Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 124

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: War dogs can jump

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent 

In today's photo we have Master-at-Arms Seaman Tyler
Frizzard working with his MWD during an explosives detection training exercise in
San Diego on February 25. It's a snapshot of the moment just after the handler
has almost certainly told his dog -- "Seek here" -- pointing to a
spot I would gauge to be nearly five feet off the ground.

When I first saw this photo it took me a minute to understand
why it's such a great and important image. And it's far more than just the
composition or how cool the dog looks stretched almost entirely vertical
against the length of his broad-shouldered handler. You can also see in the
dog's expression how focused he is on his handler's instruction--the dog's eyes
seem to be locked in on the spot indicated by his partner, which also means
that's the space from which he is drawing in scent -- potentially explosive
odor. And, last but not least, look closely at the dog's feet -- there's a
good bit of air between those paws and the ground. Which for anyone who still
believes bomb sniffing dogs are at a deficit when pitted against other
explosive detection machinery -- hand-held devices, remote controlled robots,
and the like -- is an important thing to note. Dogs' agility and the swiftness
with which they respond to commands cannot be overlooked and hasn't been
matched. 

In that vein, this photo becomes something of a modest but
almost perfect piece of evidence to support the advantages dogs really do bring
to the humans they support during IED patrols. So again, look closely. 

Rebecca Frankel is away from her FP desk, working on a book
about dogs and war.

Top 10 books on U.S. interrogation

By Lt. Col. Douglas Pryer, U.S. Army

Best Defense guest columnist

Most Americans do not realize the sheer
volume of literature that exists showing that torture is a great tool for
extracting false confessions but an extremely poor tool for collecting
intelligence. Here's my Top 10:

1. The
Black Banners, by Ali Soufan. From my review of the book in the
Army's Military Review: "Soufan
describes multiple interrogations in which he earned the trust and cooperation
of Al-Qaeda operatives, only to have psychologists and amateur interrogators
from the CIA destroy this rapport through brutality. He reports that once they
used harsh techniques, detainees stopped providing substantial intelligence."
Soufan, an Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator, dispels the myth that al Qaeda
terrorists are "hardened" to withstand traditional interrogation approaches.
Getting al Qaeda members to talk, he demonstrates, is rarely difficult for a
skilled interrogator who uses rapport-based approaches and who understands
their language, culture, and religion.

2. Stalking the Vietcong, by Colonel
(Ret.) Stuart Herrington. Although primarily known as a counterinsurgency
classic (this book is one of the recommended readings in the famous 2006
counterinsurgency manual), this memoir describes how Colonel Herrington
convinced a senior South Vietnamese official to use rapport-based approaches
rather than torture. The result was not only far more reliable intelligence,
but often, the "turning" of enemy soldiers so that they actively collected
against their former units. Incidentally, in a more recent essay, he writes
about what he learned from his 2002 and 2003 inspections of Gitmo and Abu
Ghraib, respectively. This essay, which is his foreword to my own book on
tactical-level interrogations in Iraq, is as important as any on the subject.
You don't need to buy my book to read it. It's available online here.

3. How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S.
Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in
Iraq, by Matthew Alexander and John Bruning. From my review of Alexander's
second memoir, Kill or Capture, for Military Review: "In his ?rst
memoir, How to Break a Terrorist,
Alexander described how he used the power of personal example to teach his team
that they could be far more effective if they convinced (rather than coerced)
their sources to talk. Thanks to his good efforts -- and to those he led -- his
unit quickly began to produce results. Most notably, his team coaxed
intelligence from sources that led to the successful U.S. air strike against
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq."

4. The Interrogator: The Story of Hanns
Joachim Scharff, Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe, by Raymond Toliver.
Nazis are invariably depicted in movies as cruel torturers. Historical reality
is different -- surprisingly so, in light of the Holocaust and how many Nazis
treated members of "races" they deemed inferior. The Nazis' most successful
interrogator, Hanns Scharff, "methodically and deliberately treated his
prisoners with dignity." Some eyewitnesses reported that Scharff never even
raised his voice in questioning. Instead, he enjoyed great success by building
rapport with captured Allied pilots. After the war, the U.S. Air Force paid him
the ultimate compliment by inviting him to America to teach their
interrogators.

5.
Mission: Black List #1: The Inside Story
of the Search for Saddam Hussein -- As Told by the Soldier Who Masterminded His
Capture, by Eric Maddox and Davin Seay. From the book's Amazon website: "Maddox's candid and compelling narrative reveals the logic
behind the unique interrogation process he developed and provides an insider's
look at his psychologically subtle, nonviolent methods. The result is a
gripping, moment-by-moment account of the historic mission that brought down
Black List #1." You will hear more about this book in 2014: It is being made
this year into a movie starring Robert Pattinson.

6. None of Us Were Like This Before, by Joshua Phillips. Phillips explores the causes
and harmful effects, not just of American soldiers recently torturing for
information, but of their abusing detainees in general. The book is
particularly important for those researching military suicides and "moral
injury," a PTSD-like condition that derives from the cognitive dissonance that occurs
when people see or do things that conflict with their own deeply held values. In one chapter, Phillips investigates the utility
of torture and, after a survey of literature on the subject, concludes that there seems to be no real evidence that torture
gathers intelligence well. In one of my favorite paragraphs, Phillips cites the
apparent "patina of pseudo-science" that was passed on by the mere presence of
psychologists at torture sessions, making it appear to others as if there were
a scientifically valid basis for torture (even if these psychologists often did
little to actually influence interrogation plans).

7. The
History of Camp Tracy: Japanese WWII POWs and the Future of Strategic
Interrogation, by Alexander D.
Corbin. Corbin tells the story of a remarkably successful interrogation
facility established during World War II at Camp Tracy, California, for the
questioning of Japanese POWs. Camp Tracy interrogation teams consisted of one
Caucasian and one Nisei, thus enabling teams to leverage language skills,
cultural knowledge, and physical appearance to build rapport. In making the
case that interrogators today should pay close heed to lessons learned at this
facility, Corbin describes the similarities between Islamic radicals today and
zealous Japanese warriors willing to conduct suicide attacks for their God
Emperor. From the foreword: "The use of torture or ‘physical coercion' was not
necessary; in fact, the opposite was true: Camp Tracy interrogators found that
courtesy and kindness overcame most Japanese reluctance and reticence."

8. Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq, by
Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian. This book teaches interrogation through
counter-example -- what wrong looks like. As an impressionable new
interrogator, Lagouranis had the misfortune of being assigned in 2004 to two of
the worst places for interrogators in Iraq, Abu Ghraib prison and a facility
run by one of Petraeus's brigades that was nearly as bad. Lagouranis's
Kurtz-like descent into the heart of darkness is a cautionary tale for the U.S.
military interrogation community. He summarizes his team's failure to collect
intelligence through torture thus: "These techniques [EITs] were propagated
throughout the Cold War, picked up again after 9/11, used by the CIA, filtered
down to army interrogators at Guantanamo, filtered again through Abu Ghraib,
and used, apparently, around the country by special forces...If torture works
-- which is debatable -- maybe they had the training to make sure it worked.
But at our end of the chain, we had no idea what we were doing. We were just a
bunch of frustrated enlisted men picking approved techniques off a menu."

9. Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American
Intelligence in Vietnam, by Orrin DeForest and David Chanoff. This memoir describes
how DeForest, a CIA interrogation officer in Vietnam, employed the "art of
sympathetic interrogation" at the war's most successful joint interrogation
center. He also describes the critical need of interrogators for access to
robust databases and supporting analysis. The book makes the compelling case
that if intelligent rapport-based methods supported by robust analysis had been
the norm rather than simple, brutal, and ignorant tactics, U.S. and South
Vietnamese intelligence would have enjoyed far greater success in the war.

10. Field Manual 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations,
which can be downloaded online. The accumulated practical wisdom of generations
of U.S. military interrogators has been collected into the latest iteration of
this book-length manual. Here's what they have to say: "Use of torture is
not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable
results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to
say what he thinks the HUMINT collector wants to hear." Not the most exciting
reading, but indispensable if you want to understand how the vast majority of
U.S. military interrogators really think.

Lieutenant
Colonel  Douglas A. Pryer   is a military intelligence officer who has
served in various command and staff positions in  Iraq , Kosovo, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States,
and, most recently, Afghanistan. He is the author of the Command and General
Staff College Foundation Press's inaugural book,  The Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and
Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003 - April 2004 . The views expressed in this article are those
of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the
Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Yemen movie: 'In the hands of al Qaeda'

By
Emile Simpson

Best
Defense terrorism movie reviewer

Yemeni security forces recently fired on protesters in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, apparently wounding
up to 30 of them. In the Hands of al Qaeda hydrates such headlines: In this gripping documentary film, released
last year, Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad unpacks the
complex dynamics of the conflict. At its core, this is a film about the fight
between al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Yemeni Government -- government versus insurgents -- but this polarized dynamic is
situated within broader kaleidoscopic elements: How many south Yemenis see the
security forces as northern occupiers? Why do some tribes support AQAP and
others fight them? This provides a nice illustration of the erosion of the
boundary between the military and political domain in contemporary armed
conflict.

The centerpiece of the film is Ghaith Abdul Ahad's coverage of the AQAP heartland east of Aden, at the
centre of the U.S. drone campaign in Yemen. For example, in Ja'ar we encounter
a city of 100,000 fully controlled by AQAP. This is truly fascinating; the
tension of the documentary at this point is palpable. Since Ja'ar was retaken
by Yemeni forces in the summer of 2012, this film offers a rare glimpse into
what ground-holding by the international jihadis of AQAP looked like: While we
see an extreme form of sharia law practiced, so too is there an active print
and internet media operation, and real efforts to gain local support by AQAP
water and electricity projects.

AQAP's carrot and stick approach during their overt, ground-holding
phase does not seem so distant from COIN doctrine, albeit in a far more brutal
form (an example of mirror imaging?). The film draws out the contrast with the
no carrot, big stick, U.S. drone approach that appears to strike fear not just
into AQAP, but also into the civilians who live under the drones' gaze: Much of
the local population's political support is lost, but U.S. objectives against
the AQAP leadership nonetheless appear to be met. Whether this represents
campaign success more broadly presumably would depend on how one conceptualizes
the conflict -- are you fighting physical networks or an idea? Perhaps too the
film illustrates in Yemen a U.S. move back to a more conventional understanding
of military effect against an enemy, for better or worse. While the film is not
about COIN or drones per se, and is
indeed admirable in its objectivity, a viewing would no doubt form an excellent
basis for discussion of the pros and cons of these approaches.

In the
Hands of Al Qaeda (2012)

Clover Films

Executive Producer: Tracey ‘H' Doran-Carter

Producer: Jamie Doran

Director: Safa Al Ahmad

Emile Simpson served in the British Army as an
infantry officer in the Gurkhas from 2006 to 2012. He deployed to southern
Afghanistan three times and is the author of War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century
Combat as Politics (Columbia,
2012).

A new treatment for PTSD emerges

By Dr. Elspeth Ritchie

Best Defense guest columnist

Psychiatric Annals recently
published the second in a series on new and innovative treatments for PTSD. The series focuses on so-called complementary and
alternative medicine (CAM) used in the Department of Defense. I say "so-called"
because no one quite agrees on the name; it is also called integrative medicine
and/or holistic medicine. CAM generally includes acupuncture, herbal techniques,
and meditation. I add canine-assisted therapy, virtual reality, and other
innovative therapies in this series in Psych
Annals, of which I am the guest editor.

PTSD is an immense problem in the
military after 11 years of war. The military is also leading the way in
developing new therapies. This article focuses on stellate ganglion block,
which is an anesthetic technique traditionally used to treat pain. In brief, an
anesthetic is injected into the peripheral nerves. In some cases, it has been
found that this technique drastically reduces symptoms of PTSD.

One of the many things that are
exciting about this treatment it is that it is biologically based. So, if
anyone still thinks that PTSD is "all in their head," or totally psychological,
the success of this technique would seem to refute that. Another interesting
point is that it seems to work in refractory PTSD that has not responded to
other treatments.

This is not yet an evidence-based
treatment. In other words, it has not yet been subjected to randomized clinical
trials (RCTs), which are the gold standard in research in medicine. However, in
the days since the on-line version was published, funders from the Medical
Research and Material Command (MRMC) have been reaching out to researchers to
see if they can do some of the RCTs. So exciting times in new approaches to
treating an age-old problem.

Retired Army Col.
Elspeth Ritchie, MD, MPH, is the chief clinical officer, Department of Mental
Health, for the District of Columbia. She also is a professor of psychiatry at
the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Last questions about COIN (X): Is it time for a truth and reconciliation commission?

By Major Tom Mcilwaine, Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Set Ten -- Do we really want to be doing this? COIN,
or whatever it is that we have been doing over the last decade, is tremendously
difficult. The direction of some of these questions suggests that it might be a
little bit more than that though. If what we are doing is fundamentally
imperial, then it raises two extra questions. First, can we do this without
using imperial methods? Second, do we want to use those methods? Is the price
we might pay to alter the behavior of the population of Yemen (in terms of what
it requires us to do) worth paying? If I am correct, then what we are doing
perhaps takes us into some areas that morally we might not wish to go. Failing
to ask ourselves some hard questions about what we have done and what we should
have done will lead politicians to believe that we can somehow do it without
doing bad things -- which means that they are more likely to want to do it in
the future. Precision munitions surely contribute to this as they have been
sold as making war clean. Perhaps we should restrict their use for COIN fights
to make politicians realize that wars really are nasty? Politicians should
understand that going to war is a terrible thing, something I am not sure the
COIN'dinistia philosophy makes clear enough.

And that is the
final issue I would like to raise: As we move away from the conflicts of the
last decade it is not enough simply to return to our combined arms heritage --
however necessary that might be. Nor is it enough to log the current narrative
on what is required for COIN success in our institutional memory bank, and
return to it when we next face a similar threat. What is required, if we are
not to make the same mistakes that we made this time, is a comprehensive
examination of what it is we were trying to achieve, what we needed to do to
achieve it, and whether we really wanted to travel down this path, or want to
now or in the future.

A
place to advocate some truth and reconciliation rather than escalating the
intellectual holy war within our profession might help too.

Major Tom Mcilwaine is a British Army officer who
is currently a student at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Ft
Leavenworth. He has deployed to Iraq as a Platoon Commander and Battalion
Operations and Intelligence Officer, to Bosnia as Aide to the Commander of
European Forces and to Afghanistan as a Plans Officer with I MEF(Fwd). Consider
this the standard disclaimer.

How we got this carrier-dominated Navy

Thomas Hone has a
good article in the new issue of Naval War College Review on how aircraft
carriers replaced battleships in World War II. "Today's officers do not really
know where the Navy they command came from," he states.

His answer: "What
took place during the war was not a simple substitution of carriers for
battleships but the creation of a modern, combined-arms fleet, one that
included submarines and land-based aviation."

He also makes an
interesting observation that has application far beyond the Navy. The newly
designed Navy approach during World War II, he writes, "did what doctrine
should do, which is give a force tactical cohesion so that it has energy to
spare for dealing with the inevitable unexpected challenges," such as the
kamikaze.

E.B. White’s definition of democracy

[image error]

I've
read a lot of E.B. White, but I'd never before come across his interesting
definition of democracy, written in June 1943:

Democracy is the recurrent
suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the
time.

The response from Tom Ricks that ARMY magazine declined to carry in its pages

You'd think ARMY
magazine would welcome a free piece about Iraq from a best-selling author. Apparently
not -- they have declined to run this response I wrote to their two articles
about my new book, The Generals. I
even said they could run it as a letter to the editor, but no. They didn't say
why. I am sorry to see them turn away from what might have developed into a
good, vigorous debate about what the Army should learn from its time in Iraq.

Make up your own
mind -- below is the letter apparently too hot for them to handle.

Sirs:

Thank you for carrying articles about my new book, The Generals: American Military Command From
World War II to Today, in both your January and February issues. I appreciate
the attention. However, I think that Brig. Gen. John S. Brown's commentary, "Do
We Need an Iraqi Freedom Elevator Speech?", requires a response.

General Brown makes several questionable assumptions in the
article.

The first is that in 2003 the Army did in fact understand
unconventional warfare in Iraq. Sure, there were isolated instances of
individuals, such as the one he cites. I interviewed many of these people and
wrote about many of them in my 2006 book Fiasco.
But one swallow doesn't make a summer. General Sanchez and other senior leaders
did not act upon such instances, and instead focused on large-scale
indiscriminate roundups of "military age males." The fact that they did not
take advantage of those moves underscores the point of my new book that the
troops did not fail in Iraq, but that
the Army's leaders at the time did.

Also, throughout General Brown's piece, there runs an
assumption that having more troops would have made a major difference during the
initial year of occupying Iraq. This is an unproven point. In my opinion, given
the poor leadership of Lt. Gen. Sanchez, having twice as many troops on the
ground in 2003-04 might well have resulted in having twice as many angry Iraqis
driven to support the insurgency. Given the indiscriminate roundups and
associated abuses that occurred that year by the units at Abu Ghraib, by the 82nd
Airborne and by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Anbar Province, and by the
4th Infantry Division in north-central Iraq, such a result seems
more likely than not. In addition, those roundups stuffed thousands of people
into the detention system, overwhelming the system and clogging the
interrogation of suspected terrorists, as well as helping provoke riots inside
the jails.

Did the Army really give a good account of itself in Iraq,
as General Brown asserts? If so, I would counter, why did it take the Army
until early 2007 to begin operating effectively in that war? The preceding
period of maladaptive operations, from 2003 to 2007, lasted longer than the
U.S. Army fought in World War II.

General Brown depicts the Army as a surprisingly passive
institution. Things just kind of happened to it. For example, in passing he
mentions Lt. Gen. Sanchez. But who selected Sanchez to command in Iraq? Who
thought that he was the best person for the job? Did that just happen to the
Army, or was its leadership simply a group of bystanders? The Army had a
responsibility to provide
the very best of leadership, talent, resources, and priorities to the fight in
Iraq. Did it?

Yes, I understand that the relationship between the defense
secretary and the Army's leadership was toxic in the spring of 2003, a crucial
period that shaped much of what followed. But this does not excuse the failure
to have an adequate Phase IV plan for Iraq, or for Army generals to say that
they had all the troops they needed if they indeed believed they did not, or to
insist that things were going well when it was clear to anyone on the streets
of Baghdad that they were not. All this cannot be blamed on Ambassador Bremer
and other civilians. At any rate, I would say that part of the duty of generals
is to speak truth to power, even with it makes civilian overseers
uncomfortable. It is not clear to me that the Army's generals did this in
2004-06.

The bottom line is that General Brown's commentary could
only be written by someone who never actually witnessed our war in Iraq.

The issue here is more important than someone simply
misunderstanding my book. I worry that a narrative is emerging in today's Army
that holds that the military pretty much did everything right, but that the
civilians screwed things up. Certainly, the Bush administration made huge
errors in invading and occupying Iraq. I've written more than one book that
looked at those.

But the military also made mistakes, and I don't see those
being addressed. This should be a time of sober reflection, not of hunkering
down and refusing to listen to reasonable criticisms. Why do we not see now
reviews akin to the Army War College's 1970 study on the state of the officer
corps? Until we see such hard, probing analysis that does not spare the
feelings of our generals, the accounts of the Iraq war that capture the
attention of the public and the Congress are indeed likely to be written by
outsiders.

Sincerely,

Thomas E. Ricks

Washington, DC

Soldier poets of the Great War (V): Hodgson's nobility vs. Sassoon's realism

William Noel Hodgson
prayed ambivalently in his poem "Before Action":

By all delights that I shall miss,

Help me to die, O Lord.

At about the same
time, Siegfried Sassoon's thoughts were running colder as he marched
past a corps commander:

‘Eyes right!' The corpse-commander was a
Mute;

And Death leered round him, taking our
salute.

A defense acquisition expert on the procurement lessons of 'Star Wars'

Air Force Lt. Col.
Dan Ward wasn't at all impressed by Darth Vader's management style, which he finds overly reliant
on motivating workers through "telekinetic strangulation." Also, he says,
"Death Stars can't possibly be built on time or on budget, require pathological
leadership styles and...keep getting blown up."

The lessons of "Star
Wars," he concludes, are: Build simple, inexpensive weapons, and rely more on
droids than on Death Stars.

Meanwhile, since I
have nowhere else to put it, and I don't have the copyright clearance to run it
myself, here's a link to a great weird photo.