GAO Report Examines Iraqi Force Independence

GAO Report Examines Iraqi Force Independence
By Thomas D. Williams
t r u t h o u t | Report
Saturday 07 April 2007

The nation's primary federal watchdog agency says Iraqis need better logisticians to procure supply and maintain equipment to become independent from US forces and what the US Department of Defense defines as an international coalition. Improved communications specialists are essential to Iraqi operations as well, says the oversight organization's report.

The report from the General Accountability Office assumes that Iraqis have a structure capable of functioning as a free-standing military force representing Iraq. In fact, according to the Department of Defense, the Iraqi forces referred to in the report are organized, armed and funded by the US force in Iraq, and operate entirely under direct US military supervision.

"Without qualified logisticians and communications specialists, reliable vehicles and equipment, and accepted policies and procedures, the Iraqi forces cannot achieve the self-sufficiency upon which the drawdown of Coalition forces depends," William M. Solis, he General Accountability Office's director of defense capabilities and management, concluded last week.

Last month, in a separate inquiry, the GAO said only the Iraqi army, representing about 40 percent of the 327,000 Iraqi security personnel including police, has counterinsurgency as its mission. It explained that "high rates of (force) absenteeism and poor (Iraqi) ministry reporting result in an overstatement of the number of Iraqi security forces ready for duty."

While US officials have maintained that Iraqis are exceedingly assuming control of the country's security from US military personnel, a report in the Associated Press last week contradicts those statements.

"The US military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province," the AP reported last week.

Two additional factors, said the GAO, weaken Iraqi forces' prospects: "Sectarian and militia influences have divided the loyalties of Iraqi security forces;" and "Iraqi units remain dependent upon the coalition for their logistical command and control and intelligence capabilities." The GAO concluded that "the extent of these problems cannot be fully assessed without detailed information on the readiness of each Iraqi unit."

Although the US Defense Department cooperated and contributed to Solis's latest report released more than a week ago, its spokesperson would not comment to the GAO on its newest conclusions. The report, nonetheless, said: "Coalition officials recognize these challenges and state they work daily to rectify them." The Coalition Provisional Authority is led by the United States and the United Kingdom. As of last year, twenty other countries had provided some form of military support.

"I think the report speaks for itself," said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Defense Department spokesman. A number of reporter's phone calls and emails to the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, DC, were not returned. Gordon Johndroe, a White House national security spokesman, said: "The president's supplemental budget requests funding [from Congress] for the Iraqi security forces so they are able to be self-sustaining, which will bring all of the [US] troops home."

The question of Iraqi political, military and police self-reliance is central and crucial to the ongoing conflict between President George W. Bush and Congress over ending the war in Iraq. The president, now aiming to communicate more directly with members of Congress in White House skull sessions, is resisting deadlines for pulling out US forces. Meanwhile, the Senate approved a $97.5 billion Iraq war spending bill that calls for the withdrawal of most US forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008. With the House already having passed its war funding-deadline bill, it and the Senate now need to reconcile before a final bill is sent on to the president. However, President Bush has repeatedly vowed to veto any bill setting a war-ending deadline.

In Bagdad, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber smashed a truck loaded with TNT and toxic chlorine gas into a police checkpoint in Ramadi on Friday, killing at least 27 people - the ninth such attack since the group's first known use of a chemical weapon in January, the Associated Press reported Friday evening.

Earlier Friday, "Iraqi and U.S. forces clashed with Shi'ite militia loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Friday in a dawn operation aimed at returning the volatile city of Diwaniya to government control. In Ramadi, west of Baghdad, a truck bomb killed at least 10 people and wounded 24 in the latest in a string of attacks that have spewed poisonous chlorine gas into the air, three Iraqi police officers said. A fourth officer put the toll at 35 dead.The Iraqi government said this week it was extending a seven- week-old U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad to other cities as it seeks to halt the slide to sectarian civil war," the AP reported.

Solis's GAO report quoted unidentified Coalition force officials as saying the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, in charge of military forces, has progressed further logistically than the Ministry of Interior, which controlls police, border enforcement and other Iraqi civilian security services. But, Solis said he could not confirm that comparison because Coalition and Iraqi efforts are so "numerous and in various stages of development, making them difficult to compare." In the future, he said, the GAO will assess this contrast during further inquiry into Iraqi security capabilities.

But, the GAO critique of wartime logistics has also focused on the US military operational shortfalls. In March, from the military's own reports, the Congressional oversight agency concluded: "The overwhelming size and number of conventional munitions storage sites in Iraq, combined with certain prewar planning assumptions that proved to be invalid, resulted in US forces not adequately securing these sites, and widespread looting."

As a result, the Defense Department agreed in part to a theaterwide survey and risk assessment regarding unsecured conventional munitions in Iraq; to report ensuing risk-mitigation strategies and their results to Congress, and to incorporate security of conventional munitions storage sites in strategic planning.

And, in 2003, the GAO said, the US military suffered from "substantial logistical support problems, including backlogs of supplies due to transportation constraints; a discrepancy of $1.2 billion between the value of Army supply shipments and the value of those shipments in receiving areas; the cannibalization of vehicles and reduction of equipment readiness due to unavailability of parts, and other serious shortfalls. GAO said the DOD generally "concurred" with the critique, had identified similar problems and was already addressing them.
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Thomas "Dennie" Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970s, he has written extensively about irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court and Probate Court systems for disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct, and about failures of the Pentagon and the VA to assist sick veterans returning from war.