War Has Changed.

              The difference in war has certainly changed between Vietnam and Global War on Terror.

 I would like to share a personal perspective:

The Army of 2003 (I cannot speak for other services) was still a product of the Cold War. The Army of 2003 was trained and equipped to fight the Soviets on the fields of Germany; coincidently this was also ideal to fighting Iraqis in the deserts of the Middle East. Two years later there was an enlistment crisis, the Iraq Invasion was widely considered an unpopular if not illegal war and therefore a shortage of new recruits was a reality the Army had to contend with. This created a situation where the Army was taking everyone it could get: Convicted felon? No problem, sign here. Failed the mental examination? No problem, sign here. You’d rather join the Army than go to prison? No problem, sign here.

The Army of 2005 was a mob of roughnecks, felons, and patriots. In the midst of it was an 18 year old white kid from the suburbs who didn’t want to go to college. Basic training was still teaching the tactics of all out mechanized war; tactics used to kill Soviets. The Army’s equipment was the same used to invade Panama in 1989 and Iraq in 1991. Drill Sergeants were teaching the things seen in 80s action movies. We were taught how to shoot from the hip, how to make a wall out of bullets, how to throw hand grenades, and how to use a bayonet. Painted on a wall in the giant room my 60 man platoon lived was the phrase, “Bullets don’t kill people: bayonets and bombs kill people.” That was what we were training for, massed firepower against an enemy which would allow us to get close enough to throw grenades and eventually get even closer so we could utilize our bayonets to finally and completely destroy our enemy. One day we were being taught how to enter and clear a room. The idea is for a group of soldiers to enter a room and instantly be able to visually and if necessary violently render a room secure. Our Drill Sergeant began by telling us that if we thought an enemy was present in a room the best thing to do was have armor send a high explosive round through the window. If no armor was present use an anti-tank rocket. If no anti-tank rocket was available use hand grenades. He then went on to tell us if we didn’t feel the need to do this, there wasn’t a need to use the enter and clear technique anyway. This was the war my Army’s generation of rough and sordid characters was being trained to do, to fight a classic war where civilians were absent and only the enemy was a threat.

The Army of 2006 realized it had a problem. Iraq was on the verge of delving into an all-out civil war. Genocide was almost a reality. Every morning when the sun came up hundreds of corpses were found. Death squads roamed the night freely, executing people for reasons I could never understand. The Army was powerless to stop it. Why shouldn’t they be? They were trained to engage, close with, and destroy an enemy; not win hearts and minds. The same troubles that plagued the Vietnam War were repeated themselves, something had to change.

The answer was the development of counter-insurgency training on a mass scale. All out 80s style combat was replaced with surgical applications of power, building relations with locals, rebuilding infrastructure, and doing it all at the smallest levels possible. The roughnecks that populated the Army were quickly retrained to protect innocents while combating the enemy. Combat operations began to focus more on rebuilding Iraq rather than waiting for Iraq to rebuild itself. The leaders of militias and other violent groups became the targets and operations also tended to involve specific raids to detain those leaders at home rather than engage in street fighting.

The Army of 2007 was the first to put these principles into action. The troop Surge of that year flooded the city of Baghdad and surrounding areas with tens of thousands of troops in an attempt to overwhelm the militias and other insurgent forces that were actively engaged in sectarian violence. The strategy worked. The Army was able to rebuild the city which in turn made friends from the local populations which allowed for the identifying of insurgent leaders, which led to low key precision raids to detain those leaders, which led to insurgent groups falling apart. The Iraq War created an Army that was much more professional, highly trained, and disciplined than anything seen during the Vietnam War. Lessons were learned and it proved to be successful. Whether that success continues is irrelevant, without the groundbreaking strategy of giving even the smallest unit the skills to be elite, the war was saved from outright disaster.  Vietnam, Iraq was not.