By Eric Schmitt
New York Times
20 September 2004
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - Three months into its new mission, the military command in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces has fewer than half of its permanent headquarters personnel in place, despite having one of the highest-priority roles in Iraq.
Only about 230 of the nearly 600 military personnel required by the headquarters, from lawyers to procurement experts, have been assigned jobs with the group, the Multinational Security Transition Command, military officials in Washington and Iraq said. One officer said the military's Joint Staff had given the armed services until Oct. 15 to fill the remaining jobs, but other officials said those people might not actually be in place until weeks later.
The effect of the headquarters' shortages on the actual training of Iraqi forces is hard to measure, military officials and reconstruction specialists say. But at the least, the gaps mean fewer people to lobby Washington for resources, coordinate with Iraqi officials and get money and equipment into the hands of trainers around the country. Despite recent attacks on Iraqi security forces and their facilities, American officials say Iraqis in search of work are still signing up in large numbers.
Senior military officials in Washington and in the Persian Gulf region say the delay in filling the headquarters jobs stems from the Pentagon's methodical - critics say plodding - approach to establishing a new organization with the extremely complex mission of preparing more than 250,000 members of the Iraqi police, border patrol, national guard and army units for duty.
"It takes time to build these new organizations and to man them," said one military official who has been briefed on the personnel requirements of the group's commander, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus. "The bureaucracy of the process is necessary but time consuming."
Frederick D. Barton, a senior adviser at the Center of Strategic and International Studies here and one of the authors of a new report that assesses Iraqi security and reconstruction measures, said, "The fact that Petraeus, who is really the poster boy for doing things quite well over there, is still building his team shows that this doesn't have that urgency that you've got to have."
Mr. Barton, a former senior United Nations official overseeing refugee affairs, disclosed the shortfalls at a seminar here on Iraq last week, citing an American official in Iraq as the source of the information. Military officials in Washington and Iraq later confirmed the statistics.
Chronic personnel shortages in the headquarters of L. Paul Bremer III, the former senior American administrator of Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American ground commander in the country, hampered their ability to oversee reconstruction and security missions, military officials said.
To ensure that training and equipping Iraqi forces continues apace, General Petraeus, one the Army's most highly regarded officers, has gone to extraordinary lengths to borrow top lawyers, training experts and other specialists from the Pentagon, West Point, American commands worldwide and even from British forces in Iraq, to tide him over until his permanent staff arrives. He is also relying on civilian contractors, officials said.
General Petraeus's efforts are deemed so important that Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, are personally monitoring the command's staffing levels, and ensuring that it gets first-rate temporary help until permanent staff members arrive, military and Pentagon officials said. For example, one of General Myers's top military lawyers is on loan to General Petraeus for six months.
But some lawmakers and reconstruction specialists have criticized the Pentagon's approach, arguing that the train-and-equip mission in Iraq is too important and too urgent to be left to wend its way through the cumbersome military bureaucracy. Those officials say the Pentagon's handling of the headquarters staffing matter reflects serious flaws in how the administration is tackling the increasingly difficult problem of providing security and stability in Iraq.
"This is a damn joke," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee who met with American commanders in Iraq in late June, said in a telephone interview. "Petraeus and the military guys aren't the problem. They know what they need. But there's no sense of urgency in this administration."
Pentagon and State Department officials deny that accusation and insist that training and equipping Iraqi forces to assume more and more responsibility for their country's security is a top priority for the administration and necessary before the 140,000 American forces in Iraq can begin withdrawing.
These officials say the training of Iraqi forces is moving ahead well. "We're making good progress," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told soldiers last week at Fort Campbell, Ky. "They've had some bad setbacks when they weren't fully trained or fully equipped. But for the most part, they are doing a darned good job as their chain of command system is developed."
But on Sunday, four Senate Republicans - Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; John McCain of Arizona; and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - criticized the administration for the problems facing American troops in Iraq.
"We're in trouble, we're in deep trouble in Iraq," Mr. Hagel said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."
The training of Iraqi security forces has become a central issue ahead of the Iraqi election, scheduled for January, and the American election in November. Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers said earlier this month that the American strategy to retake rebel-held strongholds in Iraq, especially in the so-called Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad, would rely on training and equipping enough Iraqis to take a lead role.
But General Myers said the Iraqis would not be ready until the end of the year to join American forces in any assault against the rebel havens and then keep the peace afterward. Some administration officials express concern that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide election that would be seen as legitimate.
The administration said last week that it would shift $1.8 billion from reconstruction projects to law enforcement and security, principally to train and equip an additional 80,000 police officers, border guards and soldiers, and build facilities for them.
As violence increases across Iraq, military officials here report growing tensions between Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and General Petraeus.
Dr. Allawi wants more Iraqi security forces and wants them more quickly, but General Petraeus, mindful of the Iraqis' woeful performance in April against an insurgents in Falluja and Najaf, wants to give them more training before they hit the streets. So far, General Petraeus's view has prevailed, officials said.
Dr. Allawi is said to be eager to get Iraqi troops into battle, and at a recent tour of the American-sponsored training facilities near Baghdad International Airport, he watched as Iraqi recruits drilled.
Evidently pleased, Dr. Allawi told the recruits that their work was just beginning. "There will be battles coming, and we will destroy the enemy," he told the Iraqi soldiers standing before him. "Whatever you need, let me know."
General Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, assumed his new job in June. He works closely with the Iraqi Defense and Interior Ministries, as well as with the American commanders whose troops are conducting much of the training.
Last week, the Army Reserve announced that 800 soldiers from the 98th Division, based in Rochester, N.Y., would be sent to Iraq during the next nine weeks to assume a lead training role. It will be the unit's first overseas deployment since World War II.
General Petraeus inherited a smaller organization when he took over, and he has had to build a broader headquarters largely from scratch. Troops with particular specialties were identified for yearlong tours, and in some cases activated from the Reserve or National Guard.
Commanders in Iraq say General Petraeus's headquarters has provided crucial help in cutting through bureaucratic delays. "They were very helpful in getting us a battalion set of equipment that in the past would have taken much longer to get," Col. Michael Rounds, who commands the Army's Stryker brigade in northern Iraq, said in a telephone interview from Mosul.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are growing steadily. As late as this summer, Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials frequently boasted that the Iraqi ranks had swelled to more than 200,000. Since early August, however, Mr. Rumsfeld has been careful to note that only about half of those forces are sufficiently trained and equipped.
American officials and commanders praised the performance of the Iraqi commando battalion, counterterrorist force and two so-called interventional battalions that fought last month in Najaf against loyalists to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
"Their capabilities are still uneven, but they're improving as we arm and equip them better, improve their infrastructure, give them additional training, and help them weed out the weak leaders," one American general said. "Nothing's quick in Iraq and nothing's easy."
Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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Citation: Eric Schmitt, "Effort to Train New Iraqi Army Is Facing Delays," New York Times, 20 September 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/politics/20army.html?ei=1&en=ddfc996885603220&ex=1096648619&pagewanted=print&position=
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