foxhole located just outside the beseiged Baghdad Green Zone Castle's walls. And if you truly want to know why a needless and pointless war has gone wrong, then don't asks the ones who -- in only four short years -- turned a "cakewalk" from "mission accomplished" into a long, long, long, long glacier race to Stalingrad, Dunkirk, or Dien Bien Phu. These titanic disasters had lots of "big picture" prime ministers, generals, and Fuhrers "managing" them, too.
December 12, 2006 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's an interesting idea Paul, however, your mistake was in thinking that the ISG report was supposed to come up with answers and solutions to the quagmire in Iraq, when in reality it is a purely political document, like like everything else these assclowns do.
December 12, 2006 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
And the Bush, with his war, has sunken so low,
He is puzzling and puzzling, How could it be so?
It came without flowers, or glory for him,
But death and destruction, it looks awful grim.
He'll puzzle three weeks, till his puzzler is sore,
But the troops and Iraqi's will get nothing more.
Maybe Freedom, you see,
doesn't come from a war,
Maybe Freedom, perhaps, takes a little bit more.
December 12, 2006 7:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
In March of ‘68 I arrived in I Corp. Before being sent into the boonies a friend and I slipped away to a village on Highway 1 just outside of our Brigade base camp and had a few beers. The lady serving us had pretty good English. I asked her what she thought of the VC. “VC number fuckin’ Ten”. We talked a bit and she repeated that sentiment several more times. Then I asked her if things were better since our forces had arrived. She hesitated a bit and got a bemused look on her face and said, “Before Americans come there were no VC”. That happened three days into my experience on The Magical Mystery Tour.
I thought of that many times over the next year and in the years since. I believe it was as accurate a statement as any intelligence report put together somewhere in the rear using third hand information which was slanted [likely] for what someone wanted to hear or what made someone look good.
December 12, 2006 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
the soldier on the ground has about as much view as to what is happening throughout the country as an ant knows regarding the rest of the anthill.
Ah, but if you talk to enough 'ants' you can get a better picture of what's going on in the rest of the ant hill than you can by talking to the queen and her suitors.
December 12, 2006 7:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, the pomposity level is going off the scale. Sad. From what I am hearing, it would have been dumb and useless for NASA to talk to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and listen to what they had to say as they were landing and walking on the moon. The movie "The Right Stuff" has quite a bit of discussion of this disconnect between the guys actually flying and testing the planes and the guys from Bell Aviation who sold the government the planes. As well as the Mercury and Gemini flights.
Ughh ...
Talk about cognitive disconnect.
December 12, 2006 9:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is all well and good.
But why were the "grunts" cheering for Rumsfeld at the Army Navy Game a few short weeks ago???
Granted, Paul, you and your friends in the military are a breath of fresh air.
But there are enough servicemen and women in the military ready and willing to prolong the mess in Iraq simply out of their loyalty to Bush and the Republicans and some misguided notion of what it means to be a patriot.
If Jesus himself came down to earth and declared the war in Iraq a failure, these same soldiers would nail him to a cross all over again. --starwheel.
-----
This is truly gross and disrespectful, as well as being internally self-contradictory. You congratulate the author, who served recently in Iraq, and then call the soldiers there now idiotic, robotic, sociopathic murderers. Can't have it both ways, my friend. An apology might be in order. Stereotyping = not good.
December 12, 2006 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Again, Wow. Put away your Risk games and little plastic armies, folks.
I find it extremely disconcerting that we actually have a number of combat veterans posting here, who thereby, have exclusive access, knowledge and experience of things that nobody else here. Yet ... amazingly ... their views don't count ... precisely because they have served in combat.
Wonders never cease.
December 12, 2006 9:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
but as far as what is happening inside the government, in other areas of the country, and what is going on at command level, where strategic decisions are made, not so much. Do you suppose they would have recieved useful information about what was happening in Anbar, if they talked to a grunt in, say, Kirkut?
---
Congratulations. You have described Operation FUBAR and simultaneously pronounced it as a sound, effective strategy for maintain and sustaining Operation FUBAR in a continual condition of FUBAR.
If "strategic" decisions are made about conditions on the ground without input from the people on the ground, by people who have no clue what is going on on the ground, then ...
What is the probability those "strategic decisions" will be useful when actually implemented on the ground?
Major Major, Out.
December 12, 2006 9:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is now facing the U.S. troops is close quarter urban guerrilla fighting. US Marines are extensively trained in this because it is so unbelievably dangerous. My friend Jason Rowland, USMC, was a teacher in close, building to building urban fighting for the Corps. The training was specifically designed for what the Marines are now forced to deal with in Baghdad. Virtually all military operations in Iraq and Baghdad are happening in close, urban guerrilla fighting conditions, where the enemy (say, one sniper with very good aim) has an enormous advantage.
As such, the exact people who need to be heard from now are the Marines who are actually doing the patrols. They are the ones who have useful information to bring to the table because they are the ones who actually see and expose themselves to exactly what is happening. Everything else is a PowerPoint demonstration shipped over on a CD-ROM from the Pentagon.
December 12, 2006 10:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
My fellow Vietnam Veteran and Pentagon Papers hero Daniel Ellsberg says something to the effect that -- for understandable reasons -- we tend to think that our government and military organizations contain no intelligent people in the upper echelons. Not so, says Ellsberg. In general, he says, our leaders do have enough intelligence and education to do a reasonable job -- except for the fact that they've lost their minds. Put anyone in a monstrous, bloated hierarchy for long enough and you get shit-for-brains for output nearly every time. On the other hand, General Tommy Franks did call the Pentagon's number three guy, Douglas Feith, "the stupidest fucking man on the face of the earth." And we don't even want to reflect upon the propaganda catapult occupying the very pinnacle of our prevaricating pyramid. So perhaps Daniel Ellsberg's comments reflect a polite overgenerosity in his assessment of our government's intellectual accumen.
Anyway you slice it, though, if you take the pudding as your proof, so to speak, we've gotten nothing in Iraq but runny brown diarrhea from a military of whom Israeli historian Martin Van Crevald says: "They're totally incompetent. The only thing they've trained Iraqis to do is fight Americans. How stupid can you get?" Many explanations account for IraqNam, of course: some of them more kindly and restrained -- even reverent -- than others. Still, though, after four years of only making things monumentally worse, the common-sense observer has to almost ask, as Casey Stengel used to when managing the New York Mets: "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?" It appears not -- at least above the rank of major.
We need to go back to fighting the Germans and the Japanese. At least they would line up in clearly identifiable uniforms and formations and die fair and square in large, industrial strength numbers. The Vietnamese and the Iraqis just cheat. Nobody can win against such unsportsmanlike people refusing to passively surrender their country to occupation by foreign infidels. Who in America could possibly understand such inscrutable motivation well enough to defeat it?
December 13, 2006 2:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
The mistake is getting involved in a situation where you're perceived as imperialist occupiers. No amount of brain power in the military or elsewhere in the government can overcome that except by getting out of the situation where you're perceived as imperial occupiers.
Tom
December 13, 2006 3:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
First of all, I am not your friend.
Secondly, telling someone to apologize for thoughts you placed inside his/her head is gross and disrespectful.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting soldiers cheering for Rumsfeld are interchangeable with "idiotic, robotic, sociopathic murderers".
But I certainly didn't call our soldiers "idiotic, robotic, sociopathic murderers" so you owe me an apology for suggesting I did.
It is not contradictory to distinguish those soldiers who are critical of the chain of command from those who are not.
What I witnessed at the Army Navy Game was a large contingent of grunts who were still loyal to Rumsfeld despite the chaos in Iraq his decision's exacerbated.
If you can prove the majority of the troops aren't loyal to Bush and the Republicans, then I'll gladly apologize for "stereo-typing".
December 13, 2006 9:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen
Six Brutal Truths About Iraq - Lt. Gen William Odom
December 13, 2006 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen
Network pentagon correspondents are typically the most Bush friendly of the Bush friendly. So as a measure of how much the ISG has changed the landscape, CNN reporting from the Pentagon on Bush's military briefings:
"President Bush is fond of saying 'failure is not an option' but military leaders are telling him it is the likely outcome"
My what a difference a week makes
December 13, 2006 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Superb insight and brutal conclusions by Gen Odom in the article linked by jexster!!!
From Joshua Landis:
Six brutal truths about Iraq -- COMMENTARY By William E. Odom
diane@hudson.org
December 13, 2006 11:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Do you mean that their views don't count HERE, which is what your statement implies; or that their views weren't heard by the ISG?
If you mean the former, how do you support that? At the Coffee House, everyone's views count. Some may disagree with someone else's views, but the very fact that they get responded to means that someone read their comments and thought about them.
Jan Knaus
December 14, 2006 6:57 AM | Reply | Permalink