The Fate of Iraq
WES BRYANT
The BIAP Strike Cell, as we had created it in 2014, was unprecedented in the ad hoc group of multiservice conventional and special operations forces coming together as one killing team. But there was one fundamental problem that Vern and I knew would later present itself—there was never really a clear understanding of the specific lines of effort tasked to each military entity in relation to the new strike cell operations.
From the special operations command, we were essentially “on loan” to the commander of Iraq to assist him in the air campaign that supported the advise and assist mission of our special operations forces. To Vern and me, that mode of thinking was not a long-term solution.
We had levied up our chain of command that SOCCENT needed to establish a formal, long-standing agreement for task force JTACs to continue to lead strike cell support of task force operations. We’d even personally addressed the deputy commander of SOCCENT, Brigadier General Kurt Crytzer, when he visited the strike cell from Tampa around October 2014. But none of our efforts went anywhere.
By 2015, U.S. support to Kurdish Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq became even more robust. We attached more Special Forces, Navy SEAL, and even Marine special operations teams to key locations in the north to support the Kurds taking and maintaining ground from ISIS. Our teams were at forward locations with partner Kurdish Peshmerga units but given strict orders to advise and assist the Pesh units only. They were told that under no circumstances would they accompany Kurdish forces on combat operations.
Senior military commanders even established various distances the teams were told to keep back from the FLOT (forward line of own troops). This catered to the Obama administration’s continued guidance that the U.S. would not participate in ground combat operations. But it was sorely misguided. In counterinsurgency warfare there was never a true FLOT. The term was invented in the days of conventional warfare, when the armies of entire nations faced off on the battlefield in comparatively delineated fights. In those wars, lines could quite literally often be drawn in the sand to differentiate friendly and enemy held areas. In asymmetric warfare, lines are constantly in flux if they even exist at all.
The reality ended up that our forward special operations teams often found themselves in the mix, with eyes on ISIS targets or first-hand witness to firefights between their Peshmerga forces and ISIS positions and, at times, under fire themselves from ISIS forces. Because of the directives from our chain of command, the teams were forced to keep those facts quiet, or at least mute the full story in their reports to headquarters. If they did not, they would risk being pulled off the mission and the team leader fired for violating orders.
In 2015 the Special Operations Task Force-Iraq migrated solely to the mission of advise and assist to the Iraqi and Kurdish forces, along with a limited high-value targeting mission. Both the Erbil and BIAP Strike Cells transitioned to sole operation by conventional force commands. The fact that conventional forces were running the strike cells was not the issue. The main issue was in the fundamental application of fire support in warfare. The new strike cell ownership had no real relationship with the forward special operations teams they supported with airstrikes. That would turn out to be a detriment to the advise and assist mission and, at times, a danger to the special operations teams forward.
The new strike cell leadership became adamant about maintaining strike approval authority and control from their strike cells miles away from the fight, even with U.S. troops and JTACs on the ground. The strike cells consistently refused to hand over control of air assets to our forward special operations JTACs even when they had eyes on targets or were taking fire from ISIS. Instead, the strike cells would take the unnecessary time to gather all the information from the forward JTAC over the radio, run it through their formal “strike approval process,” and eventually prosecute the strikes from their end.
More often than not, the extended time that process took put our U.S. ground forces under unnecessary risk. On a couple of occasions, strike cell commanders even risked the lives of forward teams under fire from ISIS, insisting on maintaining control of air assets then delaying strike prosecution for one reason or another or never striking at all.
It was all in direct opposition to the ROE change I’d seen pushed through in summer of 2014 when the campaign against ISIS first began. And it was actually in violation of the U.S. Standing Rules of Engagement and Rules for Use of Force, which state that on-scene commanders always have the “inherent right to self-defense.” (I found, over the years, that the U.S. military has a knack for often taking two steps back before going forward.)
The bottom line was, the risks that we had to accept in strike cell operations supporting forward partner Iraqi forces—that daisy-chain of communication from the ground force up to us that so often caused confusion and delays in targeting—were being accepted with our own U.S. forces on the ground. I couldn’t fathom it.
We’d been forced to accept such risks in support of our partner Iraqi and Kurdish forces because we couldn’t just hand over control of coalition air assets to Iraqi and Kurdish units and allow them to hit targets of their choosing under U.S. authority and with coalition airpower. But transferring that same limitation and level of risk to our own U.S. forces on the ground was grossly irresponsible.
Still, things got better with time. Even with those early hitches in the evolution of strike cell operations in Iraq, and the extreme challenges that persisted within the operational environment on the ground, the fight against ISIS intensified. By early 2018, of the three countries in which the U.S. was waging major combat operations against ISIS, Iraq was definitely going the smoothest. That was directly attributable to the fact that the Iraqi government and military were the most developed, stable and capable of the three. Since 2014 we’d helped the Iraqi and Kurdish forces liberate the key cities and regions around Baqubah, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul, and Tal Afar. And we’d kept ISIS from getting anywhere close to Baghdad or the Kurdish capital.1
But to this day, there are major operational roadblocks to the Iraq mission.
Iraq continues to be a morass of tribal factions with varying degrees of loyalty to the government and one another, where a small U.S. troop footprint has the challenge of uniting Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias in a sustained fight against ISIS. And the hope of a long-term Iraqi-Kurdish unification was at least temporarily shattered when Kurdish and Iraqi forces battled again in October 2017 over the long-contested oil-rich region of Kirkuk.2 Add to that a heavy influence of Iranian special operations forces training and equipping the Shia militias toward their own interests, and there is still quite a quagmire in the region.
In July 2018, Lieutenant General Paul E. Funk—who replaced General Pittard as the commander of Iraq in 2014—wrote a commentary emphasizing the progress made since we initiated the campaign against ISIS. In it, General Funk states:
For the first time, many of us are optimistic of their [the Iraqis’] long term success and confident that the Iraqi brothers and sisters we fought next to for so long are heading along the right path.3
We will have to see what the future of Iraq holds. Until then, we sincerely hope that General Funk’s words ring true.
1 Sarah Almukhtar et al., “The Islamic State: From Insurgency to Rogue State and Back,” The New York Times, October 22, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/22/world/middleeast/isis-the-islamic-state-from-insurgency-to-rogue-state-and-back.html.
2 Maher Chmaytelli and Raya Jalabi, “Iraqi forces complete Kirkuk province takeover after clashes with kurds,” Reuters, October 20, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-kurds-clash/iraqi-forces-complete-kirkuk-province-takeover-after-clashes-with-kurds-idUSKBN1CP0PT.
3 Lt. Gen. Paul E. Funk, “Commentary: Iraq endures the crucible, and emerges transformed,” Army Times, July 9, 2018, accessed August 13, 2018, https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/2018/07/09/commentary-iraq-endures-the-crucible-and-emerges-transformed/.