When Army Capt. Jeremy Gwinn's company patrolled Baghdad in 2005, the approach toward roadside bombs was simple: avoid them or die.
By early 2006, that strategy had begun to shift: Instead of hunting for the bombs, the soldiers hunted for bombmakers. "We started to know a lot of people in the community and develop contacts," recalls Gwinn, now a major. "There was a noticeable change
in the way we were doing things."
Today, that change has swept across Iraq, and attacks using improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have declined steadily for eight months. Casualties from the bombs are at their lowest point since 2003, the first year of the war. Troops have seized twice as many weapons caches this year as they did all of last.
"Just about every single night, we are identifying and engaging one or more cells caught in the act of planting IEDs," Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, said in an interview.
Efforts to stop IEDs by targeting the insurgent networks that finance, build and plant the bombs showed results only after the Bush administration adopted a broader counterinsurgency strategy this year ?- and sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq to support it.
But a USA TODAY investigation shows that the strategy now used to defeat the bombmaking networks and stabilize Iraq was ignored or rejected for years by key decision-makers. As early as 2004, when roadside bombs already were killing scores of troops, a top military consultant invited to address two dozen generals offered a "strategic alternative" for beating the insurgency and IEDs.
That plan and others mirroring the counterinsurgency blueprint that the Pentagon now hails as a success were pitched repeatedly in memos and presentations during the following two years, at meetings that included then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The core of the strategy: Clear insurgents from key areas and provide security to win over Iraqis, who would respond by helping U.S. forces break IED networks and defeat the insurgency.
Bush administration officials, however, remained wedded to the idea that training the Iraqi army and leaving the country would suffice. Officials, including Cheney, insisted the insurgency was dying. Those pronouncements delayed the Pentagon from embracing new plans to stop IEDs and investing in better armored vehicles that allow troops to patrol more freely, documents and interviews show.
Even after the Pentagon began committing substantial resources to combat IEDs, USA TODAY found, its spending focused mostly on high-tech devices with limited utility. Some silver-bullet solutions, such as microwave beams designed to destroy IEDs before they blew up, never worked.
By the time the Pentagon moved to a counterinsurgency strategy at the end of last year, the bombs had been the top killer of U.S. troops for three years, claiming more than 1,160 lives. To date, they are responsible for more than 60% of combat deaths.
"What's astounding is how long we spent not applying traditional counterinsurgency principles to fighting what obviously was an insurgency," says Fred Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and former West Point instructor. "It's not that we've solved the IED problem, per se. It's that we've begun to have success in defeating the insurgents."
Andrew Krepinevich, the consultant who addressed the generals in 2004 and met with Libby in 2005, says the price of that failure was profound.
"One is the human cost, both in terms of the suffering of Iraqis and the Americans killed and wounded," he says. "Second is the material cost. And third is the failure to accomplish the mission."
Krepinevich, who has advised several secretaries of Defense and the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, says "the American military is on the clock in this war, and the American people, in a sense, gave the administration several years to make progress. Those years, to a significant extent, were wasted."
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe says the administration weighed all strategy options and made "appropriate decisions."
"Throughout the war, many people have come forward with various suggestions and ideas, from 'more troops' to 'get out now,' " he says. "The president has listened to the commanders on the ground and the Defense Department."
Rumsfeld declined to comment.
'This mind-set of the short war'
Rumsfeld and other civilian and uniformed war planners "had this mind-set of the short war, a liberation vs. an occupation," says retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command.
He says many combat commanders were frustrated by the Pentagon's failure to recognize that a force larger than the 120,000 U.S. ground troops in the initial invasion was needed to secure the country ?- and its ammunition dumps, which held the explosives that insurgents continue to use to build IEDs.
Officials also failed to send the right kind of vehicles.
In July, USA TODAY reported that until 2006, the Pentagon balked at pleas from battlefield commanders to send safer armor to protect U.S. troops from IEDs. The armored vehicles, called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, weren't fully embraced by the Pentagon until mid-2007, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's successor, made them his top procurement priority.
Today, 11,941 MRAPs have been ordered, and about 1,200 of those are being used by troops in Iraq. "These are a vast improvement in terms of protection," Petraeus says.
Petraeus cites other crucial steps ?- among them the 30,000-troop "surge" ?- that have led to a decline in violence and a better chance to secure the country. Most are key components of the strategy favored by Krepinevich and others during the first months of the war.
When asked about the previous strategy, Petraeus says he is focusing not on the past, but on what's happening now -- and its apparent successes. "It's not just the additional forces. It's also how they are used," Petraeus says. "The deployment of our forces and Iraqi forces into the neighborhoods, to the areas where the bad guys are located, is key. You have to live with the population to help secure it. "
He says that "in the past couple of months, we have been finding greater than 50% of the IEDs (before they go off), which is a first."
Zinni credits Petraeus with shifting U.S. fortunes. "It's about Americans being out there and being visible, providing security, building confidence among the people," he says. "It's paying off."
No 'coherent strategy'
For years, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials resisted just such an approach. Although generals such as Petraeus put their theories into action on a small scale in Iraq as early as 2003, the military still lacked a detailed, nationwide plan for battling the insurgency.
In September 2004, 18 months into the war, Krepinevich flew to Nashville at the invitation of top generals. Krepinevich, then 54, wore a jacket and tie; except for the spouses many generals brought to the session, he was one of few in the hotel conference room not in uniform. It added to his trepidation.
Krepinevich had the credentials: A graduate of West Point, he had been an officer for 20 years and now ran the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank. What he didn't have was the experience: He hadn't been to Iraq. Moreover, he was about to tell the generals that the Pentagon's approach to the war made no sense.
He would be embarrassed if they told him he didn't understand the situation in Iraq, he recalls thinking. But if they agreed with his assessment, it meant trouble for U.S. efforts to secure the country.
"It is difficult to discern a coherent U.S. strategy for defeating the insurgency," he told them. The solution: "Win the hearts and minds, and
deny insurgents easy access to the population, thereby enhancing intelligence on the enemy."
Krepinevich's call for a new direction drew no criticism. "It told me they didn't have an approach" for winning the war, he says.
Retired Army major general Paul Eaton, who was at the meeting and had been directing the training of Iraqi forces, said Krepinevich "was saying what had become increasingly obvious to many of us."
"What we had was a secretary of Defense who denied (the insurgency existed)
and the senior leadership of the Army would not challenge him," Eaton says. "But Krepinevich could. A lot of us were thinking, 'He gets it; maybe he can reach some of the leadership.' "
Krepinevich would become one of several analysts and retired military officers who helped develop the counterinsurgency strategies. But their ideas wouldn't gain footing with decision-makers for years.
Meantime, the Pentagon had spent billions of dollars on technology to detect or defeat IEDs.
The high-tech solutions
Most of the money went toward "jammers" ?- devices to block the electronic signals used to detonate IEDs by remote control. Jammers remain one of the more successful electronic IED countermeasures. As insurgents shifted to new types of detonators, new jammers were introduced. This year, the Pentagon has spent $2 billion on them.
Other high-tech initiatives in the IED fight have failed entirely:
Forerunner, a remote-controlled truck, was to be driven ahead of convoys to detect IEDs. It was scrapped after almost $7 million in spending. It didn't work.
BlowTorch was designed to use microwaves to fry the circuitry in IEDs from afar. It was abandoned after more than $8 million was invested. It didn't work either.
Defense officials acknowledged that technology alone would not defeat IEDs, but spending soared. In 2006, the Pentagon's counter-IED office, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, spent 67% of its $3.5 billion budget on jammers and other technology to "defeat the device."
But IED deaths kept rising.
Retired Army general Montgomery Meigs, who took over the IED office at the end of 2005 and led it until this month, began pushing for a new focus in 2006. "We made attacking the network No. 1" on the priority list, he says.
Krepinevich had continued to push the same message. In an Aug. 23, 2005, memo to Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, Krepinevich warned that technology wasn't the answer.
Instead, as Krepinevich says today, U.S. forces needed to provide "enduring" security that would make it "risky for people to go out and plant" IEDs. "You needed to think not just about technology; you needed to think about how you defeated the overall problem. The key
was intelligence."
Krepinevich says he told that to Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, during a July 2005 meeting in Libby's office. In May, just two months earlier, Cheney had declared that the Iraqi insurgency was in "its last throes." Now, Krepinevich was suggesting the administration refocus its approach around that insurgency. Libby "took it all in and asked a few questions," Krepinevich recalls, but that was it.
Krepinevich says the only meaningful support he got came from Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who was briefed by Krepinevich just before heading to Baghdad in June 2005. Despite Khalilzad's apparent interest, the approach got no traction with administration war planners.
Khalilzad, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declined through a spokesman to comment.
Failures prompt change
Turning over security to newly trained Iraqi forces remained the hallmark of U.S. strategy in Iraq until early 2007. Army Gen. George Casey, who led coalition forces in Iraq until February, often said the goal was to have U.S. forces stand down as Iraqi forces stood up.
In June 2006, Kagan and three other military experts visited Camp David for a meeting with the president's war Cabinet. Each took a turn addressing the officials, who included Rumsfeld, Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Kagan's message ?- "We've got to do some counterinsurgency on these guys" ?- didn't take.
Within weeks, the Pentagon launched "Operation Together Forward." Coalition forces would "clear" an insurgent stronghold and Iraqi forces would "hold" it. When Iraqi forces failed to hold, violence soared. After two months, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell acknowledged that Together Forward had "not met our overall expectations."
In November 2006 ?- a day after Democrats won control of Congress ?- Bush accepted the resignation of Rumsfeld, who had backed the stand-up, stand-down strategy. Bush chose former CIA director Gates to replace him. By December, the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy had begun.
Iraq was boiling over: 69 U.S. troops would be killed that December by IEDs, the most IED deaths in any month since the war began. On Dec. 6, the Iraq Study Group, a panel of military and political thinkers, issued a report calling the Iraq situation "grave and deteriorating" and urging a phased U.S. withdrawal.
The next Monday, Dec. 11, Bush met with retired generals and top military analysts. One, retired Army general Jack Keane, pushed hard for a "surge" of U.S. troops coupled with a secure-and-hold strategy for Baghdad and other key areas.
Keane and other experts had developed the idea with Kagan, who was invited to the White House later that week to meet with Hadley. It was one of several strategy options, and the only one calling for a big increase in U.S. troops. Keane and Kagan proved persuasive.
Even so, it took what Kagan calls "a perfect storm" to put it in place. The deteriorating situation in Iraq, the grim report from the study group and growing calls for U.S. withdrawal made the administration more flexible, he says.
On Jan. 5, Bush chose Petraeus, who had finished writing the military's counterinsurgency doctrine, to take charge in Iraq. Five days later, Bush outlined a new strategy: "to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods
protect the local population, and
ensure that the Iraqi forces
are capable of providing" security.
It was precisely what his administration had rejected ?- and counterinsurgency advocates had championed ?- for years.
