confidence that Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl cared extremely deeply for each and every soldier in 1-5 Cav. I have nothing but positive things to say about him. I think in combat he was willing to accept certain risks in order to achieve success, which is what any good commander must do. If you take zero risks, you hunker down your forces in extreme force-protection mode, then you will not succeed in this kind of war. Consider for a moment: if you follow the bunker mentality to its logical conclusion, then you might as well not even leave the FOB at all—or better yet, never even deploy to Iraq in the first place. That way you are guaranteed not to incur any casualties. However, you also are guaranteed not to accomplish any of your strategic objectives. I think this marks perhaps the most important way in which we blazed a new path in Amriya. We were willing to take calculated risks into unchartered waters in order to make progress. Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates said it best himself: we cannot kill or capture our way to victory. If we focus only on killing the enemy and force protection as our overriding objectives, then we effectively ignore history and disavow counterinsurgency doctrine. Dismounted patrols, the establishment of COPs, getting out on the ground and gaining the trust of average Iraqis—all these things involve inherent risk. But if we take prudent steps to mitigate each risk, we stand the best chance of success. Compare the security situation in Amriya when we departed [in January ‘08] to the security conditions previously. The results speak for themselves.”
According to a major who served under Gentile, “Despite Lieutenant Colonel Gentile being depicted in the media as a ‘conservative’ who only wants to focus on high-intensity conflict, he set the groundwork for Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl extremely well in one of the most important aspects of counterinsurgency. COIN is about people, and people are about relationships—especially in Arabic and Muslim culture. Gentile spent all of his time, in the very brief time that I saw him, talking, negotiating, and working with the local imams in Amriya. Kuehl, the beneficiary of this initial relationship building, continued the relationship and allowed the SOI to emerge with the support of the local imams.”
I asked Gentile what he thought Kuehl did differently from him. “Other than rightly capitalizing on the changed conditions that presented to him the opportunity to cut a deal with the SOIs, not much,” he said. “His organizational structure as a combat battalion was a bit different than mine, since I was an armored reconnaissance squadron—which meant that he had a greater dismounted capability, which might have produced more dismounted patrols. But in terms of tactics, I don’t believe there was much difference at all, although I am sure he would disagree with that statement. My outfit did dismounted operations, we engaged with the local population, etc. The notion that I ‘commuted’ to the area and stayed inside my vehicles as put forward by the surge zealots is a chimera. Dale did not put his first combat outpost in until late May ‘07, and it was a tactical one in the sense that its purpose was to facilitate movement into and out of the area. The first Galula-like COP did not go into the district until late June. So the notion that during the first five or six months of the surge—which arguably was the decisive period—that he was doing things on the tactical level radically different from me is not correct. What happened is that after the violence began to drop, and American soldiers and marines stopped dying in large monthly numbers, folks looked back onto the first period and superimposed the coherence of [the COIN manual] FM 3-24 that they believed was there at the time but actually was not.”
“Probably the biggest difference,” Kuehl said of his approach as opposed to Gentile’s, “was in taking a broader, long-term perspective of the problem. One of the things that was highlighted in our staff training was the need to develop a ‘campaign plan’ at the battalion level. This plan is intended to be long-term, with objectives six months to even a year out. In contrast, the campaign plan I got from Gian looked out about two weeks and really was nothing more than a patrol schedule.
“I visited Gian’s squadron in July 2006, and they were stretched pretty thin. If other parts of Baghdad were like his area, I am sure it looked like there were barely any U.S. soldiers on the ground. To be fair, I do not think that this type of planning or creating of a vision was part of the train[ing] Gian would have had, so [it is] not necessarily surprising that they did not have one. Even now we continue to adapt, and units that are there now are probably doing things I never thought of. There were two long-term projects that Gian left me with. The first was the Amriya Bank, which he laid the groundwork for. The other was the establishment of a police station. This second one did not happen until after we left.”
Gentile wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of
I asked Gentile about this. “I don’t think that a center of gravity, theoretically, even if there can be such a thing, should be predetermined and turned into a rule for any type of stability or counterinsurgency operation,” he said. “In modern counterinsurgencies certainly the population is an important consideration, but the American Army has turned the notion of the people as a center of gravity into an immutable rule, which then determines a prescribed set of tactics and procedures, which ultimately calls for large numbers of American combat soldiers on the ground. This kind of approach might be the right choice in certain circumstances, but it should not be the only way. If it is, then we can expect many more adventures at nation building to come.”
Kuehl told me that “Gian tried to maintain the initiative while maintaining the morale and fighting esprit by his men by doing periodic large-scale cordon-and-searches to keep them focused. He also established small kill teams in houses, some of them occupied by residents. These teams generally consisted of a six-man team, usually including a sniper, emplaced to counter enemy IED efforts. I remember Gian telling me that many of these operations were to maintain the morale of the unit. What baffled me was that they served no real tactical purpose. In fact, I think in some ways they hurt the effort because they were not focused on good intelligence, so we were stumbling around inconveniencing the local populace.
“I banned the use of occupied homes for small kill teams right after we took over. I read a couple patrol reports from Gian’s unit that made clear to me that these operations were not going to win over the populace. We continued with the cordon-and-search operations (we called them ‘block parties’) for a while. However, as we gained more intel, we relied less on them and focused more on targeted raids and eventually did away with them altogether.”
I asked Gentile if he thought his cordon-and-search operations and small kill teams had been counterproductive. “Well, this is certainly the stock question that any population-centric counterinsurgency expert would ask,” he said. “Sure, they can be, but we should not assume a priori that they will be all the time.”
These operations could serve a purpose that outweighed their potential to alienate the population, he said. “It depends on the situation and what strategy has been created as the political object of war and the necessary military means to accomplish it. In other words, if you are a New American Army Way of War proponent, then the absolute and unequivocal answer to the question is that they are never productive and can never work in
Kuehl found it ironic that Gentile focused on offensive operations to maintain the initiative and morale, he said, because “Gentile did not have the initiative when he turned over the area to us. The initiative belonged to the insurgents. Gian’s patrols would not go on the two main streets in town due to the IED threat, and there was one area where they would not dismount due to the sniper threat. He had very little information on the nature of the threat in the area. While there were perhaps a dozen individuals that they were looking at, there was no clear understanding of the nature of the insurgency. At least none that he passed on to me.”
Kuehl’s operation officer, Lieut. Col. Chris Rogers (who was then a major), wrote a response to Gentile in the January 2008 issue of
