Safer Vehicles for Soldiers: A Tale of Delays and Glitches

Michael Moss
New York Times
26 June 2005

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Iraq last year to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead, they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner. State Department officials traveling in Iraq use armored vehicles that are built with V-shaped hulls to better deflect bullets and bombs. Members of Congress favor another model, called the M1117, which can endure 12-pound explosives and .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds.

Unlike the Humvee, the Pentagon's vehicle of choice for American troops, the others were designed from scratch to withstand attacks in battlefields like Iraq with no safe zones. Last fall, for instance, a Rhino traveling the treacherous airport road in Baghdad endured a bomb that left a six-foot-wide crater. The passengers walked away unscathed. "I have no doubt should I have been in any other vehicle," wrote an Army captain, the lone military passenger, "the results would have been catastrophically different." Yet more than two years into the war, efforts by United States military units to obtain large numbers of these stronger vehicles for soldiers have faltered - even as the Pentagon's program to armor Humvees continues to be plagued by delays, an examination by The New York Times has found. Many of the problems stem from a 40-year-old procurement system that stymies the acquisition of new equipment quickly enough to adapt to the changing demands of a modern insurgency, interviews and records show.

Among other setbacks, the M1117 lost its Pentagon money just before the invasion, and the manufacturer is now scrambling to fill rush orders from the military. The company making one of the V-shaped vehicles, the Cougar, said it had to lay off highly skilled welders last year as it waited for the contract to be completed. Even then it was paid only enough to fill half the order. And the Rhino could not get through the Army's testing regime because its manufacturer declined to have one of its $250,000 vehicles blown up. The company said it provided the Army with testing data that demonstrate the Rhino's viability, and is using the defense secretary's visit as a seal of approval in its contract pitches to the Defense Department.

Many officials in the military and the government say the demands of war sometimes require the easing of procurement requirements like testing, and express frustration at the slow process for getting equipment. "When you have troops in the field in a dynamic environment, where the tactics of the opposition are changing on a regular basis, you have to be nimble and quick," said Representative Rob Simmons, a Connecticut Republican on the Armed Services Committee. "If you're not nimble and quick and adaptable, people will die."

Nearly a decade ago, the Pentagon was warned by its own experts that superior vehicles would be needed to protect American troops. The Army's vehicle-program manager urged the Pentagon in 1996 to move beyond the Humvee, interviews and Army records show, saying it was built for the cold war. Its flat-bottom-chassis design is 25 years old, never intended for combat, and the added armor at best protects only the front end from the heftier insurgent bombs, military officials concede.

But as the procurement system stumbled and the Defense Department resisted allocating money for more expensive vehicles, interviews and records show, the military ended up largely dependent on Humvees - a vast majority of which did not yet have any armor - in both combat and noncombat operations in the war. Today, commuting from post to post in Iraq is one of the deadliest tasks for soldiers. At least 73 American military personnel were killed on the roads of Iraq in May and June as insurgent attacks spiked. In May alone, there were 700 bombings against American forces, the most since the invasion in March 2003. Late Thursday, a suicide car bomber killed five marines and a sailor in a convoy of mostly female marines who were returning to camp in Falluja. Thirteen others were injured. Officials said the vehicles most likely included a seven-ton truck. Last winter, 135 convoys were attacked on the Baghdad airport road alone, and even the most fully armored Humvee is no longer safe from the increasingly powerful insurgency bombs.

Marine Corps generals last week disclosed in a footnote to their remarks to Congress that two of their best-armored Humvees were destroyed, while a Marine spokeswoman in Iraq said five marines riding in one such Humvee were killed this month in a roadside bomb attack. Still, thousands of Humvees in Iraq do not have this much protection.

The Pentagon has repeatedly said no vehicle leaves camp without armor. But according to military records and interviews with officials, about half of the Army's 20,000 Humvees have improvised shielding that typically leaves the underside unprotected, while only one in six Humvees used by the Marines is armored at the highest level of protection.

The Defense Department continues to rely on just one small company in Ohio to armor Humvees. And the company, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, has waged an aggressive campaign to hold onto its exclusive deal even as soaring rush orders from Iraq have been plagued by delays. The Marine Corps, for example, is still awaiting the 498 armored Humvees it sought last fall, officials told The Times. In January, when military officials tried to speed production by buying the legal rights to the armor design so they could enlist other venders to help, O'Gara demurred, calling the move a threat to its "current and future competitive position," according to e-mail records obtained from the Army.

Defense Department officials defended their efforts in supplying troops with armored vehicles, saying they have managed to convert a largely unarmored fleet into one in which every vehicle in combat has some level of shielding. "We are constantly assessing and making the necessary adjustments to make sure they have the best possible protection this country can provide," said a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan G. Whitman, adding that no amount of armor would defeat the insurgency's biggest bombs. He said Mr. Rumsfeld had ridden in many types of vehicles, including Humvees, and "travels in whatever vehicle the commander feels is appropriate."

The Defense Department created a task force last winter that is charged with revamping its entire fleet of light vehicles, including the Humvee. Some say these efforts, however resolute, will suffer if the Pentagon does not also overhaul its underlying procurement system. "There's been a confluence of factors that colluded to keep this system hidebound," said Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller until May 2004. "It's going to take a joint effort by Congress and the executive branch working in good faith, and I underline good faith, to bring about a change."

Old Problems, New Details

By the time an Army National Guard member complained to Mr. Rumsfeld in December that troops were still scrounging for steel to fortify their Humvees, the Pentagon's troubles with armoring vehicles had been years in the making. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of insurgencies more than a decade earlier had changed the dynamics of war for American troops. The problem came into bloody relief in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 when militia members cornered and killed 18 American soldiers who were trying to capture a warlord's top assistants using Black Hawk helicopters and unarmored Humvees.

At an Army command center in Warren, Mich., John D. Weaver saw the events unfold and set out to revamp the light-vehicle program that he managed. One option came from executives at O'Gara, who proposed adding the extra steel shielding to Humvees. Mr. Weaver praised the effort but foresaw some flaws, he said in interviews. Because the Humvee's hull is flat, its underbelly absorbs the force of blasts more readily than combat vehicles with angled bodies. Moreover, the chassis can carry only so much armor, leaving the rear more exposed.

And while land mines were the biggest threat at the time, Mr. Weaver said his group began worrying about a more insidious one: a fragmentation mine called the M-18 Claymore. Developed by the United States for the Vietnam War, the device can be remotely detonated to hurl its 700 steel spheres at any part of a passing vehicle - much like the improvised devices that insurgents are using in Iraq. That means the armored Humvee is vulnerable to a timed attack that focuses on its underbelly or rear, Mr. Weaver said. Its box shape also makes it less able to deflect low-flying bullets.

"We need to invest more in the details of the design, to integrate state-of-the-art material, which, while costing more, weighs less and provides greater levels of protection," Mr. Weaver wrote in a paper presented to the Army's 1996 armor conference at Fort Knox, Ky. "Finally, we must overcome the paradigm that wheels are cheap and 'throw away.' The vehicle may be, but the occupants are not."

By 1997, when Mr. Weaver left his post, he was helping draft an Army mandate requiring new vehicles like the M1117. "I'm not sure anybody got their arms around what was needed," he said. By 1999, the Army began buying a limited number of M1117's. Three years later, it canceled the program. At roughly $700,000 each, the M1117 is considerably more expensive than the current $140,000 price for an armored Humvee.

"This decision is based upon budget priorities," Claude M. Bolton Jr., an assistant Army secretary, wrote to Congress in 2002. Existing vehicles, he added, can be used instead "without exposing our soldiers to an unacceptable level of risk." Yet the military was reluctant to mass-produce the armored Humvee, with many in the Army agreeing that the vehicle made little tactical sense. By the time the Iraq war started, the Army had been ordering only 360 armored Humvees a year. "We never intended to up-armor all the Humvees," said Les Brownlee, who was the acting Army secretary from 2001 until late last year. "The Humvee is a carrier and derives its advantage from having cross-country mobility, and when you load it down with armor plating, you lose that." But just months into the war in Iraq, it was lives the Pentagon was losing, and it reached for the quickest solution.

Clinging to a Contract

What the Defense Department thought would be the easiest option turned out otherwise. The Humvee chassis is rapidly made on a vast assembly line near South Bend, Ind., by AM General. But before its vehicles can be rushed to Iraq, they are trucked four and a half hours to O'Gara's shop in Fairfield, in southern Ohio - which had 94 people armoring one Humvee a day when the war began. There, the Humvees are partly dismantled so the armor can be added. "Clearly, if you could have started from scratch you wouldn't be doing it that way," Mr. Brownlee said in a recent interview.

In February 2004, Mr. Brownlee visited the O'Gara plant and asked the company to increase production, gradually pushing its monthly output to 450 from 220 vehicles. The Defense Department also wanted to contract with other companies to make armor. Determined to hold onto its exclusive contract, O'Gara began lobbying Capitol Hill. Among those it drew to its side was Brian T. Hart, an outspoken father of a soldier who was killed in October 2003 while riding in a Humvee. Early last year, as a guest on a national radio show, Mr. Hart urged the Pentagon to involve more armor makers. Two weeks later a lobbyist for O'Gara approached him. "He informed me that the company had more than enough capacity," Mr. Hart says. "There was no need to second-source." Mr. Hart then redirected his efforts to help the company push Congress into forcing the Pentagon to buy more armored Humvees. With support from both parties, the company has received more than $1 billion in the past 18 months in military armoring contracts.

Meanwhile, the Army did not give up on trying to speed production by involving more armor makers. Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly said several armor companies were eager to be part of a plan to produce armored Humvees entirely on AM General's assembly line. In January, when it asked O'Gara to name its price for the design rights for the armor, the company balked and suggested instead that the rights be placed in escrow for the Army to grab should the company ever fail to perform. "Let's try this again," an Army major replied to the company in an e-mail message. "The question concerned the cost, not a request for an opinion."

The Army has dropped the matter for now, General O'Reilly said, adding that he hoped to have other companies making armor by next April. Robert F. Mecredy, president of the aerospace and defense group at Armor Holdings, the parent company of O'Gara, acknowledged that the company was protecting its commercial interests. But, he said, the company has proved it can do the Humvee work and he blamed the Defense Department for delays. Military officials concede that it sometimes took months for requests made in Iraq to filter through the Defense Department. O'Gara says it has armored nearly 7,200 Humvees since the war began, and while there is a persistent need for more in Iraq, the company stresses that the Pentagon keeps changing its orders: from 3,600 in the fall of 2003 to 8,105 last year to more than 10,000 today.

Asked why the Marine Corps is still waiting for the 498 Humvees it ordered last year, O'Gara acknowledged that it told the Marines it was backed up with Army orders, and has only begun filling the Marines' request this month. But the company says the Marine Corps never asked it to rush. The Marine Corps denies this, but acknowledges that it did not get the money to actually place the order until this February. Officials now say they need to buy 2,600 to replace their Humvees in Iraq that still have only improvised armor.

Beyond the Humvee

With insurgents using increasingly powerful bombs and bullets, American troops in Iraq have been looking beyond the Humvee. When the Marine Corps returned to Iraq last year, it settled on the Cougar as a superior vehicle to perform one of its main jobs: searching the roads for improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. The Cougar can take more than twice the explosive punch as the armored Humvee and deflect .50-caliber armor piercing bullets. British troops had used the vehicle during the invasion.

The Marines used a new ordering method called the Urgent Universal Need Statement, which allows it to skip competitive bidding, to speed the process, officials said. Even at that, the Marines Corps took two months to complete a product study, its records show. The contract took two more months to prepare. By then, one of its units in Iraq, Company E of the First Marine Division, was suffering the highest casualty rate of the war; more than half of the 21 marines killed were riding in Humvees with improvised armor or none at all.

When the Cougar order was completed in April 2004, the Marine Corps got only enough money from the Iraq war fund to buy 15 of the 27 Cougars it wanted. "This start-stop game is driving everybody nuts," Michael Aldrich, an executive with the Cougar's maker, Force Protection, said in a recent interview. Marine Corps officials, who have high praise for the Cougars they have, said they needed to move cautiously for fear of overwhelming the company, which had only 39 workers. It now has 250 and is racing to fill a new order for 122 Cougars, at $630,000 apiece, by next February. "I think we are moving about as fast as we could move," Mr. Aldrich said. "It's the chicken and egg. If you don't have the order you can't make the investment, and there are extremely long lead times" on the components. Wars are always tricky affairs for military contractors that are asked to ramp up overnight. But for this and other makers of armored vehicles, the Iraq war has been especially challenging.

To get Congress's attention last year, Mr. Aldrich compiled maps that showed the number of troops from each state who had died in Iraq in vehicles that were inadequately armored. "I got some very open pupils and a couple of gasps and a couple of questions on who I had showed this to," said Mr. Aldrich, who presented his findings during the fall election campaign when the issue of equipping troops became a focus of intense debate. "The Republicans wanted to know if I showed it to the Democrats, and the Democrats wanted to know if I showed it to the Republicans."

The M1117, made by Textron in Louisiana, had advocates in that state's senators, who told Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, in a September 2003 letter that the vehicle was superior to the armored Humvee in blast and bullet protection. Still, the M1117 did not shake off its 2002 cancellation until last summer, when the Army began placing a series of orders totaling 290. The company, which will make 16 vehicles this month, has been asked to more than triple that pace by next March, Textron officials said.

Labock Technologies, which makes the Rhino Runner in Israel, thought it had the best advertising ever. Besides posting photographs of Mr. Rumsfeld aboard the Rhino at Abu Ghraib, the company has pictures of a shackled Saddam Hussein going to court last summer, with the headline: "So safe. ... some V.I.P. won't ride anything else."

The Defense Department says some military personnel are using the privately owned Rhinos that run the gantlet of bombs on the airport road. But with the Army not accepting the company's test results, and Labock not wanting to destroy a Rhino on the chance of getting orders, some soldiers in Iraq are doing their own lobbying. Last month, the company says, an Army colonel and two other soldiers at Camp Victory in Baghdad picked up a satellite phone and called Labock at its Florida office to pepper the company with questions about performance, price and how fast it could deliver. Mark Dunlap, a company executive, said in recounting the exchange, "They said they would run it up their chain of command."

Citation: Michael Moss, "Safer Vehicles for Soldiers: A Tale of Delays and Glitches," New York Times, 26 June 2005; Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/international/middleeast/26armor.html?pagewanted=4

From Solzhenitsyn's Gulag: The Simplest Methods which Break the Will

An excerpt on interrogation methods from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

Excerpted by Calgacus*

Citation: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York, NY: Perennial, 2002), pp. 44-55. Buy this book: http://www.harpercollins.com/global_scripts/product_catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060007761

In The Gulag Solzhenitsyn writes:

Let us try to list some of the simplest methods which break the will and the character of the prisoner without leaving marks on his body Let us begin with psychological methods.....

1. First of all: night. Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night? Why, from their very earliest years, did the Organs select the night? Because at night, the prisoner, torn from sleep, even though he has not yet been tortured by sleepless-ness, lacks his normal daytime equanimity and common sense. He is more vulnerable.

2. Persuasion in a sincere tone is the very simplest method. Why play at cat and mouse, so to speak? After all, having spent some time among others undergoing interrogation, the prisoner has come to see what the situation is. And so the interrogator says to him in a lazily friendly way: "Look, you're going to get a prison term whatever happens. But if you resist, you'll croak right here in prison, you'll lose your health. But if you go to camp, you'll have fresh air and sunlight. So why not sign right now?" Very logical. And those who agree and sign are smart, if _ if the matter concerns only themselves! But that's rarely so. A struggle is inevitable....

3. Foul language is not a clever method, but it can have a powerful impact on people who are well brought up, refined, delicate. I know of two cases involving priests, who capitulated to foul language alone. One of them, in the Butyrki in 1944, was being interrogated by a woman. At first when he'd come back to our cell he couldn't say often enough how polite she was. But once he came back very despondent, and for a long time he refused to tell us how, with her legs crossed high, she had begun to curse. (I regret that I cannot cite one of her little phrases here.)

4. Psychological contrast was sometimes effective: sudden reversals of tone, for example. For a whole or part of the interrogation period, the interrogator would be extremely friendly, addressing the prisoner formally by first name and patronymic, and promising everything. Suddenly he would brandish a paperweight and shout: "Foo, you rat! I'll put nine grams of lead in your skull!" And he would advance on the accused, clutching hands outstretched as if to grab him by the hair, fingernails like needles. (This worked very, very well with women prisoners.)

Or as a variation on this: two interrogators would take turns. One would shout and bully. The other would be friendly, almost gentle. Each time the accused entered the office he would tremble-which would it be? He wanted to do everything to please the gentle one because of his different manner, even to the point of signing and confessing to things that had never happened.

5. Preliminary humiliation was another approach. In the famous cellars of the Rostov-on-the-Don GPU (House 33), which were lit by lenslike insets of thick glass in the sidewalk above the former storage basement, prisoners awaiting interrogation were made to lie face down for several hours in the main corridor and forbidden to raise their heads or make a sound. They lay this way, like Moslems at prayer, until the guard touched a shoulder and took them off to interrogation. Another ease: At the Lubyanka, Aleksandra O_-va refused to give the testimony demanded of her. She was transferred to Lefortovo. In the admitting office, a woman jailer ordered her to undress, allegedly for a medical examination, took away her clothes, and locked her in a "box" naked. At that point the men jailers began to peer through the peephole and to appraise her female attributes with loud laughs. If one were systematically to question former prisoners, many more such examples would certainly emerge. They all had but a single purpose: to dishearten and humiliate.

6. Any method of inducing extreme confusion in the accused might be employed. Here is how F. I. V. from Krasnogorsk, Moscow Province, was interrogated. {This was reported by I. A. P__ev.} During the interrogation, the interrogator, a woman, undressed in front of him by stages (a striptease!), all the time continuing the interrogation as if nothing were going on. She walked about the room and came close to him and tried to get him to give in. Perhaps this satisfied some personal quirk in her, but it may also have been cold-blooded calculation, an attempt to get the accused so muddled that he would sign. And she was in no danger. She had her pistol, and she had her alarm bell.

7. Intimidation was very widely used and very varied. It was often accompanied by enticement and by promises which were, of course, false. In 1924: "If you don't confess, you'll go to the Solovetsky Islands. Anybody who confesses is turned loose." In 1944: "Which camp you'll be sent to depends on us. Camps are different. We've got hard-labor camps now. If you confess, you'll go to an easy camp. If you're stubborn, you'll get twenty-five years in handcuffs in the mines!" Another form of intimidation was threatening a prisoner with a prison worse than the one he was in. "If you keep on being stubborn, we'll send you to Lefortovo" (if you are in the Lubyanka), "to Sukhanovka" (if you are at Lefortovo). "They'll find another way to talk to you there." You have already gotten used to things where you are; the regimen seems to be not so bad; and what kind of torments await you elsewhere? Yes, and you also have to be transported there. . . . Should you give in?

Intimidation worked beautifully on those who had not yet been arrested but had simply received an official summons to the Bolshoi Dom-the Big House. He (or she) still had a lot to lose. He (or she) was frightened of everything-that they wouldn't let him (or her) out today, that they would confiscate his (or her) belongings or apartment. He would be ready to give all kinds of testimony and make all kinds of concessions in order to avoid these dangers. She, of course, would be ignorant of the Criminal Code, and, at the very least, at the start of the questioning they would push a sheet of paper in front of her with a fake citation from the Code: "I have been warned that for giving false testimony _ five years of imprisonment." (In actual fact, under Article 95, it is two years.) "For refusal to give testimony-five years . . ." (In actual fact, under Article 92, it is up to three months.) Here, then, one more of the interrogator's basic methods has entered the picture and will continue to re-enter it.

8. The lie. We lambs were forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like. Those articles of the law did not apply to him. We had even lost the yardstick with which to gauge: what does he get for lying? He could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends-and it would be just a skillful interrogation technique.

Intimidation through enticement and lies was the fundamental method for bringing pressure on the relatives of the arrested person when they were called in to give testimony. "If you don't tell us such and such" (whatever was being asked), "it's going to be the worse for him_. You'll be destroying him completely." (How hard for a mother to hear that!) "Signing this paper" (pushed in front of the relatives) "is the only way you can save him" (destroy him).

9. Playing on one's affection for those one loved was a game that worked beautifully on the accused as well. It was the most effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved. (Oh, how foresighted was the saying: "A man's family are his enemies.") Remember the Tatar who bore his sufferings-his own and those of his wife-but could not endure his daughter's! In 1930, Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: "We'll arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics!" And that was a woman!

They would threaten to arrest everyone you loved. Sometimes this would be done with sound effects: Your wife has already been arrested, but her further fate depends on you. They are questioning her in the next room just listen! And through the wall you can actually hear a woman weeping and screaming. (After all, they all sound alike; you're hearing it through a wall; and you're under terrific strain and not in a state to play the expert on voice identification. Sometimes they simply play a recording of the voice of a "typical wife"-soprano or contralto -a labor-saving device suggested by some inventive genius.) And then, without fakery, they actually show her to you through a glass door, as she walks along in silence, her head bent in grief. Yes! Your own wife in the corridors of State Security! You have destroyed her by your stubbornness! She has already been arrested! (In actual fact, she has simply been summoned in connection with some insignificant procedural question and sent into the corridor at just the right moment, after being told: "Don't raise your head, or you'll be kept here!") Or they give you a letter to read, and the handwriting is exactly like hers: "I renounce you! After the filth they have told me about you, I don't need you any more!" (And since such wives do exist in our country, and such letters as well, you are left to ponder in your heart: Is that the kind of wife she really is?)

Just as there is no classification in nature with rigid boundaries, it is impossible rigidly to separate psychological methods from physical ones. Where, for example, should we classify the following amusement?

10. Sound effects. The accused is made to stand twenty to twentyfive feet away and is then forced to speak more and more loudly and to repeat everything. This is not easy for someone already weakened to the point of exhaustion. Or two megaphones are constructed of rolledup cardboard, and two interrogators, coming close to the prisoner, bellow in both ears: "Confess, you rat!" The prisoner is deafened; sometimes he actually loses his sense of hearing. But this method is uneconomical. The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking up new ideas.

11. Tickling. This is also a diversion. The prisoner's arms and legs are bound or held down, and then the inside of his nose is tickled with a feather. The prisoner writhes; it feels as though someone were drilling into his brain.

12. A cigarette is put out on the accused's skin (already mentioned above).

13. Light effects involve the use of an extremely bright electric light in the small, white-walled cell or "box" in which the accused is being held-a light which is never extinguished. (The electricity saved by the economies of schoolchildren and housewives!) Your eyelids become inflamed, which is very painful. And then in the interrogation room searchlights are again directed into your eyes.

14. Here is another imaginative trick: On the eve of May 1, 1933, in the Khabarovsk GPU, for twelve hours-all night-Ghebotaryev was not interrogated, no, but was simply kept in a continual state of being led to interrogation. "Hey, you-hands behind your back!" They led him out of the cell, up the stairs quickly, into the interrogator's office. The guard left. But the interrogator, without asking one single question, and sometimes without even allowing Chebotaryev to sit down, would pick up the telephone: "`Take away the prisoner from 107!" And so they came to get him and took him back to his cell. No sooner had he lain down on his board bunk than the lock rattled: "Chebotaryev! To interrogation. Hands behind your back!" And when he got there: "Take away the prisoner from 107!"

For that matter, the methods of bringing pressure to bear can begin a long time before the interrogator's office.

15. Prison begins with the box, in other words, what amounts to a closet or packing case. The human being who has just been taken from freedom, still in a state of inner turmoil, ready to explain, to argue, to struggle, is, when he first sets foot in prison, clapped into a "box," which sometimes has a lamp and a place where he can sit down, but which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours, or for half a day, or a day. During those hours he knows absolutely nothing! Will he perhaps be confined there all his life? He has never in his life encountered anything like this, and he cannot guess at the outcome. Those first hours are passing when everything inside him is still ablaze from the unstilled storm in his heart. Some become despondent-and that's the time to subject them to their first interrogation. Others become angry-and that, too, is all to the good, for they may insult the interrogator right at the start or make a slip, and it will be all the easier to cook up their case.

16. When boxes were in short supply, they used to have another method. In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutinskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from it. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours!

Then again, as a variation, the prisoner can be forced to sit on a tall chair, of the kind used in laboratories, so that his feet do not reach the floor. They become very numb in this position. He is left sitting that way from eight to ten hours.

Or else, during the interrogation itself, when the prisoner is out in plain view, he can be forced to sit in this way: as far forward as possible on the front edge ("Move further forward! Further still!") of the chair so that he is under painful pressure during the entire interrogation. He is not allowed to stir for several hours. Is that all? Yes, that's all. Just try it yourself!

17. Depending on local conditions, a divisional pit can be substituted for the box, as was done in the Gorokhovets army camps during World War II, The prisoner was pushed into such a pit, ten feet in depth, six and a half feet in diameter; and beneath the open sky, rain or shine, this pit was for several days both his cell and his latrine. And ten and a half ounces of bread, and water, were lowered to him on a cord. Imagine yourself in this situation just after you've been arrested, when you're all in a boil.

Either identical orders to all Special Branches of the Red Army or else the similarities of their situations in the field led to broad use of this method. Thus, in the 36th Motorized Infantry Division, a unit which took part in the battle of Khalkhin-Gol, and which was encamped in the Mongolian desert in 1941, a newly arrested prisoner was, without explanation, given a spade by Chief of the Special Branch Samulyev and ordered to dig a pit the exact dimensions of a grave. (Here is a hybridization of physical and psychological methods.) When the prisoner had dug deeper than his own waist, they ordered him to stop and sit down on the bottom: his head was no longer visible. One guard kept watch over several such pits and it was as though he were surrounded by empty space. They kept the accused in this desert with no protection from the Mongolian sun and with no warm clothing against the cold of the night, but no tortures-why waste effort on tortures? The ration they gave was three and a half ounces of bread per day and one glass of water. Lieutenant Chulpenyev, a giant, a boxer, twenty-one years old, spent a month imprisoned this way. Within ten days he was swarming with lice. After fifteen days he was summoned to interrogation for the first time.

18. The accused could be compelled to stand on his knees-not in some figurative sense, but literally: on his knees, without sitting back on his heels, and with his back upright. People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator's office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four or forty-eight hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another-this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.) What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? One already broken, already inclined to surrender. It was also a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Which shows that the method also worked well on proud people_.

19. Then there is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated-because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way-so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn't lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.

20. During all these tortures which involved standing for three, four, and five days, they ordinarily deprived a person of water.

The most natural thing of all is to combine the psychological and physical methods. It is also natural to combine all the preceding methods with:

21. Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times. They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright light, terror, and the unknown -what other tortures are needed!?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own "L" (As in Chekhov's "I Want to Sleep," but there it was much easier, for there the girl could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in just a minute would revive and refresh the brain.) A person deprived of sleep acts half-unconsciously or altogether unconsciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.

They used to say: "You are not truthful in your testimony, and therefore you will not be allowed to sleep:"" Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Here is how one victim-who had just sat out days in a box infested with `bedbugs-describes his feelings after this torture: "Chill from great loss of blood. Irises of the eyes dried out as if someone were holding a red-hot iron in from of them. Tongue swollen from thirst and prickling as from a hedgehog at the slightest movement. Throat racked by spasms of' swallowing."

Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection-something unheard of anyway-were to strike on the morrow.

"They didn't let you sleep? Well, after all, this is not supposed to be a vacation resort. The Security officials were awake too!" (They would catch up on their sleep during the day. j One can say that sleeplessness became the universal method in the Organs. From being one among many tortures, it became an integral part of the system of State Security; it was the cheapest possible method and did not require the posting of sentries. In all the interrogation prisons the prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute from reveille till taps. (In Sukhanovka and several other prisons used specifically for interrogation, the cot was folded into the wall during the day; in others, the prisoners were simply forbidden to lie down, and even to close their eyes while seated.) Since the major interrogations were all conducted at night, it was automatic: whoever was undergoing interrogation got no sleep for at least five days and nights. (Saturday and Sunday nights, the interrogators themselves tried to get some rest.)

22. The above method was further implemented by an assembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a continuous interrogation.

23. The bedbug-infested box has already been mentioned. In the dark closet made of wooden planks, there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bedbugs, which had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner's jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling. At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur.

24. Punishment cells. No matter how hard it was in the ordinary cell, the punishment cells were always worse. And on return from there the ordinary cell always seemed like paradise. In the punishment cell a human being was systematically worn down by starvation and also, usually, by cold. (In Sukhanovka Prison there were also hot punishment cells.) For example, the Lefortovo punishment cells were entirely unheated. There were radiators in the corridor only, and in this "heated" corridor the guards on duty walked in felt boots and padded jackets. The prisoner was forced to undress down to his underwear, and sometimes to his undershorts, and he was forced to spend from three to five days in the punishment cell without moving (since it was so confining). He received hot gruel on the third day only. For the first few minutes you were convinced you'd not be able to last an hour. But, by some miracle, a human being would indeed sit out his five days, perhaps acquiring in the course of it an illness that would last him the rest of his life.

There were various aspects to punishment cells-as, for instance, dampness and water. In the Chernovtsy Prison after the war, Masha G. was kept barefooted for two hours and up to her ankles in icy water -confess! (She was eighteen years old, and how she feared for her feet! She was going to have to live with them a long time.)

25. Should one consider it a variation of the punishment cell when a prisoner was locked in an alcove? As long ago as 1933 this was one of the ways they tortured S. A. Chebotaryev in the Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him naked in a concrete alcove in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, nor turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water onto his scalp-a classic torture-which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day apparently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been, or what had happened. For a whole month he was useless even for interrogation.

26. Starvation has already been mentioned in combination with other methods. Nor was it an unusual method: to starve the prisoner into confession. Actually, the starvation technique, like interrogation at night, was an integral element in the entire system of coercion. The miserly prison bread ration, amounting to ten and a half ounces in the peacetime year of 1933, and to one pound in 1945 in the Lubyanka, and permitting or prohibiting food parcels from one's family and access to the commissary, were universally applied to everyone. But there was also the technique of intensified hunger: for example, Chulpenyev was kept for a month on three and a half ounces of bread, after which-when he had just been brought in from the pit-the interrogator Sokol placed in front of him a pot of thick borscht, and half a loaf of white bread sliced diagonally. (What does it matter, one might ask, how it was sliced? But Chulpenyev even today will insist that it was really sliced very attractively.) However, he was not given a thing to eat. How ancient it all is, how medieval, how primitive! The only thing new about it was that it was applied in a socialist society! Others, too, tell about such tricks. They were often tried. But we are going to cite another case involving Chebotaryev because it combined so many methods. They put him in the interrogator's office for seventy-two hours, and the only thing he was allowed was to be taken to the toilet. For the rest, they allowed him neither food nor drink even though there was water in a carafe right next to him. Nor was he permitted to sleep. Throughout there were three interrogators in the office, working in shifts. One kept writing something-silently, without disturbing the prisoner. The second slept on the sofa, and the third walked around the room, and as soon as Chebotaryev fell asleep, beat him instantly. Then they switched roles. (Maybe they themselves were being punished for failure to deliver.) And then, all of a sudden, they brought Chebotaryev a meal: fat Ukrainian borscht, a chop, fried potatoes, and red wine in a crystal carafe. But because Chebotaryev had had an aversion to alcohol all his life, he refused to drink the wine, and the interrogator couldn't go too far in forcing him to, because that would have spoiled the whole game. After he had eaten, they said to him: "Now here's what you have testified to in the presence of two witnesses. Sign here." In other words, he was to sign what had been silently composed by one interrogator in the presence of another, who had been asleep, and a third, who had been actively working. On the very first page Chebotaryev learned he had been on intimate terms with all the leading Japanese generals and that he had received espionage assignments from all of them. He began to cross out whole pages. They beat him up and threw him out. Blaginin, another Chinese Eastern Railroad man, arrested with him, was put through the same thing; but he drank the wine and, in a state of pleasant intoxication, signed the confession-and was shot. (Even one tiny glass can have an enormous effect on a famished man-and that was a whole carafe.)

27. Beatings-of a kind that leave no marks. They use rubber truncheons, and they use wooden mallets and small sandbags. It is very, very painful when they hit a bone-for example, an interrogator's jackboot on the shin, where the bone lies just beneath the skin. They beat Brigade Commander Karpunich-Braven for twenty-one days in a row. And today he says: "Even after thirty years all my bones ache and my head too." In recollecting his own experience and the stories of others, he counts up to fifty-two methods of torture. Here is one: They grip the hand in a special vise so that the prisoner's palm lies flat on the desk-and then they hit the joints with the thin edge of a ruler. And one screams! Should we single out particularly the technique by which teeth are knocked out? They knocked out eight of Karpunich's.

As everyone knows, a blow of the fist in the solar plexus, catching the victim in the middle of a breath, leaves no mark whatever. The Lefortovo Colonel Sidorov, in the postwar period, used to take a "penalty kick" with his overshoes at the dangling genitals of male prisoners. Soccer players who at one time or another have been hit in the groin by a ball know what that kind of blow is like. There is no pain comparable to it, and ordinarily the recipient loses consciousness.

28. In the Novorossisk NKVD they invented a machine for squeezing fingernails. As a result it could be observed later at transit prisons that many of those from Novorossisk had lost their fingernails.

29. And what about the strait jacket?

30. And breaking the prisoner's back? (As in that same Khabarovsk GPU in 1933.)

31. Or bridling (also known as "the swan dive")? This was a Sukhanovka method-also used in Archangel, where the interrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A long piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner's jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking-and without water and food for two days!

Is it necessary to go on with the list? Is there much left to enumerate? What won't idle, well-fed, unfeeling people invent?

* Marginally edited by Calgacus, who has been employed as a researcher in the national security field for 20 years.

Afghans flee army over Taliban and low morale

Tom Coghlan
The Telegraph
06 June 2005


Thousands of soldiers are deserting Afghanistan's new British- and American-trained national army, their morale undermined by poor conditions and the threat from the Taliban.

Since the 205th Afghan National Army corps became the first unit of the new national army to be deployed outside Kabul, joining US forces fighting the Taliban in the south of the country, half of its strength has deserted.


"Between 1,200 and 1,500 have run away since September," said one officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, at the 205th corps base near Kandahar. "Morale is going down fast. Four to six hundred soldiers have deserted in the last two months." The ANA has surprised many Afghans by successfully integrating the country's diverse ethnic factions, all of which were responsible for reciprocal human rights violations in the civil war of the 1990s.


But nationally, of 31,000 men who have been trained for the national army only 20,000 currently remain with their units. In line with plans for a reduction of foreign troop numbers the army is supposed to reach a target strength. The army is meanwhile under pressure to shoulder greater responsibility in the battle with the Taliban from a US military that is overstretched globally. The Bush administration hopes to start reducing its presence in the country next year.


Since March Afghan forces have lost dozens of men to roadside ambushes as the Taliban have confounded predictions of their imminent demise and survived the defection of dozens of mid-ranking members.

In Taliban stronghold provinces of Zabul, Uruzgan and Kandahar ANA troops, lacking the training, body armour and firepower of their US counterparts, are vulnerable to attack.


Morale has also been hit by rows over money. Afghanistan has no banking system so soldiers' families must wait for them to return from duty with their wages, which start at £40 a month.


It is a decent wage in Afghanistan but for many soldiers the delay is putting their families at risk of starvation. "Everybody wants to run away," said one sergeant. "We cannot tolerate this."

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Tom Coghlan, "Afghans flee army over Taliban and low morale", The Telegraph, 09 June 2005. Original URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/09/wtal09.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/09/ixworld.html

Prescient insurgency experts want tactical changes

Stephen J. Hedges
Chicago Tribune
07 June 2005


WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Nearly 16 years ago, a group of four military officers and a civilian predicted the rise of terrorism and anti-American insurgencies with chilling accuracy.

The group said U.S. military technology was so advanced that foreign forces would be unlikely to challenge it directly, and it forecast that future foes would be non-state insurgents and terrorists whose weapons would be suicide car bombs, not precision-guided weapons.

"Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers," the group wrote in a 1989 article that appeared in a professional military journal. "A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk - a car that looks like every other car."

The five men dubbed their theory "Fourth Generation Warfare" and warned that the U.S. military had to adapt. In the years since, the original group of officers, joined by a growing number of officers and scholars within the military, has pressed Pentagon leaders to acknowledge this emerging threat.

But rather than adopting a new strategy, the generals and civilian leaders in the Defense Department have continued to support conventional, high-intensity conflict and the expensive weapons that go with it. That is happening, critics say, despite ongoing, lethal insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They don't understand this kind of warfare," said Greg Wilcox, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and an open critic of Pentagon policies. "They want to return to war as they envision it. That's not going to happen."

Wilcox is just one of a number of maverick officers, active and retired, who have been agitating for change. Others include Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, whose recent book on the subject has become required reading in some units, as well as Marine Col. G.I. Wilson, currently serving in Iraq, and H. John Poole, a retired Marine who has written extensively on insurgencies.

Together they make up the public face of a much larger debate within the U.S. military over whether the Defense Department is doing enough to train troops to fight insurgents, now and in the future.

It is a debate with enormous consequences. Though most of the more than 1,350 American combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by low-tech insurgent weaponry such as roadside bombs, the Army plans to spend more than $120 billion in the next decade on a future combat system of digitally linked vehicles, weapons and unmanned aircraft. It is based largely on conventional warfare theory.

The Army also is reorganizing its 10 divisions into 43 more flexible, 5,000-soldier brigades that can be plunked down in a war zone. But the weapons and training those forces receive still will lean heavily toward the traditional view of conflict, with heavy tanks, helicopters, close air support and terrain-holding troops.

The mavericks' Fourth Generation Warfare theory is about as far as one can get from current Pentagon doctrine. But many of the captains, corporals and privates fighting today have adopted the mavericks' theories and tactics.

"So much of it was validated that it's theoretically right on the money," said Jim Roussell, a chief warrant officer in the Marine reserves who focuses on gang crime in Chicago as a sergeant in the city's Police Department. He recently returned from Iraq after leading a Marine unit against insurgents.

Army and Marine Corps officials in Washington declined to answer questions discussing the changes suggested by the maverick officers.

But in November, the Army issued a revised field manual on fighting insurgencies that had not been updated in more than a decade. It is being disseminated and has gotten a mixed reception.

"We really have a lot of institutional friction right now," said Lt. Col. Jan Horvath, the manual's primary author. "There are a number of junior officers who understand this." Senior officers, Horvath said, have been less accepting.

Still, some units are adapting, according to officers in Iraq and back home.

The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, for instance, last month began its second tour of Iraq after months of innovative training, including a requirement that all officers and soldiers receive basic Arabic language and culture training.

"It's working," said Col. H.R. McMaster, the regiment's commander, who has lectured at U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and written a book about the failures of the Vietnam War. "It's a hard problem. Nothing is easy over here. But I'm telling you we're getting after it, we're pursuing the enemy, we are totally on the offensive right now."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office has given irregular warfare a "higher priority" in the upcoming 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, according to an excerpt of the document. But the report will not be completed until next year. Real war, the mavericks point out, is happening now.

The Chinese war philosopher "Sun Tzu had it right," said one Army lieutenant colonel who spent a year fighting insurgents in Iraq and who requested anonymity. "If you know your enemy and if you know yourself, you'll never lose. We know about half of what we should about the enemy, and we don't know ourselves. We can't figure out what kind of Army we want to be."

The 1989 article that first broached the rise of terrorism and insurgencies sprang from a group of officers who met regularly to discuss tactics and strategy. The group gathered in the Alexandria, Va., home of William Lind, a military analyst and former Senate aide who is director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism.

Lind already had written about the first three generations of modern warfare: Napoleonic-style lines of battle, World War I trench conflict and the swift-moving "maneuver" warfare that the German army displayed in World War II. In the 1980s, the Marine Corps adopted maneuver warfare as its official doctrine.

What, the group wondered, would be the next generation of war?

The group - Lind, Wilson, John Schmitt of the Marines, and Keith Nightengale and Joseph Sutton of the Army - put its collective answer in a short article that was published in the October 1989 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. As the Soviet Union faltered, they wrote, new insurgencies and terrorist groups could erupt in countries with an "Islamic or Asiatic tradition."

"Mass, of men or fire power, will no longer be an overwhelming factor," they wrote. "In fact, mass may become a disadvantage, as it will be easy to target. Small, highly maneuverable, agile forces will tend to dominate."

The article marked a radical departure from military thinking. Until then, the word "insurgency" had been virtually banned inside the Pentagon.

In his 1986 book, "The Army and Vietnam," military analyst and Army veteran Andrew Krepinevich details just how reviled a fight against insurgents is among American military leaders. Top Army commanders in Washington, Krepinevich found, brushed aside orders from President John Kennedy in the early 1960s to build a counterinsurgent capability in Vietnam.

And after the war, he said, counterinsurgency theory was purged from the Pentagon. Instead, the military returned to preparing for a conventional war with the Soviet Union.

"In a way, the lesson of Vietnam for the American people and the Army was `No more Vietnams,'" Krepinevich said. "Vietnam was a searing personal experience for the Army, incredibly negative."

After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the mavericks argued that it was less a victory than it appeared. The war was "a throwback to World War II in Europe with updated weapons," they wrote in a 1994 Marine Corps Gazette article. U.S. claims of success, they suggested, only masked the vulnerabilities of lumbering, heavy armor, a notion borne out in 1993 during the U.S. military's misadventure in Somalia.

The Pentagon, though, continued to equip for battlefield warfare, encouraged by a Congress that was more than willing to back big weapons, ships and aircraft programs and the jobs they create.

"There's no money in counterinsurgency," said Hammes, the Marine colonel who has written widely about Fourth Generation Warfare, served in Iraq, and whose recent book, "The Sling and the Stone," has stirred more debate within the military. "It's about language skills. It's about people. It's about a lot of soft money moving over to (the Departments of) State, Commerce, Treasury, and there's no F-22 (fighter jet) in this program."

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Schmitt, a former Marine and a co-author of the 1989 article, was at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on his way to Pittsburgh. Minutes before boarding his flight, he saw a television report that an airliner had hit New York's World Trade Center. He kept watching as the second plane hit.

"I was thinking, `We're at war here,'" said Schmitt, a military consultant based in Champaign, Ill. "This is the new warfare."

The Sept. 11 attacks, Schmitt and others hoped, would bring change within the Pentagon. Even an al-Qaida terrorist Web site referred to the 1989 article, noting that "some American military experts predict a fundamental change in the future form of warfare" and that "this new type of war presents significant difficulties for the Western war machine."

But little changed. The U.S. forces that flowed into Afghanistan in late 2001 and into Iraq in March 2003 were largely conventional.

The American military quickly toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But after those successes, both the Afghan extremists and Saddam's sympathizers transformed into effective insurgencies that the U.S. commanders and troops did not know how to combat.

The mavericks contend that the U.S. response has been a string of classic military mistakes, especially in Iraq.

U.S. forces took over Saddam's palaces and military bases, secluding themselves from ordinary Iraqis and cutting off lines of intelligence. Thousands of innocent Iraqis were wrongfully imprisoned in a ham-handed search for insurgents, breeding contempt for the American occupiers.

Training to fight insurgents lagged. Emphasis instead was put on finding technical solutions - another echo of Vietnam. They include devices that detect roadside explosives placed by insurgents, a proliferation of surveillance drones and the belated armoring of vehicles, which so far has cost more than $600 million.

"Here's an army that went into Iraq in 2003 with exactly the same set of equipment it had in 1991, with very few modifications," said Douglas Macgregor, a tank commander in the first Iraq war who wrote several books about reforming the Army before retiring as a colonel a year ago. "It hasn't produced anything new at all in 20 years."

Still, the mavericks argue that, even today, a number of swift changes could have a deep impact on the way soldiers are fighting.

First, the mavericks call for ground forces to reorganize into distinct, small units - not large, lumbering divisions or expeditionary forces - that will live among Iraqis.

"Why are we still riding around in Humvees?" asks Poole, the retired Marine, whose Posterity Press has published books on counterinsurgent tactics. "In a war like this, you've got to get off the vehicle and into the neighborhood."

Second, more needs to be done to give soldiers language and cultural training, they say, something that officers in the Army and Marine Corps say has recently begun.

A third reform would prescribe a more judicious use of powerful weapons, such as tank rounds and 2,000-pound precision aerial bombs, especially in cities. Insurgencies exploit the deaths of civilians, the mavericks argue.

They say that the most important change would be a new command system, one that bases promotions on initiative rather than obedience and encourages taking risks, recognizing that mistakes will happen.

"One of the things we found in our experiments was the idea of strategic corporals," said Roussell, the Marine reservist and Chicago policeman. "The corporals are capable of doing it. We just need to empower them. We need to organize ourselves to implement it."

The military has taken some small steps toward change, and it is promising more.

Other units are following the lead of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and offering more language and cultural training, as well as a review of tactics - recognition that old rules no longer apply.

Units rotating to Iraq now get several weeks of specialized training at the Army's two national training centers; tactics simulate life among Iraqis, including the use of Iraqi-American role players.

Additional focus has been put on running road checkpoints, detecting roadside explosives and protecting convoys.

But those efforts give new troops just a brief taste of the challenges they will be facing, and they put a heavy emphasis on defensive measures. According to officers who have been involved in counterinsurgent operations, there still is a reluctance among top commanders to acknowledge the nature of the enemy U.S. forces face and what skills American soldiers now need to fight.

"There's definitely the sensation that the Army's holding its breath," said one officer who recently took command of deploying forces, "that this will all blow over, and they can go back to what they want to do."

At the same time, said the officer, who also requested anonymity, younger officers with command of fighting units are making the changes they need to, whether the Pentagon approves or not.

"There's a way the institution does things," he said, "and then there's the way that things are actually done."

Receiving little notice inside the Pentagon, the maverick officers have continued to post their theories, criticisms and extensive PowerPoint briefings on unofficial military Web sites. One notable article last year, written by Marine Col. Wilson, was titled "Iraq - Fourth Generation Warfare Swamp."

The Marine Corps denied permission for Wilson, who is in Iraq, to be interviewed for this article.

Although they differ on the particulars of changing the military, the mavericks agree that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan and Iraq has become a lost opportunity. At best, they say, the outcome of both conflicts is uncertain. Some say they are doomed.

"There's nothing that you can do in Iraq today that will work," said Lind, one of the original Fourth Generation Warfare authors. "That situation is irretrievably lost."

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Stephen J. Hedges, "Prescient insurgency experts want tactical changes", Chicago Tribune, 07 June 2005.

Election, even if a success, is just first difficult step

Matthew B. Stannard and Edward Epstein
San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, January 29, 2005

To many Americans and Iraqis, tomorrow's elections in Iraq are being seen as a major step in the country's march toward full-fledged democracy. On Wednesday, President Bush called it "a grand moment in Iraqi history."

But even if the elections succeed amid continuing violence, the nationwide vote is just the beginning of a tough, uncertain political process that will take another year and possibly much longer to complete, as Bush and other senior administration officials have acknowledged.

"People have to look at these elections as part of the overall transition process," said Washington lawyer Brett McGurk, who, as a legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, helped draft the interim constitution now in effect. "If anybody sees these elections as a panacea or the endgame, then they are not seeing the whole picture."

The picture begins with Iraqis voting tomorrow for a National Assembly, and for local councils in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Separately, Kurds in the north are voting for candidates to the Kurdistan National Council, which has governed the semi-autonomous northernmost regions of Iraq for more than a decade.

The new assembly will assume the day-to-day governing powers currently held by the U.S.-appointed interim government -- including oversight of reconstruction and the Iraqi military -- along with several new ones, including the ability to negotiate international treaties, propose and ratify laws, and enter so-called status of forces agreements that could, for example, determine who has jurisdiction for U.S. troops accused of committing crimes on Iraqi soil.

The assembly will elect a three-member Presidency Council that, in turn, names a prime minister, chooses Cabinet ministers and appoints Federal Supreme Court judges -- all positions with real power, especially the prime minister.

"They'll be running the government on a day-to-day basis," said Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Those will be key interim positions."

Meanwhile, the assembly will have its hands full with perhaps the most critical, and potentially divisive, task of all: writing a new, permanent constitution for Iraq.

"It's shaping the rules for the future. Everything is at stake in those rules," including whether Iraq will be secular or religious, the status of women and the nation's basic political geography, said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. "It's all up for grabs."



McGurk predicts that the drafting will involve "a lot of horse trading, not everybody getting what they want."

Apart from the vexing issues of the role of women and the status of Islam, the constitution will have to decide between a strong federal government with weak local control -- an option probably preferred by lawmakers representing the majority Shiite population -- to a loose confederation of states, an option attractive to the Kurds in the north, who have enjoyed semi-independence for more than a decade. Or any arrangement in between.

The assembly is to prepare a draft of the permanent constitution by Aug. 15 and hold a national referendum on it by Oct. 15 -- a time frame many experts say is dangerously short -- followed by new national elections in December. That deadline can be extended -- once -- by no more than six months if a majority of the National Assembly so requests by Aug. 1.

If the constitution is rejected by the voters -- or by two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces, a mechanism designed mainly to protect Kurdish autonomy over Shiite objections -- the assembly will be dissolved and a new one formed by Dec. 31, with a mandate to write a new constitution within a year.

After that, there are no further extensions, and the future slips into undetermined territory.

"It could be a legal and constitutional conundrum," Brown said.

The key to holding Iraq together, experts say, is for its different religious, ethnic and geographical groups to compromise, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The backroom maneuvering will take three or four weeks after the election before we know how good or bad the situation will be" before the assembly gets organized, he said.

McGurk said the Shiite politicians expected to dominate Iraq's election are not foolish enough to allow the process to self-destruct.

"The Shia political class in Iraq is quite responsible, and I think you will see a lot of outreach to Arab Sunni groups," he said. "The idea that the National Assembly is going to lock the doors, draft the constitution and that's it isn't true."

Even if, as expected, the Arab Sunni turnout is low tomorrow, which some fear could call into question the election's legitimacy, Sunni politicians who have said they will boycott the election have also said in the past few days that they want to participate in the constitutional process.

And McGurk and other experts said the checks and balances built into the process will protect the rights of the minorities.

As for the U.S. military presence, while there is widespread expectation that troop withdrawal negotiations will commence with a new Iraqi government, most of the political leaders expected to do well in the election have said they expect a U.S. force to remain for some time. A senior U.S. Army operations officer said Monday that 120,000 will stay through 2006.

Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives of Cambridge, Mass., said the United States will remain a vital player as the political process unfolds.

"The most powerful political institution in Iraq -- indeed, the only truly powerful one -- is the U.S. Mission. Its resources, organizational capacity and armed might far surpass those at the disposal of the Iraqi government," he wrote in a recently published paper.

But other experts point out that a sovereign Iraqi government is not bound by either U.S. policy or the U.N. resolution that states the mandate for a multinational force on Iraqi territory shall expire Dec. 31.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Matthew B. Stannard and Edward Epstein, "Election, even if a success, is just first difficult step", San Francisco Chronicle, 29 January 2005.

Iraq security forces suffer fatal month

Adrian Blomfield
The Daily Telegraph
02 June 2005


Iraq's security services have suffered their deadliest month since the fall of Saddam Hussein, illustrating the rise in violence in the country.

Yesterday's announcement by the interior ministry gives the lie to suggestions that better intelligence and more arrests had reduced the insurgents' capability to strike.


Random searches have made little impact on insurgent activities Officials reported that at least 220 police officers and soldiers were killed in May, mainly by suicide bombings. The figure does not include potential recruits killed while queuing up to join the forces, a favoured target. "This figure does not even include those killed in the last two or three days," a senior police officer said.

March was the previous deadliest month, with 200 security personnel killed. Nearly 500 civilians were killed in the past month and US forces also suffered badly with 77 military deaths, the highest toll since January. However, an Iraqi defence ministry spokesman said that the insurgency had also suffered, with more than 260 fighters killed during May.

"The figure is more than 260, especially if you consider the 125 killed in Qaim and those killed in Haditha [two US-led operations] and the many suicide bombings last month," he said.

The insurgents seem to be improving the sophistication of their attacks. The ministry yesterday said that one insurgent, posing as a fruit vendor, had sold poisoned watermelons to police officers manning checkpoints on one of the main roads from Baghdad to the north. At least one policeman died.

The UN oil-for-food scandal has claimed its first casualty, with Joseph Stephanides, the head of the UN Security Council Affairs Division, being dismissed for "serious misconduct".

He denied any wrongdoing over the $64 billion programme and said he planned to appeal.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Adrian Blomfield, "Iraq security forces suffer fatal month", The Daily Telegraph, 02 June 2005. Original URL:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/02/wirq02.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/02/ixworld.html