Nir Rosen - Aftermath

According to a major who served under Gentile, “Despite Lieutenant Colonel Gentile being depicted in the media as a ‘conservative’ who only wants to focus on high-intensity conflict, he set the groundwork for Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl extremely well in one of the most important aspects of counterinsurgency. COIN is about people, and people are about relationships—especially in Arabic and Muslim culture. Gentile spent all of his time, in the very brief time that I saw him, talking, negotiating, and working with the local imams in Amriya. Kuehl, the beneficiary of this initial relationship building, continued the relationship and allowed the SOI to emerge with the support of the local imams.”

I asked Gentile what he thought Kuehl did differently from him. “Other than rightly capitalizing on the changed conditions that presented to him the opportunity to cut a deal with the SOIs, not much,” he said. “His organizational structure as a combat battalion was a bit different than mine, since I was an armored reconnaissance squadron—which meant that he had a greater dismounted capability, which might have produced more dismounted patrols. But in terms of tactics, I don’t believe there was much difference at all, although I am sure he would disagree with that statement. My outfit did dismounted operations, we engaged with the local population, etc. The notion that I ‘commuted’ to the area and stayed inside my vehicles as put forward by the surge zealots is a chimera. Dale did not put his first combat outpost in until late May ‘07, and it was a tactical one in the sense that its purpose was to facilitate movement into and out of the area. The first Galula-like COP did not go into the district until late June. So the notion that during the first five or six months of the surge—which arguably was the decisive period—that he was doing things on the tactical level radically different from me is not correct. What happened is that after the violence began to drop, and American soldiers and marines stopped dying in large monthly numbers, folks looked back onto the first period and superimposed the coherence of [the COIN manual] FM 3-24 that they believed was there at the time but actually was not.”

“Probably the biggest difference,” Kuehl said of his approach as opposed to Gentile’s, “was in taking a broader, long-term perspective of the problem. One of the things that was highlighted in our staff training was the need to develop a ‘campaign plan’ at the battalion level. This plan is intended to be long-term, with objectives six months to even a year out. In contrast, the campaign plan I got from Gian looked out about two weeks and really was nothing more than a patrol schedule.

“I visited Gian’s squadron in July 2006, and they were stretched pretty thin. If other parts of Baghdad were like his area, I am sure it looked like there were barely any U.S. soldiers on the ground. To be fair, I do not think that this type of planning or creating of a vision was part of the train[ing] Gian would have had, so [it is] not necessarily surprising that they did not have one. Even now we continue to adapt, and units that are there now are probably doing things I never thought of. There were two long-term projects that Gian left me with. The first was the Amriya Bank, which he laid the groundwork for. The other was the establishment of a police station. This second one did not happen until after we left.”

Gentile wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal called “Eating Soup With a Spoon,” the title being a reference to John Nagl’s influential book on COIN, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife . In the article Gentile criticized the COIN manual and especially the paradoxes of “Tactical success guarantees nothing” and “The more you protect yourself, the less secure you are.” Kuehl would later write accounts of his time in Amriya in part as a response to Gentile’s criticism. “I think in this article Gian underestimates the abilities of our officer corps to use the manual as it is intended, as a guide as opposed to dogma,” Kuehl told me. “I think the article also provides some insights into Gian’s way of thinking. In his mind the new manual takes the enemy out of the equation and tries to make COIN sound easy by winning over the populace. I think one quote by Gian is relevant: ‘I was angry and bewildered because the paradoxes, through their clever contradictions, removed a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency warfare that I had experienced throughout my year as a tactical battalion commander in Iraq: fighting. And by removing the fundamental reality of fighting from counterinsurgency warfare, the manual removes the problem of maintaining initiative, morale and offensive spirit among combat soldiers who will operate in a place such as Iraq.’”

I asked Gentile about this. “I don’t think that a center of gravity, theoretically, even if there can be such a thing, should be predetermined and turned into a rule for any type of stability or counterinsurgency operation,” he said. “In modern counterinsurgencies certainly the population is an important consideration, but the American Army has turned the notion of the people as a center of gravity into an immutable rule, which then determines a prescribed set of tactics and procedures, which ultimately calls for large numbers of American combat soldiers on the ground. This kind of approach might be the right choice in certain circumstances, but it should not be the only way. If it is, then we can expect many more adventures at nation building to come.”

Kuehl told me that “Gian tried to maintain the initiative while maintaining the morale and fighting esprit by his men by doing periodic large-scale cordon-and-searches to keep them focused. He also established small kill teams in houses, some of them occupied by residents. These teams generally consisted of a six-man team, usually including a sniper, emplaced to counter enemy IED efforts. I remember Gian telling me that many of these operations were to maintain the morale of the unit. What baffled me was that they served no real tactical purpose. In fact, I think in some ways they hurt the effort because they were not focused on good intelligence, so we were stumbling around inconveniencing the local populace.

“I banned the use of occupied homes for small kill teams right after we took over. I read a couple patrol reports from Gian’s unit that made clear to me that these operations were not going to win over the populace. We continued with the cordon-and-search operations (we called them ‘block parties’) for a while. However, as we gained more intel, we relied less on them and focused more on targeted raids and eventually did away with them altogether.”

I asked Gentile if he thought his cordon-and-search operations and small kill teams had been counterproductive. “Well, this is certainly the stock question that any population-centric counterinsurgency expert would ask,” he said. “Sure, they can be, but we should not assume a priori that they will be all the time.”

These operations could serve a purpose that outweighed their potential to alienate the population, he said. “It depends on the situation and what strategy has been created as the political object of war and the necessary military means to accomplish it. In other words, if you are a New American Army Way of War proponent, then the absolute and unequivocal answer to the question is that they are never productive and can never work in any counterinsurgency operation. But depending on the policy objective and a realistic approach to strategy, such methods might be effective. And arguably, during the critical months of the surge, it was just these types of operations that reduced Al Qaeda, fueled by the former Sunni insurgents who we bought off.”