The eighth of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks: The U.S.Army in Iraq, incorrect in its assumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy -- completed the job of creating the insurgency. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence" -- that is, soldiers demonstrating to the local population that they're in the area, mainly by patrolling. . . .
The flaw in this approach, wrote Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, was that after the public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive."
The U.S. military jargon for this was boots on the ground, or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers.
© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.
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