November 2, 2005
U.S. to Intensify Its Training in Iraq to Battle Insurgents
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 - Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, is so concerned that the military's counterinsurgency training must be sharpened in the face of increasingly flexible and deadly attackers that he has ordered the formation of a new school in Iraq for officers, according to senior military officials.

The school, which will open in the next few days at the Iraqi military base in Taji, north of Baghdad, will be for Army and Marine battalion and company commanders immediately after they arrive.

It is seen as a clearinghouse where field commanders can pass on the latest tactics and situations in the country. Among the topics will be patrol methods, techniques to find and destroy roadside bombs, and education on the various insurgent factions. And in the long term, it is hoped that the format can be passed on to the new Iraqi Army and security forces.

Soldiers and marines now receive some counterinsurgency instruction in the United States before shipping out to Iraq, but some senior commanders have expressed concern that the instruction has been uneven and lags behind the fast-changing tactics insurgents use in Iraq.

The academy, which will give intensive one-week courses, is an effort to focus officers immediately on the task at hand.

"We are committed to this," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a military spokesman in Iraq, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

The school opens its doors amid signs that few inroads are being made against the insurgents despite recent offensives by American troops and despite months of scrambling to train more Iraqi troops. At least 92 Americans were killed in Iraq in October, the highest monthly toll since January.

The effort is the latest reflection of the emphasis the military has been placing on counterinsurgency education.

In the past few weeks, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus has begun using his experience as the former top trainer in Iraq to infuse counterinsurgency lessons throughout his new command, the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where doctrine is written and mid-level officers go to graduate school. Last fall, for the first time in decades, the Army issued a field guide to counterinsurgency warfare, an acknowledgment that the kind of fighting in Iraq may become more common in the years ahead.

At their desert base at Twenty-Nine Palms, Calif., marines rehearse convoy operations and urban counterinsurgency missions in a mock town with 1,500 buildings. In addition, Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, recently ordered a new strategy to guide marines in what he calls "irregular threats," including counterinsurgency missions, according to Lt. Col. Richard Long, a Marine spokesman.

"The training we're constantly modifying based on lessons learned," Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif., told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

One hurdle for the new program is finding the trainers. Many senior officers and noncommissioned personnel have already been plucked from units in Iraq and the United States to serve as advisers to Iraqi units.

An option under discussion is to have Special Operations forces who just left the fighting area help with instruction. Another possibility is to contract with retired military personnel who have training skills. In the short term, though, the American military headquarters in Baghdad will provide trainers.

While the new program will mean pulling commanders out of their units during a final two-week pre-deployment phase in Kuwait, senior officers said the tradeoff was well worth it.

"General Casey and many others have thought it would be valuable to provide a final piece of training, in country, with the latest situational awareness, latest tactics, techniques and procedures, and latest thinking on the situation in Iraq," said a senior Army officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because final details were still being worked out.

Senior officers in Iraq say that for several months, General Casey has been eager to expand counterinsurgency training, a priority that was underscored by a confidential review of allied strategy that he ordered in late summer.

The assessment, carried out by a small team headed by an Army colonel that interviewed top staff and field officers across Iraq, was called heartening in most respects.

"Our soldiers have a very good feel for counterinsurgency doctrine, and I've recently sent a team out there to see how they were applying it," General Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 29. "The team came back and said that they generally have it about right. Sure, things we can do better, but we're applying counterinsurgency doctrine to the situation in Iraq, and doing it fairly well."

One senior officer described the assessment and its findings this way: "It is a decentralized fight that relies on building a strong relationship with the local Iraqis so as to create an environment where insurgents are not welcome or allowed to train, recruit, rest, and where the locals are confident that Iraqi security forces will stay. This means that battalion and brigade commanders need to have good skills working with local civic and police leaders and help them with reconstruction, governance."

In addition to those nonmilitary aspects of counterinsurgency, General Sattler said, it is essential in battling insurgents - and in teaching tactics - to attack militants as precisely as possible to avoid alienating large numbers of Iraqi civilians.

"We don't want to take out one enemy and create five more," he said.