How We Fight

Colin H. Kahl

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2006

Summary:  Reports that U.S. troops may have killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, last November have renewed fears that the U.S. military routinely violates the laws of war. But is the Haditha incident the exception or the rule? In fact, U.S. compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq has been relatively high by historical standards, and it has been improving since the beginning of the war.

Colin H. Kahl, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, conducted research at the Department of Defense from January 2005 to August 2006 on a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations.

On other occasions, U.S. troops have interpreted "hostile act" and "hostile intent" in dubious ways. In some instances, merely spotting military-aged men engaged in suspicious activities or gathered in a questionable location has been enough for them to be treated as "bad guys" and "terrorists." In others, U.S. forces acting in legitimate self-defense during firefights, roadside attacks, and insurgent ambushes have responded with overwhelming force in the general direction of the attacks without taking sufficient care to positively identify their targets.

The U.S. military has also been roundly criticized, especially in Europe and the Middle East, for launching large-scale offensives against insurgents in densely populated urban areas with little regard for the inevitable civilian casualties. Nowhere has this criticism been more acute than in the case of Fallujah. In April 2004, approximately 2,500 marines assaulted the city in response to the death and mutilation of four U.S. contractors. The marines engaged in a series of ferocious close-quarters battles with scores of insurgents thoroughly mixed in with the civilian population. Reports from embedded news correspondents suggest that the marines did not intentionally target civilians during the offensive. And in my interviews, marine commanders who had overseen forces in the city claimed that their troops, unlike the insurgents, went to considerable lengths to protect noncombatants. They insisted that U.S. forces did not use artillery in the city, despite reports to the contrary, because they deemed its "area effects" to be too imprecise. Instead, the commanders relied on ground forces backed up by AC-130 gunships and 500-pound laser-guided bombs -- among the most precise air assets available to the U.S. military -- to strike hardened insurgent locations. And they called in air strikes only after lesser force had been employed without success.

Humanitarian concerns and widespread criticism forced the U.S. military to withdraw from Fallujah in late April. Almost immediately, the city became a stronghold of Sunni insurgents and a base for al Qaeda activities, eventually prompting another major U.S. attack. The second offensive, in November 2005, was massive. Between 10,000 and 15,000 troops assaulted the city, damaging or destroying 18,000 of the city's 39,000 buildings. Before attacking, however, marine and army forces surrounded Fallujah and launched an extensive information campaign urging residents to leave. Military and media estimates suggest that at least 250,000 of Fallujah's 280,000 inhabitants fled in advance of the onslaught. U.S. forces also collected much more specific intelligence about insurgent locations inside the city, relying extensively on unmanned aerial vehicles to identify potential targets. Even with improved intelligence, concern for civilian casualties was so great that senior U.S. commanders approved only a small percentage of the preplanned targets prior to the attack. Additional targets were struck only after positive sightings of insurgent fighters.

Despite the steps taken to spare civilians, over 1,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed during the two Fallujah offensives (precise figures remain uncertain). The scale of destruction alone convinced many observers that the attacks were disproportionate, an illegitimate form of collective punishment that violated the norm of noncombatant immunity.

Many such instances of real or perceived noncompliance are at least partly attributable to the incredibly thick "fog of war" that enveloped U.S. forces as the swift invasion of Iraq turned into a frustrating counterinsurgency campaign. Even during the major combat phase of the war, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps were confronting mostly irregular fedayeen fighters, not uniformed soldiers. With the thorough intermingling of insurgents and civilians since then, the increasing frequency of attacks on U.S. troops by individuals in civilian garb or civilian vehicles, and the insurgents' intentional use of civilians and civilian objects as shields, the landscape has become increasingly confused. To make matters worse, the U.S. military failed to adequately plan or train its troops for the stability operations and counterinsurgency missions that followed the invasion. Troops fresh from major combat and new ones deployed just as the major fighting was winding down had little practice or training in the types of nonviolent activities -- manning checkpoints, policing crowds, conducting searches -- that became so important after the invasion.

COURSE CORRECTIONS

Accidents and mistakes are bound to happen during war, and some individuals will always behave atrociously under the stress of combat. Occasional violations of the laws of war, even if egregious, do not in and of themselves constitute conclusive proof of general noncompliance. More telling than such instances of misbehavior is the U.S. military's response to them.

The U.S. military's record on punishing offenders and correcting practices is mostly promising, if somewhat checkered. It is not clear what steps, for example, the U.S. military has taken to avoid repeating the mistakes it made in hastily striking high-value targets at the beginning of the war. Although the United States seems not to have relied on satellite-phone intercepts to launch attacks during the counterinsurgency period, it has sometimes launched strikes based on dubious human intelligence, causing more civilian deaths.

The U.S. military has done a better job of trying to fix the problem of ground-launched cluster munitions. The Defense Department commissioned the Defense Science Board to study the problem of duds, and the resulting report identified a number of measures that could be taken to reduce the threat to civilians and friendly forces. The army has introduced new guidance systems to improve the accuracy of ground-launched cluster munitions and has developed a new unitary Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that uses precision GPS-guided artillery that does not rely on dud-producing submunitions.

Progress on improving counterinsurgency practices is even clearer. First, the U.S. military has changed its official tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). For example, in response to a number of incidents at checkpoints in Baghdad involving troops from the First Armored Division (which was among the units criticized in a 2003 Human Rights Watch report), the division's TTPs were promptly adjusted to reduce risks to civilian drivers. Although these practices were then adopted by many U.S. units throughout Iraq, they were applied inconsistently. Consequently, in late 2005 and early 2006, U.S. commanders began to place renewed emphasis on reducing escalation-of-force incidents. Signs at checkpoints, on U.S. vehicles, and on portable materiel have since been improved; new "dazzling" laser technologies to warn drivers are being tested; and steps have been taken to raise awareness within the Iraqi population about U.S. military practices. U.S. troops have also been instructed to pay more attention to cues that could help them distinguish actual bombers from innocent drivers. To monitor and enforce these changes, the U.S. military now requires commanders to report and justify the use of force up the chain of command every time a weapon is fired at a checkpoint or during a convoy operation. The resulting data are being tracked to further adjust TTPs.