Engram makes my point better than I can.

In ‘An Alternate Reality’ he directly addresses your argument.

Were does that leave you…

Can you provide the military review or wargaming scenario that Senator Obama, et. al., used as the basis of their strategy for victory in Iraq?

COIN is a known concept. Ink Spot is a known subset of COIN strategies.

Given that the Democrat Party – and Senator Obama, in particular – must want victory in Iraq can you provide a think tank paper or military review that promotes Senator Obama’s plan?

The Arizona senator told reporters Wednesday afternoon that when he refers to the surge, it encompasses not just the January 2007 increase in troop levels but also the counter-insurgency that started in Iraq’s Al Anbar province months prior.

But, McCain would not have left the Awakening to fight al-Qaeda and the Shiite militia alone, eh.

Not even close.

The current success of the surge was predicated on the US Army and USMC developing a human intelligence network in Iraq that mapped the “Human Terrain” and told American commanders which tribal chief could be trusted, which could be bought and which could be turned if Al-Qaeda thought they were informants for the Americans.

US Army National Guardsman and Reservists of both services put together criminal data bases of the tribal & criminal personalities involved in Iraq. The US Military also drew on Israeli advice from their experiences with the Palestinian intifahta to tweet its information gathering techniques.

See this:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20080629.aspx

In the United States, it’s quite common for police to join the reserves. They don’t always end up doing police work, but they have their experience with them always. In Iraq, reservists who were detectives and police commanders quickly saw the need for databases and developing informant networks. That led to the Israeli connection. Israel had been at war with Palestinian terrorists since 2000, and had cranked up their already extensive informant network in the Palestinian territories, and throughout the Arab world. Israeli advise turned out to be critical. But one bit of Israeli wisdom was decidedly unwelcome. Setting up a reliable informant network in Iraq would take time, and there was no way to rush it.

U.S. intel troops, mainly U.S. Army, persevered, and now that’s paying off. You can tell by the confident pronouncements from U.S. generals about success in Iraq. It’s career suicide to make such statements, unless you are very confident with your resources, especially your intelligence capabilities. Naturally, no one will talk openly about this stuff. Can’t risk giving the enemy anything. But in a decade or so, if not sooner, lots of details will come out. It’s quite an epic adventure.

In addition, the US Military took a page from the world of open source intelligence, data mining and predictive analysis using the data base structure described above to create predictions of enemy intent to kill the enemy.

Anyone who has watched the TV show NUMBERS about an FBI unit that uses these techniques will be familiar with what the US Military did.

This, again, is from strategypage.com:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20080723.aspx

For years, there have been calls from Iraq and Afghanistan for more intelligence analysts, computer techs and geeks of all types. It’s easier to get good infantry than it is an effective intelligence analyst. None of this gets covered much in the media, because the military, especially the army, doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s because they don’t want the enemy to know too much about how U.S. troops can predict what the enemy will do, who they will do it with, and how they will do it. This sort of predictive analysis is nothing new. Been used for years in the commercial world. But even there, not many people paid much attention to what the bean counters and geeks were doing. However, most of the time all this analytical stuff, and the math it is based on, does work. ISR has saved thousands of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s saved even more Iraqi lives, because it enables U.S. troops to go after the enemy with more precision, and fewer casualties among nearby civilians. So it’s no wonder that the generals, and troops, want more ISR.

When the “Anabar Awakening” happened, The US Military had version 1.0 of this “Predictive Human Intelligence Map” to watch what was going down and intervene to achieve decisive results. These results were analyzed and made into the campaign plan that became “the Surge.”

When Gen Petraeus got the okay to do the surge, he took the troops out of the FOBs, changed the Rules of Engagement (ROE) and exploited previously gathered intelligence with the additional troops.

US Army and Marine boots on the ground provided the validated HUMINT targeting data, the ROE change (removing the layers of lawyers who previously had to approve attacks) for precision guided indirect fire weapons (Guided MLRS in most instances) killed the enemy in Urban areas, and the 20% troop increase allowed rotating temporary major troop increases in those urban areas the terrorists had been driven out of so the local warlords could effectively stand up their own security forces (”Concerned Local Citizens) to keep the terrorists from coming back.

The Air Force Role here was to kill the insurgents flushed into rural areas by the Army and Marines. Once disentangled from urban collateral damage considerations, the USAF’s full weight of “high collateral damage” 2000lb JDAMS could be used to kill the insurgents.

This was the small war equivalent of hunting down and killing a retreating truck column of a defeated Army.

So saying that the US Military didn’t win the war in Iraq is reality denial that ranks right up their with denying the Nazi Holocaust happened.

There are ‘surges’ and there is ‘The Surge’.

The Ink Spot COIN strategy is not a new one for anyone familiar with anti-insurgency operations. And, there are other strategies for dealing with insurgency problems. And, those strategies overlap. And, we and the Iraqis have chosen, modified, and implemented various flavors of COIN over time. In fact, the purple finger election was part of a COIN ‘surge’. In fact, early support of Anbar Awakening uprisings when they started fighting what was then termed ‘red on red’ battles near the Syrian border was part of a COIN ‘surge’.

‘The Surge’ was a large scale ‘surge’. It had to wait till the Iraqi Army was large enough and well trained enough to take and hold territory, till they were respected enough to get the support of the Iraqi population. ‘The Surge’ as defined by ‘The Media’ was a national COIN Ink Spot strategy where we supported the military and political and civilian fight against ‘the insurgency’.

Regardless, electing to draw down military assets as the civilian population gets massacred is not part of any COIN strategy.

Senator Obama’s strategy, like that of much of the Democratic Party, was the strategy of ‘surging’ off the rooftop of an embassy without honor and without victory. Losing the trust of allies the world over. Emboldening the will of enemies the world over.

Been there, done that.

Some things in life will always be beyond your grasp…

I think I finally got it. The “surge” already started long before the military started debating whether to recommend this strategy to Bush and/or Bush actually adopted it as a new strategy. The surge Bush announced in January of 2007 by definition retroactively includes any activity our military conducted since March 2003 that can be characterized as a “counter-insurgency” tactic. When McCain said the surge started the Sunni Awakening, what he really meant was that the Sunni Awakening started the Sunni Awakening because the Sunni Awakening and the surge are one in the same. How silly, who would question the fact that the Sunni Awakening started itself. Well now this all makes perfect sense . . . oh wait, now I’m confused again. Please pass the cool-aid, I’m starting to have rationale thoughts again!

To: The proggosphere, the Opinionated Press, New York Times, et al.

Re: Attempting to claim John McCain is wrong about the counter-insurgency in Iraq

At the risk of sounding rude, how dumb are you, anyway? Starting an argument with John McCain over the timeline of the counter-insurgency in Iraq, e.g., the relationship between the Anbar tribes turning against al Qaeda and the “surge,” attempting to paint this as some big gaffe of McCain’s part is a dead-bang political loser for you. However, as you seem blithely ignorant to the history of the counter-insurgency in Iraq, allow me to briefly recap a few points.

As noted here yesterday, those of you who have relied on The Narrative of hotel journalists from the establishment media (as opposed to embeds and milbloggers) have missed the role of the US in helping the Anbar tribes turn against al Qaeda. You would be well-advised to read the material linked there, but at the very least the Small Wars Journal piece from Bing West and the timeline presented by the Mudville Gazette. However, if you insist on relying on the establishment media and are too lazy to click your mouses more than once, here is a Washington Post story from March 7, 2006:

Tribal chiefs in Iraq’s western Anbar province and in an area near the northern city of Kirkuk, two regions teeming with insurgents, are vowing to strike back at al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni Arab-led group that is waging war against Sunni tribal leaders who are cooperating with the Iraqi government and the U.S. military. Anbar tribes have formed a militia that has killed 20 insurgents from al-Qaeda in Iraq, leaders said.

***

Members of the Anbar militia said the group comprised about 100 people who have had relatives slain by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The group is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Iraqi intelligence officer from the now-disbanded Iraqi army who lives in Ramadi.

[Khalaf al-]Fahdawi, the sheik from the Albu Fahd tribe, said the militia was forged in a series of secret meetings among tribal leaders, each of whom was asked to help form the group. Some contributed men, some money, Fahdawi said. U.S. military officers attended some of the meetings, he said, and helped “with “all kinds of financial support.”

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, denied that American forces were funding the militia…

Which no one with half a brain ever believed. The US encouraged and funded this movement from the outset, ultimately backing it with artillery and air support. The US did so as part of the evolving counter-insurgency doctrine that was ultimately formalized by Gen. Petraeus and his colleagues. It also did so as part of the ongoing counter-insurgency mission that came to include the increased troop levels which most think of when they hear the word “surge.” It is a mission McCain has supported and Obama has opposed.

The original discussion about the overall surge policy, which includes that change in rules of engagement…that included take and hold territory…began years before it was implemented. McCain was one of the people pushing it. He actually showed up to work in the Senate and he pushed it.

Now, the left is saying all of this would have happened anyway as if they were all unrelated because they can not think of any other way to discredit McCain and revise history. And the Sunni Awakening is not just about Anbar. Btw, those same Sunni leaders are deadset against a timeline today and do not support Obama’s policies. Go look it up. They want those Americans to stay as long as necessary.

Part of the policy was the overall counter insurgency efforts and that included actively recruiting locals to work with. When AlQAida started killing civilians the Americans used this counter insurgency policy which was part of the overall strategy to help create alliances.

The militias began to fall apart both because of increased troop levels and because of a loss of support from the locals and improved performance on the part of the Iraqi military.

And no, not everyone did refer to it that way. Not if they actually knew what they were talking about. Look at Kagan, look at Patraeus and what his background is. The fact that you are informed is no one’s fault but your own.

The surge was more than just a troop increase. The fact that you do not know that is just your ignorance. The point is there was no way to successfully carry out all aspects of the policy without additional troop levels, but that was not the entire policy.

I suggest you re-read McCain’s CBS interview – perhaps slower this time. Obama demonstrated an understanding of why the security situation improved in Iraq – it was a combination of the Sunni Awakening, Shite militias calling a truce and the additional troops Bush sent in when he order the surge. Just about every military analyst I’ve read agrees with this statement.

McCain was the one who demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding on this issue. He called Obama’s statement “a false depiction of what actually happened” because the surge supposedly “began the Sunni Awakening.” So apparently McCain believes that the Sunni Awakening was not significant to the improvement in the Iraqi security situation (even though it largely achieved its objective of regaining control of Anbar before the additional surge troops even arrived) and that the surge led to the Sunni Awakening in the first place. I challenge you to find a single official or analyst that agrees with McCain’s assessment prior to yesterday. Also, if McCain really intended to use the term “surge” broadly to include the Sunni Awakening when he spoke on CBS, why would he say that the surge “began the Sunni Awakening”? Why would McCain say that the surge begin something that is already part of the surge? Wow, McCain’s parsing of words would make Bill Clinton proud.

Up until yesterday, EVERYONE referred to the surge as the new military strategy that Bush ordered in January of 2007. The Sunni Awakening occured well before the surge and was a Sunni, not Bush or US military, initiated agreement. Now McCain and all of the die-hard GOPers are ignoring this fact and pretending like the term surge really is a loose term that means anything that contributed to the improving security situation, even if it occured well before Bush decided to pursue the “surge”. It is not a good sign when the best damage control McCain’s campaign could come up with to cover his gaffe is to literally ignore facts and make stuff up. Has it really gotten that desparate for McCain? I can’t wait to hear McCain’s response to his other gaffe about the Afghanistan war that CBS tried to cover up – maybe McCain will pretend like everyone has always assumed that the Afghanistan war was not really a “major conflict” after 9-11 because we won that war so easily . . . at least until we diverted our resources to Iraq!