Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  Always a glutton for punishment, I took the opportunity to write a master’s thesis at Leavenworth and chose the topic Asymmetric Threats to the Security of the United States through 2010, earning a master of the military arts and sciences degree for arguing in June 2001 that enemies of the United States would use irregular ways and means to accomplish their objective of harming us. Al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole occurred during the writing process, underlining the relevance of my work. At the end of each of the first two trimesters, I wrote a memo to the head of the school suggesting changes to the curriculum, never receiving a reply, but either despite or because of my grousing, I was selected as the George C. Marshall Award winner as the top member of our class. Captain Petraeus had previously earned this distinction, known as the White Briefcase despite the fact that the actual award is a demilitarized .45 pistol behind glass. When writing about the award in the Oxford alumni journal, I joked that this was the perfect metaphor for the U.S. Army of 2001 as constrained by the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine: a nonfunctional antique, kept behind glass to prevent access.

  In truth, I was thrilled to join the long list of Army officers who had received the honor and even more pleased that the Army had seen fit to assign Susanne and me to the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, just two hours down the road from Kansas City. Mom drove her new beetle-green Beetle to the graduation ceremony at Fort Leavenworth, and it was there that I told her that Susi, visiting her mom in England to convey good news, was with child. Life looked peaceful and bright.

  3.

  Back to Iraq

  Al Anbar 2003–2004

  After graduation, Susi and I moved down Interstate 70 from Leavenworth to Fort Riley, Kansas. This was the historic home of the famed First Infantry Division that had blown the holes in the berm through which my tank had passed from Saudi Arabia into Iraq during Desert Storm and that had earlier distinguished itself in World Wars I and II and in Vietnam.

  Like most new majors, I was assigned to the division staff for a year as I waited for a position in one of the four tank battalions that called Fort Riley home. Division headquarters was a short walk from the brick apartment that the Army had provided for us in historic Old Post, and as we awaited the arrival of our son, we got acquainted with a new Army installation and a new community, and I spent nights checking footnotes on my doctoral dissertation.

  On the beautiful morning of September 11, I was walking into work after an early PT test when the sergeant major told me that he’d heard about an attack on New York while driving in. We rushed to the division conference room, which was showing live news coverage of the World Trade Center, and we watched the towers fall. Like other U.S. military installations all over the world, Fort Riley immediately increased security at its gates and prepared for combat.

  The nation was in shock, and even Fort Riley, safe from any conceivable terrorist predations in the middle of Kansas wheatfields, was affected. In the whirl of more rigorous guard procedures and heightened efforts to prepare our equipment for war, the arrival of Jack Frederick on October 13, 2001, was a wonderful reminder that life nonetheless would go on. He was born at the base hospital just a mile from our quarters, and Susi, with her high pain threshold, didn’t ask for an epidural until it was too late; her version of “natural childbirth” included not even an aspirin. Jack was small but healthy, and we took him home the next day, when the joys of fatherhood began competing with the pain inherent in completing the index of a doctoral dissertation that was still in the process of becoming a book. I don’t think I’d fully realized what love was until Jack’s arrival, and he grew and smiled and soon began to talk, long bursts of nonsensical syllables that sometimes reminded me of my own writings.

  Although the initial attacks on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan didn’t include any tank units, they did include the innovative use of special forces calling in air strikes against the Taliban, a story that made its way into the version of Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife that finally saw print late in 2002. Given the raw emotional appeal of the title on which my publishers insisted, it was no surprise that it took months after publication for the book to crack the one millionth bestselling title on Amazon, a fact often pointed out to me by a soldier on the staff of the First Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment, who took immense joy in tracking my minuscule sales ranking by the day. He did a lot of push-ups as a result.

  By then I was the executive officer, or XO, of 1-34, having escaped from division headquarters after working for a year in what young officers considered a kind of purgatory. The XO is second in command of a tactical Army unit, responsible for logistics, maintenance, and oversight of the staff. While 1-34 Armor, the Centurions, was a good unit, XO wasn’t my first choice; the fun major’s job in a tank battalion is S3, or operations officer. That job comes with a tank of one’s own, while the XO is stuck in the rear with the gear, as the saying goes, proud owner of a Humvee that draws enormous scorn if it goes down for maintenance issues. I’d originally been slated to be the S3 of 1-34 but got bumped for a late-arriving officer from Korea, Marty Leners, a West Point graduate a year younger than I who had earned a Silver Star for Valor in Desert Storm. The brigade commander called me at division headquarters to give me the bad news, asking what I would say if he told me that he needed me to serve as XO instead of Centurion 3. I promptly told him that I would cry but would try not to do so until after he hung up the phone. He told me to deal with it.

  As it turned out, over the course of the next year the XO had more to do than did the “three.” The fun began when one of our tankers discovered that the nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) protective system on his M1A1 was inoperative in a big way. The system is essentially an air conditioner built into a box on the side of the tank. Not well designed for the rigors of tanking, it had a habit of ingesting sand and dirt and hence not performing its assigned task of providing filtered air inside the tank, allowing the crew to breathe easily without wearing a cumbersome protective mask like the one that Sergeant Shoe had forgotten outside our tank back in Desert Storm. The system was supposed to be checked monthly, but somehow these checks had been missed. When I saw the system that had failed—it literally had a solid chunk of sand and mud covering delicate air control components—I ordered that every one of the tanks in the battalion be inspected. All were broken, rendering the battalion’s tanks being declared non-mission-capable for deployment to combat operations. That was a big deal in a tank battalion that was then on call for a number of contingency missions around the world, with a priority toward the “fight tonight” mission to defend South Korea against a North Korean attack.

  It turned out that pretty much every tank in the U.S. Army had the same problem. We were just the first to discover (or perhaps more likely, report fully) the systemic failure. The battalion’s crews and mechanics went to work tearing the systems down to bare metal, sandblasting them to remove rust, body-coating the clean metal, and then rebuilding the systems. The NBC system rebuild quickly became the most important thing happening at Fort Riley that hot summer-into- fall of 2002, and Brigadier General Frank Helmick, the assistant division commander for support, spent a fair amount of time in the 1-34 motor pool overseeing the process. Helmick was a career paratrooper who was on his first assignment to a heavy tank unit, a thin, intense, deeply dedicated Army officer who would remember the time we spent together in the motor pool in days to come when he needed an action officer in the Pentagon. He also remembered a PT test we’d run together, when I failed to beat him in the two-mile run but won “trying points” for throwing up as I crossed the finish line—the second-best possible outcome in General Helmick’s eyes. At Fort Riley, while 1-34 was the first tank battalion in the Army to fall to having zero fully mission-capable (FMC) tanks—a fact that was reported all the way up to the Pentagon—we were also the first battalion to come back up to 100 percent FMC, and we passed word of our repair procedures around the Army. />
  “Big Army” had not been heavily involved in the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban; that had largely been a Special Operations Forces and CIA endeavor. But it was going to play a role in the pending invasion of Iraq, and we knew it. I was deeply unconvinced of the need for the invasion, despite the fact that I accepted the intelligence picture that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. (I was in good company; Colin Powell, by now secretary of state, believed it too, a big factor in my own mistaken faith in the assessment.) As a student of the Cold War, I knew that the United States had lived for more than forty years with a Soviet Union that had been dedicated to the destruction of the West and possessed a huge nuclear stockpile; the doctrine of mutually assured destruction prevented those weapons from ever being used to attack us. I believed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with a far smaller arsenal even according to the worst-case projections, could be easily deterred with America’s far larger arsenal. Not many people were interested in what an Army major at Fort Riley thought about the decision to invade Iraq, but I did what I could to ward off the invasion. Among other things, I told my friend Jim Miller, who was no longer serving in the Pentagon but still well connected in Washington, that I thought the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary—even if Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, Iraq had a return address and could be deterred, unlike a terrorist group—and likely to be a costly disaster.

  This attitude was shared by a number of other people whose concerns would not have much impact on a Washington that was convinced of the need for war. One of them was a retired lieutenant colonel with whom I’d taught at West Point while he was still wearing the uniform. Conrad Crane had earned a history Ph.D. from Stanford and taken a position at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, after his retirement from the Army. Con and fellow War College professor W. Andrew Terrill argued in a prescient War College publication dated February 1, 2003:

  If this nation and its coalition partners decide to undertake the mission to remove Saddam Hussein, they will also have to be prepared to dedicate considerable time, manpower, and money to the effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fighting is over. Otherwise, the success of military operations will be ephemeral, and the problems they were designed to eliminate could return or be replaced by new and more virulent difficulties.1

  Concerns raised by many officers about the need for the invasion and the likely cost, including the need for a postwar occupation of Iraq, were not widely heeded, however, and the war commenced in March 2003. The call largely bypassed Fort Riley. The only unit that was tagged to go was 2-70 Armor, a sister tank battalion commanded by a tall former college defensive end named Jeff Ingram. During the invasion, Ingram’s tank battalion was assigned to support the famed 101st Airborne Division commanded by Major General David Petraeus, who had zipped right past the full-bird colonel rank I’d predicted he would someday wear when I was a cadet sharing the major’s desk at SHAPE. Petraeus relied heavily on 2-70’s tanks, and Lieutenant Colonel Ingram earned a Silver Star for Valor during the fight, as did a number of his soldiers. He was also wounded by a mortar fragment that hit his back during one firefight, but battled through, reporting for medical treatment only after the shooting had died down. The doctor pulled a tiny piece of metal out and sewed Jeff up with just two stitches, one fewer than required by battalion guidelines that Jeff himself had instituted for a Purple Heart award. Jeff joked with the doc, asking him if he could squeeze in one more very small stitch, but the doctor held firm and Jeff went without the medal initially established by General George Washington. He was a great Army officer, and Fort Riley was proud of him, but the closest the rest of us came to the war was watching Jeff on television.

  Major General Petraeus had Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and historian who had authored a great book on Vietnam and West Point under the title The Long Gray Line, embedded with him throughout the invasion. Atkinson’s resulting book, In the Company of Soldiers, should really have been titled In the Company of a Soldier. He reported that several times during the invasion, Petraeus asked himself, “Tell me how this ends.” That quote would later become the title of a book by Linda Robinson about Petraeus’s role in altering the answer to that question for the better, but for the time being it hung in the air as a well-informed concern from a man who had written his doctoral dissertation at Princeton on the lessons taken from the Vietnam War and their influence in its aftermath.

  Petraeus and Crane were right to be concerned about the subsequent phases of this war, although they were not joined in that concern by the civilian officials responsible for the outcome. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was not enamored of postconflict stability operations and had repeatedly insisted on a smaller invasion force than the uniformed military recommended. Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, the director of operations on the Joint Staff, finally rebelled when Rumsfeld demanded cuts in troop strength below those he thought acceptable. Newbold resigned from the corps in protest but did not make public his concerns about what he saw as unacceptable risk to the mission and to the troops until years later, in a Time magazine piece titled “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.”

  Rumsfeld won the argument with General Newbold, and the initial invasion force was—just barely—big enough to topple Saddam Hussein but nowhere near large enough to meet the obligation of an occupying force to provide security for the Iraqi people in the wake of the war. Army Chief of Staff General Ric Shinseki, who had been wounded in Vietnam and commanded U.S. forces in Bosnia, had told House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton that “several hundred thousand” troops would be required to hold Iraq together in the wake of the invasion, a number that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz scoffed at the next day in congressional testimony. Wolfowitz described Shinseki’s estimate as “wildly off the mark” and said “the notion that it would take several hundred thousand American troops just seems outlandish.”

  In fact, it was not even prescient; it was simply an extrapolation based on previous successful postconflict military occupations, including the one that Shinseki had led in Bosnia. Mark Twain famously said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and military doctrine itself is merely distilled history, lessons drawn from the long history of warfare. The insufficiency of troops to secure Iraq’s cities, much less lock down the many supposed weapons of mass destruction storage sites that were the presumptive purpose for invading in the first place, was just one of many shortfalls in one of the least successful military operations in American history.

  Another was the complete absence of plans or planning for the postconflict phase of operations, called Phase IV in military parlance, following the major combat operations of Phase III. In its official after-action review, the Third Infantry Division, which had conducted the Thunder Run into Baghdad and captured Saddam International Airport. Fardus Square, says that it requested from its higher headquarters, the Army’s V Corps, instructions once Baghdad had fallen to American tanks, but that “none were found.” It is a seditious line, intended to insulate the Third ID against guilt for the failures that followed, and a scathing indictment of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon that oversaw the preparations for a war of choice that we began on our own schedule. Because we knew that we were chasing a bus, we should have had a plan for what we were going to do once we caught it.

  Throughout the first term of George W. Bush, the Department of Defense under Secretary Rumsfeld had been in a state of something approaching undeclared war with Colin Powell’s State Department, and the disaster that was the postwar occupation of Iraq was one of the casualties. Rumsfeld fought and won a battle over which department of the U.S. government would be responsible for postwar Iraq and then did very little to fulfill the task he had asked to be given. He selected retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who had been in charge of securing Kurdish areas of Iraq after Operation Desert Storm, to run the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assis
tance (ORHA) to secure Iraq after this invasion. However, he gave Garner only a few weeks to prepare ORHA for these responsibilities before the invasion began. (Planning for the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan began in 1942, three years before the end of the war.) Although ORHA failed horribly, it is hard to blame Garner for the disasters of the occupation, and he deserves credit for calling his team, composed largely of retirees, the “space cowboys,” after the film of that name describing the rescue of Earth from a meteor by a team of similarly experienced renegades.

  Garner was quickly replaced by former ambassador Paul Bremer, who arrived in May 2003 with instructions to head what was now called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), still under the Pentagon’s control. Bremer quickly promulgated orders to disband the Iraqi Army, outlaw local elections, and prevent any members of the Ba’ath Party, which had previously ruled Iraq, from holding positions of authority in the new government structure, throwing those in the top four Ba’ath Party levels out of their jobs and taking away their pensions and other benefits. These three decisions were disastrous, playing a huge role in incubating the chaos that erupted not long after Bremer’s arrival.