Military Officer - April 2008 - (Page 59) Q&A insurgency center north of Baghdad where all leaders are taken while their units are coming through ports in Kuwait. The ability of our leaders to carry out tasks would have been undreamed of just a few years ago. I thought reenlistment rates would show sharp declines given that a generation of soldiers is looking forward to deployment after deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. This hasn’t happened. It is counterintuitive. A lot of these great young Americans really deserve the title Tom Brokaw gave them — “the new greatest generation” — because they are reenlisting. There is concern about the captains who entered as lieutenants in the wake of 2001. Some are on their third yearlong tour. Their retention rates have fallen. That’s a challenge when we’re trying to increase the size of our Army. Increasing [their] numbers of brigades takes lots of captains. On visits back, I presume, you saw how troops operated in Iraq before the surge. Could you compare that to their typical day today? Is there more engagement in the local populace? Better morale? The idea is that, to secure the population, you have to live with them. [The U.S. military and its] Iraqi partners have together located forces in neighborhoods of villages and towns and rural areas where there are security challenges. That’s where we help our Iraqi partners get a grip on things. We have to kill, capture, or run off the enemy and sustain a security posture. A lot of our soldiers prefer being away from the flagpole. This is what they came in the Army to do. I assume it’s a factor in the reenlistment rates. What has happened to your intelligence capabilities? There’s a cycle our soldiers experi- GEN. DAVID H. PETRAEUS ence once they are in a neighborhood for a week or two. People realize they’re going to stay, and soldiers go from an information deficit to overload. We have vastly higher numbers of walk-ins. As a result, weapons caches found have skyrocketed. In 2007, we found and cleared 6,900 caches compared to 2,600 in 2006. In Anbar province, we nearly tripled the number found because of our greater freedom of movement and contact with the population. When an area is secure, the people want to get rid of explosives in their backyard or field or wherever al-Qaida stashed them. Also impacting intelligence [are] unmanned aerial vehicles, new intelligence tools and applications, and enablers in the form of largercapacity communications links — big pipes, if you will — that allow us to push slow-motion video down them or shoot photographs back. ANOTHER VIEW LT. GEN. RAYMOND ODIERNO On arriving in Baghdad in December 2006 on his tour to command Multi-National Corps — Iraq (MNC-I), Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno immediately began discussing with his new boss, Gen. George Casey, top U.S. commander in Iraq, how to reduce the violence in Iraq. Attacks against coalition and Iraqi forces and Iraqi citizens “had reached an all-time high,” says Odierno, who has been nominated for appointment to the rank of general and assignment as vice chief of staff, U.S. Army in Washington, D.C. “We started discussing additional units — surge forces — and developing a plan.” By April 2007, with Gen. David H. Petraeus having replaced Casey as commander of MNF-I, enough additional troops had arrived to begin major offensive operations. “We went after safe havens and sanctuaries. We realized that to reduce violence in Baghdad we had to secure the ‘Baghdad belt’ outside of the city, which al-Qaida and other extremist elements used as support zones to build accelerants to violence.” PHOTO: ROBERT H. REID/AP Odierno, left, speaks with Army Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, right, assistant commander of the 25th Infantry Division in Baqouba, Iraq. The U.S. strategy shift also included moving troops off base to live among Iraqis where they could do more to ensure their security. “We began pushing all units out into the city into small combat outposts and joint security stations. Platoon and company-size elements began living in APRIL 2008 MILITARY OFFICER 59
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