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So by killing 150 dudes in a city of 250,000, you guys totally kicked their asses into submission? Or maybe it had less to do with force of arms than others matters. Like I said, you didn't shut down the Rat Line, Al Qaim was known to have continued to be controlled by insurgents. So congrats that they didn't fire at you but you didn't drive them out. Here's how Qaim was after you left (March 2007):

'In al Qaim, a community of farmers and merchants along Iraq's border with Syria, the Marines have been employing a classic counter-insurgency strategy since the end of 2005. The emphasis here has shifted from hunting down and destroying the enemy to providing security in al Qaim's cities and villages....

For Vistek [company commander] the new approach has meant "a lot of responsibility that the pay grade has never really had before." In al Qaim, he says Marines are now tasked with such community outreach at the rank-and-file level and with every contact with Iraqi civilians. Says Vistek: "The responsibility went from, 'oh, that's on the [lieutenant]' to, 'Holy s---, my [unit's] responsible for three patrols a day? Wow.'" That new function combined with the old but still necessary task of fighting insurgents can be overwhelming. Gove, like other Marine commanders in al Qaim, is mindful that he risks pushing his men past their limits as he attempts to blanket the area with American troops. "You can't burn these guys out," says Gové. "On the other hand, you can't leave a section of town uncovered — because wherever we aren't, that's where [the insurgents] are.'

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1625893,00.html


As you can clearly read, they shifted tactics to security away from capture/kill and then progress was made. Coincidence? Partly, the conditions were being set throughout the whole country for much of the insurgency to stop fighting. We got a cease fire with the Madhi Army and the Awakening quelled most of the Sunni insurgents. Boom, peaceful Iraq. After that break of violence, we could then institute proper COIN doctrine in full.

As for use of might and overwhelming force, by every senior officer's admission in Bing West's books and others, "crushing" Fallujah fueled the insurgency, it did nothing to slow it down. Leveling cities and killing civilians on Al Jazeara doesn't stop Jordanians from not wanting to cross into Iraq to shoot Americans. It doesn't stop local insurgents who have a cultural obligation to avenge the cousin you killed. It doesn't do shit to the insurgent still alive, in hiding, waiting to snipe some Marine or Soldier. Besides, we weren't killing even close to the number of people to induce some sort of fear in them. We barely even did that with the fire bombing in WWII (See sources regarding heightened morale in spite of strategic bombing in WWII). Check out the "massive" casualty counts in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, they are in the thousands, not the tens of thousands. So I don't understand where you think attrition was paying off. It would have taken 20 years to "kill your way to peace" and that doesn't even include birth rates or jihadis from outside Iraq.


And as for paying Al Sahwah/Sons of Iraq/Concerned Local Citizens (CLC), they were getting funded one way or another. They could plant an IED, videotape it, snipe us, or they could get paid to guard a check point. You act as if its some kind of loss or weakness to pay them. Well we were spending a shit load more than that on SGLI payments for guys getting ripped to pieces by the IEDs these same guys were emplacing so I'd say good strategy.  






 

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The problem is you are citing secondary sources and I was there.  Prior to Steal Curtain and the eventual BPs talked about in the article you cite there were numerous other battles like Operation Lighting,  Dagger,  Spear, Matador, etc.  These were a series of large Kinetic campaigns that focused on the Al Ubaedi tribe and breaking their control of the area and the foreign fighter trade.  After we killed a significant portion of their male population the Ubadis switched sides.  We than started focusing on the other tribes like the Al Salamonies and Karboolis, once they too took a heavy enough of a beating we are able to started putting the various BPs like mention in the article.
The BPs and COIN fight you think happened would not have happened without the large amount of killing you discount

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No offense, but first hand accounts are not evidence by themselves. If what you wrote coincided with what was stated by other people with first hand knowledge then it would be have some validity. When it discounts other first hand accounts, especially from the senior officers that planned many of the operations you are referring to, not the Regt staff but the G3 level, then I'm not just taking your word for it, sorry. I'm not a novice in the history game, if you want to convince me, I need more than a few anecdotal accounts that contradict nearly every other source.  

In addition, all the operations you are referring to seem to have been battalion (+) sized if I'm not mistaken. Exactly how many MAM in the Al Ubaedi, Al Salamonies, or Al Karboolis tribes are you claiming your battalion or Regt killed? For instance, in Lightning it was 21 EKIA, in Dagger the body count was reported to be 20-50. In Matador, it was 125. That's not exactly a shit load of people considering how many were crossing the border. Its a drop in the pool when you look at how many men are in a single tribe.  

Lightning: http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/5-marines-killed-4-wounded-21-bodies.html
Dagger: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=us-says-50-insurgents-killed-in-iraq-operation-2005-06-19

Matador: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/05/15/us-operation-matador-success/
             http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051500785_pf.html

I think think quote is very telling (from Washington Post, not a liberal paper):

"Where the [expletive] are these guys?" Maj. Kei Braun exclaimed in frustration.

It was noon Friday. The Marines had swept Arabi and found only frightened Iraqi families hiding in their homes. They had found more bombs in the roads, but no enemy to fight.

Marines said many of the foreign fighters fled west into Syria or to Husaybah, a lawless Iraqi border town where foreign fighters and local tribesmen have battled each other this month for control, shooting it out in the streets with AK-47s and mortars, American officials say. But the Marines lack the manpower to go into Husaybah."

____

In the big picture, these were "whack a mole" operations, which were standard SOP in Iraq. You went in, kicked some ass of those that stayed, shot some, dropped bombs on others, had a few friendlies die from IEDs or snipers, and the left, claiming a success. Meanwhile, as soon as operation ended, the bad guys came back when the rest of the battalion split up again and only a company controlled the area. I've done these ops too, as did many other Arfcomers who were there. But in honesty, they did little to fix the problem. In the case of Qaim, in 2005 you didn't stop the Rat Line. Like I mentioned, well after 2005, Al Qaim was still an insurgent haven, regardless of the few hundred you guys killed. Not enough rats were killed for you to claim that technique was valid or sound.

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Hint for you the Washington Post is the liberal paper for DC, the Times, Examiner and Free Beacon are non-liberal ones.  



So why were the Kinetics and all the killing necessary (no one knows the true numbers killed because in-between the major named operations there was consistent heavy patrolling and strikes, a FA-18 pilot friend of mine use to drop about every other night not in support of TIC based on locating the enemy via all source intel)  because when we started OIF 2, we attempting all the COIN you talked about including all the overtures the shieks, arab tradtion, lines of economic development etc?    That got us nothing but more insurgents and more fighting.  It was not until we started pounding the shit out of them they started cooperating.

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Yup. War is hell. We should be focused on winning, as in killing every mother fucker who wants to do us harm, not focused on winning hearts and minds.

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Yup. War is hell. We should be focused on winning, as in killing every mother fucker who wants to do us harm, not focused on winning hearts and minds.

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That's where we need to be targeting.  

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That's where we need to be targeting.  

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The victors get to write the history, at this rate tradition and protocol will be broken and the defeat of the West will be an addendum to the Koran.

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We didn't kill untold numbers in Iraq. According to classified reports that crossdressing traitor released on Wikileaks, the US reported 23,984 as total enemy combatant deaths (google the number and you'll find sources), and that is from 2003 invasion to 2010. Those are US govt/military numbers too. In other words, we didn't kill our way to the negotiating table.

And that includes Anbar province, though I will definitely say that they saw a heavier than average part of the fighting. To put that in perspective, America lost almost as many KIA in the battle of Bulge, a one month long operation. Did that break our will? Then why would a few thousand more, over the course of a seven year period, involving groups of people who have religion and political fervor, break their will? Looks what Saddam did to the Kurds, hundreds of thousands dead, and their will was never broken. Look at the Shi'a, who lost hundreds of thousands to Saddam, who likewise were constantly in a state of near open rebellion. The measly numbers we killed didn't affect shit, it just fueled them even more to fight.  

I'm not discounting the value of killing, warfare in general is heavily affected by it. But killing has NEVER been the sole purpose of any country's military operations. Its all about breaking the will of the enemy. How did killing less than 3% of the local population of Qaim (percentage is high, due to not counting any foreign fighters) break the will of AQI or 1920s or other Sunni groups? Maybe they didn't shoot at you for a few months but they sure didn't quit, because it got worse after the operations you stated.

The US doesn't have the means, ability, civilian support, political will, or cultural desire to do what you think is the right thing to win wars. No country has done those things in the last 100 years and gotten away with it, the closest being maybe Nazi Germany against partisans (which didn't come close to breaking their will or ability to fight). The World Court (as stupid and weak as it is) exist entirely because of nations or state actors that tried that shit. We have people all over the world already wanting to try GW Bush for war crimes and you think we should have gone all in and start massacring our way to victory? The fucked up thing is that method rarely even worked in history.  

I highly recommend people read this:
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/Repository/Materials/COIN-FM3-24.pdf


What is this softer side of COIN that was part of the METL that was being wrongly taught to Marines at 29 Palms? What TTPs are you referring to?

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I read the COIN manual, that being said I don't agree with much of it or the small wars manual it was based. The original small wars manual written by Caldwell, "Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice" is a much applicable read on how to conduct a counter insurgency





I honestly don't know what to say about your belief we killed  23,984 but those are only that low side estimates because US forces don't know how many people were killed, because often the enemy was wounded and died later or destroyed via fire and or high explosives and thorough exploitation of the sites was not done.

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That's job #1