January 8, 2008 THE 3RD ACR IN TAL’AFAR: CHALLENGES AND ADAPTATIONS David R. McCone, Wilbur J. Scott, and George R. Mastroianni1 Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs The Third Armored Cavalry Regiment (3d ACR) is a self-contained, mobile reconnaissance force made up of Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, Humvees, its own observation and attack helicopters, and some 5,200 troops. Bristling with hi-tech weapons systems, it is capable of a wide variety of missions, though its prototypical one in conventional settings is to serve as a higher commander’s eyes and ears by crossing the line of demarcation in search of enemy armor. Its full range of weaponry makes it perfectly capable of defending itself, or even of wiping out enemy armored units, should the situation require it. This is precisely what the 3d ACR thought it would be doing in Iraq. Like most U.S. Army units, the 3d ACR has spent the better part of the last 4 years deployed as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Their first tour took them from their home post at Ft. Carson, Colorado, to Iraq in April 2003 through April 2004, a time frame since designated OIF I. They returned to Iraq 10 months later in February 2005 as part of OIF III, this time coming home to Ft. Carson in May 2006. In July 2006, the entire Regiment was reassigned and moved to Ft. Hood, Texas. In OIF I, however, the shooting war with the Iraqi Army was over before the 3d ACR made its way into Iraq in late April 2003, and, taking on the subsequent insurgency, called for tactics that would take them out of their customary fighting mode. As armored scouts, they trained and expected to fight from inside their tanks and Bradleys where their mindset and unofficial motto is “death before dismount.”2 The counterinsurgency mode, to the contrary, called for them to leave their armored vehicles and move about in “leather personnel carriers,” i.e., boots, as foot soldiers. Adjustment to these changes was rather uneven— some units in the Regiment handled it well, while others did not. The 10 months between the two deployments provided the new commander of the 3d ACR an opportunity to retrain and, in a sense, retool, for these altered contingencies on the ground in Iraq. In its second deployment, the 3d ACR was the central force in Operation Restore Rights, a mission to retake Tal’Afar, a city in northwestern Iraq that had fallen under the control of insurgents. 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TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER The 3rd ACR in TAL’AFAR: Challenges and Adaptations 5b. GRANT NUMBER 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER 6. AUTHOR(S) 5d. PROJECT NUMBER 5e. TASK NUMBER 5f. WORK UNIT NUMBER 7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership,United States Air Force REPORT NUMBER Academy,Colorado Springs,CO,80840 9. SPONSORING/MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSOR/MONITOR’S ACRONYM(S) 11. SPONSOR/MONITOR’S REPORT NUMBER(S) 12. DISTRIBUTION/AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Approved for public release; distribution unlimited 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT 15. SUBJECT TERMS 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17. LIMITATION OF 18. NUMBER 19a. NAME OF ABSTRACT OF PAGES RESPONSIBLE PERSON a. REPORT b. ABSTRACT c. THIS PAGE Same as 23 unclassified unclassified unclassified Report (SAR) Standard Form 298 (Rev. 8-98) Prescribed by ANSI Std Z39-18 ACR accomplished this mission has been touted as one of the success stories of the war in Iraq. In this paper, we draw on information from interviews and focus groups we conducted with 3d ACR soldiers to explore the conduct and implications of the Tal’Afar campaign. Theoretical, Methodological Considerations. The town of Tal’Afar is located in Iraq’s northwestern Ninewa province about 240 miles from Baghdad, 30 miles west of Mosul, and 40 miles east of the Iraqi- Syrian border.3 Though there is no available official census count, it is estimated that 220,000 inhabitants live within the 9 square miles of densely-packed buildings that make up the town proper. The Tal’Afar area historically has been heavily populated by Kurds and Turkomen, a distinct Iraqi Turkic ethnic group. However, as part of Saddam Hussein’s program of “Arabization” during the 1970s, Sunni Arabs loyal to the Ba’ath Party were relocated to the area specifically to dilute the influence of the Kurds. As a result, most Kurds in the area now live in villages to the north of Tal’Afar, while the area’s Sunni Arabs are found in villages to the south. Yet another ethnic-religious group, the Yezidi, live in villages to the east of Tal’Afar. In Tal’Afar itself, the population is mostly Turkomen, about 75 percent of whom are Sunni Muslims, while a quarter are Shi’ites. Both groups are Arabic speakers, though a dialect of Turkish is their, and hence the town’s, language of choice. Local customs therefore reflect a blend of Turkish and Arabic influences—e.g., Turkoman men and boys often wear Arab-style dishdashas (white, outer robes) and checkered headscarves, and many of Tal’Afar’s residents maintain ties with relatives in Turkey. The town and surrounding area consists of mostly flat, desert-like terrain seemingly unsuitable to Western eyes for its principal agricultural product, wheat. Other local crops include potatoes, tomatoes, raisins, and cucumbers, usually served in the local diet with grilled lamb and unleavened bread. Tal’Afar contains 18 distinctly named neighbor- hoods, each consisting of several dozen extended families sharing a distinct tribal identity. Each neighborhood, singly or in conjunction with two or three others, is affiliated with a local sheik who represents its interests in the town’s council of sheiks. The council of sheiks also appoints the town’s mayor. During the 3d ACR’s first deployment to Iraq, its area of operation was al- Anbar province, located to the south and west of Ninewa. Roughly the size of West Virginia, al-Anbar was an enormous area of operation for 5,200 troops, regardless of how mobile they might be. Its large Sunni majority and its proximity to the Syrian border eventually made it a hotbed of insurgency. The 3d ACR’s experience here typified the problems endemic to the American mission in Iraq during that time frame. The 3d ACR expected to be fighting armored components of the Iraqi Army and had trained accordingly, visiting the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, in the fall of 2002 to brush up 2 on armored warfighting in an urban environment. However, by the time the 3d ACR arrived and moved into position in Iraq, the Iraqi Army already had dissipated or been “sent home” as part of Paul Bremer’s (then U.S. Administrator in Iraq) program of “De-Ba’athification.” This left open the question of exactly what the 3d ACR’s mission was. The first signs of an insurgency began to appear, then intensify, during the summer and fall of 2003. The insurgents carried out, clumsily at first, hit-and-run attacks on U.S. convoys, checkpoints, and staging areas. To complicate matters, they wore civilian clothes and mingled purpose- fully with civilian bystanders to make forceful response by American units difficult. This situation created difficulties for the 3d ACR at two levels. One, the Secretary of Defense and other top officials resisted the notion that an insurgency was underway. Consequently, no coherent strategic plan was developed and communicated to units on the ground for responding to these attacks. Each unit therefore was left to develop its own response.4 Two, the 3d ACR was neither configured nor trained to fight person-on-person, much less confront an ill- defined insurgency. Featuring Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, Apache attack helicopters, and armed-to-the-teeth dismounts, it settled into aggressive, armor-based patrolling and searching routines. Though well-intentioned, these heavy-handed techniques were better suited for a conventional battlefield than one populated by towns, villages, and, of course, civilians. 5 However, commanders of some squadrons during this deployment sought and successfully applied alternatives to conventional battlefield tactics. The 3d ACR’s predicament and response was typical of that by most American units in 2003 and 2004, and produced a torrent of discussion and a scramble of adaptive strategies in the U.S. Army (and, similarly, in the Marine Corps). For example, a search through Military Review, a refereed journal devoted to “cutting edge” issues in military affairs and strategic/tactical studies, revealed dozens of articles between 2004 and 2006 on conventional vs. counterinsurgency warfare and on “lessons learned” in bridging the gap between the two by Army units in Iraq. For example, Gen. David Petraeus6 (now Commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq) wrote of his application of counterinsurgency principles while commander of the 101st Airborne Division in 2003 and early 2004, and Maj. Gen. John Chiarelli7 and Maj. Gen. John Batiste,8 commanders of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 1st Infantry Division, respectively, during the same timeframe, described their use of “full spectrum” warfare. These and similar articles and books characterize U.S. military deployments since the end of the Cold War and the strategic and tactical challenges they present for a military designed and equipped for conventional warfare. The common theme is that virtually all these actions have been in response to nonstate actors without formal militaries in “sovereignty challenged” regions,9 engagements labeled as “savage” but “small,”10 “4th generation,”11 “full- spectrum,”12 and “long” wars.13 They also assert the U.S. military’s reluctance to 3 adjust to these contingencies, for to do so would have required a departure from larger trends within the military toward a greater reliance on technological gadgetry and less on “boots on the ground.” Ironically, successful forays against nonconventional forces rely more centrally on the latter than the former. In the summer and fall of 2004, we had the opportunity to collect oral histories from soldiers from the 3d ACR (and from the 3d Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division) who had just returned from Iraq to Ft. Carson.14 Our research, based upon these oral histories, showed that these soldiers and their commanders had made varying degrees of effort to adjust to the gap between their expectations of what they would be doing in Iraq and what the realities on the ground called for them to do. For the most part, they sought to retrain and retool “on the spot” and generally felt they had done a good job doing so. The rough spots revolved around their frustrations in determining “who was the enemy,” from fighting insurgents who used guerrilla tactics while mingling among civilians, and in maintaining an even-handed mindset after taking casual- ties of their own. We approached this dilemma from the standpoint of expectancy theory15 and psychological contract theory,16 both of which address the implicit but informal “contract” that forms between organizations and its members. The latter theory in particular addresses what is likely to occur when members perceive a “breach of contract,” i.e., feel that their expectations and good faith have been violated. We concluded in this phase of the research that these soldiers and their commanders felt that the organization, in this case the Army and its higher chain of command, had given them a reasonable set of expectations, had prepared them accordingly, and were not to blame for the realities that developed in the post-invasion phase of the war in Iraq. However, we also warned that this interpretation could easily change should the military not address these realities in subsequent deployments, especially those stemming from the gap between conventional vs. counterinsurgency warfare.17 We again had an opportunity to conduct interviews with soldiers from the 3d ACR upon their return from the second deployment in Iraq. The window of opportunity this time was much more fleeting, as the unit simultaneously was preparing for its move from Ft. Carson to Ft. Hood. Hence, we decided in this round to conduct a series of focus groups as the central part of our post- deployment interviews. In addition to in-depth interviews with several respond- ents whom we had interviewed after the first deployment, we held eight focus group sessions. These sessions were conducted with soldiers or officers from a particular unit sharing the same military occupational specialty. These specialties included armored scouts, tankers, military intelligence, maintenance, and air defense artillery (operating in a nonair defense capacity). Each group consisted of four to six soldiers or officers who volunteered to participate. Because sessions were videotaped and would become part of the historical collection at the Ft. Carson’s Mountain Post Museum, we emphasized 4 that we could assure neither anonymity nor confidentiality. Sessions typically lasted 1-2 hours, though some lasted longer. Our question list and format were adapted from that used in our oral history interviews to better match focus- group characteristics. Further, because we were aware of the Regiment’s Tal’Afar campaign through news coverage before its return to Ft. Carson, the focus-group question list also contained items specifically relating to Tal’Afar. 3d ACR’s Preparations for the Second Deployment. Col. H. M. McMaster, a Central Command staff officer in 2003 (later, commander of the 3d ACR during its second deployment), described the early efforts by U.S. units as follows: “When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.”18 The problems spawned by this strategy are many: U.S. forces, lacking a connection with the populace and therefore lacking sound intelligence about the insurgents, found it difficult to figure out who to kill or capture, consequently did not kill and capture insurgents effectively, and frequently came to be regarded by frustrated and angry Iraqis as more of an army of occupation than of liberation. Kalev Sepp, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a former Special Forces officer in Iraq, summarized the situation this way:19 You’ll get some people that way, but the failure of that approach is evident: they get Hussein, they get his sons, they continue every week to kill more, capture more, they’ve got facilities full of thousands of detainees, yet there are more insurgents than there were when they started. Tal’Afar figured tangentially into the action during this time frame (and the 3d ACR never went there during its first deployment). Since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, religious-based tension in the area increased dramatically. By virtue of the Shi’a takeover of the national government, Shi’a Turkomen became arbiters of the town’s government and police force to the chagrin and then resentment of the more numerous Sunni Turkomen. Further, an influx of Iraqi jihadists and of foreign fighters from Syria (and elsewhere) used Tal’Afar as a base of operations and became part of a volatile mix for control of the local government. Since 2003, U.S. forces occasionally swept through the area and town, targeting primarily Sunni neighborhoods. In the absence of a continuing U.S. presence, however, Tal’Afar eventually fell under the control of what Col. McMaster termed a “hybrid insurgency” blending Sunni malcontents, Iraqi jihadists, and foreign fighters. Col. McMaster assumed command of the 3d ACR shortly after its return to Ft. Carson following its first deployment. While at his position at Central Command, he had reached the conclusion that the military threat on the ground was indeed an insurgency, calling therefore for a strategy of counterinsurgency. Seemingly a 5 simple play on words, his acknowledgement, however, called for American units to think and behave much differently than they generally had to this point. Rather than the “kill-capture” strategy of 2003 and 2004, the new counterinsurg- ency thinking, officially termed “clear, hold, and build,” explicitly recognized that the solution is only partly military and that the lethal, somewhat indiscrim- inate use of force so productive in a conventional battlefield, here is essentially counterproductive. Though the best equipped, best trained, most technologically sophisticated, and most lethal fighting force in the world, the U.S. military is not, as the 3d ACR discovered during its first deployment, institutionally suited to this strategy. Col. McMaster and his staff therefore set out to prepare for doing things differently the second time around. Instead of returning to Ft. Polk for field exercises, the 3d ACR constructed its own training sites and regimen at Ft. Carson. One of the fundamental changes was an emphasis on training each solider, regardless of military specialty (MOS), to be a light infantryman. A 3d ACR NCO, a tanker, who served during both of the unit’s deployments described the shift as follows: And so that’s where it was a huge training difference when we went back for OIF-III. . . . [W]hat really changed I think . . . was, I don’t care if you’re logistics, I don’t care if you’re a cook, I don’t care if you’re a mechanic, I don’t care what you are, when you’re out on that road, you’re a United States Army soldier. And you need to learn to fight. And McMaster . . . nailed into the head [of] everybody their primary focus was as a soldier fighter. . . . Everybody got training in dismount training and four-man stack training and live-fire convoy exercises. So weapons qualification was very important for all soldiers and not just your combat arms guys. Matter of fact, I’ll never forget it, [Col. McMaster] pulled all the support guys together. He was like, look, you’re gonna be the fighters. You’re it! He said, all these guys over there on the tanks and Brads—[the bad guys are] . . . not going to face-off with them anymore. OIF-I they did and, call it insurgency Darwinism, whatever you want to call it, the dumb ones, they die off quick, . . . he said, but now they will be attacking the fuelers. They’ll attack the logistic convoys. He said, you are my killers. You are the guys who really need to get your ground convoy operations under a handle. You need to have recovery plans in place. You need to have your cas-evac, casualty evacuation plans. And he really, he really focused on the importance of getting those guys combat ready. I just, I thought that was incredibly impressive. In a similar vein, Col. McMaster added the requirement that each soldier in the regiment, rather than only the medics and medical service personnel, be combat life-saver certified. The same NCO explained: The other thing was a huge focus on what we call CLS, Combat Life-Savers, . . . which basically means everybody in the unit knows how to give an IV to a soldier who has been wounded and that is just, I can’t tell you how important that is at the small unit level because it’s that golden hour of saving that soldier’s life. It is stabilizing him and basically keeping him from major loss of blood. 6 In addition, the unit also developed Iraq-specific training scenarios. The site of some of this training was an Iraqi-style “village” peopled by soldiers and Arab Americans dressed in dishdashas to play the role of Iraqis. These role-playing scenarios simulated situations the troops typically encountered in Iraq— manning checkpoints or searching homes—and emphasized culturally aware methods for carrying out these procedures effectively, i.e., doing so in a manner to ferret out the “bad guys” without alienating the bystanders. Col. McMaster also forbade the use of derogatory terms (hajis, Mujis, ragheads) to refer to Iraqis, cautioned against swearing in front of Iraqis, and urged the reading of books on Iraqi history and culture. In addition, he mandated that troops within each squadron should be trained in conversational Arabic. According to a 3d ACR NCO: Col. McMaster actually coordinated with . . . Pikes Peak Community College, and we sent two soldiers per platoon, so that’s about two soldiers in every 16—we just basically said, look we’re gonna lose these guys for 2 months. We’ll just keep tabs on them but they’re gonna go to school for 2 months like a regular college student. And they went every day, 5 days a week, and learned Arabic. . . . And so what that really gave you is internal interpreters that you could trust. . . . [Usually] you don’t have interpreters at the lowest levels. That was one of our biggest issues during OIF-I was not [being] able to understand what the [Iraqis] were trying to tell us and, uh, we had no way to communicate with them. . . . So, to have two guys per platoon . . . with that level of language training was awesome. It paid huge dividends. Finally, Col. McMaster repeatedly stressed that only a small fraction of the population were hard-core insurgents or jihadists who needed to be dealt with coercively. The bulk of the populace, he argued, was sitting on the fence, waiting to see what the Americans had in mind. A fundamental theme therefore was, “Do not do the enemy’s work,” i.e., soldiers were expected to develop a mindset that treated Iraqi citizens with respect, so as not to push fence-sitters into the insurgent group. The combination of these changes set a new tone for the second deployment. One NCO remarked of the changes, “I gotta say the training we did and the plan we had before we went, especially with only a 10-month window, I don’t think you could have set better conditions for us to be successful in Iraq.” However, this NCO also noted that morale had taken a bit of dip prior to the second deployment. This was due, in his view, to the rather short period between deployments and to intense “negative media coverage” of the incidents at Abu Ghraib during those months. Operation Restoring Rights - Challenges. The 3d ACR redeployed to Iraq in February 2005. At first, the unit was sent to an area in south Baghdad where it was responsible for area security. Known as a tough draw, the predominantly Sunni area had been the scene of extensive, often 7 effective, insurgent activity against American convoys, particularly in the form of roadside bombs and sniper fire. To complicate matters, national police check- points in the area typically were manned by Shi’ite policemen, whom the local Sunnis regarded with suspicion and distrust at best. Though suited to handle such a mission, many in the 3d ACR were surprised to receive the assignment, expecting instead to establish relations and manage the town of Mosul and surrounding area. By May, however, the bulk of the regiment had a town and surrounding area to quell—Tal’Afar. By all accounts, the area was a mess. For example, the follow- ing quotes reveal a focus group’s characterization of the situation in Tal’Afar when the 3d ACR arrived: When we showed up it was a ghost town. It was the Wild West pretty much. I mean people couldn’t go out in the streets ‘cause they were being shot at. . . . Before we got there, Tal’Afar was more or less sort of a pushover for the insurgency to come in and sort of set up camp in there so that they could supply logistics, personnel, anything they wanted because the local government was very weak. Back when the city was at its worst, you couldn’t send a Humvee through the town. We did not go in with anything less than two Bradleys or two tanks. Indeed, factional fighting among Tal’Afar’s ethnic/religious groups had left it particularly vulnerable to occupation by insurgent groups from elsewhere in Iraq or across the border in Syria. In 2005, the provincial police chief in Mosul had appointed a nonlocal, Muhammed Najim Abadullah al-Jibouri, to replace the former police chief, a Shi’ite. It was hoped that al-Jibouri, a Sunni and former officer in Saddam Hussein’s Army, could set a different tone in the activities of the police, mostly Shi’ites, in fighting Tal’Afar’s insurgents, mostly Sunnis. (Al- Jibouri later was promoted to mayor.) Knight-Ridder Newspapers reporter Joe Galloway later interviewed al-Jibouri, and described the level of sectarian and insurgent violence the 3d ACR was walking into:20 Abductions and executions were the order of the day, with beheaded victims thrown into the street at a busy traffic circle in the heart of the city. A young man was killed by the terrorists, al-Jibouri said, then disemboweled and his body stuffed with explosives. When his father came to get the body, the bomb exploded, killing him, too. Further increasing the importance of wresting control of the city from these factions, intelligence reports asserted Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the reputed head of al-Qaeda in Iraq at that time, was operating from that area. Beyond problems with the police, the Iraqi army was not only ill-prepared to take on this challenge, it was often perceived as a hindrance. A 3d ACR NCO stated: “I remember just when we first got there Iraqi soldiers, they’d have a fight over a water bottle and 8 shoot each other. I mean, ridiculous stuff.” The same NCO summed up the situation this way: So when we get there, you’re dealing with a very determined enemy because they’re sitting on the route from Syria to Mosul, and this is the main staging area for attacks on Mosul. . . . So the regiment was sent there to cut the supply and essentially eliminate their staging point. And so not only did we have a very determined enemy because of the necessity for their support in Mosul but [the people have] seen us put a hurt to the enemy. They’ve seen us draw back and the enemy move back in. I mean they saw it twice already. And a 3d ACR supply officer described the insurgents there as “ruthless,” reiterating the story Police Chief al-Jibouri had told to Galloway. He explained: Col. McMaster called them evil, and I agree. They completely controlled Tal’ Afar before we got there. They had a recruiting operation, bomb building factory. They terrorized the city by killing people and leaving their headless bodies in the street. Or they’d kill a child and then pack his body with explosives, and leave it for the parents to come pick up and kill them too. What kind of person does that? A 3d ACR helicopter pilot noted the strain this puts on soldiers: [These are] things that you never want to encounter the insurgency using against you and having to fight through it professionally. And targeting civilians eats at a soldier's soul because that's what we're there to protect. And for them to target them there is nothing worse than targeting innocents. And we take that personally. Despite the grip the enemy had on the town and the obvious reluctance of some of the townspeople to support the U.S. forces, a surprising number of the locals were welcoming and supportive. When asked his opinion of the local population, a supply officer noted: “These people are incredibly brave. They just want stability, that’s all. They want to see democracy succeed. So they take a lot of risks to help us out.” In addition to the risks implied above, there were several other challenges facing U.S. and Iraqi forces in the battle for Tal’Afar. The overall insurgency in Iraq had become more sophisticated by this time. Virtually all our respondents concurred that the enemy they encountered this time around had become much smarter in “training, tactics, and procedures” (TTPs), maybe because the “dumber ones” had been killed or captured by this time. For example, there was consensus that the insurgents developed more lethal IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in the form of triple-stacked and shaped charges, making route security of primary importance to all operations. As one NCO with an armored scout unit explained: [The enemy] got smarter. I remember one time (during our first deployment) in Hadithah, we’d find people with RPGs wrapped in plastic bags. They figured that if 9