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42–900 2008

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–106]

A CONTINUING DIALOGUE:

POST-SURGE ALTERNATIVES

FOR IRAQ (PART 1 AND 2)

HEARING

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

HEARING HELD

JANUARY 16, AND 23, 2008

(II)

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina

JEFF MILLER, Florida

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky

LORRY FENNER, Professional Staff Member

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member

ROGER ZAKHEIM, Professional Staff Member

(III)

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2008

Page

HEARING:

Wednesday, January 16, 2008, A Continuing Dialogue: Post-Surge Alternatives for Iraq (Part 1) ....................................................................................... 1

Wednesday, January 23, 2008, A Continuing Dialogue: Post-Surge Alternatives for Iraq (Part 2) ....................................................................................... 61

APPENDIXES:

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 ................................................................................ 25

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 ................................................................................ 93

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2008

A CONTINUING DIALOGUE: POST-SURGE ALTERNATIVES FOR IRAQ

(PART 1)

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 1

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1

WITNESSES

Hamre, Hon. John J., President and CEO, Center for Strategic and International Studies ................................................................................................... 2

Keane, Gen. Jack, (Ret.), Former Vice Chief of Staff and Acting Chief of

Staff of the Army, U.S. Army .............................................................................. 5

Kojm, Christopher, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, Elliott

School of International Affairs, George Washington University ...................... 11

McCaffrey, Gen. Barry, (Ret.), U.S. Army, President, BR McCaffrey Associates ........................................................................................................................ 8

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 32

Hamre, Hon. John J. ........................................................................................ 35

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 29

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

Memorandum, After Action Report—General Barry R. McCaffrey USA

(Ret) Visit Iraq and Kuwait 5-11 December 2007 ...................................... 41

The Christian Science Monitor, December 13, 2007, Here’s the Surge

Iraq needs, The US can still stabilize Iraq—if it steps up its efforts

by Christopher Kojm ..................................................................................... 52

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

Mr. Davis ........................................................................................................... 58

Page

IV

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD—CONTINUED

Dr. Snyder ......................................................................................................... 57

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2008

A CONTINUING DIALOGUE: POST-SURGE ALTERNATIVES FOR IRAQ

(PART 2)

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 62

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 61

WITNESSES

Biddle, Dr. Stephen, Senior Fellow for Defense Policy, Council on Foreign

Relations; Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., President, Center For Strategic

and Budgetary Assessments; Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret),

Former Chief of Staff to Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Visiting

Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government, College of William and

Mary; Michael Eisenstadt, Director, Military and Security Studies Program,

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy beginning on page ................ 62

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 99

Biddle, Dr. Stephen .......................................................................................... 102

Eisenstadt, Michael .......................................................................................... 133

Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr. ...................................................................... 113

Snyder, Dr. Vic ................................................................................................. 97

Wilkerson, Col. Lawrence B. ........................................................................... 124

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Documents submitted.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Questions submitted.]

(1)

A CONTINUING DIALOGUE: POST-SURGE ALTERNATIVES

FOR IRAQ (PART 1)

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Wednesday, January 16, 2008.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:04 p.m. in room

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman

of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Dr. SNYDER. The hearing will come to order. Gentlemen, we appreciate you all being here. You are old friends to this committee

and to this town and to your country. We appreciate your service.

I have a written statement that I actually was looking forward to

delivering with great gusto, but I think I will pass on that. I am

not sure exactly what our voting schedule is, and we may try to

get your opening statements in, at least if we were to have some

votes. But we should have plenty of time this afternoon to do the

kind of discussion we want to have.

Mr. Akin and I decided, back at the end of June, early July, that

we wanted to do a series of hearings on the way forward in Iraq.

And after having done four of those hearings back in July, it occurred to me over the break that once again it was timely to do

that. The one thing you can predict about war, is they are unpredictable, the situation changes and we want to hear your-all’s opinion. Some of you we have heard from before, and some we have not.

And we look forward to that discussion today. There is no question

that Presidential election years are not necessarily the best time to

discuss the nuances of significant issues, but obviously the situation in Iraq is of absolute importance to this country and our national security, and those kinds of discussions that get into the details of national security policies must occur. And with that, I

would like to hear any comments Mr. Akin would like to make and

then I will introduce our panel.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 29.]

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Dr. Snyder. And welcome, again, to our

witnesses. It is a nice situation to be in here. We were here a year

2

ago and everybody was very pessimistic. We had solicited testimony from every expert, or non-expert in Washington, or in I don’t

know how many hundred of miles around and we got some kind

of interesting ideas. We were looking for ideas. But it was sort of

a generally pessimistic sense as to what we could do in Iraq. And

some of you, of course, were not part of that pessimism, but by and

large, it was. Now a year later, we have seen a turnaround that

is probably more significant than anybody would have even dared

to have hoped for hardly.

Yet in spite of that, there are continuing challenges and there

are ways that we should be taking advantage of the good situation

to try to improve it even more. So I hope that your testimony will

focus on the additional steps that we could take and how we can

prove what General Keane particularly, we thank you, is a voice

of encouragement last year and maybe more encouraging this year.

I hope you are not discouraging anyway. But we think that things

have gone very well and are very interested in now, where do we

go and how do we continue? Thank you all for joining us. And I

appreciate, Mr. Chairman, your scheduling these set of hearings. I

think that we have had some very interesting subjects and this is

another good one.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 32.]

Dr. SNYDER. Without objection, any formal opening statement by

Mr. Akin and myself will be made a part of the record. Any written

statement you will provide to the committee will also be made a

part of the record. We are pleased to have with us today, General

Jack Keane, retired Army, Former Vice Chief and Acting Chief of

Staff of the Army; retired General Barry McCaffrey, who is now the

President of the BR McCaffrey Associates; Dr. John Hamre, President and CEO of the Center For Strategic and International Studies; Mr. Christopher Kojm, the Director of the U.S. Foreign Policy

Summer Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs at

George Washington University. What I think we will do is we will

begin with General Keane and go to General McCaffrey and then

Dr. Hamre. Oh, Dr. Hamre first.

Dr. Hamre, we will go with you first. And I guess we will just

march down the line then. We have some votes that will hit us at

some point, but we may well get your-all’s formal opening statements in and even get to some questions. As you know, it is unpredictable. We will start with you, Dr. Hamre. We will put the clock

on for 5 minutes, but it is not a hard 5 for you-all, just to give you

an idea of where you are. And if you are still going strong, keep

going.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN J. HAMRE, PRESIDENT AND CEO,

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Dr. HAMRE. We will easily make it for that. I think I get to go

first because I am the heaviest physically and I appreciate that.

Thank you for inviting me to come back, especially to join my colleagues. These are men that I have worked with and admired for

a very long time, and it is a privilege to be with them, and of

course here before you. I think I was asked to come because I was

involved with and the Center for Strategic and International StudVerDate 22-MAR-2001 06:46 Aug 29, 2008 Jkt 042900 PO 00000 Frm 00006 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-106\016160.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
3

ies (CSIS) was involved with the Jones Commission. We were

asked by the Congress to send retired military officers and police

chiefs to Iraq to assess the capability of the Iraqi security forces,

and we were there during the summer, came back and reported to

the full Armed Services Committee in September, and I will say I

have not been back since then.

So my observations are constrained by the personal experiences

I had at that time. But I have stayed in touch with people who are

there, friends who are there and other delegations that have gone.

So I may be able to offer a bit of help to the committee today. Let

me just summarize what we—what we said in the Commission report, just very briefly. First we said there was real progress, we

could see real progress at the time. It certainly has picked up enormously since we were there. But there was genuine progress on the

ground, especially in Anbar province, you could see it.

Second we saw there were no shortage of Iraqis who were prepared to join the Army or the police forces. There were—people

were not a problem. It was really getting them trained and getting

a leadership cadre was the challenge. And we went around and

saw the training establishments, and I must say I was impressed.

I thought we saw genuine command and leadership credibility

among the trainers and these were Iraqis. So that was good. It was

still in the startup phase, but it was positive. We thought that—

you know, the Iraqi, I should say the Iraqis were confident that

they could take greater control of their security. The defense minister told us flat out we can take care of internal security by next

summer. Yesterday or the day before, he has revised that. He has

shifted that date back and he is now saying 2012. Our people felt

he was a little optimistic last summer. But nonetheless, there was

a genuine sense that they can do more and we ought to let them

do more. And I will come to that in just a moment.

We saw the training of the police and we saw the police—there

are four different police elements in the country, the provincial police, that is the bulk of the police. There are national police, a small

cadre, really a paramilitary force largely in Baghdad. There are

border police and then there are kind of highway traffic patrol type

police. The ones that really matter for our purposes here, it is the

provincial police and it is the national police. We judged at that

time that there was genuine progress on the provincial police and

we saw the training for them. Uneven leadership. Where there was

good leadership, they did well. Where there was weak leadership,

they didn’t do well. But it was starting to get better.

National police was a problem, frankly, and we said in our report

that we thought they were beyond real repair that they needed to

be disestablished and rebuilt in a different direction. Now the Iraqi

government really hotly protested that. They disagreed with us

sharply. They were quite deeply riven by sectarian elements very

much seen as being a Shi’a force and we didn’t feel it would be productive. We gave recommendations on how they could be retooled,

use them in a different capacity.

Sixth, we said that the interior ministry was a major problem.

The interior ministry was dysfunctional. And now again, this is a

hotly disputed finding on our part and the Iraqi government claims

4

quite to the contrary that it is not. But I think there are still serious problems in the interior ministry that we need to tackle.

Seventh, we concluded that the Iraqis could do more if we would

let them do more. I noticed a very interesting phenomena when I

talked to, you know, field grade officers, majors and lieutenant

colonels, majors and captains and lieutenant colonels and said, you

know, what is your view? I heard the same all the time. They could

do more if we would let them. Usually general officers said they

would take a long time. But field grade officers that were close to

them said they could do more. And I think it was our view they

could do more.

Indeed, if we do it for them, they will let us. If we insist that

they do more of it, they will stand up. And things they want to do,

they do. And they are able. For example, they make payroll every

two weeks. And it is not a pretty process, but they get it done. And

so it was our view they could be more effective and could do more

if we let them do it.

Eighth, we concluded there was no progress on the political reconciliation. This was in September. And I think that is still a major

problem. Now, we are building—we shifted our concept. We spent

four years trying to create a central government and then have

that government reach out and provide control over the country.

That hasn’t worked. What we have been doing during the last year

is to build security up from the ground level and the provincial

level and that is working. But what happens if you build that competency at the ground level and you are not able to build a central

government that has credibility and authority? We will be in trouble.

So now let me just very briefly say with that as a threshold,

what can I offer the committee now? Certainly the surge has contributed to a much better environment. But it is not just the surge.

I mean, I think there are two other factors which we don’t appreciate. One, is we have put 100,000 more cops and Army—Iraqis

on—out on the beat. And that has made a big difference. They have

become more competent and a better force. I think that is a major

factor. The second factor is we have basically recognized the Sunni

militia as a de facto police force and that is something we had resisted for a long time.

So there is a lot more Iraqi security presence on the ground at

the same time we were doing the surge. Now, the surge it was a

good idea and it has—we have created a security concept at work.

So we have to say that is the starting point for, I think, the success

that we can register this year. I think we can pull troops out this

year. I think the plan we are on can work. I think we will build

up enough Iraqi capabilities so it will compensate for us being able

to pull out probably 5,000 a month. I think that is a path that we

can and should stay on. We should put more of the burden on the

Iraqis for the security. And then finally the economy is still a great

problem, huge amount of unemployment in Iraq.

And, of course, the security situation has been a major factor for

that. Hopefully greater security will provide more economic opportunity and you see it in the north. You see it in Kurdistan. Things

are really moving remarkably better, it is starting to pick up in the

south, starting to. So economic boosting the economy will be an

5

enormous thing we do. And frankly, our developments—our efforts

have not been very effective. Partly because of the security, partly

because we didn’t have very coherent plans. Finally, let me say, we

do need to find a way to encourage greater responsibility by the

Iraqis. We have to give them and lead them to taking a larger role,

and I think that is, in part, our pulling back and part of what we

have to do during the year. Let me stop and turn to my colleagues.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Hamre can be found in the Appendix on page 35.]

Dr. SNYDER. General Keane.

STATEMENT OF GEN. JACK KEANE, (RET.), FORMER VICE

CHIEF OF STAFF AND ACTING CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE

ARMY, U.S. ARMY

General KEANE. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee,

thank you for inviting me to participate again in discussions about

Iraq. And I am honored to do that with my colleagues at the table,

particularly Secretary Hamre and General McCaffrey, both of

whom I have worked with and known for years and I just have tremendous regard for. If I can indulge you, I have got 10 minutes of

statement here. And I will get to it. A year ago this month, the

President announced what was a very unpopular decision based on

a harsh reality, that the strategy in Iraq had failed, that Iraq was

spinning out of control with an ever increasing level of violence,

that a new government less than a year old was about to be fractured, that the consequences of failure in Iraq were unacceptable

and that the only course of action was to conduct a counteroffensive

soon to be called surge, and that action remained the only viable

action to gain security as a necessary precondition for political and

economic progress.

As such, the military strategy was changed to use proven

counterinsurgency practices, which means protect the people where

they live and a new team, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were put in place to implement it. Troops began arriving next month in February and they completed their deployment in June. After all the troops were in place, the violence began

to go down. So much so that it has fallen dramatically over 60 percent in all major categories. This is a stunning achievement and

credit to General Petraeus and General Odierno and their magnificent troops. To those who say, well, of course, you add more troops,

particularly American troops, the violence will go down.

That misses the essential point. We had surged three times before, albeit with less troops, with no long-term success. It is a combination of proven counterinsurgency practices, in other words, a

new strategy, yes more troops and also brilliant leadership which

has made the difference. We have never, ever before taken on defeating the counterinsurgency directly. In the past, we had left that

up to the Iraqis to do and that is why the change of mission and

the strategy is so critical to the success. General Petraeus asked

me to look at the situation in February as the troops were arriving.

I did and I did a number of times after that.

But back in February, I confirmed that my analysis, something

I had already known that we really needed eight brigades to surge,

not five. But they were not available. So how these troops were

6

used also very dramatic. The leaders’ intellectual flexibility and

tactical agility maximized the troops we had and made the sum

much greater than the parts. This is a remarkably successful military campaign which has broken all of the previous paradigms of

counterinsurgency and regardless of what we view here, this will

be studied for years in my view. A little over six months after the

surge forces were complete, the Iraqis passed a major piece of legislation last Saturday, the de-baathification law. This actually is the

justice and accountability law. But I think for our identification,

that is the proper term. Despite our impatience and many frustrations with the Iraqi political system, in this new fledgling political

culture, it is a remarkable achievement in such a short period of

time for them. More must be done, it will be challenging, but I am

convinced more will be done.

The Iraqis are already proving their willingness to change. They

have implemented the following without codifying it into law because the executive branch knew how important it is. One, sharing

oil revenues with the provinces; two, purging sectarian extremists

from positions of authority; three is hiring Sunni volunteers for security forces and also in the civilian ministries; and four, making

major improvements in the legal and justice system. Eventually,

these will be codified into national legislation just as the debaathification law did. But they deserve the credit for implementing it beforehand.

With the dramatic improvement in security, and the beginning

of real political and economic progress, where do we go from here?

May I suggest at the outset that the alternative strategy in Iraq

is already in place. It is operating and it is succeeding. I have got

10 short points to make: One, security. We must sustain and build

on the gains that we have made. We have taken out 25 percent of

our combat forces this year based on the stress and strain that is

on the military, the Marines and the Army to be specific, and General Petraeus and General Odierno’s empathy of that situation and

they have looked at it and they have determined it an acceptable

risk. That will be completed in July. The fact is that no one knows

to include General Petraeus or General Odierno what the impact

of a 25 percent force reduction will be. But we are going to find out

eventually.

Therefore in my view, we should make a realistic assessment

after we complete that reduction in July and determine the consequences of that. And I think that would take four to six months

for us to be able to do that accurately. To those who say we should

reduce further beyond the 25 percent because of our success or because of our frustration with the length of involvement, my response to that is it is an unacceptable risk. We should not squander the gains that we have made. To do that is a repeat of past

failures where we planned for unrealistic reduction based on what?

Our underestimation of the enemy and second our overestimation

of the Iraqi security force’s capacity level.

We have been there before and it has not worked. When General

Petraeus testifies in April, the emphasis should be on how do we

sustain the gains that we have made, not on how fast we should

withdraw. Of course, we will withdraw our forces eventually as we

should. But it must be based on the conditions on the ground. That

7

is a powerful lesson that we should not relearn. It is safe to assume

that we would reduce our forces further in 2009, but equally important, if we meter this right, violence and casualties will continue

to go down significantly, and in my view, Iraq will be much less

of a concern to the American people as a result of that.

Number two, continue the current military strategy and this is

important. Our protecting the people. We cannot pull away from

them. Because if we encourage the extremists, if we do, we are

going to encourage the extremists both Sunni and Shi’a and the

criminals to escalate the level of violence. Three, continue to grow,

develop and build the Iraqi security forces. The Army will double

in size. 100,000 have been added this year. And our training teams

are crucial to their success. The national police, who I recommended to General Petraeus last year be disbanded, are actually

finally making some progress. And I think General Petraeus will

provide evidence of that when he comes in April.

General Hussein, who is in charge, is a tough, competent leader.

He has fired every brigade commander, all nine of them, and 17

of the 27 battalion commanders. Four of five of those brigades are

finally starting to show some progress and get rid of the sectarianism, and also show some competence much to all of our surprise,

and that is good news.

Number four, transition control to the Iraqis as they demonstrate

a capacity to be successful. I mean, that is self-evident. But it is

already happening in the south and it is already happening in the

north. In 2008, we will do that in Anbar province and we will do

it in certain areas within Baghdad. And obviously, as those conditions become available in other places, that transition control will

continue.

Number five, encourage the government of Iraq to accept more

of the concerned local citizens group into the security forces after

they are properly vetted. They number now a staggering 70,000,

which is very significant, but they can do more in terms of accepting more.

Number six, continue to assist the government of Iraq to pass

the remainder of the legislative benchmarks. Recognize while the

benchmarks are important, they are only the first steps for the

Iraqis in resolving their differences through the political process,

versus violence, to those who say we must reduce our forces immediately to force the Iraqis to complete the political process, my response is that the template—that template is harmful and does not

fit the reality in Iraq. Quite the contrary, those who know the key

leaders in Iraq believe with conviction that it is our presence that

has helped the Iraqis to move this political process. Immediate

withdrawal actually caters to their fears and paranoia, that they

will be left to deal with the extremists themselves. It forces them

to do the opposite of what we are intending. Instead of political

process and progress, they will pull back from that and that impact

will be very significant. What they will do is pull back and develop

a bunker mentality to defend themselves. It invites a return to sectarian violence, extremism and civil war.

Number seven, assist the Iraqis in providing provincial elections

in 2008 and the general election which is planned for in 2009. Out

of that, a much stronger political system in my view is on the way.

8

We have to hold them to it. Number eight, Iraq is improving economically. While unemployment is much too high, staggeringly too

high, it is improving. Utilities are improving. Micro loans for small

businesses are on the rise. Iraqi currency, much to everyone’s surprise, is in pretty good shape and the government has a budget.

And this legislative body should be aware of how tough it is to get

a budget out; it is no small task for them and they have succeeded.

And, of course, much more is needed. As the security situation

improves, we must encourage foreign investment and free trade.

And number nine, we must enter into a long-term security relationship with Iraq. The groundwork for this has already begun. First,

we must resolve the internal security situation we are facing, then

transition the Iraqi security forces to external defense. This will involve a much reduced force on our part and will be executed initially, in my view, with much less casualties and eventually with

no casualties because Iraq will be stable.

And ten, more must be done to look at Iraq regionally with its

neighbors who can assist with the further growth and development

of Iraq, a stable Iraq is in everyone’s interest in the region to include Syria and Iran.

So in conclusion, yes, I am hopeful about the future in Iraq. We

have many challenges to be sure. The future is not certain. There

will be frustrations there to be sure as well. But we have a very

real opportunity to succeed and achieve in a stable government in

Iraq. Capable of protecting its people and providing a quality of life

experience for the Iraqi people. This could only be accomplished

with the generosity and sacrifice of the American people, the courage and sacrifice of the Iraqis, and the truly magnificent selfless

service and sacrifice by our troops and their families. Thank you

and I look forward to your questions.

Dr. SNYDER. General McCaffrey.

STATEMENT OF GEN. BARRY MCCAFFREY, (RET.), U.S. ARMY,

PRESIDENT, BR MCCAFFREY ASSOCIATES

General MCCAFFREY. Well, Mr. Chairman, let me thank you and

the members of your committee for the opportunity to be here. I

am delighted to join this panel. Dr. John Hamre and General

Keane and I have worked together for years. I have tremendous respect for them and I have read a lot of Chris Kojm’s work to boot.

I provided each member of the committee a report from my Iraq

visit. I just got back prior to Christmas as is my custom. I spent

about a week there. I went throughout much of the country. I spent

most of my time focused at lower level province and below. Talking

to both Iraqi police, military and U.S. military leadership. And perhaps those observations—and also accompanied Wall Street Journal op ed to try to summarize the findings will be helpful to you.

Let me, if I can, lay down some general themes, and I look forward to responding to your own interests. Number one, it is clear

to me that the situation in Iraq has changed like night and day.

So the debate has to move forward and not talk about whether that

is true or not, but instead, understand what are the plausible explanations to why that change has occurred, and therefore, are

they sustainable or what will happen if we withdraw in the coming

years? But I think any objective measure, principally measures the

9

violence, kidnapping, murders and attacks on U.S. forces, attacks

on Iraqi forces, you name it, the situation is remarkable. I spent

a day with an infantry brigade in Baghdad during the so-called

surge into the city. 6 million Arab people took 80 killed, 600 hundred wounded regaining control of their piece of ground. The day

I was in Baghdad in that entire city, there were two violent incidents that day. I rode around, spent a day in Ramadi, which was

constant gunfire, 24 hours a day, and the last visit and this time

around, there were no violent incidents in Anbar province the day

I was out with the Marines and the Army forces. So the situation

changed. That is not to imply there aren’t still just under 3,000 attacks per month still against coalition allied forces or civilians.

There is still a civil war going on but it is one changed environment.

Second observation, I think the political dynamics are dramatically changed, not clear we understand it, and that is the principal

reason behind much of the change. It is not to deny the cards—the

excellence of U.S. and Iraqi security force, but it is clear as you

look at the Sunni, I think the bottom-line to me was they just woke

up, they said my God, these people are leaving, we will be left a

minority of the population, 16, 20 percent of Iraq to the mercies of

the people we cruelly exploited for the last three decades, they

rushed to join the police, the Army, Baathists, two star intel generals became province police chiefs in Anbar.

So the Sunnis got scared and started to engage. The spinoff of

that was these concerned local citizens who are primarily Sunni,

but is now being extended to Shi’a areas south of Baghdad. So suddenly you have got 60-, 70,000 people with AKs, guarding their

neighborhood and their community. The Kurdish situation north, I

think the Turkish threat to them may have been helpful where

they suddenly got—were reminded of the notion better to be part

of an Iraq federation—an Iraqi state than to be a target for the

powerful Turkish military.

And then finally, the Shi’a, for a variety of reasons—again, I am

not sure we totally understand it. It is clear that the ceasefire

which—the generating factor was the humiliation of Mr. Sadr and

his forces during their outrage against Shi’a pilgrims in the south.

But nonetheless—and his personal fear probably of being killed by

U.S. Special ops or captured. There is a ceasefire. To some extent,

it is holding. And so the level of violence went down. The political

dynamics are quite different. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), this is a

strong statement, one the military is not willing to make. U.S. special operation forces Stan McCrystal and Joint Special Operations

Command (JSOC) have tactically defeated AQI in Baghdad and

Anbar province.

They are killing them faster than they can generate leadership.

It is the first time in the history of warfare I have seen that happen. It is a combination of unbelievable intelligence, forensic police

investigation, tremendous intel input from the Iraqis and some of

the most ferociously talented special ops people we have ever introduced. That is not to say they can’t respond with an outrage or

that their operationally or strategically no longer a factor. They

moved up into Diyala, they moved up around Mosul. They are in

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the deserts out in the western frontier. They are still there, but

tactically it has been appalling to them what we did to them.

The State Department dialogue, it changed the nature of the situation. There is an ongoing—Dr. Rice has an ongoing outreach to

the Iranians and the Syrians. To some extent, it may be that they

are responding. It may be that there is less active Iranian support

for Shi’a attacks on U.S. forces. Clearly, the number of border

crossers has gone down dramatically. The ones who are crossing

the border, the overwhelming majority are dead within 4 weeks, either because they ineffectually, in general, conducted suicide attacks or they have been policed up by Iraqi security forces or U.S.

military forces. And then finally I think Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey are now being engaged, now more supportive toward the general goal of not having us withdraw, leaving chaos in Iraq. Bottomline, we have still got problems. The Maliki government is largely

dysfunctional. There is reason to believe provincial district municipal government is starting to become connected. The Army and police have been reenergized. The police who are still modestly corrupt, ineffectual, badly equipped and not reliable.

Nonetheless, I think there is eight of nine new brigade commanders, a massive retraining program, new commitment showing up

and a lot of U.S. military mentorship. Not to be discounted, the nature of the leadership on the ground. General David Petraeus and

Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the two of them have—and I would

agree totally with General Keane’s comment. It wasn’t five additional brigades to get to 21 for 5 months. It was a drastically different tactical application of counterinsurgency tactics combined

with smart diplomacy. In the background, the new Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, I think has changed the climate to one of pragmatism and focus on outcomes, thank God we have him in the last

year of this administration in charge of trying to direct the interagency debate.

We have got some other problems. The U.S. Army can’t sustain

the current strategy. Our manpower is inadequate. Article I of the

Constitution, that is the Congress’s job to raise and support an

Army and Navy and provide for a national defense. Manpower is

off. The quality of recruiting and retention is a huge challenge to

us. I think 10 percent of the soldiers coming into the Army

shouldn’t be in uniform. We do that too long, we will regret it. They

will become sergeants. We are losing our hotshot young officers and

midcareer NCOs in too high a number. Our equipment is broken

and the Army and the Marine Corps and special ops are

underresourced.

Finally—and I provide you one other handout. I would be remiss

in not reminding all of us that the $12 billion a month campaign

that has run 34,000 killed and wounded is largely not supported

by the American people and has affected one other aspect of the

national defense: Our technological modernization in particular of

global air power. And, you know, it is hard for us to say this in

public. We don’t want to create and reset a battle for us that is capable of fighting Iraq, better minus Mr. Rumsfeld. Instead, we

want to look out 15 years and say what are the new challenges and

how do we deter mischief on the Pacific rim with a world class air

11

and naval force to prevent war in the next generation. I think we

have sadly misjudged this and not database our job in that area.

Mr. Chairman, again, I thank you and your committee members

for what you have done to sustain a strong national defense and

I look forward to responding to your questions.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, General McCaffrey.

We have been joined by the chairman of the committee, Chairman Ike Skelton from Missouri. Mr. Chairman, do you want to say

anything?

Mr. SKELTON. Only that this is a very distinguished panel.

Dr. SNYDER. I think we had better do our recess now for the series of votes that we have, Mr. Kojm. Otherwise, your are going to

see members impatiently looking at their clock and not giving you

the time you need. This is a longer break than we would like it to

be. I think we will probably be close to 40 to 45 minutes. I apologize for that. It is just the nature of the game. The staff will be

happy to help you with any thing you need in terms of a private

room or fresh ice water, whatever you need. We will be in recess.

[recess.]

Dr. SNYDER. The committee hearing will resume. Gentlemen, I

apologize for the delay. Part of, I guess, your seasoning and your

professional careers, you have probably all been through this before. But that was one of those six-vote ones with some debate in

the middle. Mr. Akin, our Ranking Member, said it was okay for

us to go ahead. I think he had something else he had to run to.

Mr. Kojm, your opening statement, please.

STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER KOJM, PROFESSOR OF THE

PRACTICE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, ELLIOTT SCHOOL

OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Mr. KOJM. Thank you. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it is a distinct honor to appear before you today. The distinguished witnesses who have already testified have spoken in detail

to the military situation and I cannot add very much to their eloquent testimony.

Where I would like to begin is with a slightly different question,

picking up really on point 10 that General Keane mentioned. The

most important question before us now is how to take advantage

of this lull in the fighting on behalf of securing peace and stability

in Iraq. Not a moment should be wasted in pressing for political

reconciliation. Reconciliation is the only sure way to end all the violence, end the violence in Iraq.

Now, Iraqis cannot achieve reconciliation on their own. Too much

blood has been shed. Bitterness is deep. And despite the best efforts of the United States, we, by our own actions, cannot achieve

such reconciliation for them. We have influence with many parties

in Iraq, but not all parties, and attitudes toward the United States

are fairly well set in Iraq, FIVE years on. Many view us as friends

and partners. The leaders, especially, many in Iraq, still view us

as occupiers.

Political reconciliation in Iraq requires not only our efforts, but

a strong, vigorous, determined effort by the international community. The United States can help start such an effort. American

12

backing for it is essential, but success requires an international effort, preferably led by the United Nations, with the strong involvement of all of Iraq’s neighbors. Why? Because all of Iraq’s neighbors share an interest in peace and stability in Iraq. They do not

want Iraq to export its violence. They do not want more refugees.

All of Iraq’s neighbors oppose the breakup of Iraq. All of Iraq’s

neighbors support the unity of Iraq. All of Iraq’s neighbors see the

need for political reconciliation as the key to stability in Iraq. Iraq’s

neighbors will be there until the end of time. American forces will

not. Therefore, any effort to create enduring capability must engage

Iraq’s neighbors on behalf of reconciliation and a settlement they

can support.

While Iraq’s neighbors share this interest in peace and stability,

as I have said, they disagree, of course, on many other questions.

That is why a diplomatic effort simply cannot be left to Iraq’s

neighbors. A strong international diplomatic effort is required to

find common ground. An effort backed by the United States can

help galvanize Iraq’s neighbors in support of stability in Iraq. But

let me repeat: The United States cannot do this alone.

What constitutes reconciliation? Reconciliation is certainly a long

process. The recent law on de-Baathification is a good step. It is a

first step. Whether this law is meaningful remains to be seen.

Implementation—here I agree with the administration certainly—implementation based on a spirit of inclusion will make it

meaningful. Implementation based on a spirit of exclusion will

make it meaningless.

This current moment of hope in Iraq will fade unless Sunnis see

a future for themselves in the life of their country. The deBaathification law holds out the hope that a significant number of

Sunni leaders and former military and police and government employees can be brought back into government in meaningful ways.

But this new law is only a first step.

And I agree with the other distinguished witnesses that we also

need a chance for Sunnis and all Iraqis to vote for their own elected representatives at the provincial level. We need an oil law. All

parties need to share in Iraq’s oil wealth. There needs to be a negotiated outcome for the future of Kirkuk. The current moment is one

of possibilities and hope if we take the steps to make it so.

We are seeing tantalizing signs of new political alignments in

Iraq between Sunni leaders and Shia nationalists on behalf of a

united Iraq and on behalf of reconciliation. We see the start of dialogue between Sunnis and Kurds. We see an olive branch from

Abdul Aziz Hakim toward the Sunni awakening.

The time is ripe for dialogue and intense diplomatic engagement

not only by the United States but by the international community

with complete American support. Otherwise the current lull in violence, as important and significant as it is, will just be a time-out

in an unfolding sectarian war and a future Iraq made up of gangs

and warlords. This is not the future Iraqis want, but it is the future they will get if successful military tactics and progress are not

matched with comparable intensive efforts at political reconciliation.

I want to close by saying a word about refugees, a subject that

is far too often not discussed at the policy level. Reconciliation and

13

stability in Iraq absolutely requires addressing the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons. Those who have fled Iraq are

running out of money. They lack access to schools and medical

care. Those inside lack almost everything. They are in a daily

struggle for survival. This is no small problem. This is one out of

every seven Iraqis, 4–1/2 million people, who have been forced from

their homes because of violence.

We are spending over $10 billion a month in Iraq. The total request for humanitarian assistance in Iraq for the current fiscal

year is $240 million, less than a day’s worth of costs for the war.

This great country with its long tradition of humanitarian relief

can and must do better by the Iraqi people not simply out of altruism, although that is necessary too here, but because it is vital to

the future stability of this country.

The last thing the region needs, the last thing Iraq needs is

anotherlarge and bitter exile community akin to that created in

1947, 1948. Tolerable outcomes for the United States and Iraq are

still possible if we use all of the tools of national power, and my

distinguished counterparts here have spoken, certainly, of the importance of military power and what it has accomplished. I would

simply flag for you, as I appear before your committee, that we

need to use all the tools of national power—certainly diplomacy

among them—on behalf of national reconciliation, building regional

stability, and helping the Iraqi people. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Kojm.

Thank you all for your opening statements, your very thoughtful

statements.

I meant to mention also in addition to the voting schedule, as

you know, we have had this issue with the defense bill. It is on the

floor right now, and so Mr. Skelton planned to spend considerable

time with us, as did other members, but they are on the floor with

the debate on the defense bill. We will put ourselves on the fiveminute clock here and I will begin with questions.

The first question I want to ask is—I think I will direct it to our

military folks—as you all look ahead, you are pleased with the direction things are going. But as you see the size of the American

force in Iraq going down, do you at some point anticipate some

kind of formal decision in terms of what activities those forces

should be engaged in?

This is a discussion that I think began last year. When we first

came back we had that discussion, it would be limits. And I sat

down with a pen and pencil and realized, well, that wouldn’t be

much of a limitation because you could have tens of thousands of

troops to guard U.S. civilians.

So as you all look ahead, is that a practical way of looking at the

use of U.S. forces as the numbers come down, that they would be

restricted in certain kinds of activities?

General MCCAFFREY. Let me if I may—I know General Keane

has an informed view on this. One of the things that has concerned

me from the start—and I don’t see this in any way, in a

confrontational way—is that Washington not try and drive tactics

and operational decisions in Iraq. There is a legitimate strategic argument, I would suggest, for the next administration to tell the

military commander, joint commander on the ground, I want you

14

to get down by half your forces. At which point I would expect the

military commander to come back and say, if that is your constraint on me, here is what I will do with them. But I would be

really reluctant—by the way, some of the suggestions have been

completely asinine—we are going to instruct you to go to the borders and guard the borders. That is not where the war has been.

It is a civil war inside Iraq. Why we assume we can guard thousands of kilometers of Syrian frontier, Iranian frontier, Turkish

frontier, when the threat is inside Iraq to a large extent.

The other thing I have said is, be careful, don’t you dare go to

a force—largely suggested by the Baker-Hamilton report—in which

there is a modest, tiny, combat presence and we will be out of the

political eyesight of the American people because we will be doing

embedded training and intel and logistics and air power, because

I honestly believe the theater is too dangerous to not have a substantial combat presence on the ground. The number I jerked out

of my own judgment was seven combat brigades. Go below that, get

out of Iraq except for a Marine battalion in the Green Zone.

I think there ought to be a certain sense of modesty out of Congress to not try and drive antipathy toward this mismanaged war

by substituting their judgment for those of the military commanders on the scene.

Dr. SNYDER. That is the gist of my question because there is a

temptation, when you are dissatisfied with what is going on, to say,

We are going to keep your forces there but don’t get in the civil

war, just go after al Qaeda.

Well, how do you sort that out when you are doing door-to-door

searches trying to make a neighborhood safe? General Keane, do

you have any comments on that?

General KEANE. I think it is just as reckless for somebody here

to provide instructions on what the numbers of forces should be in

Iraq. I think the situation there should be driven, you know, by the

conditions that are there and that reality.

What has taken place, there are three major missions that we do,

and two of them have changed dramatically. One is the training of

the Iraqi Security Forces, and that mission will be a constant in

my view, you know, for many years to come, even after the country

is stable and there are no more casualties.

The second one is the pursuit of the al Qaeda, which at one time

was the province almost exclusively of the Joint Special Operations

Forces. What Odierno and what Petraeus have done, and one of the

reasons largely for the success of the operational defeat of the al

Qaeda, is the joining of that operation with conventional forces.

There are actually more conventional operations in toto in terms of

massive troops being conducted against the al Qaeda now than

what JSOC is doing with the leadership. So those two have melded.

And they had to be melded if we are going to truly be protective.

And the third one is protecting the population in Iraq which

soaks up most of our forces.

So those are the three major missions. And I think the major

change will take place as the Iraqis develop capacity, and they are

developing it all the time, and it is a good news story.

As I said in my opening statement, they are largely in the South

by themselves. They are largely in the North by themselves, and

15

in 08 we will find that in the West and in parts of the central region.

So that is the major transition that will take place. And that actually permits the reduction of forces, initially the 25 percent reduction, and then something beyond that. And as I indicated, I

think that the logical time is probably 09 to see that come to fruition.

I don’t believe we should dictate the mission, and I don’t believe

we should dictate the force size as well. The overall strategy in

Iraq, certainly for a new administration, is a decision and a policy

question that they have to deal with in terms of what is the outcome they want.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin for five minutes.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A couple of questions. The

first is, it appeared to me that a series of things in your testimony

has reflected the same thing, that it wasn’t just one thing that

went right, but a whole series of things have really come together

and produced some arresting kinds of positive results. One of those

seemed to me—and it is sort of ironic in an amusing way—we who

work in D.C. tend to think in terms of centralized governments. It

seems that the real success was at the local level.

It seems that Iraq, even though the State Department told me

they have no concept of federalism, yet it seems like the concept

of local government is uniquely suited to these places where there

are these tribal differences. And it seems like great progress at the

local level, provinces and towns and cities and local sheiks, and all

being willing to shake off the al Qaeda and join with our Marines

and other places and start to build at the local level.

Now, first of all, I would like you to comment on that. And was

that a positive piece of what made things go well, or was that just

sort of an ancillary thing: ‘‘Oh by the way, this happened.’’

And then the second question I have is my concern is that local

government and federalism cannot really endure long if the money

comes from oil which goes to the Federal Government or the Parliament. And then the Parliament controls the money entirely, because he who controls the money is going to control the government.

And so my question is: Is it not a very important next step to

make sure that there are some dollars guaranteed to local governments just to make sure that federalism is alive and well? This is

sort of a two-part.

General KEANE. Who is that question for?

Mr. AKIN. Whoever wants to take a shot. General Keane, if you

want to do it first.

Dr. HAMRE. Let me offer one brief comment. First of all, I think

it was crucial that we discovered the power of tribal authority as

part of this new strategy. The new strategy is really bottom up,

outside in, and I think it is a very important—it is our coming to

realize those power structures and how to make them work.

Now, it still creates this dilemma of how do you create a coherent

central government, because if the central government ain’t working and the provincial governments are working, then you have the

problem of how do you hold this place together over time. But there

is no question that that is the foundation of a much more successVerDate 22-MAR-2001 06:46 Aug 29, 2008 Jkt 042900 PO 00000 Frm 00019 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-106\016160.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
16

ful strategy. And it wasn’t an accident. Our people really went to

school on this and learned that capacity to make that happen. And

I think it is a crucial dimension to our success.

Now, the point you raised about how do you share revenue, I will

just say that one of the dilemmas we have is the provincial police

are allowed to hire people but the Federal Government pays them.

And last year, they left over half their budget on the table because

of a tug of war between Baghdad and the provinces. This is a problem. We are going to have to get this fixed.

General KEANE. Yes, this is an interesting question and in my

own discussions with Iraqi and insurgent leaders and other Sunni

officials and some of the sheik tribal leaders, it has kind of been

a fascinating process. Out in Anbar Province, certainly the repression of the al Qaeda, the cumulative effect of that almost four

years; forced marriages; the killing and raping that was taking

place; the behavioral modification that was taking place to the degree that it was. They crossed over at some point where their future for their children was far more important than their very

lives. And that was being pressed on the tribal leaders themselves

by the people. So this bottom-up is interesting.

And then the key sheik leader came to one of the brigade commanders and opened his heart to him on the subject and asked for

assistance. And that is how we began. And that started actually in

Ramadi itself. And then it spread to that entire province much

faster than anybody could have imagined.

But the second thing is very instructive. The Sunni insurgent

leaders—not all of them because they don’t all agree, and some of

them are still fighting us—they strategically met and believed that

they could not win. They had far too many enemies. They had the

al Qaeda. They underestimated the Shia militia response to the

provocation of the Samara mosque bombing and what it did to

their people. They had the United States military and they had the

Iraqi Security Forces. They made this decision. President Bush

made a military decision not described in this fashion, but in fact,

the way they look at it from their eyes, to occupy the capital of

Baghdad with U.S. Military forces. They made a decision that what

they needed to do was to influence the Shia-dominated government

while the United States had the most influence on this power they

believed it would have.

And they haven’t had this kind of influence on this government

for a number of years. And that is also what brought them to this

movement. So they were pulling back from the insurgency, seeking

some kind of political accommodation. And that brought the people

out in numbers, even beyond the Anbar Province where those tribal

sheiks and leaders are, into the other provinces themselves.

So it has been a fascinating thing to sort of pull the threads and

understand what actually took place here. And those two factors

are stunning in terms of the amount of time it took.

And the other point I would make is on the revenue sharing. The

Shia model of government is strong provincial government with

money to operate, with a looser central government, if you will.

They want to achieve that. They have such a weak coalition in

power right now, they are having great difficulty getting to it. But

when you talk to them, the intellectual backdrop for what they

17

want to do is that. That is where they are moving. They realize

that the money in the hands of provinces and municipalities is

going to be much better spent. The Sunni model of government is

centralized power, centralized funding, and centralized distribution.

I don’t think this current coalition which is running the country

up until the end of 09 can get there in the fashion that you are

describing, with them being vested with money and that kind of

power. I think they may be able to get to provincial elections, but

to get to that kind of execution I don’t think. I think after the elections and the Sunnis participate, then we will get a stronger coalition that may be able to do what you suggest and what the Shias

believe is the right way to integrate the government.

Dr. SNYDER. Ms. Sanchez for five minutes.

Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, gentlemen, again for being before us today. I just want to begin by saying

that there has been a lot of talk and there are a lot of our colleagues—there are some of our colleagues who would prefer to see

a timeline and prefer to see a number of troop reductions and everything. And that more or less stems from the fact that if you continue to look at where the American people are, they really don’t

want us spending $3 billion a week in Iraq.

My dad always used to say, you know, I sit on the board, on the

board of directors of America U.S.A., and one of the things we do

is we look at the limited resources and we decide where to place

them. So I think for a lot of us, especially those of us who have

been on this committee, we really have been trying to sort out

where we move and how we move and what we do. We are not trying to micromanage the process.

I would just, you know, caution that we really aren’t trying to

micromanage this process from the Congress, but we are trying to

figure out where we place limited resources; whether we place

them on domestic issues or whether we put them into Iraq.

And I would also like to say that even though—and I do believe

that the surge is working, and I don’t think the surge is a strategy.

I think it is a tactic, personally. That is the way that I view it. I

would say that even though I think that it has been working,

meaning to try to create the space which is really the strategy for

political and economic things to happen in Iraq, the fact of the matter is if you look at this past year, 2007 it was the year of the entire war where we have had the most casualties to our men and

women in uniform. So we are not out of the woods yet with respect

to that.

And I also would say that I have a real bad feeling that if we

really begin to draw down troops in a significant amount that we

could be back to square one again, with an inability to really get

Iraq back on its feet, especially with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) report about how the Ministry of Interior is corrupt and the police force isn’t worth anything, et cetera, that we

had earlier this year. So I am very interested and I have been listening very closely and I have read your statements, the ones that

we did receive in time, with respect to what is going on there.

I just would like to have on the record that we are not out of the

woods yet and there are a lot of issues. If we don’t pull out our

18

troops, then it is not a surge; that is an escalation of the war. As

long as we keep the amount of troops really in, that was an escalation of the war, and I don’t think the American people really

want to hear that. So I think we are at a very critical point.

I think that one of the reasons why we have had such success

in the North and the South is that those are much more homogeneous areas, as you know, and we don’t have the problems that

we have where people who are of different stripes are in the same

city. I think one of the great factors has been the accomplishments

we have seen up in the Kurdish area, and to that extent the question that I have for you all is with respect to the declaration of

principles that was recently signed by Prime Minister Malaki and

President Bush, talking about the presence of U.S. troops for the

future in Iraq.

And I understand that the planners at Central Command

(CENTCOM) and the Joint Staff are preparing staff recommendations and courses of action for the eventual drawdown of our U.S.

forces and the repositioning—or where we are going to leave troops

or what types of troops we are going to leave.

And my question to you is: Do you think that those troops should

be focused or centered or based in an area like the North where

the Kurds are seeing that that is the most stable sort of an area?

Or do you think that those—that we should be looking at bases or

future troops that we keep in there, for whatever reason in other

areas, in the areas that are going to be tougher to deal with?

I would sort of like to get your opinions on what types of troops

you think ultimately we might have there if we can really do the

reconstruction and the political construction that we need, and

where they might be situated.

General MCCAFFREY. Let me, if I may respond to a bit of a spillover from the last question, but one of the things that is both extremely positive and unsettling, I had a sensing session with 38

tank commanders from throughout the Baghdad area, and the first

impression one gets is these are the finest people we ever had in

uniform. I have never seen anything like it, looking at our company

commanders, tank commanders, brigade commanders, they have

grown up, and they understand counterinsurgency. Many of them

are on their third or fourth tours. They are phenomenally effective.

And I stumbled around several marketplaces, several towns, with

some major who would tell me what he was doing was his say. And

I would assert one of the problems we are going to encounter as

we come out of Iraq is not just the lack of security, but a withdrawal of these unbelievably effective troops are going to bring. But

when you take the captain and company commander out, suddenly

that is the guy who has been organizing economic activities starting women’s councils. The personnel, tank commanders going to

these ineffective national ministries and talking about his clinic

with three dentists and five docs, and he walked the paperwork

around the capitol, and that is why it is there. So it is a bit unsettling.

Now, maybe General Keane and I don’t agree on this point, I am

not sure. I think the next administration is going to take a zero

base approach to this. I think hopefully, because of Petraeus and

Ambassador Crocker and Secretary Gates and others, we hopefully

19

won’t have a disaster when the next administration is sworn in. In

fact, I am modestly optimistic, to be blunt. And so they can look

around, decide what they want to do. But one legitimate outcome

is to say, for sure we are not going to keep apart a civil war in Iraq

at 1,000 killed and wounded a month and $12 billion a month. So

there is one outcome that politically would be legitimate for the

next administration to start with.

And then they would go on to say, well, what are we willing to

do? So I actually think there is some argument that the next administration might well say, we are in a timeline. I opposed that

in the last three some-odd years. I am now more of a mind that

the next administration may well say, we want to stand up 50,000

troops, we want to be outside the urban areas, and to give that

kind of guidance to a military commander and have him come back

and say, okay, here is my assessment on what you are telling me

to do.

But I don’t think we are there for 130,000 troops for 10 years or

1,000 years. Shouldn’t happen, probably won’t politically.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Davis for five minutes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One thing

I would like to do is to the subject away from interpretations, often

driven by political positions, before we go and vote on the defense

authorization again.

And one question that comes up, I have seen it on the ground

firsthand in Iraq and Afghanistan, it comes through in much of

what everybody on the panel has suggested in their statements, an

area that Chairman Snyder and I and Congresswoman Davis have

put together a task force to really look at from a congressional

level, and that is the issue of the interagency community and how

it functions together.

I can think all the way back to being a second lieutenant in the

Army when I saw it, let’s say, broken. But there was never the

pressure on the interagency community with the kinds of things

that the military is seeing now. One thing I hear from my classmates a lot is the military is at war, the Army is at war, but the

country is not. And so you have a disengagement on top of that

which creates a lot of misperception out in the general public about

what is actually happening.

I throw this out just for the sake of time and would be interested

in all of your opinions as we are trying to work on crafting legislation ranging from increased 1206 authority all the way to structural ways that can do, in effect, what the Goldwater-Nickels joint

legislation did for the military back in the 1980’s. And that would

be this: What do you feel has been the greatest interagency success

or shortfall, or perhaps both, that we have seen in Iraq? I would

probably point to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) if I

were going to say a ‘‘shortfall.’’ But in addition to that, having seen

these symptoms, you dig down to root causes, from a statutory perspective, what could we in the Congress do to help ease that effort,

so that when we get into the next time we send our troops—or our

instruments of power may be better put—down range, where do we

need to focus, from an authorizing appropriations personnel standpoint, to have us better prepared for the types of things we are

going to face this century.

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Dr. HAMRE. I must apologize, I have an obligation. I must be

downtown at five, but I could very briefly say, sir——

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. You have been very gracious hanging

with our unpredictable vote schedule here.

Dr. HAMRE. This is the hardest problem I think we have, because

it goes to the fault line in the Constitution. There is no question

the Congress has a right to oversee the operation of the departments of the Federal Government. But the Congress has no right

to oversee how the President organizes the interaction of those departments. That is in how the President structures the execution

of the activities of the executive branch. And I can’t conceive of a

structural solution to this problem. I think we can come up with

small things that we could do, which are important.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. I would reclaim my time for just one

second, just to beg to differ. A Member of Congress about 1810

made the statement that if the Congress doesn’t have the right to

oversee what the Army does, the Army doesn’t belong to the country, it belongs to the President.

Dr. HAMRE. Congress does have a right to oversee the standing

departments. That is not a question. It is the interagency process

that is being run on a day-to-day basis that is the prerogative of

the President. And we do need to find a solution to this problem.

And it is at the core the constitutional dilemma that we have in

our form of government.

Now, I think there are things we can do. There are things—we

certainly need to deepen the capacity of other executive branch

agencies to be able to work with the Department of Defense. There

is no mobilization capacity inside these agencies. The State Department is 2,100 Foreign Service officers short. They are short. They

have no surplus. They can’t send anybody to training because they

haven’t got a float.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Great Britain has more than we do.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir. So there are very real things we can do. I would

love to come up and talk to you, but I think it is very hard to come

with a legislative solution to the interagency process because of

this constitutional question.

But there are things that you can do and things I would strongly

encourage you to do that would help build up these other departments, because the Department of Defense has been pretty much

alone in this thing for far too long. State is trying.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. I am going to take you up on that invitation to meet personally with you, and we will arrange that. And

I would be interested in your opinions as well, especially the General, from a standpoint of I feel like I have college classmates that

are proconsuls in some cases. They are managing all kinds of

things very well, but really outside what their purview is.

Dr. SNYDER. If you could be brief, please. Then we will go to Mr.

Sestak for five minutes. And that bell you heard is the buzzer, and

we will let you go after that because you have been very patient

this afternoon.

General KEANE. We were recommending a counteroffensive to

the President and one of the concerns we had was that we needed

to get the other agencies involved to the degree that the military

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department is, because we have been, for three-plus years, compensating for their lack of involvement.

I really believe we have to take a stab at the structural change

and organizational change and then the education and training of

the people who are involved. You know it was put together post

World War II. I think it has served us well for a while, and in the

post 9/11 era, the global Information Age, it cannot keep up. And

that is the reality of it.

And I think serious people have to come together to look at solutions for it in a post Goldwater-Nichols era. That is the reality of

it. I do believe there are structural changes that we can make. I

do believe we can make an organizational change. There has to be

a formal structure that people participate in and are held accountable for their performance in that structure, and also they have to

receive education and training to be able to deal with the complexity of the interagency.

And then when we—I think we should before we do conflicts—

this group comes together and initially it probably is headed up by

a military commander in a planning and preparation phase, and

then in the execution phase it is as well. And early on, the military

commander stays in charge of it, and then maybe at some point as

we are dealing with more stability operations than military operations, we switch and another agency head takes over the joint integration task force. So there is a lot we can do and we should do

it, and we should stop talking about it and start doing something

about it.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Sestak.

Mr. SESTAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

General, I was taken by your comments that people should not,

because of success in Iraq or because of frustration with the length,

be calling for a redeployment. I have always been taken by some

of those, at least on the side that ask for redeployment, that they

are not doing it for any other reason than they believe it would be

a improvement in security.

I say that because with the following background in the short

term, that there is not—pre-surge, there was not one Army unit,

guard, reserve, or active here at home, not one, that could deploy

anywhere in the world, because the state of readiness was so bad.

Korea has known, in open testimony, Army units that could deploy to protect the 27,000 troops there. We were told by the Commander in Chief, Pacific Forces (CINCPAC) that Air Force and

Navy would back them up. You know what the war plans call for.

Afghanistan has the highest increase in violence we have ever

seen this year with harvest, record harvest crops, and the Taliban

are in the ungoverned regions again. Pakistan is probably the most

dangerous place in the world. In the longer term, I see an Army

that 42 percent of its recruits are in the below mental category, to

your point, General. No training in any other warfare area except

for Iraq-type of. And then China, probably where the center of strategic gravity for our Nation needs to be.

To my mind, we are still at the same place we were the last time

you all testified. Same place. How long and at what acceptable

cost?

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General, you said, McCaffrey, that the Sunnis basically are doing

something because, oh my gosh, they are going to leave, I better

get more involved. Oh my gosh, they are going to leave, I better

get more involved.

You also said, though, that our responsibility in Congress is to

raise armies and those things. But it also says in the Constitution

provide for the common defense, which constitutionally gives Congress a role to play in this debate. I know you have answered this

in a way, but how long? And at what acceptable cost for overall

U.S. security? In particular, when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

of Staff says, in Iraq we do what we must. In Afghanistan—and I

believe he could have added in there, for the rest of the world—

we do what we can.

General, or each of you, how long and at what acceptable cost to

stay there?

General MCCAFFREY. First of all, I think your premise is an appropriate one that, you know, when the question was to what extent has the interagency process failed, I might add to what extent

has the congressional role of oversight failed, to what extent has

the Senate responsibility to confirm senior officers of government?

And without overstating, this part of the problem wasn’t structural

it was leadership. We had a level of arrogance and misjudgments

on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld and some of his senior team that were

of historical importance. And they were not confronted. At one of

these hearings six months ago where the—and the Senate asked

me, why didn’t the generals tell us the truth? And the answer was,

you did get the truth, and you were intimidated by a leadership

that got us in a real perilous position.

If Dr. Perry had been the Secretary of Defense, if Dr. Gates had

been the Secretary of Defense, you will see quite different tones.

That wasn’t a structure problem. It was wisdom. It was judgment.

And I think the second piece of it is Congress should play a legitimate role, not by specifying missions or tinkering with the internal tactics in Iraq, but you do have a role to play.

Mr. SESTAK. But, General, if I could—and I am almost out of

time—your wisdom, your judgment, each of you, how long, with

knowing what is happening in our overall security, because this

isn’t just about Iraq security, it is about our overall security, how

long and at what cost?

General KEANE. Well, this gentleman asked a legitimate question

and, you know, some of the points that you made are certainly

valid. We do have other concerns in the world, and those are real

concerns, and we do have some impact on our forces and those are

very real. But the only thing I would say in response to that is that

we know the consequences of failure in Iraq are generally unacceptable, I think to most thoughtful people; and if that is truly the

case, if you accept that premise of what failure in Iraq would mean

in terms of endangering the American people and what it would

mean to us in the region, the seriousness of that, then I don’t for

the life of me understand why would we risk losing a war in Iraq

so that it would help us with maybe fighting a future war someplace? That, I think, invites adventurism on the part of our enemies, and it also affects the relationship that we have with our

allies. And certainly it changed the dynamic in the region.

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I don’t think anybody has an answer to your question as to how

long. I know I don’t. But this much I do know. We are bringing the

combat forces down by 25 percent in 08. I think the prudent thing

to do is to reduce those forces even further in 09. I would not do

any more reductions in 08 until we knew what the assessment of

that reduction is. And I think as a side bar to that, the casualties

are still going to come down. And as those casualties come down,

I think it changes the dynamics in Iraq rather dramatically, and

it will free up forces as well.

Dr. SNYDER. I apologize. We have two minutes left, or maybe

less, on this vote.

Mr. Sestak, I appreciate your question. I think it is as about as

bad a truncated experience we have this afternoon as I have seen

in a while, but it is bad luck on the votes.

I appreciate your all attendance here today. We are not going to

keep you after this vote. You have been here almost three hours

anyway, but we really appreciate your statements and your

thoughts and the wisdom that you provided.

Committee is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 4:40 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

A P P E N D I X

JANUARY 16, 2008

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

JANUARY 16, 2008

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DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

JANUARY 16, 2008

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE

RECORD

JANUARY 16, 2008

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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. SNYDER

Dr. SNYDER. Lt. General Lute’s role is shaping Iraq policy has been unclear. Can

you explain what you think his role is and what he has accomplished? CENTCOM’s

position has been similarly ambiguous, as the chain of command seems to be from

General Petraeus directly to the Secretary of Defense. Can you explain what role

CENTCOM is playing, if any?

Dr. HAMRE. I know that LTG Lute’s appointment caused great debate, and there

were statements that he was to be the ‘‘czar’’ for Iraq policy in the Bush Administration. I actually think his role was more modest and more appropriate. I believe LTG

Lute has been playing an essential coordination role, to ensure that the U.S. Government’s response is more coordinated and coherent. The leadership for action has

remained with the respective Departments of the Executive Branch. My impression

is that he is working hard to make sure interagency problems are brought forward

to the National Security Council, and that there is some measure of follow through

on the decisions that are made.

I don’t believe that CENTCOM’s role is ambiguous. CENTCOM remains responsible for the security issues in their area of operation. Secretary Rumsfeld created

a reporting relationship where the Commander in Iraq reports directly. I know that

General Petraeus (as did his predecessor) also reports to the CENTCOM commander. This relationship is analogous to the situation we have in the Pacific with

the Commander, US Forces Korea. CENTCOM is responsible for the broader security challenges in the region, with special attention to Iran. I also know that Secretary Gates has tasked CENTCOM to provide an independent assessment of the

security situation inside Iraq. He indicated recently that he has asked for independent assessments from General Petraeus, from CENTCOM and from the Joint Staff

so that he has differing perspectives on the situation in Iraq for purposes of is own

decision making.

Dr. SNYDER. Have you had the opportunity to evaluate the current Joint Campaign Plan? If so, what are your unclassified impressions of it?

Dr. HAMRE. I am afraid I am not familiar with the current Joint Campaign Plan

and have not studied it. I have several experts at CSIS who are familiar with it.

If the Committee would wish to draw on those experts, please let me know.

Dr. SNYDER. Please feel free to submit any other information on the way forward

in Iraq, or to extend your remarks.

Dr. HAMRE. I feel the Committee gave me ample opportunity to explain my views,

both during the period of my opening statement and in my response to questions

from the Committee members. Therefore, I do not have any additional comments

to offer at this time.

Dr. SNYDER. Have you had the opportunity to evaluate the current Joint Campaign Plan? If so, what are your unclassified impressions of it?

Mr. KOJM. I have not had the opportunity to review the Joint Campaign Plan.

Dr. SNYDER. Please feel free to submit any other information on the way forward

in Iraq, or to extend your remarks.

Mr. KOJM. Tactical progress under the surge, and a dampening of the violence,

is an opportunity for U.S. policy. Yet if there is no significant progress on political

reconciliation in Iraq, this moment of hope will pass, and sectarian violence will resume.

As General Petraeus put it in the Washington Post (March 14, 2008), ‘‘no one’’ in

the U.S. and Iraqi government ‘‘feels that there has been sufficient progress by any

means in the area of national reconciliation,’’ or in the provision of basic public services. In the absence of such progress, the achievements of the surge will erode and

unwind.

There is still a significant imbalance in the use of American power and influence

in Iraq. Too much emphasis is focused on the military side of the equation.

The focus for U.S. policy in 2008 should be an all-out effort to press the parties

in Iraq on political reconciliation. In addition, US diplomatic efforts should be focused on engaging regional partners and the international community in support of

reconciliation, security and stability in Iraq. Our diplomatic efforts to date have

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been lackluster. They have been selective. They cannot be successful unless we engage all of Iraq’s neighbors directly in that diplomatic effort.

Finally, the United States has a strategic interest as well as responsibility in addressing the plight of the more than 4 million Iraqis who have been forced from

their homes. Stability in Iraq will be difficult to achieve and sustain unless the humanitarian needs of these refugees are addressed, and unless there is a growing climate of political reconciliation that makes it possible for refugees to return to their

homes.

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. DAVIS

Mr. DAVIS. What do you feel has been the greatest interagency success or shortfall, or perhaps both, that we have seen in Iraq? From a statutory perspective, what

could we in the Congress do to help ease that effort, so that when we get into the

next time we send our troops—or our instruments of power may be better put—

down range, where do we need to focus, from an authorizing and appropriating personnel standpoint, to have us better prepared for the types of things we are going

to face this century?

Dr. HAMRE. This is an enormously complex problem and question. It has many

dimensions.

There have been substantial ‘‘interagency problems’’ associated with our activities

in Iraq. The Department of Defense made a mistake to think that it could manage

all the problems by itself in Iraq. In the early stages of the operation, it excluded

other agencies from participating in the planning and early organization. When

DOD realized this was a mistake and it needed the other agencies, a climate of ill

will prevailed that limited the extent to which other federal agencies wished to jump

into the situation.

One of the greatest failings in the interagency process was the failure to follow

through when tasks were assigned to the various agencies and bureaus. The Administration held countless meetings on Iraq and made many decisions, but there was

a systematic weakness in that they failed to follow up to determine whether the

agencies had followed through on their assignments. In my personal judgment, this

lack of follow up and accountability was the greatest interagency failure in Iraq.

The non-DOD agencies of the federal government lack an operational culture

(using the term ‘‘operational’’ in the terms used by DOD, meaning undertaking

tasks in the field) and lack sufficient depth of staffing resources to focus specifically

on pressing assignments. This led the Government to turn to contractors for conducting operations that should have involved U.S. governrnent personnel.

You asked what Congress can do from a statutory perspective to deal with these

problems.

First, let me say that I think this question hits the great fault line in the U.S.

Constitution. The Constitution unequivocally assigns the Congress the right to oversee the functioning of the individual departments of the Executive Branch. But the

Constitution also protects the right of the President to exercise his executive authority. Historically, how the president coordinates the various activities of the executive

branch through the interagency process has been judged to be an executive branch

authority. I personally hold this view. So I do not think that the Congress has a

right to statutorily regulate the interagency process.

Having said this, however, I do think there are important things that can be done

by the Congress. First, the Congress can and should use its oversight functions to

bring together various Department heads at the same time in joint hearings to ascertain how the agencies are working together. The Congress has not done a good

job of overseeing the activities of the Executive Branch concerning Iraq, in my personal judgment. Second, the Congress can insist that executive branch agencies (especially non-DOD agencies) have adequate staff to participate in emergency operations that were not anticipated in baseline budgets. DOD routinely programs to

buy more personnel than are needed for peacetime operations (a so-called ‘‘float’’)

so that it can send people to training, dispatch them to professional development

assignments in other agencies, and staff emergency operations. Non-DOD federal

agencies do not have this so-called manpower ‘‘float’’. They very much need it if we

are to fix this problem.

The Congress could consider mandating that senior civilians may not be promoted

above a certain rank unless they have had interagency experience, paralleling the

reform instituted in the Goldwater-Nichols Act.

I also believe that we need a standing administrative capability in the Executive

Branch to assist the stand-up of interagency crisis action teams when problems

emerge. The State Department created the Stabilization and Reconstruction Office

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in part to deal with this problem, but I don’t think this has been accepted as a viable solution outside of the State Department. Personally, I believe an administrative

structure should be attached as a field operating agency to the White House Executive Secretary organization. This administrative structure would serve as the mechanical backbone for coordination in the early hours of a crisis and become the

backbone for an interagency crisis action team. I believe this is something the Congress can mandate.

The U.S. experience in Iraq is marked by interagency shortfalls and failures of

the decision-making process that have resulted in several mistakes deeply harmful

to US goals and interests in Iraq.

For the sake of brevity, only a few are noted here:

 ̨ the dissolution of the Iraqi military in 2003 contrary to the advice of U.S.

forces on the ground, and without interagency consultation;

 ̨ a de-baathification order that similarly was contrary to expert advice and promulgated without interagency review;

 ̨ a failure to recognize the presence and growth of an insurgency against the

U.S. presence;

 ̨ a failure to carry out economic reconstruction projects in a manner that involved Iraqis in their design and execution; and

 ̨ a failure to deploy a meaningful and expert U.S. civilian affairs presence in

conjunction with the U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Several of these problems are not susceptible to legislative correction. The President is responsible for the activities of the National Security Council and the proper

function of the interagency policy coordination process. The President’s National Security Adviser is responsible for ensuring that national security agencies have

meaningful input before key decisions are made. Presidents will resist, on both practical and constitutional grounds, legislative dictates as to how they should manage

the policymaking process.

The Congress has a critically important role to play in helping to create or restore

the capabilities of national security agencies of the United States government.

The Congress should insist that the President present budgets that build the

international capabilities of civilian agencies of the United States government, including the Department of State, the Agency for International Development, and the

international affairs activities of a wide range of Cabinet Departments.

The Congress should call on the President to create a civilian expeditionary force

or capability that can deploy in conjunction with the U.S. military in support of

post-conflict reconstruction activities.

Whatever the President may request in his budget, the Congress and its Committees Have a responsibility to authorize and appropriate funds that restore balance

with respect to the tools of national power. In the first instance, this requires significant budget increases for the personnel and activities of the civilian agencies of

the national security establishment.

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A CONTINUING DIALOGUE: POST-SURGE ALTERNATIVES

FOR IRAQ (PART 2)

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Wednesday, January 23, 2008.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 1:03 p.m., in room

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman

of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Dr. SNYDER. The hearing will come to order. We appreciate you

all being here with us this afternoon. Mr. Akin will be joining us

shortly.

I see our chairman of the full committee, Mr. Skelton, is coming

in to join us, and we are pleased to see him here this afternoon.

This is the sixth hearing that this subcommittee has held in the

last seven or eight months on Iraq. We held four back in July and

one last week and one today. And I think the title of this series,

a continuing dialogue, post-surge alternatives for Iraq, is a good

one, because this is a continuing, ongoing dialogue that this country is having.

I will have to say, sometimes the dialogue is perhaps more flash

than substance, but we hope that the pattern continues at this subcommittee today that it is one of substance.

I want to say from the get go I was very pleased with all of your

written statements. They obviously were very thoughtful contributions to this continuing dialogue that this country needs to have.

That is about all I am going to say. I am going to introduce you.

We will be joined by Mr. Akin. Mr. Skelton may want to participate in this hearing also.

Our witnesses today are Dr. Stephen Biddle, the Senior Fellow

for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations; Dr. Andy

Krepinevich from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; Professor Lawrence Wilkerson, Former Chief of Staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell and is now the visiting Pamela Harriman Professor of Government at the College of William and

Mary; and Mr. Michael Eisenstadt, Director of the Military and Securities Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East

Policy.

And I must also acknowledge that Mr. Michael Eisenstadt is also

Lieutenant Colonel Eisenstadt, who is due to deploy in Iraq fairly

soon.

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How soon? Sorry?

Mr. EISENSTADT. A short tour.

Dr. SNYDER. A short tour.

Gentlemen, we appreciate you being with us today. I will have

Sasha put on the five-minute clock for your opening statements,

but you feel free to ignore it if you have got other things to say.

It is just to give you a sense of where time is. Your written statements will be made a part of the record.

We are joined by Mr. Akin. If he would like to do his opening

statement now, he may do so.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 97.]

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. AKIN. I think I have a short opening statement. Doctor, I am

just thankful for the witnesses, look forward to your testimony, and

we have an energetic doctor running this committee. This is his

second committee hearing in one day, so I think he ought to get

a special star award.

Thank you, Vic.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. Mr. Akin is referring to this morning.

We had a private briefing at 8 o’clock with Kathy Hicks and Rick

Barton, and what was the third person’s name? Steve McMorris, on

the whole issue of interagency issues in post-conflict situations.

So, Dr. Biddle, why don’t you begin? We will go right down the

row.

STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN BIDDLE, SENOR FELLOW FOR

DEFENSE POLICY, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS; DR.

ANDREW KREPINEVICH, JR., PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR

STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS; COL. LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON, U.S. ARMY (RET.), FORMER CHIEF OF

STAFF TO FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL,

VISITING PAMELA C. HARRIMAN PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT, COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY; MICHAEL

EISENSTADT, DIRECTOR, MILITARY AND SECURITY STUDIES

PROGRAM, THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST

POLICY

STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN BIDDLE

Dr. BIDDLE. Well, thanks for the opportunity to discuss these

issues with the committee. The surge saw a major reduction in violence, but the surge is ending, so what does this mean for Iraq? I

think that is about as important a question as the Nation faces

right now.

Obviously, nothing is guaranteed in Iraq. We are a long way

from anything that looks like peace or stability. There are a lot of

things that could cause these trends to reverse.

But, having said all of those things, I think that the underlying

strategic calculus in Iraq has changed since 2006 in ways that create an opportunity, by no means a guarantee, but an opportunity

for something that looks like tolerable stability in Iraq, but not if

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the United States takes a peace dividend and pulls our troops out

too fast or too deep.

I think our role in Iraq, if breaks continue to go our way, could

shift from war fighting to peacekeeping, and if that happens, it

wouldn’t involve the casualty rates of war fighting as we have seen

it in Iraq since 2003. But peacekeeping is a long-term, long-duration, labor-intensive job. And I think if we draw our troops down

too far, too fast, we run the risk of being unable to do it effectively

and undermining what we have been able to obtain over the course

of 2007.

Now, my written statement goes into some detail on the nature

of the strategic environment in Iraq and how it is changing. I am

just going to highlight three key events in the last couple of years

that I think have been particularly important in this context, most

of which, incidentally, we had nothing to do with. And in fact in

at least one key element of which we actually sought to prevent,

but which nevertheless has conspired, if you like, to bring about an

environment that could be more favorable.

The first and most important of these is Sunni military defeat in

the battle of Baghdad that followed the Askaria mosque bombing

of February 2006. The wave of sectarian violence that followed that

event was a humanitarian disaster and the United States, for understandable reasons, would have preferred that it not occur.

But the net result of that violence was to push Sunnis systematically out of the majority of what had been a mixed Baghdad and

take a Sunni insurgent collection that had believed prior to this

point that if they could just get the Americans out of the war they

would win the full-scale version of the civil war that would follow

against what they viewed as a weak Shiite government and persuaded them that this was an incorrect appreciation of the military

reality in Iraq.

They got the Sunni-Shiite war in Baghdad with us standing on

the sidelines that they wanted, and the result hurt them. It didn’t

help them. That meant that systematically their view of the military possibilities changed.

The second key change in the environment was a series of mistakes by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). It is nice to know that we don’t

have a monopoly on screwing things up in Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq managed to be so violent to their Sunni co-religionists, and interfered so substantially with the smuggling routes

that had been the traditional tribal patronage network fuelers of

Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar Province, that they convinced their

Sunni allies that they, AQI, were extremely costly allies to have

around.

Prior to the battle of Baghdad, Sunnis believed that this was a

cost they just had to bear, because they thought al Qaeda in Iraq

was carrying their military water for them and was necessary for

security against the Shiites and the Americans. The battle of Baghdad persuaded them that AQI couldn’t deliver military results on

the battlefield.

This made them all cost and no benefit and caused Sunnis systematically to look for other allies and the only possibility for that

was us. And this is where the third key development, the surge,

came in the picture.

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Tribal sheiks in Anbar had tried to break away from AQI in the

past and al Qaeda counterattacks had made it impossible for them

to sustain that posture and they would come back to the fold. What

the surge did was to provide protection for Sunnis who wanted to

flip, to enable them to survive the counterattack they would inevitably receive from their erstwhile allies in the form of al Qaeda in

Iraq.

This systematically changed cost-benefit and opportunity for

Sunnis and the result was that the majority of the Sunni combatants in the theater have now stood down and are observing local

negotiated cease-fires with the United States and the government

of Iraq.

That then changed Shiite militia incentives in ways that put it

in the interest of militia leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr to observe

cease-fires of their own for reasons that are detailed in the testimony, and I would be happy to follow up on in Q and A if you like.

But for the moment I will simply assert that the result of this

change in strategic possibilities facing the Sunnis, creating a standdown which created incentives for a comparable series of ceasefires from Shiite militias, has been that at the moment violence has

come down because most of the people who had been doing the violence have made a voluntary decision to stop.

They retain their arms, they retain their organizations. In many

cases, they maintain their leaders and their ambitions, but it is for

now in their strategic interest to cease firing, rather than continuing the warfare. All of those decisions have a base in strategic reality but could change.

Voluntary decisions to stop fighting can be followed by voluntary

decisions to resume fighting. These deals are terribly important,

but they are not inherently stable or self enforcing or terribly unusual when we look at the negotiated endings of ethnic and sectarian civil wars like Iraq’s.

You always face an initial period in which parties have made a

voluntary decision to stand down but retain enough military capacity to go back to war if they decide to. Critical in stabilizing these

deals classically is the role of an outside party that can serve as

a peacekeeper to enforce the terms that the parties have agreed to

and prevent the situation from spiraling out of control as spoiler

violence returns the situation to something that looks more like

2006.

For that reason, I think it is terribly important that if we are

going to take advantage of the opportunity that the moment provides—no guarantee, even if we do the right thing—but a chance

and an opportunity, we have to play this peacekeeping, stabilizing

role in the event that breaks continue to work our way.

If we decline to do it, I think it is very likely that Iraq will return

to what we saw in 2006 and before.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Biddle can be found in the Appendix on page 102.]

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Krepinevich.

STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW KREPINEVICH, JR.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the

opportunity to be here today and share my views on this issue. My

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testimony speaks to first a critique of the strategic alternatives you

mentioned as being suboptimal. I won’t go into that. I will focus my

remarks primarily on alternatives, as opposed to critiquing the current public debate.

Echoing what my colleague says, I think it is almost certain to

be a difficult path for us in Iraq, whether we stay or whether we

withdraw. And it seems to me this is one of the fundamental issues

that the American political leadership has not really presented to

the American people.

It reminds me to some extent what President Johnson once said

about Vietnam. He said I feel like a hitchhiker out on a west Texas

highway, where you see a car about once every hour or so. And I

see a storm coming on the horizon, and I can’t run, and there is

no place to hide. I have just got to stand there and take it.

And, again, I think if you look at the option for a timed, stated

withdrawal and you look at the options that are involved in staying, there is no pleasant option. There is no easy path. And I think

we need to come to an acceptance of that at the very beginning.

I think we also therefore need to accept the fact that if we are

to achieve even our minimal objectives, a reasonably stable Iraq

that is not a haven for terrorism, not likely to pursue weapons of

mass destruction, not likely to lead to a wider war, that we are

going to have to be in Iraq for an extended period of time.

We need to convince the Iraqis of this necessity, as well as ourselves. And I think there are some Iraqis who are beginning to

come around in terms of—I think one of the more interesting statements I have heard is, well, we can’t tolerate you as occupiers, but

we might be able to accept you as guests. We have got to get them

moving toward that second mindset.

As Dr. Biddle points out, the surge, part through serendipity,

part through design, has enjoyed a number of successes, enhanced

security, the tribal awakenings it is termed by some, the weakening of AQI, some bottom-up reconciliation, stability at the local

level, some top-down progress as well. But it hasn’t produced yet

the major movement toward the grand bargain or the national compact, as Ambassador Khalilzad once referred to it.

The political solution that we all agree really is necessary before

stability can come to that country. However, I do think that our

best chance at achieving our minimal objectives lies in building

upon the success that has come out of the surge, rather than pulling the plug on what we are doing in Iraq and hoping for the best.

I think, though, that continuing the surge, first of all is not really an option. Surge means it is a temporary increase in effort and

of course that increase in effort is coming to an end. Nor do I think

that we can count on the serendipitous events—there are others in

addition to what Dr. Biddle mentioned—as a strategy for how we

are going to proceed into the future.

What are some elements of the way ahead? Well, first, I think

we need to maintain the fundamental shift in approach that characterized a good part of the surge campaign, which is to say an effort to provide greater levels of enduring security to the Iraqi people.

To a great extent, an insurgency conflict, this kind of conflict, is

a war of intelligence. If we know who the enemy is and where the

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enemy is, we can defeat him. It is not a matter of not having

enough tanks or planes or guns, it is a matter of not having enough

good intelligence.

And to the extent that you provide people security and an option

to cooperate, you enable enduring reconstruction, you begin to work

out deals at the local level with these tribes and so on, that is one

effective means of getting access to that intelligence.

Second, as our troop levels come down, we have to help the Iraqis

help themselves. This means that, I think, we are going to have to

move more in the direction of standing up a cadre, a cadre of advisers that can work with the Iraqis as U.S. forces draw down, both

to enable them to operate effectively, but quite frankly also as a

great source of intelligence for us to identify which Iraqi commanders are competent and incompetent, which are loyal and disloyal,

which are sectarian and which are prone to avoid those temptations.

Third, I think we need to continue to pursue reconciliation from

the bottom up, as well as the top down. This hopefully will

incentivize faction leaders at the national level to work toward

compromise and also to enable us to form local alliances if things

do take a turn for the worse.

Fourth, we need to keep our best commanders and diplomats in

the fight. I was struck by the statement on the part of one senior

Army officer who said to me at one point, you don’t understand.

The United States Army would rather lose this war than change

its personnel policies.

We have got to stop the practice of rotating commanders in and

out as though they are interchangeable parts, when the history of

warfare teaches us that it makes a huge difference whether you

have a George Washington or Benedict Arnold in charge of your

army, or a General Grant versus a General McClellan.

Right now, again, we have General Odierno, who by the account

of many has done a remarkably effective job in his role in commanding forces in the surge, rotating out. Why? Is he burned out?

Is he battle weary? No, it is just not his turn anymore.

Finally, we need to establish unity of command in Iraq, as well

as in Washington. There still is no single American in charge in

that country. Both Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus have

to negotiate with each other in order to get something done.

Fortunately, they are two people in the right place at the right

time, but, again, this is a serendipitous event to some extent. Sooner or later—there are already rumors about Petraeus leaving to go

to Europe. We will be faced with can we get two other people to

get along well?

And, finally, we need to see any strategy within the larger context of a war that is really ongoing between the Mediterranean and

the Hindu Kush, and certainly this is the way a number of our enemies look at this, whether it is al Qaeda or Iran or others. This

is not a war in which the consequences of the outcome will be localized solely to Iraq.

In summary, these initiatives, like others, offer no guarantees of

success. I think they offer a better chance than just simply staying

the course and continuing with current processes or setting arbitrary dates for withdrawal and following through on them.

67

There are no easy solutions. Although former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been roundly criticized by some, I think he got

it exactly right when in October 2003 he said we are in for ‘‘a long,

hard slog.’’ Again, I think that is true whether we stay or whether

we leave.

President Kennedy once talked about the challenges that each

generation faces. And, to be sure, we will debate for many years

whether or not we should have gone into Iraq, whether it was the

right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

FDR once asked Winston Churchill in the middle of World War

II, what should we call this war? And Churchill responded, immediately, why, the unnecessary war, of course, realizing that appeasement had led to that conflict.

Having said that, we are in the middle of this conflict, and the

question is how do we resolve it? How do we end it? It is certainly

going to be a difficult challenge. The question is, are we up to that

challenge? Is it a reasonable challenge? Is there a strategy that will

lead us somehow to achieve our minimal objectives?

President Kennedy once challenged this nation by saying we

choose to do these things, going to the moon, waging the Cold War

and so on, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,

because the challenges are ones that we are willing to accept, that

we are unwilling to postpone, and ones that we intend to win.

And I think we really need to get to the point of seriousness, of

understanding that staying or going, it is going to be difficult and

we have to get about the business of improving our strategic options.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be found in the

Appendix on page 113.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Krepinevich. One of my accomplishments in my 12 years here is learning to say Krepinevich, so I try

to demonstrate that skill in each answer I give.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. It took me longer than 12 years.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Wilkerson.

STATEMENT OF COL. LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON

Colonel WILKERSON. Thank you, and thank you for having me

here today. I wish I had been in your morning meeting. One of my

major interests right now, having seen it absolutely dysfunctional

for a long time now, particularly my four years at the State Department, interagency coordination is a large part of what got us

to where we are now.

Dr. SNYDER. Well, that will be my first question during the Q

and A, so you can keep your powder dry until then.

Colonel WILKERSON. And let me also identify myself rather

strongly with Dr. Biddle’s remarks in particular and, as well, on

my right—I won’t try the name.

But let me try to put just a few more markers on the table, I

think. Muqtada al-Sadr going to ground and taking the most powerful militia in Iraq with him certainly is part of the reason why

we have a better situation in Iraq today. And that is why his recent statements, however accurately reported, about perhaps rejoining the fight are particularly disquieting.

68

Again, the decision of many Sunni leaders to suddenly decide to

change their ways is a part of that. And I would add that the vigorous U.S. and coalition combat operations that occurred starting in

early 2007 and right up to the point of the actual so-called surge

did a lot to convince the Sunni leaders that maybe they should

change their ways. Maybe taking money and arms and training

was better than getting killed.

And I would add to that the significant operations against al

Qaeda also. And I think we can’t fail to understand or misunderstand—we shouldn’t misunderstand the war we are in amongst

what is left in Iraq. That is coupled to the fact that we have had

anywhere from two to three million in a diaspora, most of whom

are in Jordan or Syria, and another million or so probably in Iraq

who didn’t have the wherewithal and the means to get out.

And we need not forget also that at the time of the surge, the

ethnic cleansing was pretty much done. So there is this kind of

weird equilibrium in Iraq right now, produced, as Dr. Biddle said,

by sort of a confluence of things that is as much serendipitous as

it is anything else.

I do agree, though, that we have the first competent leadership

team in Iraq since the war started. That is a profound statement

to make, but I think it is nonetheless true.

In the face of this favorable development, I don’t disagree with

anything my colleagues have said either with regard to the difficulty or with regard to the possibilities or the opportunities. But

I would like to point out, I think, two other very important realities. One is that we are significantly malpositioned to protect with

a very small professional military the rest of our strategic interests, not only in the Gulf and the Middle East, but in the world.

I would not want to be Admiral Fallon, trying to figure out how

he is going to do all the things that he needs to do with 154,000,

I am told is the figure right now, American troops with their boots

on Arab soil, sort of enmeshed in what they are in. And then add

to that in Afghanistan and so forth.

I would want to get those forces, as rapidly as possible, back out

into carrier battle groups and Marine amphibious ready groups,

pre-positioned stocks, exercises with Gulf Cooperation Council

(GCC) countries and so forth, a profile not unlike the profile we

had before we enmeshed ourselves so much in this particular portion of the Middle East.

I would want to be agile. I would want to be flexible with my

military forces, particularly since they are so small, to protect the

rest of America’s interests. So I think that is a reality that imposes—maybe we don’t publicize it, but it imposes a timetable on

what we are talking about in terms of exploiting this new opportunity or these new opportunities.

I also think there is another area. I think we are destroying our

land forces. And this is a very arcane, esoteric subject that people,

just their eyes go dull on, but we have got to look at the institutional fabric of the Army, for example, its educational processes,

the courses that officers have to go through to be professional and

so forth.

69

We have to look at the captains in the Army, which I am told

now we are about 15,000 short on. We have to look at recruiting.

My son just came home from Kirkuk. It was his second tour.

My son walked through Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI), went through customs, came up to me, and the first

words out his mouth were not, it is good to see you, dad. They

were, I am out. And he submitted his paperwork. He is on the major’s list. He is going to get promoted to major on 1 May, and he

is going to get out on 2 May.

That is anecdotal, but I think we have a significant problem on

the spousal side, whichever that might be, male or female, as much

as we do maybe even amongst the ranks. That said, I will have to

tell you that I heard Seth Moulton on a radio show yesterday

where Michael O’Hanlon and I were talking for about an hour, ‘‘On

Point’’ on National Public Radio (NPR), and Seth Moulton came out

of the desert and just surprised me, because he is one of my heroes,

Harvard-trained Marine, mind you. And I spent 12 years with the

Marines. I know there aren’t too many of those animals.

And Seth is on his fourth tour in Iraq and what he said on that

show really gripped me, and I think it gripped Michael and it

gripped the listeners, too. He said, we have made remarkable

progress in this country. And this is the man who at the end of

Charles Ferguson’s documentary, ‘‘No End in Sight,’’ says, don’t tell

me that America can’t do better. Don’t tell the guys that died with

me in Najaf that America can’t do better.

On his fourth tour in Iraq, he says we have made remarkable

progress. But then he said something quite disheartening. He said

there has been absolutely no, in my view, political progress, and if

we don’t make political progress—and then he left it hanging.

I think that is the sine qua non here. If you don’t make political

progress, then what are you doing there in the first place? And so

these two realities, the need to get back the strategic agility and

flexibility again, the need to get our boots off Arab soil, the need

to protect our land forces—because I don’t see you approving a vast

increase in the land forces. And I don’t see that taking effect quickly enough to have a real impact anyway.

I think we have to think about these two things as we consider

all of the things that have been said here. And as we try to exploit

these opportunities, we have to have sort of a date certain, at least

in our minds, about where we are going to say it is over.

And then I would say we might be surprised about what happens

when we say it is over. I think there are two possibilities. It will

muddle through, and we will be over the horizon to make sure that

the muddling is more in our interest than against it, or it will turn

into a vicious civil war as the Sunnis, newly trained and newly

armed and backed by the Saudis suddenly get very, very aggressive

again.

And, in that case, I would say we wait and see who wins and

then try to work out an arrangement with the victor. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Colonel Wilkerson can be found in

the Appendix on page 124.]

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Eisenstadt.

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STATEMENT OF MICHAEL EISENSTADT

Mr. EISENSTADT. Yes, sir. Three very powerful and compelling

sets of testimony. I would just like to add a few of my own

thoughts to the comments, the preceding comments.

First, just a few comments about the factors which account for

I think the dramatic improvement in the last six months in the security situation in Iraq, and the first having to do with the tribal

awakening. And what we are seeing I think in Anbar Province and

spreading elsewhere as well is something which is very typical in

tribal societies in the Middle East. And that is when tribal groups

are threatened by external actors, tribal groups that often have

problems working together will bond together to deal with the external threat.

And once the threat is removed, they will once again relapse to—

I wouldn’t go so far as to say their natural state of affairs of kind

of somewhat contentious relations. But I think that is something

that we have to be careful about and keep an eye on, that if we

succeed in putting an end to the threat posed by AQI that this

could result in a change in the calculus of the people who we have

allied ourselves with.

And a second point on this fact. I think we should have no illusions about the people who we are dealing with. One reason I think

that the tribal awakening has been so successful in rolling up AQI

in the areas that they have operated in is because in the past many

of them belonged to Islamo-nationalist insurgent groups that

served as facilitators or co-belligerents with the al Qaeda people

and they know exactly who these people were. And therefore they

were able to go after them and roll them up.

And this is, for them, a tactical alliance of convenience and we

should have no illusion about it. Again, I think what we are doing

is right and well and it has borne remarkable successes, but, again,

we have to recognize that this is for them most probably a tactical

alliance of convenience.

As for the surge, I think one of the things that is the cause of

the success of the surge is not just that we have been able to increase our force footprint, which went against the previous strategy

we were pursuing, by putting an additional five brigade combat

teams into Iraq. But, by putting these units out at the local community level, we transformed the local psychological environment.

One brigade combat team commander said to me, when people

saw that we were coming into their neighborhoods and we were

there to stay, their attitude toward us changed and we were able

to achieve a new level of cooperation with them and the intelligence started pouring in.

And I raise this simply because if we are going to start drawing

down, this could result in potentially a reversal or a change in the

psychological environment again in a way that is adverse from the

American point of view. And we have to figure out ways to prevent

that from happening.

I think it is also something to consider for the next administration, whoever gets elected president. Keep in mind that Iraq is still

a dangerous place. There is still a fairly significant level of violence

going on there. There are still insurgent groups that are attacking

coalition and Iraqi forces.

71

And I think in part their willingness to continue the struggle is

based on the calculation that there is a good chance the new administration might change its policy and pull out. And therefore

they would like to take credit for pushing the United States out.

And I think it is vitally important that a new administration reassert its commitment to the security of Iraq and in that way perhaps alter the calculus of these groups to realize that they are

going to have four more years of hard combat against the U.S.

Army and the Iraqi security forces. And that might cause them to

reconsider their commitment to what they call armed struggle and

maybe reconsider negotiations and going down the political path.

Again, the psychological environment and what we do and how

that affects the psychological environment is very important.

Taking on Shiite militias, again, the focus in the press has often

been on operations against al Qaeda, but we have been operating

against the special groups that were supported by Iran, as well as

Mahdi army cells that were involved in sectarian cleansing in

Baghdad. And that was indeed a major factor accounting for the

decision by the Jaish al Mahdi to stand down in August.

In addition, I think there are indications that they were starting

to lose support among their support base. Again, that is something

that could change in the future if circumstances were to change on

the ground.

And then, finally, a diminished flow of foreign fighters, at least

in part due to efforts by the Syrian government, and that is also

an important achievement to preserve.

In sum, I think the essence of our success is due to the fact that

we were able to neutralize the main drivers of the escalating civil

violence in Iraq prior to the surge, AQI suicide bombings on the

one hand and the ethnic cleansing and revenge killings done by

Jaish al Mahdi cells. By clamping down on both of them, we were

able to kind of deescalate this spiral.

And it is important, there are a couple of policy-relevant conclusions that can be drawn from this experience of the last six

months. First, while the U.S. presence may have stoked insurgent

violence in Iraq between 2003 and 2006, the U.S. is for now a force

for stability.

Second, while some violence in Iraq is undoubtedly the product

of random and revenge killings, it is for the most part neither spontaneous nor self sustaining. Rather, violence is used in an instrumental fashion by armed groups whose activities can be disrupted

and whose decision calculus can be influenced by various military

and nonmilitary means. And I raise that simply because there was

a perception at the time when it looked like Iraq was slipping into

a high-intensity civil war is that you can’t stop these things once

they get a momentum of their own.

And I think the experience of the last six months shows that you

can affect it in a decisive way, maybe not completely, but you can

have a dramatic impact.

In terms of preserving recent gains, clearly it is impossible to

predict what impact the U.S. draw-down will have on the security

environment. As I said before, because there are insurgent groups

that are continuing to engage in violence, I think as we draw down

they will continue to seek and probably find new opportunities to

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act. And, as a result, we have to be aware or be alive to the likelihood that we will see probably some kind of up-tick as a result of

the violence being perpetrated by groups that have not decided to

stand down yet.

And there are a number of other factors which could occur which

could complicate issues. And I mentioned before the collapse of the

tribal coalition. We all start seeing now tensions among de facto

tribal leaders in Anbar and elsewhere and the elected leadership

of the Sunni community, which could erupt into violence.

The Mahdi army could resume military operations. Tensions

around Kirkuk could explode. And then there is the issue of internally displaced persons and refugees who might either resort to violence to retake their homes or might be met by violence if they

seek to recover their homes.

Some of these developments would have only local consequences.

Others could have far-reaching implications and our ability to deal

with them will depend largely on the success of the Iraqi security

forces and taking up the slack as the U.S. draws down and on the

political savvy and negotiating skills of Iraqi politicians and U.S.

diplomats.

Just a final point about accommodation or reconciliation. I prefer

the term accommodation. Reconciliation sets a very high bar and

if we look at other deeply divided societies around the world, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, we see that often the process of reconciliation often takes decades. And, in many places, it has never

occurred.

So I think perhaps our focus should be on accommodation. That

being said, I think we can look at the cases where inconclusive

insurgencies or civil wars were ripe for settlement, and usually

they become ripe for settlement when there are three factors

present: one, a military stalemate that leads both sides to conclude

that they cannot achieve their objectives by violent means; two, an

emerging consensus among the belligerents of the terms of a settlement; and, three, authoritative leaders capable of speaking and negotiating on behalf of their respective constituencies.

I would say that almost in just about all these cases none of

these conditions are present in Iraq at this time, although I think

we have seen signs of progress toward fulfilling some of these conditions during the last year.

Just on the issue of authoritative leadership, I will just make

just one point. It is very clear that even the ruling coalition now

is increasingly fragmented. The ruling alliance in the Iraqi government is riven by all kinds of divisions. And even within each party

there are divisions, there are issues of whether the party headquarters in Baghdad has control over the leadership in various

provinces. And we see this with several of the parties.

But I think it is important to mention that at the local level we

often see that local leaders often retain sufficient influence to negotiate on behalf of their constituencies, and therefore local accommodations may be possible and in fact I think we are seeing them

in some places, even if national reconciliation remains a distant,

unattainable goal at this time. And I think this is something we

can build on.

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In conclusion, I would like to say that while Iraq remains a dangerous place, the security situation has improved greatly, creating

the possibility of political and economic progress in the coming

year. Many challenges lay ahead and there is no guarantee that recent security gains can be sustained.

But for the first time in a long time, there is reason to believe

that an acceptable outcome may be feasible. The key is continued

U.S. military and diplomatic engagement.

An acceptable outcome in Iraq could, beyond its inherent benefits

to the long-suffering people of Iraq, help rehabilitate America’s reputation and reestablish its credentials in the Middle East and elsewhere as a reliable ally and force for stability at a time when the

region faces growing threats.

For this reason, as long as there remains a reasonable prospect

for success in Iraq, no matter how modestly defined, it is vital that

the U.S. work toward such an outcome and accept the risks and

costs that a long-term commitment to the people and government

of Iraq is likely to entail.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Eisenstadt can be found in the

Appendix on page 133.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Eisenstadt.

Mr. Skelton.

Mr. SKELTON. Thank you very much.

Just excellent testimony, and I apologize, I must run for another

engagement, but would like to ask one question and thank the

chairman for calling this all-important hearing.

Mr. Wilkerson, you used the phrase, ‘‘war weariness.’’ In 1994,

I had the opportunity to visit with two sergeants of the Royal Marines just outside Exeter in England. And they both had just returned from Bosnia, and both of them at the time agreed this conflict will end soon, because everyone is getting tired.

Are we getting close to that in Iraq at all?

Colonel WILKERSON. I think the polling that I have seen that the

military has done, which is quite exquisite—much better, I might

add, than most of the polling you see in this country, particularly

with regard to the current campaign—would indicate to me that

there is a significant majority of Iraqis that want this crap to stop,

and that if they saw something that looked like it was truly solid

in stopping it—and of course this leads one back to the Saddam

Hussein type figure, the Putin type figure, if you will, they would

support that.

If they saw that the coalition was stopping it, if they saw that

the government under Maliki in Baghdad was not a feckless entity,

was indeed effective, they would support it.

Now, whether or not that support would mean an instant cessation to violence, I don’t think so. But I do think it would mean

you would be on a track to some degree of stability and economy

progress that would lead to that eventually.

The question is, where is that entity? Where is that political entity that is going to convince this 70 or so percent of Iraqis who

really don’t want the violence, who want to lead a life, want to

have a trade, want to have a job, want to have a home, want to

74

have children and so forth, want to worship they way they want

to worship?

The median age in Iraq was 19. We should have been in there

attacking that median age. I got so frustrated at the State Department I offered the minister of women’s affairs a credit card, because the Iraqi government would not give her a budget, would not

give her any money.

This is a feckless government. That is the reason there is no political progress. And we had a little bit to do with that fecklessness

because of the way we designed it and the way we put it together.

But that notwithstanding, I don’t see the current crop of characters

as being capable of bringing about some sort of political progress

that will appeal to this majority of Iraqis who want peace.

Mr. SKELTON. Thank you very much.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Davis for five minutes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

One thing I would like to touch on, I think Dr. Krepinevich’s

comments brought back memories of sitting in military art classes

at the military academy in the age of stone knives and bearskin.

But the one concept that was pounded into our heads over and over

was the concept of unity of command.

And we spend a lot of time in the Congress creating our own

form of greenhouse gases that don’t necessarily add value talking

about first and second and third-order effects of things that everybody in the country knows about but to keep political momentum

moving in one direction, but often don’t get down to root causes of

the problems and really begin to address those.

I would like to start with Mr. Wilkerson and preface my remarks

from the standpoint that Congressman Davis and I formed a National Security Reform Caucus that we have gotten a lot of interest

from a broad section of members. Chairman Snyder has certainly

driven these efforts here in the Oversight and Investigations (O&I)

subcommittee—to really find out what I see as process problems

far more than personality issues—although certainly the wrong

personality in a broken process can really aggravate the situation.

But we seem to be seeing root issues that relate back to things

we saw in Grenada, things we saw in Panama, things we saw in

Mogadishu, things we saw over in Bosnia and Serbia and certainly

now. Only in those days the American public didn’t pay attention

to it because there was a relatively low price in human life associated with it.

You have been in a very unique position, Colonel Wilkerson, having come up through the old forces command, seen that, the joint

staff, come over to the State Department and witnessed probably

all of this in every form of pain I am sure that is conceivable to

imagine from an agency perspective.

I was wondering if you would comment, and then I would like

to open it up to the other gentlemen, as well, putting the personal

issues aside that we have all seen, if you were king for a day, if

we could amend the Constitution and you could make statutory

changes, whether to organization and personnel policies or ways

the agencies interact, to allow for a better integration of our instruments of power, so we are not always turning first to the DepartVerDate 22-MAR-2001 06:46 Aug 29, 2008 Jkt 042900 PO 00000 Frm 00078 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\110-106\016160.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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ment of Defense or the military and really get back to a way to be

better stewards of those resources.

Colonel WILKERSON. I think you have hit on the organizational,

institutional question of the opening of the 21st century, in my

view. I think we need a new national security act. I think we need

a new legislative package.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Jim Locker hasn’t been to you yet.

Colonel WILKERSON. Well, Jim and I have been together for a

long time on this.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Okay, I won’t hold that against you.

Colonel WILKERSON. A set of executive orders and other things

that can be done without statute or executive orders. And I think

it needs to involve this body, too. Your oversight alignment with

the executive branch is just out of whack.

Whether it is a joint security on national security that runs 150

and all the other budgets involved with national security together,

I don’t know. I am not expert enough to say. But I do know that

what is happening right now is broken.

For Secretary Powell, for example, to have to come testify to two

different committees, one on state operations, justice and commerce

and the other on foreign affairs and have the state operations and

justice people asking more questions about foreign affairs than

they do about the management of the State Department is just one

indicator of how oversight is just not right.

I realize the committee chairman are not going to give up their

posts and so forth, so that is a hard thing to tackle. But I think

it is the whole structure that needs some amendment, needs some

reform, needs some reshaping.

That said, if I were king for a day, the first thing I would do is change this $0.5 trillion, $0.75 trillion with supplementals, going to

DOD, as opposed to $35 billion going to State. That is unconscionable in my view.

That just says you have militarized your foreign policy. You don’t

have diplomats.

One of the things Powell did right off the bat was go with his

bona fides before you, the Congress, and get the money necessary

to hire 1,103 over his 4 years new foreign service officers. That

doesn’t sound like much, but that is a fifth of the corps.

And now that has been completely consumed by Kabul and Baghdad. They don’t exist anymore. And so now the State Department

is back to the same thing again. It is trying to double fill, triple

fill. Somebody is having to do three jobs, two jobs and so forth.

That is the first thing I would do.

The second thing I would do, if I had the authority and I was

going to do it really fast and I wanted to impact this, the failed

states and the kind of things we are seeing in Afghanistan, increasingly in Pakistan and Iraq of the future, then we need something

like a unified command, headed by a civilian with a military deputy, with $3 billion or $4 billion in their pocket to start with, not

appropriated on an annual basis, for prevention, and in the event

prevention fails, crisis management.

And that command would eventually, because of it being at the

place where the rubber meets the road, attract the creme de la

creme from the bureaucracy, all across the interagency. It would

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also attract development dollars and so forth. It would probably do

away with the U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID). It would do away with the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

It would suddenly become that entity that everybody wanted to

work in, much the way Goldwater-Nichols did for the joint staff. It

would suddenly become first rate and cooperation with the interagency that was posited under its command, under its leadership,

would be great.

That is what I would do.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Davis, I am next. I am going to yield my five

minutes to you, and you can continue it with the other three witnesses.

We will start the clock. You have got five more minutes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Thank you very much, and we would

like to follow on this dialogue at a separate meeting, if that would

be possible, because we are working on it.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your deference. I would like to recognize Dr. Krepinevich.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Just a couple of observations. I just talked to

someone who came back from Afghanistan. We have two two-star

commanders there. One is General Sanchez, who essentially is responsible for tactical operations, and also General Cohen, who is

responsible for training and advising.

Cohen doesn’t report to McNeil. He reports to Admiral Fallon,

whereas Sanchez reports to both McNeil and Fallon. We have three

Combatant Commands (COCOMs), Special Operations Commund

(SOCOM), European Command (EUCOM) and Central Command

(CENTCOM), involved in operations in Afghanistan. And to a certain extent, I think perhaps we need a Goldwater-Nichols two, but

I think this is also reflective—you go back to 1983 in Lebanon, one

of the triggers for Goldwater-Nichols one was the convoluted chain

of command that existed in the run-up to the attack on the Marine

Corps barracks there.

So, in a sense, we have met the enemy, and he is us. There is

no reason that these things can’t be sorted out, I think in terms

of the unified——

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. If I could just reclaim just a few

seconds——

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Yes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY [continuing]. Just to emphasize a point.

I mean, when I look at State, forgetting the severe personnel differential, our military commanders become proconsuls in effect,

which I think is a very dangerous precedent for the future.

But, more to the point, I am concerned—I did a tremendous

amount of organizational consolidation and process improvement.

You have got four State Department bureaus and one CENTCOM

commander, is immediately a recipe for a ripple effect of grave concern.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Well, it is also interesting I think that State

is, and Mr. Wilkerson can probably correct me, my understanding

is that they are increasing the number of State Department representatives that work now with the COCOMs. So in a sense they

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are there now to support the COCOM as sort of the regional diplomat in chief.

Second, something else that doesn’t require legislation. When we

sent large numbers of advisers to Vietnam in late 1961, President

Kennedy established something called the special interdepartmental group, counterinsurgency, that was going to bring together

the efforts of the various departments and agencies, because these

kinds of operations have a strong reconstruction, diplomatic, intelligence, as well as a military effort. And budgets have to be redirected and so on.

Lieutenant General Doug Lute is very capable, but he has nowhere near the stature that Maxwell Taylor and the president’s

brother, Robert Kennedy had. And they were in charge of that

group. And that is when we had about 10,000 advisers in Vietnam,

not 160,000.

Third——

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Have you seen Lute’s War College

paper?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am sorry?

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Lute wrote a paper in 1997, foretelling

this issue that we are experiencing now, based on the very examples that——

Dr. KREPINEVICH. And now he is getting to live it. Doug and I

taught together at West Point many years ago.

Third, getting back to what Mr. Wilkerson said, in 1964, when

things were heating up in Vietnam, President Johnson did send

Ambassador Maxwell Taylor there and essentially told him he

should organize that country as a mini National Security Council

(NSC) in terms of his diplomatic corps and also the military.

And I think you are right. For this kind of an endeavor, you need

the ability to set priorities and make trade-offs between various

elements that won’t naturally make it themselves, so not only at

a national level, but at a regional and a country level.

Another point, I think, and it is the final one I will make, is this

hearing is about strategy, and yet it seems to me strange that oftentimes it is Congress that has to in a sense direct or request,

whether it is the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) or something

else, an administration to conduct a strategic review.

You go back to the early days of the Cold War and the best strategy that has been put together by this country since 1945 was at

the initiative—it didn’t require legislation—the initiative of the

Truman administration that produced NSC 68 and the Eisenhower

administration that produced the so-called Solarium Project.

So I think to a great extent it is not so much legislation that is

lacking; it’s leadership.

Mr. EISENSTADT. If I could just jump in on this, I think one of

the major failures as a country of the United States since 9/11 is

our failure to mobilize the Nation for this war effort. And there are

two components of this problem, one of which has already been alluded to, that basically the military is shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden of conducting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The second component, though, is the failure to really, I mean,

mobilize the human wealth in our nation. I mean, we are an inVerDate 22-MAR-2001 06:46 Aug 29, 2008 Jkt 042900 PO 00000 Frm 00081 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\110-106\016160.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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credibly rich nation, not just in material terms, but in terms of

human resources. And, by and large, the civilian civil society has

not been called upon, or has not been mobilized, and the talents

in civil society have not been tapped by our Federal Government.

Now, one idea that has been floated to remedy these two issues

is the idea of a civilian reserve corps, which I would urge be investigated further. There was an idea that was floated in an op-ed in

the ‘‘Washington Post’’ a month or two ago about creating a civilian

reserve corps of about 5,000 people, but consisting of people from

civilian government agencies who would be deployable and be

available to deal with contingencies.

And I would add that that is only half the problem and that is

not really enough. And I would urge that consideration be given to

a civilian reserve corps that is much larger and that taps into the

talents and resources of our civil society. And in the case of Iraq

and Afghanistan, I think we could have benefited greatly, had we

had such assets available.

And this is a way also for dealing with an important problem in

American society, which is the growing gap between the government and the people. And therefore I would just urge that perhaps

Congress give greater attention in the future to this idea. But go

beyond just looking at how do we get civilians from government

agencies to help the military, but how do we mobilize the American

people in support of these operations overseas.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin’s opening statement, without objection,

will be made part of the record, his written statement.

And, Mr. Akin, for five minutes.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Doctor.

I had a couple of thoughts, hearing your testimonies, and I heard

the word serendipitous a bunch of different times. And of course

there are many things in life that you can’t always predict.

It seems to me, though, that there were some things that the Administration did right. The first one was to show the resolve to stay

there and be a player. If we weren’t staying there, if we were busy

trying to cover our rears as we are all running, that things

wouldn’t be the way they were.

The second thing is that I am aware from talking to General

Allen about the Marine portion over in the Anbar Province, it

wasn’t just coincidence that some of these sheiks stood up. He effectively went out like a football recruiter, went over to Jordan, and

talked some of these guys into coming back, at tremendous risk to

those sheiks’ lives, to assume the leadership for the geographic

areas that made up part of Anbar Province.

So it leads me to the conclusion that when you have extremely

competent leadership, it is surprising how luck seems to be more

of a factor, not that there weren’t a lot of factors that were going

on that were certainly outside of our control.

I appreciated most of your testimony, agreed with most of it,

from what I have been able to see. One question, though, and that

was for you, Mr. Wilkerson, and that was it seemed to me one of

the most encouraging things that I have seen was actually political,

but not political the way those of us that work in D.C. think.

It always concerned me right from the get go in Iraq that the emphasis is all on parliament. We are all a bunch of belt-line big govVerDate 22-MAR-2001 06:46 Aug 29, 2008 Jkt 042900 PO 00000 Frm 00082 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\110-106\016160.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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ernment nuts. And the thing that impressed me was the standing

up of the local communities and the local governments and the

guy’s son agreeing to join the local police force and those local communities starting to take some charge of their own fate and destiny

and policing their own neighborhoods.

It seems to me that that ground-up basis for a federalist solution

over there was tremendously encouraging, even though the parliament just sits there and appears to do nothing. I suppose maybe

they have made more progress than the Congress has, but not very

impressive anyway.

But it seemed to me that there is good political progress at the

local level and that if we could in some way do a sort of a limited

government thing in parliament that guarantees certain basic

issues, things like health care or police and this and that can be

done in those local provinces. And then if we could guarantee them

some source of revenue that is not controlled by the central government politicians, that we might be well on the way to being able

to consolidate some of the gains.

So, I am not an expert. You guys are. But I am not short of opinions, so I would appreciate if you would respond in either category.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 99.]

Colonel WILKERSON. Well, I don’t disagree with what you said.

And, in fact, Seth’s remarks yesterday to me were, as I said, quite

saddening, quite disheartening, to me to hear him say that. There

has been some progress, and it has been largely the way you say.

There has even been some progress—I would say maybe the

glass is maybe a tenth full now, rather than being empty. The revenue that is going out now is sort of an oil sharing, because most

of that revenue comes from oil, that is going out to the provinces,

is happening. And it is happening largely because they finally got

around to doing it.

And what you say about the local councils and villages and mayors and things like that is important. I think it is more important,

though, if what you are shooting for ultimately is a Kurdistan, a

Mosul, a Baghdad, a Basra, and you are not shooting for some entity in Baghdad that is going to largely be allied with us, or at

least friendly to us, and be in control in some significant ways, at

least, of these three or four outstanding provinces.

Many—not many, but some—have proposed that solution and

have said that is what we should do. If that is the political resolution you are looking for over the next 10 years or so——

Mr. AKIN. Could I stop you? My only point was I am not into the

carving it up in separate countries, that kind of thing. All I am

simply saying is if federalism is going to work, if the money all

comes from the central government, then the central government

is going to control everything. Unless you can fund local provinces,

some way cascade that money to them without the parliament pulling the strings, you are not going to be able to have that level of

federalism which potentially—federalism to me doesn’t mean different countries. It just means a series of states working together.

Colonel WILKERSON. I think my understanding of the pressures

there and the tensions there would be that that is probably what

you would wind up with, certainly in the north, I think.

80

Sulaymaniyah is prosperous now. One of my Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) friends told me the growth rate there is about 12, 13

percent now, doing well, really doing well. They don’t want to disturb that. That is the reason recently, with Gates and Rice working

with them, they have tacitly agreed to let the Turks take on the

Kurdistan Workers’ Paty (PKK), a major accomplishment.

And, as a result of that, our relations with Turkey are on the upswing again. So I compliment Secretary Rice and Secretary Gates

on finally doing that. But that again reinforces that that is

Kurdistan, really. They don’t have any care for the rest of Iraq except that they want them to stay away, particularly Arabs.

So I don’t know how you get away from that eventual happening

if you let it start in that sort of significant way. And maybe that

is the solution we should be looking for. I don’t know. It is not the

one we professedly are looking for.

Mr. AKIN. I wasn’t suggesting that the army works at a local

level. I would keep the defense under control of parliament. I am

just talking about local police.

Colonel WILKERSON. The Kurds have their own army.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Cooper for 5 minutes.

Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Excellent testimony.

From the standpoint of the Armed Services Committee, the most

striking testimony we had today was Colonel Wilkerson’s statement that for the first time we have competent generals in Iraq.

What an indictment, years into a war. For the first time, to have

competent leadership.

Dr. Krepinevich said earlier that perhaps the Army would rather

keep its personnel policies than to win the war. Those are two very

powerful and penetrating statements that to me speak of hardening of the arteries of the upper ranks of the military, in ability to

select the most powerful people for the job, inability to keep the talented people that we do find on the job so that we can succeed in

this conflict.

I hope that we can reform the Pentagon and do the things necessary so that we don’t have to wait five or six years into the next

conflict before we get the appropriate leadership at the top.

Do either of you gentlemen have specific suggestions for things

that we should be doing, as this committee, to try to improve the

leadership in the upper ranks?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am sort of repeating myself, but it really does

come down to leadership.

Mr. COOPER. Are we not developing enough leaders? Or are the

right leaders not being included?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think we are struggling to catch up in terms

of this kind of warfare. When this war began, we essentially had

no doctrine for counterinsurgency. It was as though we decided

after Vietnam we are getting out of this business and we are not

getting back into it.

Mr. COOPER. It is the sixth Muslim country we have helped rebuild in the last dozen or so years?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Certainly if you go back to the early 1990’s

and you could say, we are in Somalia, we are in Haiti, we are in

Bosnia, maybe we ought to start thinking about irregular warfare

in a serious way once again.

81

Again, I really do think there is a leadership issue here, and it

is not to impugn the leadership of——

A PROTESTER. Where are the Iraqi voices? Where are the Iraqi

voices?

Dr. KREPINEVICH [continuing]. Of the Army in terms of their patriotism or their dedication to duty. However, there were in the

early days of World War II, General Marshall fired four Army

corps commanders. In I think at least two cases, it wasn’t because

they were incompetent, it was just because he thought he had better people.

There was a certain ruthlessness, a certain seriousness of purpose, about what we were involved in. And somehow we seem to

have lost that. And I think we lost it long before Iraq.

I once talked to interview General Westmoreland, and I said,

General, the standard tour for a company commander in Vietnam

is six months. I said, in those cases where a company commander

has been able to serve longer, his casualty rates go way down, his

effectiveness goes way up. How could we justify?

And his response to me was, we didn’t know how long the war

was going to last. We didn’t want to create two classes of Army officers, one that had combat command and one that didn’t.

And, again, it was the personnel needs, the career needs, before

the needs of the country, almost before the needs of the soldiers.

And I have approached General Petraeus on one occasion, after he

had just come back from training the Iraqi security forces. And,

again, great soldier doing a terrific job. And I said, Dave, what are

you doing back in Washington? And he said, well, come on, Andy,

I have been over there for a couple of years now.

And I said, well, given the importance of the job, if you weren’t

the best guy for the job, you shouldn’t have been there, and if you

are the best, you shouldn’t be here. I have gotten answers, well, he

has been over there for a year or so. We need to bring him back.

He is exhausted.

And I said, is he really exhausted? I said, wasn’t there a guy

named Washington who was in the field from 1775 to 1781, for 6

years, no helicopter, no palace to sleep in at night. You think he

had it rough?

Again, at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself as an institution, what kind of weight are we putting on trying to achieve our

war aims as opposed to the health of the institution?

And in terms of legislation, it is worth talking to General David

Barno, who commanded in Afghanistan. And General Barno said,

Goldwater-Nichols—he said General Marshall in World War II, his

in box, he had to worry about two things. He had to worry about

the Army as an institution, and he had to worry about winning the

war.

He said Goldwater-Nichols makes it so General Petraeus worries

about winning the war and General Casey worries about the institution of the Army. And he said it is not always the case, in fact,

in many times it has not often the case, that those two gentlemen

will agree, because Petraeus is willing to risk breaking the Army

to help win this war and Casey’s job is to preserve the Army and

to preserve the morale of the officer corps.

82

So on a number of occasions, we have set up a situation where

these people are working at cross purposes from one another. But

at the end of the day, I think it goes back to—and it is too bad Mr.

Skelton isn’t here—I think it goes a fair way back to how we train

these people to think about war, how we train our senior leaders

to think about strategy and what is needed to succeed and also a

seriousness of purpose.

And I don’t quite know how you instill that in people, but it

seems as though we have lost a good part of that.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Spratt for five minutes.

Mr. SPRATT. Thanks very much for an excellent presentation and

super testimony from all of you. I am the chairman of the Budget

Committee, and it sort of surprises me, even after this many years,

to sit through the discussions of these issues without any consideration at all being given to the budgetary consequences of what we

are doing.

Now, I am not so mundane as to say that is the most important matter, but as it approaches—exceeds $500 billion. We got testimony today from The Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Their estimate of the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq since the inception is

about $691 billion to date. They have a model for estimating what

the cost will be if we stay there in smaller numbers. Their estimation is we draw down gradually to 75,000 troops in both theaters, Afghanistan and Iraq and stay at that steady state from 2013

through 2018, the last year of their projection. The cost is about $1 trillion. Those are consequential numbers,

consequential for the Defense Department, for the defense budget

and for the country’s infrastructure, all of the needs we have got,

which are highlighted by the economic situation we have got on our

hands right now.

We have been able to buy into this without taxing the American

people one penny for the effort and largely on the assurance of the

president’s rather facile argument that we will stand our troops as

their troops stand up. I have been over there five times now, I

think, including before the current war, and I am just dismayed to

see that we have not been able to put in the field 135 battalions

that we have trained and taken full advantage of the fact that we

have supposedly got an Iraqi army now that can begin to assume

more and more responsibility for our troops.

Is that happening? If not, we had an Iraqi defense minister here

a week ago who says we will need to stay there in substantial numbers until 2012. The cost of that is enormous, and it begs the question.

Dr. Krepinevich, you just mentioned Marshall. I have been reading Rick Atkinson’s latest book and the previous book as well, and,

my God, it is amazing how bad the generalship in the United

States Army was as we were learning the hard way and losing casualties and making tactical mistakes up and down.

But when General Marshall took office on September 1, 1939, he

went down to thank the president for his appointment but told the

president, Mr. President, I want you to know, I am very proud to

take this job, but I want you to know, I am the commander in chief

of the 17th-largest army in the world. In two years, he was no

longer the commander in chief of the 17th-largest in the world. He

83

was commander in chief of the army that, along with the Russians

on the Eastern Front, won the second world war.

Why can’t we shape these forces up? Is it ethnic divisions that

still run through the Army? Is it corruption? Is it because we aren’t

putting them in the field where they will get battle hardened?

What is the answer to that? Why can’t we field an army that is

adequate to bring security to the country sooner, rather than later?

Colonel WILKERSON. Let me take a shot at it and then anyone

else, of course. Your first part of your question, one of the reasons

I do all three of my seminars at William and Mary and The George

Washington University, I make my students deal with resources.

They don’t like it. They are not economists, by and large. They

don’t like it, but I make them deal with resources.

The last president of the United States to put an addendum on

every national security decision document that told him what the

estimate of his decision was going to cost the Nation was Dwight

Eisenhower. Haven’t done it since.

You are absolutely right. This——

Mr. SPRATT. That is an interesting point. I would love to see that

made part of the War Powers Act.

Colonel WILKERSON. This is another dimension of what I was

talking about yesterday with Seth and with Michael O’Hanlon on

the radio. This new president, in January 2009, is going to have

a fiscal situation that I believe is quite powerless. And to continue

to put this money out at the rate we are putting it out now, or even

close to the rate we are putting it out now, is going to be virtually

impossible.

So that is another constraint on the time we have left remaining

to exploit these opportunities that we have got. Your point is genuine from both perspectives. We never think about it, and it is critical.

On the other point, I will identify myself with what was said

over here by my colleague, but I will also tell you that I had seminar after seminar at the Marine Corps War College. And Senator

Hagel and I have had particularly poignant discussions about this,

and generally speaking we were doing counterinsurgency.

I mean, we were in Pristina in 1994. We were in Southwest Asia

doing—we put troops on the West Bank to police a settlement in

the Israeli-Palestine situation. We did really remarkable things,

but let me tell you that not very many of those lieutenant colonels

who stood out in that environment got promoted to general. And

I had Marines, sailors, Air Force officers, one Coast guardsman and

a number of other service or affiliates in reserves, national guard

and so forth in my seminars.

Why? I asked myself. Well, I know the reason. It is what he said,

but he just didn’t want to go aggressively about that. The personnel system runs my Army, and the personnel system is not geared

to producing people like David Petraeus. They sneak through.

Dr. BIDDLE. On the question of the Iraqi security forces and

whether or not they can take over for us, there are a lot of challenges, equipment training, logistics, leadership, all that. The binding constraint is not their proficiency, it is their politics.

They are in the middle of an ethnic and sectarian civil war. They

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munities and are subject to the same kinds of centrifugal pressures

that the rest of society is. If the society is breaking apart into factions, you can’t reasonably expect that we are somehow going to

create a disembodied, free-floating entity that is divorced from the

society from which it is drawn that is somehow disinterested and

nationalist.

I think because of this I think it is unrealistic to expect that

until and unless the underlying sectarian civil war that is Iraq is

resolved that we are going to be able to create an Iraqi security

force that can take over for us. Given that, I think what we are

looking at in the near-term future is an Iraqi security force that

can provide essentially a roll not unlike that that the concerned

local citizen groups and Anbar awakening councils are providing.

They can defend their own.

Shiite Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) units are very effective in defending Shiite neighborhoods. Sunni ISF units and the few nationalist, disinterested subsets, are capable of defending Sunni areas.

By and large, they are not capable of defending people not of their

sect.

That is I think centrally why if we are going to get something

that looks like stability in Iraq it is going to require a long-term

stay by us. We are the only party in the country that now, and I

think for quite a while, is not viewed by someone as a threat of

genocide.

And I think that is not a problem that we can readily fix by

amping up training budgets, amping up advising efforts. These are

good things in a variety of ways, but there are substantial limits

on what they can accomplish, given the nature of the war in which

this is taking place.

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes, and then to Mr.

Conaway and then to Mr. Johnson.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I am not sure if I am going to repeat anything that has

gone on. I am sorry I had to leave the room for a few minutes.

You talked about the chain of command and the fact that it

wasn’t really clear, I think, Dr. Krepinevich. I have been studying

that, too, so I thought I was going to get it right.

I actually heard that in a trip to Afghanistan a few days ago, the

confusion there. And so where will this come from? I mean, how

will this change?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Well, it is within the power of the Defense Department to change the chain of command. They have something

called the Unified Command Plan (UCP), where they sit down and

they say, okay, this is how we divide up the regional commands.

Right now, for example, you have one combatant commander who

is responsible for Pakistan, another one who is responsible for Afghanistan. And then you have the special operations——

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Part of my question, is there a recognition that this is a problem and that people want to solve it?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Well, I certainly think, yes, there is a recognition that it is a problem. And the question is, how hard do you

want to push in order to change things? And most organizations,

most individuals, once they have power and authority and responsibility and budgets, don’t like to give it up.

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And this part of the world, there has always been this interesting

debate about, well, we need India and Pakistan together because

those two countries are often at odds with one another, so you peel

off Pakistan. In this case, you have got a conflict, as I mentioned

before, that really transcends several commands. And do you reorganize yourself in order to be able to conduct operations more effectively?

And, of course, once the president, I believe it was, or maybe it

was Secretary Rumsfeld, designated the special operations command as the principal command involved in the global war on terror, then these other commands are supposed to support the special

operations command, so you have got that layered in, as well.

And as Mr. Wilkerson mentioned, there is a similar problem in

terms of the diplomatic side of the house, and then you have got

the problem of integration. Since the military content of an operation like the invasion of Iraq is very high, the military content of

counterinsurgency or stability operations relative to intelligence

and reconstruction and diplomacy is relatively low, and it is much

more balanced.

And so it becomes very important to be able to integrate that

under an individual who has responsibility, can make trade-offs

and can force compliance so that you can actually execute a good

strategy when you have identified one.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. I know that my colleague, Geoff

Davis, mentioned the interest and the work that we are trying to

do, raise the issue on the interagency, and a lot of members have

talked about this. Some are addressing it through different kinds

of legislation. What would it look like if the Congress actually were

to cross jurisdictions and help build the capacity in these different

areas to do that?

In your estimation, where is the greatest—aside from the culture

and getting there, I mean, is there a part of this that you think

would be the most difficult to focus on? Not just you, Doctor, but

everybody. Where is the least capacity, and I guess in one way the

most capacity? How do we do that?

Colonel WILKERSON. I will describe to you what I saw that was

the most effective interagency operation in my 40 years or so association with the government, military or otherwise. And it was essentially—I can’t talk about it in great detail, but it was essentially

70-plus people as disparate as the Secret Service and the Department of Commerce, State, Defense, others, agencies, departments,

bureaus, all working together to come up with a real plan to clandestinely go after North Korea in certain very key areas. Very successful effort, in fact, incredibly successful.

Did it ever come to any real fruition? A little bit, not much, because it ran into diplomacy, it ran into real power issues and so

forth and so on, which was good.

Why was that so different from what I saw in Iraq and what I

have seen in Somalia and a number of other places? It was principally different because the people working in the interagency

group were first of all experts in their areas. They were not possessed of huge egos and they were out of the attention of those who

were and, generally speaking, their technological and functional expertise was so exquisite that their pachyderm bosses didn’t have a

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clue what they were talking about. And so beneath the screen, so

to speak, they got things done.

When you throw egos, and you throw the big 800-pound gorillas,

into the arena, fully aware that their way is best, and you have a

leadership that is unwilling to knock heads above that and to make

people do what they should be doing, it is a very different situation.

Can you improve that?

To a certain extent, I agree with the doctor here that leadership

is the key. Leadership is the key. It is the key, it is always the key.

But you can improve the organizational structure beneath that

leadership in order to give that leadership in an increasingly complex decisionmaking environment.

The challenges of today are nothing like the challenges of the

past, in my view, in complexity. You can increase that decisionmaker’s ability to make better decisions. And that is what I think

the group that he was referring to, Jim Locher’s group and others,

are striving for, is that institutional reshaping that would give decisionmakers a better opportunity to make good decisions and then,

more importantly, probably, have them executed reasonably, the

way they ask for them to be executed.

State and Defense are at the very peak of that. You fix the relationship between State and Defense and the others will follow.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Conaway for five minutes.

Mr. CONAWAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

How long ego—it is probably a little difficult.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Conaway, could you pull your microphone in?

I know it is kind of pointed.

Mr. CONAWAY. We did a little infrastructure work on the Armed

Services Committee so that this clandestine 70 people fixed North

Korea?

Colonel WILKERSON. No, no, didn’t mean to say that. The plan

that they put together would have been a marvelous accompaniment to diplomacy, had it been executed.

Mr. CONAWAY. I am trying to blow up that 70-person working

model that had the very brightest people that walked the face of

the Earth, no ego, to a grander scale that would address Iraq or

Afghanistan, or maybe Congress itself.

Colonel WILKERSON. Good luck.

Mr. CONAWAY. Yes.

Dr. Wilkerson, you mentioned a new, grander bureaucracy that

would I guess report directly to the president, that would include

SOCOM, all the capacity of the Department of Defense (DOD), all

the capacity of the State Department, every power that the Federal

Government has, within this one organization. Once that is established and you create a new turf, how do we realistically keep it

from migrating to exactly the circumstance we have today?

I am not a fan of replacing an existing bureaucracy with another

bureaucracy that has got—if we could ignore the current turf, how

do you overcome all of that and keep it from migrating back to the

silos that we have right now?

Colonel WILKERSON. Well, it is an excellent question. I could answer you in comprehensive terms and tell you that that is probably

what you do with bureaucracy periodically anyway. You have got

to rape, pillage and plunder it every now and then and reshape it,

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perhaps every generation, to get it to be a little less sclerotic and

work a little bit better, but that is not the reason you do it.

What I suggested, I think, first of all, would be based on a fundamental strategic decision that this is the way of the future. That

is to say, failed states, and what looks like failed states, whether

they are in sub-Saharan African, Southwest Asia or wherever, are

the real strategic priority, not only of our armed forces, perhaps,

but also of the interagency group.

Mr. CONAWAY. Well, stopping right there, won’t you always have

a tension between the groups that are in and out of the failed state

models?

Colonel WILKERSON. Absolutely, absolutely. But what I am saying is, as Goldwater-Nichols did exactly what you said was impossible, because that is what Goldwater-Nichols did, it changed the

entire bureaucratic arrangement of the armed forces. It did so by

changing——

Mr. CONAWAY. I heard Mr. Krepinevich say it is terrible today.

It doesn’t function. You have got bad leadership across the board.

Colonel WILKERSON. I didn’t say it was designed to produce great

leaders. I said it changed the bureaucracy of the armed forces.

Mr. CONAWAY. Okay. Let me go to Mr. Eisenstadt.

A civilian reserve corps, given the experiences we had the last

four, five years with the national guard and the struggle and the

tension between a home career and then having to leave for, if you

were in the Marines, seven or eight months, if you were in the

Army, 12 to 15 months, and then come back and the impact that

that has had, which is not particularly favorable, how do you create

a civilian reserve corps in which people can continue to have an

outstanding civilian career here in the United States, but also at

the same time be ready to leave that, walk away from that job and

force those employers to make the adjustment that they all have

to make, to go do something somewhere else?

Is that realistic in the real world?

Mr. EISENSTADT. I don’t have all the answers for you, sir, but I

would just say that is one reason why I think numbers are important, so that is why numbers are important and that is why a civilian reserve corps of just perhaps 5,000 people is probably too small,

so that you could share and spread the burden over a larger number of people.

Having served in the Reserve for about 24 years now, I will just

tell you that the challenges of creating a civilian reserve corps in

terms of personnel management, which, if you want to talk about

problems, I will just say just having as Reservists, I think the Reserve personnel system has a lot of problems and challenges attending to it.

Mr. CONAWAY. But you still have—even though the Army has got

a personnel system that Dr. Krepinevich says is part of the root of

the problem, the personnel system, you still have to have a personnel system.

Mr. EISENSTADT. Exactly, and that is one thing that I think people, before going down this route, they have to consider that there

has to be career paths, there has to be professional education——

Mr. CONAWAY. On which side?

Mr. EISENSTADT. I am sorry?

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Mr. CONAWAY. On which side?

Mr. EISENSTADT. On the civilian side, as well, and that is I think

one of the things you hear often from military people, is that even

within the Federal Government, whereas in the military there is

a very well defined educational path that military officers in all the

services have to go through, on the civilian side of the house, very

often there is nothing analogous to that. And there is nothing analogous to doing joint billets or tours.

Now I think my understanding is that there are efforts to put

people from civilian agencies with other agencies with the military

to create this sense of jointness within the government, and I think

that is a desirable development. But I think with the civilian reserve corps, this has to be thought through very carefully and I

would not underestimate the challenges and problems involved.

But all I could say is this, that after 9/11, one thing that people

asked me in various venues, what can we do to help? Our nation

is facing historical challenges. We want to contribute, we want to

be part of it.

And there is no mechanism right now for a lot of citizens, unless

they join the military, and that is not for everybody. Unless they

join the military, there really is no avenue for them to contribute

to the general good.

Okay, you have emergency services. They could be volunteer firemen and emergency service personnel, but that is in their local

community. If they want to travel overseas, they want to contribute

to American commitments abroad, beside Peace Corps, there is just

not a lot.

Mr. CONAWAY. I am way past our time, but we have got all these

civilian contractors in country working for the dreaded company,

Halliburton or KKR or others, who found a way to get into the

fight, and yet we have spent a lot of time criticizing because of

maybe mismanagement or whatever. There are roles where we had

civilians go into the fight providing certain functions, beyond

peaceful——

Mr. EISENSTADT. I will tell you, for a lot of people, and I will just

say this in terms of myself, for certain people, the idea of serving

in the government and not for a private contractor—and I am not

knocking in any way the private contractors, because they have

really done a very important service in Iraq. But I think a lot of

people, the idea of Federal Government service has a sense of a

certain mystique or appeal to it that is not the same as working

for a contractor and there are—I would just also wonder if the economics from the government’s point of view, how they work out

contractors versus civilian reserve corps.

The contractors I am not sure provide real economies in some

areas, both in terms of in financial terms and in terms of their contribution to the situation on the ground. I mean, it has been

brought up that in a counterinsurgency fight it is not clear that security contractors are a net benefit in that particular milieu.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Johnson for five minutes.

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Biddle, I am sorry, in your ‘‘Washington Post’’ op-ed piece,

you cite the reduction in violence that has occurred in Iraq as a result of the troop increase, and you say that we can embellish upon

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this reduction in violence by negotiating a cease-fire, helping the

parties negotiate a cease-fire. And then the U.S. can serve to enforce the cease-fire as the final leg, I guess, of that three-legged

stool.

Who would be the parties to negotiate the cease-fire? What parties would be bound by the cease-fire, in other words?

Dr. BIDDLE. The cease-fire process is actually well under way already. There are over 200 currently existing cease-fire agreements

in Iraq, mostly between individual Sunni groups and the local

United States military leadership in their area, extended then to

the U.S. Government and, to some degree, to the government of

Iraq.

But I would actually attribute much of the decline in violence

that we have seen to the effects of the cease-fires that we have already put in place. And I think the——

Mr. JOHNSON. These are agreements between the United States

military and tribal factions, I guess you could say.

Dr. BIDDLE. It varies widely. Many of them are tribal leaders.

Others are not. Many of them are actually the combatant factions

that had been shooting us until hours to minutes before the agreements were signed.

So the particular parties to the agreement vary a lot from place

to place within the country. I think, as a whole——

Mr. JOHNSON. It is not an agreement between the Iraqi government and these factions.

Dr. BIDDLE. That is correct, and you raise a very important

point, which is this has mostly been independent of the government

of Iraq and largely in spite of the government of Iraq, which by and

large is very skeptical of this entire process. For a variety of reasons, centrally including the initial parties to engage in these

cease-fire agreements were overwhelmingly Sunni and were former

Sunni combatants, leading the Maliki government to fear——

Mr. JOHNSON. Actually a threat to them.

Dr. BIDDLE. Exactly, exactly.

Mr. JOHNSON. Now, you recommend that we continue this trend.

Let me hear from the other panelists, what they think about this.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would agree with Dr. Biddle. Certainly, if

you can take an enemy out of the fight who was killing Americans

and trying to undo what we were trying to accomplish, I think that

is a good thing.

Now, do they share our values? I doubt in many cases that they

do.

Mr. JOHNSON. They do like our money, though.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. They like our money, and we also have a common interest. As Mr. Eisenstadt was pointing out earlier, we had

a common interest in that we both came to view, they later than

us, al Qaeda as our enemy in Iraq. And they were willing to cooperate with us to help get rid of AQI in their neighborhoods, in their

areas.

I think you can’t think of these cease-fires or these agreements

as the kind of diplomatic arrangements you would enter into, say,

with another country, or an alliance like we have, say, with Great

Britain. I think you have to look at these groups and these arrangements as very dynamic in nature, if you will, subject to

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change on a moment’s notice. But do you gain a tactical advantage

by entering into these?

Mr. JOHNSON. Short term, certainly. Long term, does it mean

that we will continue to be trapped in Iraq with a government that

is not reconciling with the various factions that we ourselves are

negotiating with directly?

Dr. BIDDLE. The short answer is yes. I think the model we are

headed to, if this process continues and if it does produce something that looks like a national cease-fire, looks very much like

Bosnia or Kosovo today, a situation in which weary, distrustful,

fearful former combatant factions are willing to tolerate cease-fire

arrangements but are worried that the other party might and the

thing stays stable because an outside party remains to serve as a

peacekeeper.

I think that is actually the likeliest route, if we are going to get

it, subject to all the uncertainties, to something that looks like stability in Iraq.

Mr. JOHNSON. That pretty much means permanent bases in Iraq.

It means we will have to maintain a certain level of troops there

and a certain amount of money. Public money will have to be committed to that. Do you have any idea of what those numbers would

be?

Dr. BIDDLE. Well, let me give you the logic of it rather than the

specific numbers, which require a good, solid study out of the joint

staff.

But the logic of it, I think, is someone outside the system is going

to have to be there probably for 20 years. I think what you need

to truly resolve the situation such that no foreigners are needed

any longer is generational change, a group that wasn’t scarred by

this conflict rises to leadership age in Iraq.

That doesn’t have to be us the entire time. It is going to have

to be us in the near term, because right now we are the only people

who are willing to do this in quantity. If you were to get something

that looked like stability, cease-fire and peace in Iraq, after a year

or two of demonstration of that, historically there have been many

actors around international system who have been willing and able

to provide peacekeeping resources, especially if it becomes a United

Nations (UN) aegis that is running this, rather than a relationship

with the United States or with the government of Iraq bilaterally,

who could take much of the burden off our shoulders.

They are not going to do it, though, until and unless it becomes

clear that this is an actual cease-fire and they are peacekeeping

and not war fighting. The troop level required for this is hard to

estimate, because the social science of peacekeeping is so weak, but

the kinds of rules of thumb that people toss around are not unlike

the rules of thumb that people use for counterinsurgency operations.

Ideally, many people would like to see peacekeeping forces with

about one capable combatant per about 50 members of the population, which gives you an unreachable, implausible, unreasonable

troop count of about a half million for a country the size of Iraq.

We are obviously not going to get anywhere close to that.

If this is the model we want in Iraq, I think what that implies,

though, is more is better than fewer and the right U.S. troop count

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for Iraq, especially once it becomes, if it becomes, a peacekeeping

mission and not a war-fighting mission, is the largest force we can

sustain there without breaking the military, with the hope that

after two or three years of this we can begin to hand off more and

more of these responsibilities to others, preferably under UN aegis.

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. Gentlemen, we appreciate you being with us today.

Thank you for your time. I think it is interesting that this hearing

on Iraq probably had as much discussion about interagency issues

involving the civilian side of our government, but I think that is

certainly crucial to the things of the future, if not crucial to what

is happening today, and we appreciate your observations on that.

The committee will be adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 2:38 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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