[antimedia] Retired Flag Officers Conference - Comments from a Navy Rear Admiral (2 star) Retiree

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I received this today from Tom Hayward (former CNO). I think it's well-worth
reading. Phil
 


In early May the fighter squadron that I had the privilege of serving with
in Korea held its biennial reunion in Colorado Springs.  Among our
activities was a several hour session at Fort Carson.  What you will read
below is a replica of our experience.  What we saw and heard was an Army
that was sharp, confident, committed and proud of its role in support of its
mission.  It was a very reassuring experience.
 
Tom
 

 
 
Conference - Comments from a Navy Rear Admiral (2 star) Retiree


 

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Earlier this week I attended a retired general and flag officer conference
at Fort Carson, hosted by MGen Bob Mixon, the 7th Infantry Division
Commander which calls the Fort its home.  For those of you who are
unfamiliar with Ft. Carson, it is a huge installation located to the south
of Colorado Springs; it’s in the process of becoming one of the larger Army
installations in the country (26,000 soldiers); and it is the test location
for the new “modular brigade” concept that will reflect the Army of tomorrow
by 2008.  It is also the home post of the largest number of troopers who
have served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and, regrettably, the
largest number of troopers who have died in combat there over the past three
years.  There are Ft. Carson units going to and returning from the combat
area virtually on a monthly basis.

 

The conference was primarily organized to explain the modular brigade
concept, and it featured a panel of officers who had either very recently
returned from commands in the combat zone or were about to deploy there in
the next two months.  Three of the recent returnees were Colonel H.R.
McMaster, Colonel Rick S., and Captain Walter Szpak.

McMaster is the commander of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, the unit
that, through very innovative and population-friendly tactics, rid the city
of Tal Afar of insurgents.  The mayor of Tal Afar came back to Carson two
weeks ago to thank the troopers and their families personally for “freeing
his people”.  (You say you didn’t hear about that in the mainstream media?)
McMaster is considered the foremost U.S. expert on modern insurgent warfare,
has written a book on the subject which is widely circulated at the war
colleges and staff colleges, and he was asked to testify before Congress
when he returned from the 3rd ACR combat deployment.  He is obviously one of
the great combat leaders that has emerged from the war and is highly
respected (some would say revered) by his troopers and his superiors alike.

 

Colonel S. is assigned to the 10th Special Forces Brigade and he headed up
all of the 31 special forces A-teams that are integrated with the populace
and the Iraqi Army and national police throughout the country.  Many of
these are the guys that you see occasionally on the news that have beards,
dress in native regalia, usually speak Arabic and don’t like to have their
identities revealed for fear of retribution on their families (thus the
Colonel S.)  Captain Szpak was the head of all the Army explosive ordnance
teams in Iraq.  He and his troops had the job of disarming all the
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and explosive formed projectiles (EFPs)
that were discovered before they were detonated.  They also traveled around
the country training the combat forces in recognizing and avoiding these
devices in time to prevent death and injury.  IEDs and EFPs are responsible
for the vast majority of casualties experienced by our forces.

 

Despite the objective of the conference (i.e., the modular brigade concept),
it quickly devolved into a 3½ hour question and answer period between the
panel and the 54 retired generals and admirals who attended.  I wish I had a
video of the whole session to share with you because the insights were
especially eye opening and encouraging.  I’ll try to summarize the high
points as best I can.

 

·                          All returnees agreed that “we are clearly winning
the fight against the insurgents but we are losing the public relations
battle both in the war zone and in the States”. (I’ll go into more detail on
each topic below.)

 

·                          All agreed that it will be necessary for us to
have forces in Iraq for at least ten more years, though by no means in the
numbers that are there now.

 

·                          They opined that 80% to 90% of the Iraqi people
want to have us there and do not want us to leave before “the job is done”.

 

·                          The morale and combat capability of the troops is
the highest that the senior officers have ever seen in the 20-30 years that
each has served.

 

·                          The Iraqi armed forces and police are probably
better trained right now than they were under Saddam, but our standards are
much higher and they lack officer leadership.

 

·                          They don’t need more troops in the combat zone
but they need considerably more Arab linguists and civil affairs experts.

 

·                          The IEDs and EFPs continue to be the principal
problem that they face and they are becoming more sophisticated as time
passes. 

 

 

Public Affairs:  We are losing the public affairs battle for a variety of
reasons.  First, in Iraq, the terrorists provide Al Jazeera with footage of
their more spectacular attacks and they are on TV to the whole Arab world
within minutes of the event.  By contrast it takes four to six days for a
story generated by Army Public Affairs to gain clearance by Combined Forces
Command, two or three more days to get Pentagon clearance, and after all
that, the public media may or may not run the story.

 

Second, the U.S. mainstream media (MSM) who send reporters to the combat
zone do not like to have their people embedded with our troops.  They claim
that the reporters get “less objective” when they live with the soldiers and
marines – they come to see the world through the eyes of the troops.  As a
consequence, a majority of the reporters stay in hotels in the “Green Zone”
and send out native stringers to call in stories to them by cell phone which
they later write up and file.  No effort is made to verify any of these
stories or the credibility of the stringers.  The recent serious injuries to
Bob Woodruff of ABC and Kimberly Dozier of CBS makes the likelihood of the
use of local stringers  even higher.

 

Third, the stories that are filed by reporters in the field very seldom
reach the American public as written.  An anecdote from Col. McMaster
illustrates this dramatically.  TIME magazine recently sent a reporter to
spend six weeks with the 3rd ACR as they were in the battle of Tal Afar.
When the battle was over, the reporter filed his story and also included
close to 100 pictures that the accompanying photographer took.  TIME
published a cover story on the battle a week later, allegedly using the
story sent in by their reporter.  When the issue came out, the guts had been
edited out of their reporter’s story and none of the pictures he submitted
were used.  Instead they showed a weeping child on the cover, taken from
stock photos.  When the reporter questioned why his story was eviscerated,
his editors in New York responded that the story and pictures were “too
heroic”.  McMaster had read both and told me that the editors had completely
changed the thrust and context of the material their reporter had submitted.

 

As a sidebar on the public affairs situation, Colonel Bob McRee, who was
also on the panel and is bringing a Military Police Battalion to Iraq next
month, invited the Colorado Springs Gazette to send a reporter with the
battalion for six weeks to two months.  He assured the Gazette, in writing
one month ago, that he would provide full time bodyguards for the reporter,
taking the manpower out of his own hide.  The Gazette has yet to respond to
his offer.    

 

Ten More Years:  The idea that we will have troops in Iraq for ten more
years sounds rather grim, even though by contrast, President Clinton sent
troops to Bosnia and Kosovo nearly ten years ago.  And they’re still there
with no end in sight.  While Iraq is clearly a different situation right
now, the panelists believe that within a few years at the most, it will
become very much the same – a peace keeping, nation building function among
factions that have hated one another for centuries.  There is factionalism
and there was bitter fighting in the Balkans before NATO intervened and with
peace keepers, the panelists believe that Iraq will be a parallel situation.
This, by the way, is why they all believe that linguists and civil affairs
military personnel are so necessary for the future. 

 

Colonel S. went out on a limb by suggesting that if most of the troops in
Iraq were deployed home “tomorrow” he could have the entire country
“pacified” and the terrorist situation brought under control with just one
brigade of special forces.  Since these guys are linguists, civil affairs
experts, among many other skills and talents, he may not be too far wrong.

 

Iraqi Attitudes:  The panelists agreed that the public affairs problem
manifests itself most significantly in the American public belief that the
people of Iraq want us out of their country which we are occupying.  They
have served in different parts of the country but each agreed that we are
wanted and needed there.  I refer you to the anecdote from Col. McMaster and
the thousands of pictures available on the internet of the U.S. forces shown
in very cordial relations with the locals.  Of course, our media’s obsession
with Abu Graib and, if the initial reports regarding the small group of
Marines at Haditha prove to be true, then those attitudes will change
somewhat.  But as one of the panelists pointed out, the atrocities suffered
under Saddam were much worse and much more common.         

 

Morale and Capabilities:  Two weeks ago, the local TV channels showed a 3rd
ACR re-enlistment ceremony held at Ft. Carson and officiated by Colonel
McMaster.  Mind you, this unit has just returned from a one-year combat tour
of hard and bloody fighting in Iraq and will likely return there again in
eight to ten months.  Of the 670 soldiers eligible for re-enlistment, 654 of
them held up their right hands and signed on for another four years.
Incredible!

 

The Army goal for re-enlistments for fiscal year 2006 was for 40,000
soldiers to extend their active duty commitments.  With four months
remaining in the fiscal year, they have already exceeded their goal of
40,000 and may have to go back to Congress for authorization to exceed their
force structure manning limitations.  Since Congress has been pontificating
for the past couple of years that the Army is woefully under strength, that
should not pose any difficulty.   

 

Iraqi Forces:  Every one of the returning commanders had experience in joint
operations with the Iraqi soldiers – and in the case of some of them, with
the local and national police.  They are all are supportive of the quality
of the forces, but culturally, they believe that we may be expecting too
much from them as a pre-condition for handing over greater responsibility
for area control.  McMaster said that he worked with the army and the police
at Tal Afar and was not the least bit reluctant to assign major
responsibilities to them in the operations that were conducted.  

 

Col. S.’s Green Berets, on the other hand, caught a national police
lieutenant who was directing the emplacement of an IED by cell phone in
order to disrupt a convoy – immediately after the lieutenant had been
briefed on the convoy’s route.  The good news in this situation was that
they were able to reroute the convoy, safely, and track the lieutenant’s
entire network through the use of the speed dial on his phone.  Having
terrorist infiltrators in both the army and the police force remains a
problem.  But by no means does that detract from the courage and
determination of those who are loyal to the new Iraq.

 

Explosive Devices:  The combined command in Iraq is becoming increasingly
effective in countering the significant threat posed by the IEDs and EFPs.
The frequency of attacks has decreased in large part through training to
recognize the threat, the new technology (UAVs – unmanned aerial vehicles or
drones, for example) which help to discover where the devices are emplaced,
the infiltration of some of the terrorist cells, etc.  However, the
technology being used by the terrorists is also improving measurably.  In
the past six weeks, two bomb making sites were found, raided and the bad
guys arrested.  In both cases, the head bomb makers were master’s degree
graduates (one in chemistry and one in physics) from American universities.
That’s a lot of brain power to bring into the fight, but we also have some
pretty talented people in the military, industry and academia who are doing
their best to even the odds. 

 

Conclusion:  This is more than I had intended to write on the subject – so
what’s new a lot of you might say – but it is a subject that doesn’t get the
proper balance from other sources, in my judgment at least.  I trust the
information that we received far more than anything that I have heard or
seen in our usual news sources.  The most disturbing thing that I heard was
that our MSM is changing the stories filed by their own people on the scene
because they sound “too heroic”.  

 

The over riding opinion that I came away from the conference with is that we
have incredibly talented and professional leaders who are facing up to the
challenges and are making inexorable progress toward the goals of our
nation.  We’re fortunate to have courageous and valorous people on the
combat front, even though there seems to be a serious dearth of these same
types of people in Congress and the mainstream media. 


 
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