I did not know enough about the military plans prior to the start of the war in 2003.  With the decreasing probability of withdrawal in the near term, I want to understand at least 2 things:  what does this "Surge" strategy mean and what might be the thinking behind a different military strategy, Counterinsurgency.

The scariest is this Surge strategy, a significant increase in troops. Pat Lang [blogger, retired intelligence and special forces] provides a 52 page presentation from an AEI/military group chaired by Frederick Kagan. [Link for pdf file]. Lang's commentary:

... cast of contributers at the end reads very much like one of the great neocon "papers" ... military men listed among the supposed authors are a mystery to me ....

The paper urges a "surge" of many thousands more US troops into Baghdad beginning in March, 2007 for one more grand roll of the iron dice.  The concept seems to be based on the notion that Shia militias exist because of Sunni violence against them rather than as expressions of a Shia drive to political dominance in Iraq.  Based on that belief the authors seem to believe that if the additional US and Iraqi forces to be employed in the Capital area defeat (destroy?) the Sunni insurgent groups, then the Shia militia armies will "wither away" from a lack of need.  I do not think that belief is justified.

... This concept is a recipe for a grand and climactic battle of attrition between US and Iraqi forces on one side and the some combination of Sunni and Shia forces on the other....

President Bush may well accept the essence of this concept.  He wants to redeem his "freedom agenda," restore momentum to his plans and in his mind this might "clear up" Iraq so that he could move on to Iran.

The carnage implicit in this concept would be appalling... 

An opposing military approach is contained a new Army counterinsurgency manual. From an LATimes article:

U.S. military's new counterinsurgency doctrine takes issue with some key strategies that American commanders in Iraq continue to use, most notably the practice of concentrating combat forces in massive bases rather than dispersing them among the population ... field manual ... seeks to bring together the best practices in fighting sustained insurgencies that the [US] has learned during the Iraq war. It also lists tactics that have tripped up American forces,

Link to the manual. [If you have trouble go to the bottom of the article for a link.]

More informative to me is an article about David Petraeus [LtGen, served in Iraq] who led the effort to define the counterinsurgency doctrine and produce the manual. About manual:

... subject headings, just how radically Petraeus believes the military needs to reexamine the way it fights a war without conventional battlefields or an obvious end. Consider these headings in ... Chapter One titled "Paradoxes":

The More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You Are

The Best Weapons for COIN Do Not Shoot

Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction

Most Important Decisions Are Not Made by Generals.

Counterinsurgency warfare is ... "war at the graduate level," where every unit commander must be a kind of "strategic lieutenant" calibrating the right balance between soldiers' killing power and the exercise of restraint that can turn potential enemies into allies....

What is the cause of the violence, the radical terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon, Horn of Africa? If the following analysis is true, currently the US and the West are solving the wrong problem.

The outlines of the emerging "new direction" for Iraq that combines economic reconstruction with continued military presence will exacerbate a reality the decision makers do not understand. The linked article is well worth reading, it is clear the near term tactical fixes only address symptoms.

In A Matter of Pride: Why we can't buy off the next Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen and Michael Lind look at the bigger picture:

Reducing poverty in the Middle East and around the world is a laudable goal in itself, for humanitarian reasons. But it would be a mistake to treat prosperity as a universal solvent that can deprive jihadists like bin Laden of allies and sympathizers in populations that feel humiliated by foreign domination or frozen out of politics. Ultimately, both foreign occupation and domestic autocracy are political problems that must find political, not economic, solutions. The campaign against jihadism and the campaign against global poverty are both justified. But they are not the same war. 

The central role of communal humiliation in inspiring terrorism is the key finding of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape’s study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win. According to Pape, two factors have linked Tamil, Palestinian, Chechen, and al Qaeda suicide bombers. First, they are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation (like the perceived occupation of the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia by virtue of the presence of U.S. bases, in the eyes of bin Laden and his allies). Second, suicide bombers seek to change the policies of democratic occupying powers like Israel and the United States by influencing their public opinion–in a sense making the occupying power suffer the same level of humiliation they have felt.