Decisions on ground key to success in Iraq

To describe how two years of war in Iraq have changed the American military, Army Lt. Gen. William Wallace looks back to the beginning.

It was April 2003, as Baghdad was about to fall and the word “insurgency” had not yet entered the Pentagon’s Iraq lexicon. Lt. Col. Chris Hughes and his 101st Division soldiers were confronted by an angry mob in the holy city of Najaf. Rather than force his way through that day, Hughes ordered his soldiers to “take a knee” and point their rifles toward the ground. As the crowd calmed, he pulled his soldiers back.

In the midst of a no-holds-barred invasion, the restraint exhibited by Hughes was extraordinary. Hughes’ decision to trust the crowd and abort his mission was praised by President Bush as a “gesture of respect (that) helped defuse a dangerous situation and made our peaceful intentions clear.”

Now, Wallace says, generals expect such innovation, even from more-junior officers and enlisted leaders. The goal isn’t to avoid a fight, as Hughes did that day; it’s to understand Iraq’s culture well enough to know when and how to fight, and how to go beyond rote training and the rule book to find effective ways to locate and kill insurgents. Pushing lower-ranking leaders to make those decisions is key, and the military is changing to encourage it.

The emergence of bottom-up leadership is a crucial component of the military’s effort to win a fight it didn’t want. After the Vietnam War, national policy was to avoid guerrilla entanglements. When they did happen, such as in Somalia, where U.S. forces lost 18 soldiers and two Black Hawk helicopters in 1993 in an abortive raid on a guerrilla group, the outcomes seemed to reinforce that decision.

But the war on terrorism and Bush’s invasion of Iraq forced an about-face. To defeat low-tech enemies that don’t use organized battle formations, the U.S. military is taking its lessons from the troops on the ground instead of the high-level strategic planners who dominated the Cold War-era military.

“Counterinsurgency wasn’t even on our dance card. And urban operations was something to be avoided,” says Wallace, who was the Army’s top ground commander during the Iraq invasion and now oversees the Army’s training centers.