Freitag, 28. Dezember 2007

Durchdiener - militärstrategische Kräfte oder rasches Abverdienen?

Warum hat die Schweizer Armee Durchdiener (DD) Soldaten (Sdt) und Kader?
Der Grundgedanke, in der Krise und in Konflikten die innerhalb der Armee rasch verfügbaren Kräfte einzusetzen, welche je nach ihrer Truppengattungs-Zuteilung und Ausbildung ohne zusätzliche Einsatzvorbereitung und Training zur Wirkung gebracht werden können, gilt es zu berücksichtigen! Es geht weniger darum, seine Dienstpflicht so rasch wie möglich zu absolvieren. Die Interessen der Eidgenossenschaft sind höher zu gewichten, als alle persönlichen Interessen und Absichten. Dieser Hintergrund steht leider nicht im Vordergrund, sondern immer der DD als Mensch und Bürger, was dem sicherheitspolitischen Instrument "Schweizer Armee" dabei aber im Weg steht! Es geht um "Dienst leisten" (Last und Unannehmlichkeiten auf sich nehmen) und eben weniger um "rasch seinen Dienst abzuleisten"!

Die DD müssen auf die anstehenden und wahrscheinlichsten Einsätze mental, gefechtstechnisch-taktisch vorbereitet und konditioniert werden. Die Anforderungen an einen Soldaten und Kader in einer Krise und einer Konfliktphase sind hoch, die Reaktionen in der Regel auf operativ-strategischer Ebene. Jedes Fehlverhalten hat somit sehr grosses Gewicht in der öffentlichen und stark medial geprägten Meinung. Die Anwendung von Gewalt in einem Umfeld unterhalb der Kriegsschwelle (-operations other than war-) will sehr gut trainiert und konditioniert sein. Nach einem Einsatz gibt es keine "Übungsbesprechung" im engsten Kreis der Betroffenen, sondern eine Einsatznachbesprechung / - beurteilung (-AAR, after action review und lessons learned-) in einem grösseren und öffentlichen Umfeld.

Daher gilt es einige meiner persönlichen Erfahrungen im Bereich der DD als militärstrategisches Mittel umzusetzen:

1. Die Selektion geeigneter DD ist zentral. Nur physisch, psychisch und sozial gefestigte Sdt sind als DD zuzulassen. Während der Grundausbildung sind ungenügende Sdt und Kader aus dem DD Status zu entlassen. Die jungen Sdt sind in der Regel weniger problematisch wie die jungen unerfahrenen Kader, die gleich alt sind wie die Sdt, welche sie zu führen haben.
2. Die Ausbildung ist ab Start Rekrutenschule (RS) auf die wahrscheinlichsten Einsätze auszurichten. Das Trainingsspektrum darf aber breit sein, bis zur Ultima Ratio an Gewaltanwendung!
3. Ein DD muss eine besondere Anerkennung im Bereich der Ausrüstung und Besoldung / Erwerbsausgleich (EO) haben, welche sich vom anderen Milizsoldaten abhebt.
4. Die Unterstützung von DD im Bereich "beruflicher Wiedereinstieg" muss gezielt unterstützt werden. Seine geleisteten Einsätze sind mittels einem Arbeitszeugnis als Anerkennung zu belegen.

Die neueste Idee vom abtretenden Kdt HEER, KKdt Luc FELLAY, dem DD ein Diplom als "Wachtpersonal" oder "Sicherheitsspezialisten" abzugeben, beurteile ich eher als problematisch. Wer setzt die im zivilen Umfeld geforderten Standards und wer überprüft die Qualität der Ausbildung und des Wissens und Könnens in den Einsätzen?

Der DD ist ein Mittel unserer Sicherheitspolitik! Das Ziel muss ist ein rasch verfügbarer und gut trainierter und konditionierter Sdt, Kader und Verband sein, welcher die Herausforderung einer Krise und eines Konfliktes ohne grosse bleibende Schäden meistern kann! Zum Wohl unseres Landes und seiner Gesellschaft und weniger zum persönlichen Wohl des Angehörigen der Armee!

Montag, 24. Dezember 2007

Massstäbe der Führungsauslese

Festakt aus Anlass des 50-jährigen Bestehens der Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr am 14. September 2007 in Hamburg

von Horst Köhler, Bundespräsident
in Europäische Sicherheit, Nr 11 / 2007, S. 8-12


(...)

Der militärische Führer und vor allem der Stabsoffizier braucht mehr als rein militärisches Können. Er braucht eine breite Allgemeinbildung, fundierte politische Kenntnisse und wissenschaftlichen Geist. Diese Überzeugung ist mindestens 200 Jahre alt und mindestens ebenso lange wird ihr widersprochen. Es gibt eben immer hart gesottene Troupiers, die können sich gebildete und politisch kundige Offiziere nur als "gedankenschwer und tatenarm" vorstellen. (...)

Heutzutage wenigstens sollte auch dem letzten klar sein: Der im Sinne der Führungsakademie gebildete Offizier, der über seine Bildung eben nicht seine militärische Entschlossenheit verliert, ist im Zweifel der bessere Soldat, weil er sich besser in der Welt orientieren kann, weil er offener für neue Eindrücke ist und selbständig weiterlernt, weil sein Urteil freier, proportionierter und abgewogener ist, weil er historisches Bewusstsein und also Respekt vor fremden Kulturen hat, weil er artikulierter ist, weil er mehr Empathie aufbringt, ohne sich von ihr lähmen zu lassen, und weil er unduldsamer gegen Unrecht und Gemeinheit wird. (...)

...politisches Urteilsvermögen und diplomatisches Fingerspitzengefühl, interkulturelle Kompetenz und Sprachkenntnisse, tatenfrohen Mut und die Fähigkeit zur operativen Vernetzung mit den Verbündeten, Kämpfertum und die gewissenhafteste Bemühung, Unschuldige zu schützen und zu schonen. Gerade die Synthese dieser Qualitäten verspricht erfolgreich zu sein. Gewiss, im Zentrum bleibt immer die Fähigkeit, das Feuer an den Feind zu bringen und ihm notfalls unseren Willen mit Gewalt zu diktieren.

(...)

Es kommt in den Einsätzen der Bundeswehr immer mehr und immer entscheidender auf jeden einzelnen Bürger in Uniform an. ... Da operieren kleine Einheiten weitgehend auf sich gestellt in einem Umfeld, in dem der Gegner nur schwer auszumachen ist und die Zivilbevölkerung als Deckung benutzt. Zugleich herrschen die Regeln eines Medienzeitalters, in dem schon eine einzige Fehlentscheidung entsprechende Bilder und weltweite politische Erschütterungen auslösen kann. Unter solchen Bedingungen müssen schon Patrouillenführer unter Ungewissheit und Zeitdruck Entscheidungen von grosser Tragweite treffen, und angesichts der möglichen und nötigen kurzen Reaktionszeiten trifft erst recht die Offiziere eine immense Verantwortung, für die eigenen Leute und für den politischen Gesamtzusammenhang des jeweiligen Einsatzes. Die Bundeswehr ist darauf gut vorbereitet: durch ihre Tradition der Auftragstaktik; durch Soldatinnen und Soldaten, die als Bürger in Uniform das Mitdenken nicht lernen mussten, sondern niemals aberzogen bekamen und darum auch ein besonders gutes Verständnis für die politischen und kulturellen Zusammenhänge am Einsatzort entwickeln; und durch Stabsoffiziere, die das Militärische in seine Zusammenhänge einzuordnen wissen und auch darum ihre Untergebenen überzeugend und erfolreich führen können.

Weiterführerende Literatur:
Miles Kosmopolitis: Brevier für den kritisch urteilenden Soldaten
http://cmva-abegglen.blogspot.com/2007/01/miles-kosmopolitis-zwei-chancen.html
http://cmva-abegglen.blogspot.com/2007/01/8-thesen-zum-miles-kosmopolitis.html

Freitag, 14. Dezember 2007

Army 'losing battalion' to drugs

BBC, Friday, 14 December 2007

The Army is dismissing the equivalent of almost a battalion of soldiers every year for taking drugs, a report says.


The Royal United Services Institute said the number of positive tests for illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin rose from 517 in 2003 to 769 last year.

Positive tests for cocaine use rose four-fold during the same period. A dishonourable discharge is likely after a positive test for illegal drug use.

The MoD said drug abuse was less common among forces personnel than civilians.

Test changes

Unannounced compulsory drug testing (CDT) is carried out across the Royal Navy, Army and RAF.

In the Army, which tests 85% of its personnel yearly, positive tests rose from 1.4 per 1,000 in 2003 to 4.0 in the first half of 2006 and 5.7 per 1,000 from January to June 2007.

Professor Sheila Bird, a senior scientist with the Medical Research Council writing for the RUSI Journal, said the government had refused to say whether it had change testing practices since 2003 "on the grounds of cost".

More sensitive tests and more testing after weekends and home leave would "go a long way" to accounting for the rise in positive tests for cocaine, she said.

Infrequent use

However, if there had been no changes, she said the cocaine results could signal "a genuine change in soldiers' drug use during a period coincident with major operations".

It could also indicate that cocaine use was actually two to three times higher because there was a high chance infrequent use was going undetected, Professor Bird said.

This was because infrequent use could occur on weekends - but testing may not specifically carried out on Mondays.

Professor Bird analysed answers to Parliamentary questions to find out about army drug testing.

She said that in 2003 cannabis accounted for 50% of all CDT positive tests and cocaine 22%, but by 2006 the figures were 30% for cannabis and 50% for cocaine.

The switch could be the result of soldiers deliberately moving away from cannabis to "minimise their chance of testing positive" - traces of cannabis remain in the urine for two to three weeks, while cocaine remains for two or three days after use.

'Zero tolerance'

RUSI defence management analyst Christianne Tipping said the Ministry of Defence's drugs policy needed to re-examined, especially "at a time when recruitment and retention are problematic".

"CDT exists to deter rather than to try to catch every single person who might engage in occasional drug use. It also helps to maintain operational effectiveness and reduce possible security risks, such as blackmail.

"However, there could be a need to look at a more pragmatic management strategy so that recruitment difficulties in certain trades are not compounded by high discharge rates resulting from drug offences."

But a Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "Drug misuse is incompatible with service life and is not tolerated.

"Positive rates in the Army over the past four years average around 0.77%, compared with over 7% in civilian workplace drug testing programmes in the UK.

"These statistics demonstrate that drug misuse is significantly less prevalent among service personnel than in corresponding civilian demographic groups."

The RUSI report comes a month after 17 soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were discharged after testing positive for drugs.

US marine guilty of Iraq killing

by Peter Bowes, Friday, 14 December 2007
BBC News, California


A US marine has been found guilty of killing an Iraqi soldier while they were on night-time patrol in Fallujah.

Lance Corporal Delano Holmes was convicted of negligent homicide, but was found not guilty of a more serious charge of unpremeditated murder.

Holmes told a military court in San Diego he stabbed the Iraqi private in a fight after suspecting he might be signalling to an insurgent sniper.

He now faces up to eight years in prison and a dishonourable discharge.

Cigarette

Holmes told the court he had had fought with Private Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin while they had been on night-time sentry duty in Falluja.

He said he suspected that the Iraqi was signalling to insurgents with a lit cigarette and a mobile phone.

He told investigators that during the fight Pte Hassin reached for his AK-47 after refusing to put down the cigarette and phone.

Prosecutors accused Holmes of repeatedly stabbing the Iraqi solder with his bayonet. They said Pte Hassin was an ally of the United States, and there was no evidence he was anything but "a peaceful guy".


Holmes's defence lawyer told jurors the actions of the marine were "a perfectly reasonable application and escalation of force".

A post-mortem examination found that Pte Hassin had 17 stab wounds, 26 cuts and a gash that nearly severed his nose.

Holmes was also found guilty of lying to his superiors about the incident.

The five-day trial focused on the politically sensitive issue of how US marines interact with the Iraqi security forces.

Mittwoch, 5. Dezember 2007

Die Macht der Intuition wird unterschätzt

von Guido Kalberer, Engelberg im Tages-Anzeiger, Di, 04.12.2007, S. 45
"Bei der Intuition handlet es sich um eine unbewusste Form von Intelligenz"
(Gerd Gigerenzer, Psychologe, Direktor des Berliner Max-Planck-Instituts für Bildungsforschung)

(...)

Unter Intuition versteht Gigerenzer alles andere als Esoterik oder irrationale Gefühle, die unmotiviert aus dem Unbewussten auftauchen. Vielmehr sieht er darin eine unbewusste Form von Intelligenz. Inuitives Handeln meint automatisierte Abläufe, die auf Vernunft beruhen und über lange Zeit erlernt wurden. Sie stehen nach Gigerenzer nicht im Gegensatz zum Logos, sondern übernehmen immer dann ihren entscheidenden Part, wenn die Dinge so klar und eindeutig sind, dass sie keiner reiflichen Überlegung mehr bedürfen.
"Die Weisheit der Gefühle hat viel mit Wissen und nichts mit Metaphysik zu tun. Verstand und Intuition können Hand in Hand gehen"
(Gerald Traufetter)

(...)

Manipulierbare Emotionen
Wer sich mit Inuition beschäftige, habe es immer wieder mit Emotionen zu tun, die massiv manipuliert würden; und in dieser Hinsicht seien zahlreiche Medien alles anderer als aufklärische, der Vernunft und der Wahrheit verpflichtete Instanzen.
(...)

Dienstag, 4. Dezember 2007

Moral Forces in War

Kleemeier, Ulrike (2007), 'Moral Forces in War', in Hew Strachan, Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: University Press), S. 107-121.

(...)

Clausewitz today: Modern times and moral forces
Clausewitz outlines an image of the soldier which is highly individualistic, holistic, and deeply attached to the emotional realm of the human mind. Does all this mean anything to us today, and if so what exactly?
(...)

Clausewitzian vitues [1) coup d'oeil: 'intuition' is the word which best captures this power of judgement. We use exactly this term to signify mental acts which happen rapidly, are spontaneous, initmately connected with emotional life, and possess synthesizing power. Of course, this does not mean that intuition cannot be based on experience. Presumably the oppsoite is the case. 2) Bravery or courage: Much more valuable than indifference to danger is boldness (Kühnheit), a form of courage induced by positive motivations. ... Boldness enables a person not just to endure danger but to master and overcome it through acting. All of this demonstrates the mew model of a soldier who acts and thinks as an individual. 3) Self-control: Self-control itself is founded on a feeling of a special kind. It results from the intense mental need to act as somebody who is not just driven by something but instead drives things forward. The source of self-control is nothing other than a particular from of striving for Menschenwürde or human dignity. But this need is of course itself an emotion, a passion in this case, and not a product of the faculty of intellect. ... If you want to control the very strong feelings which are inevitable in war, you can do so only by powers which are themselves located within the emotional realm.] become very relevant when Western forces are involved in this kind of constellation [armed conflicts without clear fronts, wars which are not fought with collective weapons like tanks and rockets, but with Kalashnikovs, knives, machetes and rape, wars where limits between combatants and non-combatants are almost completely dissolved, wars which often seem to be completely irrational and without any political motives, wars with a great deal of primitive violence, but without battles]. With all their inherent individualism, they are in a way even better designed for 'small' warfare than 'big' warfare. People are needed who possess coup d'oeil in situations even more confusing than traditional warfare, and also people who are able to cope and survive without receicing any orders for a long time. On the other hand, you do not of course need people who are likely to assimilate with those criminals or half-criminals they are expected to fight. What is required is a type of soldier deeply committed to Western values and at the same time able to find his say in a kind of warfare dominated not so much by esprit de corps as by a mixture of economic interests and seemingly irrational factors.
...the type of soldier Clausewitz presents to us does not have a subordinate mind. He is characterized by a vivid, independent, and wilful spirit.

Sonntag, 11. November 2007

Soldat im Zeitalter der Globalisierung

von Wolfgang Schneiderhan (2007), Europäische Sicherheit, Nr. 2, S. 14-20.

(...)

Globalisierung und soldatisches Berufsbild

Die Begründung des soldatischen Dienens ist unter diesen Umständen komplexer und schwieriger geworden als zu Zeiten des Kalten Krieges. Die Übergänge vom unbeteiligten Zivilisten zum Widerstandskämpfer, Terroristen oder simplen Kriminellen vollziehen sich heute fliessend. Je rascher und geschmeidiger sie erfolgen können, umso höher müssen unsere Anforderungen an die Flexibilität, an die Bildung und an die Fähigkeiten unserer Soldatinnen und Soldaten sein.

Wir benötigen eine intensive und ersthafte Auseinandersetzung mit dem modernen Berufsbild des Soldaten, seinem künftigen Anforderungensprofil und den damit einhergehenden Risiken. Dazu müssen wir uns darüber Klarheit verschaffen und anerkennen, dass sich die Anforderungen an den Soldaten und militärischen Führer gravierend gewandelt und erweitert haben.
Die Anforderungen, die wir an die allgemeine soldatische Kompetenz stellen, erhöhen sich durch das veränderte Aufgabenfeld sowohl militärisch handwerklich und intellektuell als auch in der Frage des Selbstverständnisses. Der archaische Kämpfertypus kann diesen hohen Ansprüchen nicht genügen, beziehungsweise erfüllt nur noch einen Teil der geforderten Fähigkeiten.
Heute reicht das soldatische Berufsbild von zivilen, präventiven, manchmal polizeiähnlichen Aufgaben bis hin zum klassischen Kriegseinsatz. Letzterer wird voraussichtlich immer seltener erfolgen, bleibt aber Kernkompetenz jeder soldatischen Existenz.

Im Kampf gegen den weltweiten Terror ist ein Einsatz, in dem sich die unterschiedlichen Aspekte soldatischen Aufgabenprofils wechselseitig durchdringen, rasch miteinander abwechseln und sogar parallel auftreten, heute die wahrscheinlichste Form. Wir finden sie besonders ausgeprägt bei den Stabilisierungseinsätzen, die - anders als im alten Kriegsbild vorgesehen - häufig in völlig unterschiedlichen Kulturkreisen erfolgen.
Dafür benötigen wir charakterstarke und in der Urteilungskraft gefestigte Persönlichkeiten mit emotionaler und moralischer Stabilität, die auch in Krisensituationen unter hohem psychischen und physischen Druck bestehen können. Politsche, soziale, ethische und moralische Urteilsfähigkeit sowie interkulturelle Kompetenz werden zunehmend bedeutsam und müssen heute wie zukünftig in Ausbildung und Bildung einfliessen.


Die Bundeswehr benötigt engagiertes Führungspersonal mit hoher sozialer Kompetenz. Es muss zum ganzheitlichen Denken befähigt, kommunikativ und gleichermassen konflikt- wie konsensfähig sein. Wir brauchen flexible militärische Führer, die lernwillig und lernfähig sind und auf deren raschen Urteilsfähigkeit wir uns verlassen können. Vor allem aber müssen sie in erster Linie nach wie vor körperlich wie mental belastbar sein.
Die Asymmetrie der Kriegsführung verlangt vom militärischen Führer heute schon auf relativ niedriger Ebene ein sicheres Urteilsvermögen, um die Lage in völlig unübersichtlichen Situationen richtig erfassen und beruteilen zu können und unter Druck - Stress - sicher entscheiden zu können.
Dies ist ein komplexer Anspruch. Hier muss im Einklang mit dem Prinzip der Auftragstaktik Verantwortung für Entscheidungen übernommen werden, die unter Umständen später in der Heimat unter Berücksichtigung möglicher politscher Implikationen und unter grosser Aufmerksamkeit der Öffentlichkeit diskutiert werden.

(...)

ergänzende Literatur:
MILES KOSMOPOLITIS: Brevier für den kritisch urteilenden Soldaten

Murder trial sniper says US used 'bait' for suspect Iraqis

by David Smith in Baghdad
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer

A trial opening in Baghdad today will shed new light on a secret Pentagon programme in which US snipers allegedly planted fake weapons as 'bait' to lure their Iraqi enemies to their deaths.


Sergeant Evan Vela is accused of murdering an unarmed Iraqi man and an attempted cover-up. He has admitted that he fired two bullets at point-blank range into a detainee's head but said he was following a direct order.

His court martial comes after those of two fellow snipers in an embarrassing saga which has blown the cover of an alleged classified 'baiting' programme in which snipers scatter ammunition, detonation cords or other items, then lie in wait to shoot insurgents who pick them up.

The tactic emerged earlier this year when Captain Matthew Didier, a platoon commander in an elite sniper unit known as the 'Painted Demons', told a military court:
'Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy.
'Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against US forces.'


Didier claimed that members of the US military's Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later supplied ammunition boxes filled with 'drop items' to be deployed as bait. Soldiers told the Washington Post that about a dozen platoon members were aware of the programme, and that others knew about the 'drop items' but did not know their purpose. Vela, team leader Michael Hensley and Jorge Sandoval were members of the 'Painted Demons', which had a reputation for notching 'kills' at a high rate in the so-called 'triangle of death' south of Baghdad. They were charged with the murders of three Iraqis during US operations in the spring.

Last week Hensley, an expert marksman from the 1st Battalion, 501st Airborne, was cleared of murder charges but reprimanded and demoted on lesser charges of planting an AK-47 rifle beside the body of a dead Iraqi and disrespecting an officer.

Last month Sandoval was found not guilty on two murder charges but was demoted from specialist to private and is serving a 44-day sentence for planting a detonation cord on the body of an Iraqi.

Vela is charged with premeditated murder, planting a weapon, making false statements and obstruction of justice. The first pre-trial hearing is today.

Lawyers for the snipers have argued that the baiting programme is relevant to their defence because it shows how officials backed unorthodox methods of killing not only insurgents but also unarmed men thought to be enemy combatants.

James Culp, Vela's attorney, has said:
'I don't know how far up the chain this baiting programme goes right now. I know the government is trying to dummy this down to the lowest level possible.'


He added:
'Our government is asking soldiers and Marines to make morally bruising decisions under the most horrific conditions imaginable. When the government doesn't like the results, they isolate and vilify the soldier while hiding behind security clearances, classifications and unreasonable expectations.'


(...)

US military officers in Baghdad deny the existence of a baiting programme. The court barred most classified material from Hensley's court martial.

Montag, 5. November 2007

Nachwuchssorgen bei der Schweizer Armee bis 2019 fehlt Personal für 20 Bataillone

Bern (sda) Die Schweizer Armee kann bis 2019 rund 20 Bataillone personell nicht mehr besetzen. Die VBS-Planer machen sich deshalb jetzt schon Gedanken, den Sollbestand weiter nach unten anzupassen.

Die demografische Entwicklung zeige, dass die heutigen Strukturen in rund 12 Jahren nicht mehr mit genügend Dienstpflichtigen alimentiert werden könnten, sagte Armeesprecher Felix Endrich zu einem Bericht der «SonntagsZeitung».

Entsprechende Überlegungen zu dieser Entwicklung veröffentlichte VBS-Chefplaner Jakob Baumann in der Mitarbeiterzeitschrift «Intra». Noch steht allerdings nicht fest, um wieviele Mann die Armee reduziert werden soll. Dies sei ein politischer Entscheid, der in der kommenden Legislatur gefällt werden müsse, sagte Endrich.

Der Bestand der Schweizer Armee ist in den letzten Jahren mehrmals reduziert worden, zuletzt im Rahmen der Armeereform XXI und des Entwicklungsschritts 2008/2011.

(SDA-ATS\/tm bm/c5swi mil) agen.sdad.inland /

Kommentar:
Die Reduktion der Armee soll unter diesem Parameter ein politischer Entscheid sein? In dieser Optik der vorgefassten Meinung ist dieser Entscheid wohl demographisch vorgegeben und wird fatalistisch hingenommen! Vielmehr ist dieses politische Nichthandeln der Wegweiser für strategische Torheit.

Miles Kosmpolitis - zwei Chancen! eröffnet eine Alternative...

Sonntag, 4. November 2007

Nine fewer and under fire until the end

by Audrey Gillan
The Guardian Weekly, 02.11.07, p. 11

(...)

The fiercest, longest and most lethal firefight took place in the early hours of Saturday September 8 south of Garmsir in Helmand province.

Corporal Ben Umley, 26, fingered a hole in his helmet where a bullet penetrated and fell out inside.

Some time before, he had drawn a smiley face in white marker just next to the hole. It may have brought him luck but the corporal doesn't like the word; his friend died in the attack and later, a sergeant died trying to bring out the friend's body. "I can smile, but he can't," he says. "It's not about luck."

The corporal's platoon was crossing open ground when it came under fire from the Taliban. In the chaos, it was difficult to work out who was hit and where they were, and where the enemy would attack from again, and when.

Two soldiers were shot, one in the head and one in the leg and stomach. Then Private Johann Botha, a South African soldier, was hit and could not be found. Screaming could be heard over the radio: "They're coming to get him," and "Don't leave me."

Sergeant Michael Lockett, 27, extracted his injured men and knew he would have to leave his fatality behind. "I got them behind a position called the three walls and I radioed Brels [Sergeant Craig Breslford] and told him about Botha, that I didn't want to go anywhere till I had got him out. He said 'No dramas, I'll get him back for you'. He was moving forward in sections and Brelsy got shot in the neck. [He died in the attack]. They had to extract him." After stocking up with more ammunition and water, the men returned to the combat zone. "We had to find Botha and extract him," said Sgt Lockett.

"When we got back that night we felt like shit. Everyone was crying for six to eight hours solid. I'm still not sure that it has really hit me yet."


Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of 12 Mechanised Brigade, of which the Mercians are a part, said: "Over the last six months, 30 UK soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, all but two in Helmand.

"Our main effort now is to look after those who have been injured - both physically and psychologically - and their families."


He added that the brigade had "a quiet sense of professional satisfaction that we had done a good job", though there was a "hell of a long way to go". He said: "It has been worth the effort and the sacrifices the brigade has made."

But one soldier, who preferred not to be named, disagreed. "Did we make a difference? Yes, we have killed Taliban but the worst thing you ever want to do is lose a man and at the moment I don't think it's for a valid reason or a cause."

Brain damage fears for troops

up to 20 000 British soldiers could be at risk

by Mattew Taylor and Esther Addley
The Guardian Weekly, 2.11.07, p. 11

A committee of MPs is to investigate fears that up to 20,000 UK troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are at risk of brain damage after being exposed to high-powered explosions.

It was revealed last week that the Ministry of Defence has launched a major study into mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) in soldiers returning from active service.

MTBI, cuased by blows to the head or shockwaves by explosions, has been named in the US as one of four "signature injuries" of the Iraq war, due to the increased use of roadside bombs there and in Afghanistan. The condition can lead to memory loss, depression and anxiety.

(...)

The US army says a many as 20% of its soldiers and marines may be at risk of MTBI. It is introducing a largescale screening programme for troops returning from the frontline.

(...)

Freitag, 26. Oktober 2007

Brains, not bullets

Oct 25th 2007
From The Economist print edition (October 27th 2007 p. 16)


Western armies are good at destroying things. Can they be made better at building them?

Another debate to do with Iraq and Afghanistan is building in America, one that could have important consequences for the West. This debate is being conducted in the Pentagon—and it has to do with the future shape of America's armed forces. With its far-flung alliances and commitments, the superpower rightly wants a “full spectrum” of military capabilities to deal with everything from an all-out war to a small policing action. But precisely what the mix should be is increasingly contentious—and could prove expensive.

If the biggest threat comes from rising powers, such as a belligerent Russia or a pushy China, America and its allies will need to invest in aircraft, ships and advanced weapons to cope. If the greatest challenge is the fight against militants and insurgents around the world—seen by some as a new and different “fourth generation” of warfare (see article)—then they will need more boots on the ground and, crucially, different sorts of soldiers wearing them. Sadly for taxpayers everywhere, the emerging answer from America is that a modern power needs to prepare for both challenges. But there has been a clear swing towards manpower from technology.

The troops, they are a changin'
The change has been striking. The “transformation” advocated by Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush's first defence secretary, envisaged that the armed forces would be slimmed down and money invested in “smart” weapons, reconnaissance systems and data links. Speed, stealth, accuracy and networks would substitute for massed forces. The army's idea of its “future warrior” was a kind of cyborg, helmet stuffed with electronic wizardry and a computer display on his visor, all wirelessly linked to sensors, weapons and comrades. New clothing would have in-built heating and cooling. Information on the soldier's physical condition would be beamed to medics, and an artificial “exoskeleton” (a sort of personal brace) would strengthen his limbs.

The initial success in toppling first the Taliban in Afghanistan and then Saddam Hussein in Iraq seemed to vindicate such concepts. But the murderous chaos in Iraq, and the growing violence in southern Afghanistan, have shown that America is good at destroying targets, and bad at rebuilding states.
Firepower is of little use, and often counter-productive, when the enemy deliberately mingles among civilians.


Robert Gates, Mr Rumsfeld's successor, is thus presiding over something of a counter-revolution. Technological tricks are not being abandoned. But the army is to get a bigger share of the defence budget and has been told to recruit more soldiers with it. Precisely because America is so powerful against conventional armies, Mr Gates expects its enemies to rely on asymmetric warfare. In other words, America must expect to fight protracted, enervating counter-insurgency wars that offer no clear-cut victories and risk the prospect of humiliation.

A new manual on counter-insurgency co-authored by the man now in charge of the war in Iraq, General David Petraeus, overturns the notion that America doesn't “do nation-building”. Counter-insurgency, it says, is “armed social work”. It requires
more brain than brawn, more patience than aggression. The model soldier should be less science-fiction Terminator and more intellectual for “the graduate level of war”, preferably a linguist, with a sense of history and anthropology.


The indirect approach
In general, the shift from technology to manpower is welcome. Some sceptics will argue that America's first future priority should be to avoid smallish wars of choice altogether. Even if that were sensible, history suggests it is unlikely to happen: American troops have kept on getting involved in foreign conflicts. The military planners' job is to cope with the likely, not to restrict democratically elected politicians' options.

From that perspective, two doubts come to the fore. The first is whether the Pentagon is right to focus so heavily on creating more combat brigades. With American units serving 15 months in the field and a year at home at best, the army understandably wants more front-line soldiers to ease the strain. But large armies have often found it extremely hard to fight guerrillas in far-away places—ask the French in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan and, not least, the Americans themselves in Vietnam. With the possible exception of the British in Malaya, it is hard to think of many insurgencies in modern times that have been crushed by a Western occupying power.

Post-colonial politics, stronger concerns for human rights, the rapid dispersal of news: all these (good) things make today's conflicts even harder to win for occupiers. So it may well be better to step back and work through local allies. Few insurgencies have unseated existing governments. In the “war on terror” most of the important al-Qaeda suspects have been rounded up for America by local allies. Strengthening local forces is the best way of salvaging Iraq and Afghanistan, and may help avoid the need for future interventions.

To be fair, the Pentagon talks about building “partner capacity”, but it may need more radical steps—in particular creating new specialist units to train allies, embed Western soldiers in local forces to improve their performance and be able to call in airstrikes, and help organise civil reconstruction. Generals complain about splitting the army, but they already oversee a myriad of specialist units. It is at least worth trying.

The other lingering concern with the shift in focus from destruction to construction has to do with skimping on conventional weaponry. At the margin, it is certainly worth putting more money into manpower at the expense of some futuristic projects. The prospect of an all-out war with Russia or China is distant for now; the risk of losing in Iraq and Afghanistan is acute. But raiding other defence programmes can only go so far. At 4% of GDP, America's defence spending is low by historical standards: it was 9% during the Vietnam war and 14% during the Korean war. The problem is worse in Europe: many of America's allies spend less than the 2% minimum target set by NATO.
If the West wants to build a smarter army of the future, it will have to pay for it.


ergänzende Literatur:
Strategisches Denken
Gewalt unterhalb der Kriegsschwelle
Miles Kosmopolitis - Brevier für den kritisch urteilenden Soldaten

Dienstag, 2. Oktober 2007

Mental health problems for reservists

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/phpnews/wmview.php?ArtID=1882; accessed on 2nd of october

Tess Browne with Professors Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely, with colleagues from the King's Centre for Military Health Research, have today published a new study which highlights problems UK reservists experience before and after deployment – one indicator as to why this group has more mental health problems than regular soldiers.

The findings published in this month's British Journal of Psychiatry (June) indicate that the main differences relate more to problems at home than to what actually happens to reservists in Iraq.

The research team originally conducted a large MOD-funded survey that involved around 1,600 reservists and 8,500 regulars who went on Operation Telic ‘British Operations in Iraq' in 2003. The survey indicated that around 25 per cent of reservists experienced a mental health disorder compared with 19 per cent of regular soldiers.

The follow-up survey published today was designed to examine the differences between the two groups and suggests a lack of support for soldiers and families, before and after being deployed.

One of the authors of the new study, Professor Wessely comments that reservists tended to be older and of higher rank than the regular forces sent into war zones. They reported higher exposure to traumatic experiences than regular soldiers, lower unit cohesion, and more problems adjusting to homecoming.

He adds: ‘Improvements have been made to support serving reservists. We are now looking into whether this has been matched by similar changes in support for their families back at home.'

UK personnel deployed in the war completed a health survey about their experiences. Their health was measured using self-report of common mental disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), fatigue, physical symptoms and well-being. It was found that there were major differences in the reservists' socio-demographic characteristics, in the way they were deployed, and their reported experiences during deployment.

Although reservists were more likely to report their families feeling proud of their contribution compared with regular personnel, they also experienced more difficulties and less marital satisfaction on their return.

Traumatic experiences

The study reports that a large number of the reservists were engaged in medical and welfare roles, aiding the wounded and handling bodies. This could have accounted for their higher exposure to traumatic experiences. They were also less likely to discharge their weapons, or come under small arms fire, reflecting the relatively few reservists in combat roles (11per cent compared with 25per cent of regulars). However, reservists were more likely to report coming under artillery fire, or thinking that they might be killed.

Unit cohesion has been shown to be the single most important sustaining and motivating force among troops, and psychological problems are more common in soldiers who do not form close relationships within their unit. Professor Wessely continues: ‘It is generally more difficult for an individual reservist than if you are part of a large formal unit.'

Research has shown that reservists are at greater risk of psychological stress because of rapid mobilisation, leaving them minimal time to process fears, and put their affairs in order. The unexpected disruption to families and careers, and resulting financial pressures, may have contributed to problems at home among the reservists.

Since the Iraq War began in January 2003, more than 12,000 reservists have been deployed, making up 11per cent of the UK forces in Iraq.

The UK Ministry of Defence has recently changed its policy to provide more mental health services for reservists, who previously were not eligible to use Defence Medical Services following deployment.

Sonntag, 12. August 2007

'War tsar' calls for return of the draft to take the strain

by Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer



America's 'war tsar' has called for the nation's political leaders to consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I think it makes sense to consider it,' he said. Lute was appointed 'war tsar' earlier this year after President Bush decided a single figure was needed to oversee the nation's military efforts abroad.

Rumours of a return to the draft have long circulated in military circles as the pressure from fighting two large conflicts at the same time builds on America's forces. However, politically it would be extremely difficult to achieve, especially for any leader hoping to be elected in 2008. Bush has previously ruled out the suggestion as unnecessary.

Lute, however, said the war was causing stress to military families and, as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment. 'This kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living-room conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions,' he said.

A draft would revive bad memories of the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight and die in Vietnam. Few other policies proved as divisive in America and the memories of anti-war protesters burning their draft cards and fleeing to Canada are still vivid in the memory.

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis

by Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer



Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.
The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.
(...)

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'

It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired.

But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don't see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.
(...)
The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about broken'.
Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

(...)

Samstag, 21. Juli 2007

The war inside

by Anne Hull and Dana Priest
The Guardian Weekly, 06.07.07, pp. 23-25

(Auszug)

...

Calloway felt naked without his M-4 rifle, his constant companion during his tour south of Baghdad with the 101st Airborne Division. The yearlong deployment claimed the lives of 50 soldiers in his brigade. Two suicides. Calloway (...) lasted nine months, until the afternoon he watched his sergeant step on a pressure-plate bomb in the road last year. The young soldier's knees buckled and he vomited into the reeds before he was ordered to help collect body parts. A few days later he was given anti-depressants and rest, but after a week he was still twitching and sleepless. In September the army decided his war was over.

Every month between 20 and 40 soldiers are evacuated from Iraq because of mental problems, according to the army.

...

US soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) outnumber all of the war's amputees by 43 to one in the army alone.


...

One night he put a DVD and watched the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan (...) retching in fear as they waded ashore and faced a rain of German bullets. Limbs were severed, necks punctured, foreheads blown open, but the grunts kept charging. "See why I picked infantry," he said. "There's no other place in the world where you can have a job like that. It's a brotherhood that's deeper than your own family."

His romanticised ideals clashed with reality.

Four months out of basic training he had been sent on one of the most dangerous sectors of Baghdad.

...

The roads (...) were littered with bombs. A first sergeant was lost right away, and the casualties never stopped. Living in abandoned houses, Calloway went days without sleep. He went on raids at night, kicking in doors and searching houses to the sound of gunfire and screams.

He had never felt such excitement or sense of belonging. His best friend was Specialist Denver Rearick, a 23-year-old on his second tour who warned him: "Your entire body is a puzzle before your go to war. You go to war and every little piece of that puzzle gets twisted and turned. And then you are supposed to come back home again."

But the pressure and dread and exhaustion began to smother Calloway. He survived several bomb blasts. Some soldiers were sucking on aerosol cans to get high; one died accidentally. Sleep deprivation mixed with random violence scrambled Calloway.

...

On the day Vosbein died (he treated Calloway like a kid brother), a convoy patrol in three Humvees pulled over to check a crater in the road. As Calloway was opening his door, Vosbein was already moving towards the crater. The explosion knocked two other soldiers to the ground. Vosbein - whistling, happy Vos - was eviscerated. Parts of him were everywhere. Calloway threw up. Then: rage. He wanted to shoot the first Iraqi he saw, but his legs weren't working. He was useless to help clean up the scene. That night they confiscated his weapon. His commanders watched him closely. Eventually it was decided to ship him home.

...

The War Inside

Troops Are Returning From the Battlefield With Psychological Wounds, But the Mental-Health System That Serves Them Makes Healing Difficult

by Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 17, 2007


Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.


In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression.


At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled "severe and chronic." In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was "in need of major help" and that he had provided "more than enough evidence" to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, "have been well documented."

None of that seemed to matter when his case reached VA disability evaluators. They turned him down flat, ruling that he deserved no compensation because his psychological problems existed before he joined the Army. They also said that Cruz had not proved he was ever in combat. "The available evidence is insufficient to confirm that you actually engaged in combat," his rejection letter stated.

Yet abundant evidence of his year in combat with the 4th Infantry Division covers his family's living-room wall. The Army Commendation Medal With Valor for "meritorious actions . . . during strategic combat operations" to capture Hussein hangs not far from the combat spurs awarded for his work with the 10th Cavalry "Eye Deep" scouts, attached to an elite unit that caught the Iraqi leader on Dec. 13, 2003, at Ad Dawr.

Veterans Affairs will spend $2.8 billion this year on mental health. But the best it could offer Cruz was group therapy at the Bronx VA medical center. Not a single session is held on the weekends or late enough at night for him to attend. At age 25, Cruz is barely keeping his life together. He supports his disabled parents and 4-year-old son and cannot afford to take time off from his job repairing boilers. The rough, dirty work, with its heat and loud noises, gives him panic attacks and flesh burns but puts $96 in his pocket each day.

Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy. He no longer has the stamina to appeal the VA decision, or to make the Army correct the sloppy errors in his medical records or amend his personnel file so it actually lists his combat awards.

"I'm pushing the mental limits as it is," Cruz said, standing outside the bullet-pocked steel door of the New York City housing project on Webster Avenue where he grew up and still lives with his family. "My experience so far is, you ask for something and they deny, deny, deny. After a while you just give up."

An Old and Growing Problem

Jeans Cruz and his contemporaries in the military were never supposed to suffer in the shadows the way veterans of the last long, controversial war did. One of the bitter legacies of Vietnam was the inadequate treatment of troops when they came back. Tens of thousands endured psychological disorders in silence, and too many ended up homeless, alcoholic, drug-addicted, imprisoned or dead before the government acknowledged their conditions and in 1980 officially recognized PTSD as a medical diagnosis.

Yet nearly three decades later, the government still has not mastered the basics: how best to detect the disorder, the most effective ways to treat it, and the fairest means of compensating young men and women who served their country and returned unable to lead normal lives.

Cruz's case illustrates these broader problems at a time when the number of suffering veterans is the largest and fastest-growing in decades, and when many of them are back at home with no monitoring or care. Between 1999 and 2004, VA disability pay for PTSD among veterans jumped 150 percent, to $4.2 billion.

By this spring, the number of vets from Afghanistan and Iraq who had sought help for post-traumatic stress would fill four Army divisions, some 45,000 in all.

They occupy every rank, uniform and corner of the country. People such as Army Lt. Sylvia Blackwood, who was admitted to a locked-down psychiatric ward in Washington after trying to hide her distress for a year and a half; and Army Pfc. Joshua Calloway, who spent eight months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and left barely changed from when he arrived from Iraq in handcuffs; and retired Marine Lance Cpl. Jim Roberts, who struggles to keep his sanity in suburban New York with the help of once-a-week therapy and a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs; and the scores of Marines in California who were denied treatment for PTSD because the head psychiatrist on their base thought the diagnosis was overused.

They represent the first wave in what experts say is a coming deluge.

As many as one-quarter of all soldiers and Marines returning from Iraq are psychologically wounded, according to a recent American Psychological Association report. Twenty percent of the soldiers in Iraq screened positive for anxiety, depression and acute stress, an Army study found.

But numbers are only part of the problem. The Institute of Medicine reported last month that Veterans Affairs' methods for deciding compensation for PTSD and other emotional disorders had little basis in science and that the evaluation process varied greatly. And as they try to work their way through a confounding disability process, already-troubled vets enter a VA system that chronically loses records and sags with a backlog of 400,000 claims of all kinds.

The disability process has come to symbolize the bureaucratic confusion over PTSD. To qualify for compensation, troops and veterans are required to prove that they witnessed at least one traumatic event, such as the death of a fellow soldier or an attack from a roadside bomb, or IED. That standard has been used to deny thousands of claims. But many experts now say that debilitating stress can result from accumulated trauma as well as from one significant event.

In an interview, even VA's chief of mental health questioned whether the single-event standard is a valid way to measure PTSD. "One of the things I puzzle about is, what if someone hasn't been exposed to an IED but lives in dread of exposure to one for a month?" said Ira R. Katz, a psychiatrist. "According to the formal definition, they don't qualify."

The military is also battling a crisis in mental-health care. Licensed psychologists are leaving at a far faster rate than they are being replaced. Their ranks have dwindled from 450 to 350 in recent years. Many said they left because they could not handle the stress of facing such pained soldiers. Inexperienced counselors muddle through, using therapies better suited for alcoholics or marriage counseling.

A new report by the Defense Department's Mental Health Task Force says the problems are even deeper. Providers of mental-health care are "not sufficiently accessible" to service members and are inadequately trained, it says, and evidence-based treatments are not used. The task force recommends an overhaul of the military's mental-health system, according to a draft of the report.

Another report, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the wake of the Walter Reed outpatient scandal, found similar problems: "There is not a coordinated effort to provide the training required to identify and treat these non-visible injuries, nor adequate research in order to develop the required training and refine the treatment plans."

But the Army is unlikely to do more significant research anytime soon. "We are at war, and to do good research takes writing up grants, it takes placebo control trials, it takes control groups," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist. "I don't think that that's our primary mission."

In attempting to deal with increasing mental-health needs, the military regularly launches Web sites and promotes self-help guides for soldiers. Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, believes that doubling the number of mental-health professionals and boosting the pay of psychiatrists would help.

But there is another obstacle that those steps could not overcome. "One of my great concerns is the stigma" of mental illness, Pollock said. "That, to me, is an even bigger challenge. I think that in the Army, and in the nation, we have a long way to go." The task force found that stigma in the military remains "pervasive" and is a "significant barrier to care."

Surveys underline the problem.
Only 40 percent of the troops who screened positive for serious emotional
problems sought help, a recent Army survey found. Nearly 60 percent of soldiers
said they would not seek help for mental-health problems because they felt their
unit leaders would treat them differently; 55 percent thought they would be seen
as weak, and the same percentage believed that soldiers in their units would
have less confidence in them.


Lt. Gen. John Vines, who led the 18th Airborne Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, said countless officers keep quiet out of fear of being mislabeled. "All of us who were in command of soldiers killed or wounded in combat have emotional scars from it," said Vines, who recently retired. "No one I know has sought out care from mental-health specialists, and part of that is a lack of confidence that the system would recognize it as 'normal' in a time of war. This is a systemic problem."

Officers and senior enlisted troops, Vines added, were concerned that they would have trouble getting security clearances if they sought psychological help. They did not trust, he said, that "a faceless, nameless agency or process, that doesn't know them personally, won't penalize them for a perceived lack of mental or emotional toughness."

Overdiagnosed or Overlooked?

For the past 2 1/2 years, the counseling center at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., was a difficult place for Marines seeking help for post-traumatic stress. Navy Cmdr. Louis Valbracht, head of mental health at the center's outpatient hospital, often refused to accept counselors' views that some Marines who were drinking heavily or using drugs had PTSD, according to three counselors and another staff member who worked with him.

"Valbracht didn't believe in it. He'd say there's no such thing as PTSD," said David Roman, who was a substance abuse counselor at Twentynine Palms until he quit six months ago.

"We were all appalled," said Mary Jo Thornton, another counselor who left last year.

A third counselor estimated that perhaps half of the 3,000 Marines he has counseled in the past five years showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress. "They would change the diagnosis right in front of you, put a line through it," said the counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works there.

"I want to see my Marines being taken care of," said Roman, who is now a substance-abuse counselor at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, N.C.

In an interview, Valbracht denied he ever told counselors that PTSD does not exist. But he did say "it is overused" as a diagnosis these days, just as "everyone on the East Coast now has a bipolar disorder." He said this "devalues the severity of someone who actually has PTSD," adding: "Nowadays it's like you have a hangnail. Someone comes in and says 'I have PTSD,' " and counselors want to give them that diagnosis without specific symptoms.

Valbracht, an aerospace medicine specialist, reviewed and signed off on cases at the counseling center. He said some counselors diagnosed Marines with PTSD before determining whether the symptoms persisted for 30 days, the military recommendation. Valbracht often talked to the counselors about his father, a Marine on Iwo Jima who overcame the stress of that battle and wrote an article called "They Even Laughed on Iwo." Counselors found it outdated and offensive. Valbracht said it showed the resilience of the mind.

Valbracht retired recently because, he said, he "was burned out" after working seven days a week as the only psychiatrist available to about 10,000 Marines in his 180-mile territory. "We could have used two or three more psychiatrists," he said, to ease the caseload and ensure that people were not being overlooked.

Former Lance Cpl. Jim Roberts's underlying mental condition was overlooked by the Marine Corps and successive health-care professionals for more than 30 years, as his temper and alcohol use plunged him into deeper trouble. Only in May 2005 did VA begin treating the Vietnam vet for PTSD. Three out of 10 of his compatriots from Vietnam have received diagnoses of PTSD. Half of those have been arrested at least once. Veterans groups say thousands have killed themselves.

To control his emotions now, Roberts attends group therapy once a week and swallows a handful of pills from his VA doctors: Zoloft, Neurontin, Lisinopril, Seroquel, Ambien, hydroxyzine, "enough medicine to kill a mule," he said.

Roberts desperately wants to persuade Iraq veterans not to take the route he traveled. "The Iraq guys, it's going to take them five to 10 years to become one of us," he said, seated at his kitchen table in Yonkers with his vet friends Nicky, Lenny, Frenchie, Ray and John nodding in agreement. "It's all about the forgotten vets, then and now. The guys from Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to get these guys in here with us."

"In here" can mean different things. It can mean a 1960s-style vet center such as the one where Roberts hangs out, with faded photographs of Huey helicopters and paintings of soldiers skulking through shoulder-high elephant grass. It can mean group therapy at a VA outpatient clinic during work hours, or more comprehensive treatment at a residential clinic. In a crisis, it can mean the locked-down psych ward at the local VA hospital.

"Out there," with no care at all, is a lonesome hell.

Losing a Bureaucratic Battle

Not long after Jeans Cruz returned from Iraq to Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004, his counselor, a low-ranking specialist, suggested that someone should "explore symptoms of PTSD." But there is no indication in Cruz's medical files, which he gave to The Washington Post, that anyone ever responded to that early suggestion.

When he met with counselors while he was on active duty, Cruz recalled, they would take notes about his troubled past, including that he had been treated for depression before he entered the Army. But they did not seem interested in his battlefield experiences. "I've shot kids. I've had to kill kids. Sometimes I look at my son and like, I've killed a kid his age," Cruz said. "At times we had to drop a shell into somebody's house. When you go clean up the mess, you had three, four, five, six different kids in there. You had to move their bodies."

When he tried to talk about the war, he said, his counselors "would just sit back and say, 'Uh-huh, uh-huh.' When I told them about the unit I was with and Saddam Hussein, they'd just say, 'Oh, yeah, right.' "

He occasionally saw a psychiatrist, who described him as depressed and anxious. He talked about burning himself with cigarettes and exhibited "anger from Iraq, nightmares, flashbacks," one counselor wrote in his file. "Watched friend die in Iraq. Cuts, bruises himself to relieve anger and frustration." They prescribed Zoloft and trazodone to control his depression and ease his nightmares. They gave him Ambien for sleep, which he declined for a while for fear of missing morning formation.

Counselors at Fort Hood grew concerned enough about Cruz to have him sign what is known as a Life Maintenance Agreement. It stated: "I, Jeans Cruz, agree not to harm myself or anyone else. I will first contact either a member of my direct Chain of Command . . . or immediately go to the emergency room." That was in October 2004. The next month he signed another one.

Two weeks later, Cruz reenlisted. He says the Army gave him a $10,000 bonus.

His problems worsened. Three months after he reenlisted, a counselor wrote in his medical file: "MAJOR depression." After that: "He sees himself in his dreams killing or strangling people. . . . He is worried about controlling his stress level. Stated that he is starting to drink earlier in the day." A division psychologist, noting Cruz's depression, said that he "did improve when taking medication but has degenerated since stopping medication due to long work hours."

Seven months after his reenlistment ceremony, the Army gave him an honorable discharge, asserting that he had a "personality disorder" that made him unfit for military service. This determination implied that all his psychological problems existed before his first enlistment. It also disqualified him from receiving combat-related disability pay.

There was little attempt to tie his condition to his experience in Iraq. Nor did the Army see an obvious contradiction in its handling of him: He was encouraged to reenlist even though his psychological problems had already been documented.

Cruz's records are riddled with obvious errors, including a psychological rating of "normal" on the same physical exam the Army used to discharge him for a psychological disorder. His record omits his combat spurs award and his Army Commendation Medal With Valor. These omissions contributed to the VA decision that he had not proved he had been in combat. To straighten out those errors, Cruz would have had to deal with a chaotic and contradictory paper trail and bureaucracy -- a daunting task for an expert lawyer, let alone a stressed-out young veteran.

In the Aug. 16, 2006, VA letter denying Cruz disability pay because he had not provided evidence of combat, evaluators directed him to the U.S. Armed Services Center for Research of Unit Records. But such a place no longer exists. It changed its name to the U.S. Army and Joint Services Records Research Center and moved from one Virginia suburb, Springfield, to another, Alexandria, three years ago. It has a 10-month waiting list for processing requests.

To speed things up, staff members often advise troops to write to the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland. But that agency has no records from the Iraq war, a spokeswoman said. That would send Cruz back to Fort Hood, whose soldiers have deployed to Iraq twice, leaving few staff members to hunt down records.

But Cruz has given up on the records. Life at the Daniel Webster Houses is tough enough.

After he left the Army and came home to the Bronx, he rode a bus and the subway 45 minutes after work to attend group sessions at the local VA facility. He always arrived late and left frustrated. Listening to the traumas of other veterans only made him feel worse, he said: "It made me more aggravated. I had to get up and leave." Experts say people such as Cruz need individual and occupational therapy.

Medications were easy to come by, but some made him sick. "They made me so slow I didn't want to do nothing with my son or manage my family," he said. After a few months, he stopped taking them, a dangerous step for someone so severely depressed. His drinking became heavier.

To calm himself now, he goes outside and hits a handball against the wall of the housing project. "My son's out of control. There are family problems," he said, shaking his head. "I start seeing these faces. It goes back to flashbacks, anxiety. Sometimes I've got to leave my house because I'm afraid I'm going to hit my son or somebody else."

Because of his family responsibilities, he does not want to be hospitalized. He doesn't think a residential program would work, either, for the same reason.

His needs are more basic. "Why can't I have a counselor with a phone number? I'd like someone to call."

Or some help from all those people who stuck their business cards in his palm during the glory days of his return from Iraq. "I have plaques on my wall -- but nothing more than that."

Convoys and IED

Auszug aus: 'The carnage, the blown-up bodies I saw ... Why? What was this for?'

Friday July 13, 2007, Guardian Unlimited
by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian

...

"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad.
"So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."

Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."

Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginning of the war.

"The second you left the gate of your base, you were always worried," said Sergeant Flatt. "You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you could never see them. I mean, it's just by pure luck who's getting killed and who's not. If you've been in firefights earlier that day or that week, you're even more stressed and insecure to a point where you're almost trigger-happy."

...

On July 30, 2004, Sergeant Flanders was riding in the tail vehicle of a convoy on a pitch-black night, traveling from Camp Anaconda south to Taji, just north of Baghdad, when his unit was attacked with small-arms fire and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). He was about to get on the radio to warn the vehicle in front of him about the ambush when he saw his gunner unlock the turret and swivel it around in the direction of the shooting. He fired his MK-19, a 40-millimeter automatic grenade launcher capable of discharging up to 350 rounds per minute.

"He's just holding the trigger down and it wound up jamming, so he didn't get off as many shots maybe as he wanted," Sergeant Flanders recalled. "But I said, 'How many did you get off?' 'Cause I knew they would be asking that. He said, 'Twenty-three.' He launched twenty-three grenades....

"I remember looking out the window and I saw a little hut, a little Iraqi house with a light on.... We were going so fast and obviously your adrenaline's--you're like tunnel vision, so you can't really see what's going on, you know? And it's dark out and all that stuff. I couldn't really see where the grenades were exploding, but it had to be exploding around the house or maybe even hit the house. Who knows? Who knows? And we were the last vehicle. We can't stop."

Convoys did not slow down or attempt to brake when civilians inadvertently got in front of their vehicles, according to the veterans who described them. Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, 29, from Cañon City, Colorado, was based at the Talil Air Base in Nasiriya with the Colorado National Guard's 220th Military Police Company for a year beginning in February 2003. She recounted one incident she investigated in January 2004 on a six-lane highway south of Nasiriya that resembled numerous incidents described by other veterans.

"It's like very barren desert, so most of the people that live there, they're nomadic or they live in just little villages and have, like, camels and goats and stuff," she recalled. "There was then a little boy--I would say he was about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we responded to it with the investigative team--a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing the highway with his, with three donkeys. A military convoy, transportation convoy driving north, hit him and the donkeys and killed all of them. When we got there, there were the dead donkeys and there was a little boy on the side of the road.

"We saw him there and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't even stop," she said. "They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically--basically, your order is that you never stop."

...

Intelligence

Auszug aus: 'The carnage, the blown-up bodies I saw ... Why? What was this for?'

Friday July 13, 2007, Guardian Unlimited
by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian

...

Fifteen soldiers we spoke with told us the information that spurred these raids was typically gathered through human intelligence--and that it was usually incorrect. Eight said it was common for Iraqis to use American troops to settle family disputes, tribal rivalries or personal vendettas. Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas, was a scout in Tikrit with the Fourth Infantry Division during a yearlong tour that ended in March 2004. In late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra raided a middle-aged man's home in Tikrit because his son had told the Army his father was an insurgent. After thoroughly searching the man's house, soldiers found nothing and later discovered that the son simply wanted money his father had buried at the farm.

After persistently acting on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who raided Iraqi homes in more than fifty operations, said soldiers began to anticipate the innocence of those they raided. "People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna get the wrong house," he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon leader shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he would radio in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found the weapons of mass destruction in here."

Sergeant Bruhns said he questioned the authenticity of the intelligence he received because Iraqi informants were paid by the US military for tips. On one occasion, an Iraqi tipped off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a small Syrian resistance organization, responsible for killing a number of US troops, was holed up in a house. "They're waiting for us to show up and there will be a lot of shooting," Sergeant Bruhns recalled being told.

As the Alpha Company team leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the first person in the door. Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're so confident that there are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents...in there, why in the world are you going to send me and three guys in the front door, because chances are I'm not going to be able to squeeze the trigger before I get shot.'" Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested they pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle up to the house and shoot a missile through the front window to exterminate the enemy fighters his commanders claimed were inside. They instead diminished the aggressiveness of the raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran security out front, his fellow soldiers smashed the windows and kicked down the doors to find "a few little kids, a woman and an old man."

In late summer 2005, in a village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist Chrystal searched a compound with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly man in his mid-30s escorted Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit around the property, where the man lived with his parents, wife and children, making jokes to lighten the mood. As they finished searching--they found nothing--a lieutenant from his company approached Specialist Chrystal: "What the hell were you doing?" he asked. "Well, we just searched the house and it's clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The lieutenant told Specialist Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of the targets" of the raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as being an insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission, they'd only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there with the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he felt "humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed no threat was deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward, he posted himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission.

Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, served a yearlong tour in several cities in Iraq, including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, beginning in February 2004. He estimates that he searched more than a hundred homes in Tikrit and found the raids fruitless and maddening. "We would go on one raid of a house and that guy would say, 'No, it's not me, but I know where that guy is.' And...he'd take us to the next house where this target was supposedly at, and then that guy's like, 'No, it's not me. I know where he is, though.' And we'd drive around all night and go from raid to raid to raid."

"I can't really fault military intelligence," said Specialist Reppenhagen, who said he raided thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It was always a guessing game. We're in a country where we don't speak the language. We're light on interpreters. It's just impossible to really get anything. All you're going off is a pattern of what's happened before and hoping that the pattern doesn't change."

Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26, of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with the Rear Operations Center, Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year beginning in October 2004. He said combat troops had neither the training nor the resources to investigate tips before acting on them. "We're not police," he said. "We don't go around like detectives and ask questions. We kick down doors, we go in, we grab people."

...

Sergeant Bruhns said he uncovered illegal material about 10 percent of the time, an estimate echoed by other veterans. "We did find small materials for IEDs, like maybe a small piece of the wire, the detonating cord," said Sergeant Cannon. "We never found real bombs in the houses." In the thousand or so raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, Sergeant Westphal said, he came into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents."

Raids

Auszug aus: 'The carnage, the blown-up bodies I saw ... Why? What was this for?'

Friday July 13, 2007, Guardian Unlimited
by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian

...

"So we get started on this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc. Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno, who said he raided between twenty and thirty Iraqi homes during an eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that ended in October 2005, serving with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade.

"It starts with the psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be, saying, basically, saying, Put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we're running around, and they--we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people.

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--mother­fucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....

"And--I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had tears then, too--and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that.

"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."

According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

Each raid, or "cordon and search" operation, as they are sometimes called, involved five to twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of attacks on soldiers in a particular area, commanders would normally order infantrymen on raids to look for weapons caches, ammunition or materials for making IEDs. Each Iraqi family was allowed to keep one AK-47 at home, but according to Bruhns, those found with extra weapons were arrested and detained and the operation classified a "success," even if it was clear that no one in the home was an insurgent.

Before a raid, according to descriptions by several veterans, soldiers typically "quarantined" the area by barring anyone from coming in or leaving. In pre-raid briefings, Sergeant Bruhns said, military commanders often told their troops the neighborhood they were ordered to raid was "a hostile area with a high level of insurgency" and that it had been taken over by former Baathists or Al Qaeda terrorists.

"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant Bruhns. "And a lot of these troops think once they kick down the door there's going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them."

Sgt Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of homes in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, for one year beginning in February 2004. "We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every house," he said.

'The carnage, the blown-up bodies I saw ... Why? What was this for?

Friday July 13, 2007, Guardian Unlimited
by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian

Over the past several months The Nation interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.
...

Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

...

Court cases, such as the ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the rape and murder of a 14-year-old in Mah­mudiya, and news stories in the Washington Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi accounts have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on civilians.

...

Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims--at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.

...

Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

...

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."

...

Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant."

...

These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said.


...

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

...

Samstag, 23. Juni 2007

Moderne Führungssysteme - kein Ersatz für gut ausgebildete Soldaten

Gespräch mit Generalleutnant James D. Thurman, Befehlshaber des V. Korps der US Army

von Bruno Lezzi (2007), NZZ, Nr. 141, S. 17.
(...)

Generalleutnant Thurman räumt (...) ein, dass gerade beim Kampf in überbautem Gebiet die Verifikation von auf dem Bildschirmen vorliegenden Informationen durch menschliche Nachrichtenquellen unerlässlich sei; denn improvisierte Sprengkörper und Autobomben liessen sich kaum aus der Luft ausfindig machen. Nicht das System, das nur nach intensivstem Training beherrschen werden könne, sondern der Truppenführer mit seinen Erfahrungen, vor allem aber auch mit seiner taktischen Intuition und seinem Sinn für die Festlegung nachrichtendienstlicher Prioritäten bestimme das Geschenen. Nur so gelinge es, die Informationsfülle nach klaren Kriterien zu triagieren, zu bewerten und zu nutzen. (...)

Wer aber glaube, Systeme für die vernetzte Operationsführung ersetzten den gut ausgebildeten Soldaten, gebe sich Illusionen hin. Denn der Kampf werde nicht durch Computer entschieden. Die klassischen Prinzipien der Gefechtsführung (...) behielten ihre ungebrochene Bedeutung.

Als besonders hilfsreich bezeichnetet der General die Möglichkeit zur Kommunikation und Kooperation. So habe er sich mit seinem damaligen Kopskommandanten im Irak, Generalleutnant Peter W. Chiarelli, vor dem Hintergrund des gemeinsamen Lagebildes laufend über Video austauschen können. (...) So war die rasche Anpassung von Abschnittsgrenzen zwischen den Verbänden (...) in gegenseitiger Absprache [taktischer Dialog] problemlos zu bewältigen, wenn beispielsweise Kräfteverlagerungen nötig wurden.

(...) geäusserte Befürchtungen (...) militärisches Mikromanagement zu betreiben, wollte Thurman nicht zum Vorneherein als unberechtigt von der Hand weisen. Militätische Chefs, die solcher Versuchung erlägen, handelten aber falsch. Trotz schnellem Informationsfluss sollten Generäle sich in Geduld üben und ihren militärischen Untergebenen Vertrauen entgegenbringen, denn militärische Operationen brauchten Zeit.
Die unterstellten Verbände müssten einen breiten Handlungsspielraum haben, um aufgrund einer klar formulieren Absicht für die Operatsführung situationsgerecht agieren zu können.

(...)

Als früherer Kommandierender General des National Training Center (...) unterstrich Thurman im Weiteren die ungebrochene Bedeutung des Kampfpanzers im modernen Gefecht, auch in Agglomerationen. Mehr als früher seien Panzer, die voll ins Netzwerk von Aufklärungs- und Führungsmitteln integriert seien, jedoch im Zusammenspiel mit anderen Truppengattungen zu sehen. Zudem komme der Mischung zwischen schweren und leichten Verbanden im Rahmen von Task-Forces vermehrte Bedeutung zu. (...)

Die vernetzte Operationsführung bringe nach seiner Ansicht nicht neue taktische Verfahren mit sich. Deren Wert liege vielmehr darin, bewährte Taktiken schneller und präziser anwenden zu können und damit einem Gegner zuvorzukommen [Erhöhung des operationellen Tempos].

Obschon sich der General vom Nutzen moderner Netzwerke für Aufklärung und Führung überzeugt gab, warnt er davor, die menschliche Dimension zu vernachlässigen. Das Team und nicht das Individuum stehe im Zentrum.

(...)

weiterführende Literatur:
Information Warfare - Ein strategisches Mittel der Zukunft. Darstellung der Mittel, Möglichkeiten und Einsatzarten