Grunts (55 page)

After the Gulf War, American leaders began to scale back the armed forces. The infantry, especially the Eleven Bravo units, suffered some of the deepest cuts from the economizing scalpel. Three entire light infantry divisions were phased out. Almost all remaining grunt units, mech and light, were chronically understrength. As always, Americans particularly underestimated the importance of their light fighters. “Light-infantrymen are a unique breed,” the historian Adrian Lewis sagely wrote, “a unique national resource that has been continuously undervalued in American culture, in part, by the erroneous belief that anybody can serve as a combat soldier. The American fetish for advanced technologies further devalued the role of soldiers. This was no small loss, but it went almost unnoticed, until they were needed again.” And, as Colonel Bolger sensed in 1998, they would be needed again—badly—in the urban battlefields that only infantry can truly master. “What will happen,” he asked presciently, “in a future war when we have only the wonderful warplanes, we bomb and bomb, and the enemy does not crack?” Unfortunately, very few American policymakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s bothered to ask themselves this very same question. The sad result was old lessons learned by a new generation.
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CHAPTER 9

Grunts in the City: Urban Combat and Politics—Fallujah, 2004

Welcome to the City!

DESERT STORM SIGNALED A REVOLUTION in warfare. From now on, wars would be fought at a distance with guided munitions, precision weaponry, and a full range of information-age technological weapons. America’s enemies would be cowed into submission by the sheer ubiquity and lethality of guided bomb units, cruise missiles, laser-guided munitions, and other high-tech millennium weaponry. Rather than depend upon a slow-moving, difficult-to-deploy mass army with its attendant fleets of vehicles, American decision makers concentrated on creating a smaller, lighter, more agile ground force. In the future, most of the fighting would be done by the planes and ships with assistance from a small retinue of highly trained Special Forces and SEAL ground pounders. Modern technology had apparently made the infantryman obsolete, a quaint relic of a pre-information-age past. At least that was the thinking among far too many in the defense establishment of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Donald Rumsfeld being the most infamous example). As was so often the case, though, Americans were preparing for the war they wished to fight rather than the one they were likely to fight. The whole mind-set reflected the longtime American dream that wars could be fought from a safe distance, scientifically, rapidly, decisively, and logically, with little political strife. It was a veritable echo chamber, eerily reminiscent of similar claims made in the wake of World War II about the supposed revolution wrought by nuclear weapons.

The problem was that in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States instead found itself enmeshed in counterinsurgent ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of the tremendous American technological and material advantage, a confusing stew of tenacious insurgent groups in both countries bedeviled America’s strategic aims of rolling back Islamic terrorism and creating stable democracies. “In the United States, we’ve become so accustomed to high-tech weaponry, so assured of our own power, that we’ve become blind to who actually does the fighting and dying . . . infantrymen . . . twenty-year-old men who hunt other men with rifles,” Owen West, a military commentator and former Marine officer, wrote, quite perceptively, as these wars raged. Indeed, these young volunteer riflemen of the early twenty-first century were bearing the brunt of both wars, serving multiple tours, patrolling endlessly, sacrificing more than those at home could ever begin to understand. The grunts of this so-called global war on terror were indispensable and, as usual, America did not have anywhere near enough of them.

This is not to say that American domination of the air, control of the seas, ubiquitous satellite imagery, and precision “shock and awe” weaponry were not important. They were all vital. But their techno-vangelist proponents had simply oversold the considerable merits of a good product. It was unfair to expect standoff weaponry to achieve anything more than limited strategic aims in Afghanistan and Iraq. A joint direct attack munition (JDAM), for instance, is an accurate and effective piece of aerial ordnance. These bombs can routinely hit targets with a margin of error under ten meters. But they cannot control ground or people; nor can they favorably influence popular opinion (indeed, the bomb’s impersonal destruction usually tends to spike anti-American sentiment). Only foot soldiers can patrol an area, secure its infrastructure, develop relationships with locals, and defeat a guerrilla enemy. And only ground troops, especially infantry, can secure cities.

The war in Iraq was a classic example of this axiom. In 2003, President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s odious regime, eliminate any potential threat that Saddam might employ weapons of mass destruction (an infamously unfounded fear, as it turned out), and transform a traditionally volatile, dictatorial country into a stable democracy. These were ambitious goals, far more challenging than the simple mission of throwing Saddam out of the Kuwaiti desert in 1991. Yet war planners in 2003 unleashed their invasion with less than half the number of troops that Bush’s father had employed to win the 1991 desert war.

The twenty-first-century plan was to paralyze the Hussein regime with “shock and awe” guided bombs and cruise missiles while an armor-heavy ground force unleashed a lightning thrust through the desert to Baghdad. Their mission was to bypass the southern Iraqi cities, get to Baghdad, and decapitate the regime, before Saddam could recover and use the nukes and chemical weapons he did not really have. Once Saddam was gone, the country would then settle into a happily-ever-after coda with their American liberators. In the run-up to the war, Vice President Dick Cheney outlined this rosy scenario: “I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” he told one journalist. “The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.” Norman Schwarzkopf, the commanding general for Desert Storm, later said, “I . . . picked up vibes that . . . you’re going to have this massive strike with massive weaponry, and basically that’s going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that.”

Basically, that was the plan, and it grew from many generations of wrongheaded thinking in America about what war is, how wars are fought and won, and what they truly cost. The Bush administration invasion planners of 2003 sought to avoid urban combat because it tended to be so bloody, protracted, and destructive. Also, they avoided the cities because they knew they did not have anywhere near enough ground soldiers to secure them. So, invading columns bypassed much resistance that later morphed into a full-blown insurgency. Yet the cities were
the
center of gravity for the Iraqi population. Indeed, 70 percent of Iraq’s population lived in the cities. As a result, any invader who wished to control the country had to control those cities, not bypass them. Moreover, in an ominous harbinger, when the Americans in the spring of 2003 entered such cities as Nasiriyah and Baghdad, they found themselves involved in hard fighting.

What followed is, of course, well known. Some Iraqis, particularly Shiites and Kurds, did welcome the U.S.-led coalition as liberators. Others, especially Sunnis in Al Anbar province, were determined to resist the invasion. The coalition did overthrow Saddam’s government. In the months that followed, though, the occupiers, through spectacular incompetence and lack of cultural understanding, were overwhelmed by the job of creating a new Iraq. The Americans did not have anywhere near enough troops to secure the country and rebuild it. Multiple insurgent groups—Sunni and Shiite—sprouted from the resulting malevolent seeds of unemployment, looting, discontent, and disillusionment. The sad result, by 2004, was a full-blown guerrilla war against elusive insurgents who sniped at the Americans, ambushed them when they could, curried world opinion with Net-centric, media-savvy information-age propaganda, and inflicted devastating casualties upon them with the improvised explosive device (IED), the terrorist version of a standoff weapon (and a chillingly effective one at that).

By this time, the main arena of contest was, ironically, the cities. Day after day, American soldiers carried out an unglamorous struggle to control the roads and the urban sprawl in such places as Baghdad, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Bakuba, Samarra, Ramadi, and Fallujah. The sad reality was that there were nowhere near enough troops to do the job. The war had devolved into a messy, unpopular counterinsurgent struggle for the urban soul of Iraq. Indeed, by the spring of 2004, many of the cities, including Najaf, the Shiite slums of Sadr City in east Baghdad, and Fallujah, were pregnant with menace, teetering toward an explosion of violence. In April, when the powder keg blew, these cities turned into full-blown battlegrounds. Once again, the Americans had to relearn the unhappy lesson that urban combat is an infantryman’s game and that, technological advances notwithstanding, ground combat never goes out of style. The classic example was Fallujah.
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Vigilant Resolve?!

Since late April 2003, when American soldiers first entered Fallujah in substantial numbers, the town had bubbled with tension. This was a Sunni city with significant pro-Saddam sentiment. This was where imams controlled lucrative trading routes from Syria, where they dominated access to information and markets, and had done so for centuries. The people of Fallujah believed in their inherent superiority to their Shiite countrymen. They had dominated them for decades. The cruelty of Saddam’s regime had worked in the favor of Fallujahns, empowering them. The democracy-minded Americans were a threat to this old order. They were also culturally ignorant, heavy-handed in the use of their firepower and in their relations with locals.

By the summer and fall of 2003, this combustible situation had boiled over into outright violence between Sunni insurgents and troopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. In at least two instances, the Americans opened fire on unruly crowds, killing civilians. The locals simmered with anger over American firepower (notice how this U.S. strength had turned into a liability in an urban, information-age environment). When the 1st Marine Division, of Peleliu fame, took responsibility for Fallujah in early 2004, the leathernecks hoped to pacify the situation there by adopting a more benign approach than their Army colleagues. But the mood in the city was not receptive to rapprochement and the situation was only growing worse by the day. Fallujah teemed with weapons and guerrilla fighters. By and large, the city had become “no go” territory for the Americans. In this sense, Fallujah was indicative of an anti-American revolt that was bubbling among many of the Sunni tribes all over Al Anbar province.

Very simply put, a major confrontation was brewing. In times like this, a flash-point event can sometimes touch off a larger conflict. On March 31, insurgents in Fallujah ambushed four American private security contractors from Blackwater USA. As the contractors (all of them former military) drove on Highway 10, the main route through the heart of Fallujah, insurgents machine-gunned and grenaded their cars, killing them. A venomous crowd then dragged their bodies through the streets, set them ablaze, and hung the charred remains from a bridge that spanned the Euphrates River.

The Marines knew who was responsible for this barbarous attack and they were determined to round them up at a deliberate pace, rather than react with overwhelming force. “Iraqis would see harsh reprisal as an act of vengeance,” said Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the corps-sized I Marine Expeditionary Force, which was responsible for Al Anbar. His immediate subordinate, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, concurred. He had no desire to make any attempt to seize Fallujah. He knew that fighting for the city would be costly. He understood that he did not have the resources or manpower to rebuild the city whenever the fighting did end, much less pacify and care for a quarter million hostile Fallujahns. What’s more, any attack on Fallujah needed an Iraqi stamp of approval, and the shaky provisional government in Baghdad was hardly on board with the idea.

But American leaders, from Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer to President Bush, found it impossible to ignore the disturbing pictures of the crowd and the burned bodies. The Fallujah attack was unique and visceral. Thus it had dramatic repercussions. Desecration of bodies is a major taboo in American culture. It had happened at Mogadishu in 1993, and Fallujah was an unwelcome reminder of this awful nightmare. In the view of Bush, Bremer, and Rumsfeld, the desecration represented a worldwide humiliation for the United States and a major challenge to the American presence in Iraq. So, the Fallujah attack could not go unpunished, mainly because of the power of the appalling images (notice the importance of information-age media in shaping strategic events). For these reasons, and out of sheer anger, Bremer and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, ordered, with Bush’s approval, the Marines to take Fallujah.