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The troops call it “catch and release.” The American and Iraqi jails now hold about 40,000 prisoners - by some estimates just half the number Saddam Hussein released from prison in the mass exodus of 2002. Yet, according to Pentagon records, more than 85 percent of the suspected Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen detained are soon set free.
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American troops in Vietnam in 1968, for example, found that they killed 13 enemies for every one captured in Iraq, one enemy is killed for every 10 captured. The insurgents learned years ago not to engage in firefights with American troops. Vietnam was a shooting war Iraq is a police arrest war. Imprisonment is the dominant military weapon for quelling this insurgency. The other major defect we’ve seen in our military strategy is the consistent release of captured insurgents.
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The arrival of the equipment must be followed immediately by a biometric census - in which every house would be labeled, every occupant identified and most transients listed in a real-time database. Secretary Gates and General Lute should sever the bureaucratic chains that have crippled the military biometrics effort by calling on private companies to compete on designing handheld devices to be carried by troops, with results demanded within six weeks. With his unit struggling to keep track of the insurgents in their area, it found a nonprofit company called Spirit of America that designed and sent over a handheld device, built from scratch in 30 days, to take fingerprints and photographs. One of us (Owen) experienced this confusion firsthand. The result: Last year 400,000 coalition and Iraqi troops made fewer than 40,000 arrests in contrast, 22,000 New York City patrolmen made more than 500,000 spot checks and 313,000 arrests. Meanwhile, it is common for an Iraqi civilian to carry two or three IDs with different names. Houses are labeled by one unit and relabeled by the next. At any one time, the military is conducting dozens of separate census operations. But in Iraq, for four years our units have been forced to concoct their own identification databases using laptops, spreadsheets and poster boards. The Chicago police have handheld devices that send fingerprints over the airwaves and get a response in minutes. The New York Police Department tracks criminal trends by neighborhood and block in a real time database called Compstat. Biometric tracking and databases have since made extraordinary advances, yet our vaunted technical experts have failed at this elementary task in Iraq.Īny time a car is stopped in the United States, the police run an immediate check. In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968. Instead, they hide in plain sight, and Iraqi and American soldiers have no means of checking the true identity and history of anyone they stop. What is keeping them from doing so? The war in Iraq would be over in a week if the insurgents wore uniforms. The goal of American soldiers is to identify and kill or capture the Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents. No platoon commander tells his soldiers to go out and tread water so the politicians can talk. This vacuous idea would startle George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, to mention only a few unlikely bedfellows who forged success during an insurgency.īuying time with American lives is not a military mission. Part of the problem was that when the military surge was announced, it became commonplace for officials to assert that political compromise, not military force, would determine the outcome of the war. Douglas Lute as the new White House “war czar.” Well, they can shift senior leadership all they want, but unless they give our troops patrolling the streets the tools they need, our leaders are going to see this strategy fizzle. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the door and brought in Lt. While waiting to see if the Iraq surge strategy pays off, President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have shown Gen.