CAMP BABYLON, Iraq - The Corps' achievements in Iraq may be worthy of the record books, but the general who led the Marine forces that helped topple the Saddam Hussein regime cautioned against reshaping the Corps in light of those accomplishments.
In a July 20 interview at his command center here, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway said that while his forces were considered "the darlings of the battlefield," he wouldn't want to set a precedent for "stretching the rubber band" as far as he did. Conway, who as commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force pushed his Marine more than 600 miles inland in the assault on Baghdad and ensuing operations in towns even farther north, stressed that it's not time to reposition the Corps as a force of choice for similar operations in the future. In fact, the Iraq campaign should be viewed as the exception, not the rule, in planning for the Corps' future, he said. Now on the verge of wrapping up his campaign here after taking his Marines to war and into a peacekeeping role thereafter, Conway said he's leaving a safer and more stable Iraq than the one under the thumb of Saddam Hussein just three months ago. A multinational division including forces from 18 countries has begun pouring into Iraq, allowing the Marines to turn over control of southern Iraq and head home, likely in September. Though the multinational forces will encounter bumps in the road during their stay in Iraq, the stage soon will be set to ensure the region doesn't slide into chaos, Conway said. The following is a portion of Conway's interview with Marine Corps Times. His responses are edited for space.
Q. What is the state of affairs in your sector of Iraq?
A. Things are good. There's any number of reasons for that. But we think that we came down here with the right attitude. The war was essentially over, and the Marines had fought their way to Baghdad and killed as many Iraqis that needed to be killed. And when the [commander of U.S. Central Command] said, "OK, it's time to go into stabilization operations," the Marines were able to put on soft covers ... and initially work in Baghdad, but then on orders move to the south. ... The second thing I think we really did well is to take a look at what the organization of the south really should be. ... The initial guidance was to accept as much risk in the stabilization phase as we accepted in the operational phase. Which meant we could use seven battalions, which later became eight, and a commensurate slice of our aviation wing to support - to put one battalion in each of the major cities, or governates. So, we had seven battalions in seven governates and seven battalion commanders that became, essentially, the military governor in each of those cities. ... In some cases, we had to select local mayors, select local councils where they didn't exist ... giving the battalion commanders that kind of authority, integrating the Army civil-affairs units that were then starting to arrive in a very significant fashion, really seemed to make money for us. Because the unity of command, the clean lines of communication, the addition, almost right away, of the MEF engineer group, especially the Seabees, to the pot ... really put things into a jump-start scenario.
Q. Some have said the military didn't take enough time to plan the end of the war, the occupation phase. Is that true?
A. I'm not sure I agree with that. We sat down before the war started and said, "What is the end state? What is the commander's intent? What are the resources available to do this? How are we going |to organize?" ... I read that there wasn't much planning, but I don't necessarily agree with that. But I will say that Marines are assault troops. We don't do nation building. So, in terms of available doctrine, there's not a lot written there. But frankly, that might be a bit of an advantage to us. Because we take some sharp battalion commanders, give them the resources that we can, they in turn assign their captains independent operations in charge of a city of 50,000 people, and the young Marines know how to treat people like they like to be treated themselves.
Q. Can you think of any difficulties you didn't anticipate in this phase that you've had to overcome?
A. What we have still not overcome is establishing the basis for what I would call the "hierarchy of needs" - food, water, electricity and fuels. Food and water is OK. But the electricity, the power grid and fuels are still suffering. And we're just not getting the volume into the community so that it's able to employ those basic utilities and then build their society on top of that. We can't keep the people from stealing copper from the electrical wires. So, they tear down the electric grid for the copper that's in it. When they do that, we can't produce the oil. So, we can't get fuels to them in a consistent fashion. When we can't get power, we can't start the factories back up, so we can't get employment. ... So, the infrastructure, the utilities aspect of this, has really been a headache.
Q. "Highs" and "lows." What was your biggest "high" during the war?
A. The day, after the four-day stall, my meteorological officer came in and said at the morning brief "Sir, I'm hesitant to say for sure, but I think we've got good weather for ten more days." That was the day I new the war was won. Because I thought that the only way [Saddam] could hurt us was under cover of the bad weather. And we sort of sweated through that time when we could only see a few feet. And I've got to tell you, with the power of a Marine air wing overhead for ten days, constant, in clear weather, there was no doubt in my mind this thing was going to go our way.
Q. How about your lowest point?
A. I guess going into our first mass-casualty drill. I've got to tell you, Task Force Tarawa did a magnificent job pumping into An Nasiriyah and taking those eastern bridges and securing the western bridge that we absolutely had to have for our supply lines to extend north as far as they had to over four major water crossings going into Baghdad. But to hear the terrible cost of that was a dozen Marines killed - and many of those to friendly fire - was just a shock. I felt very badly. There wasn't, of course, any other option; we had to have those bridges in order to sustain ourselves. ... The shock and regret of losing that many Marines in such a short period of time was my lowest point.
Q. What lessons would you say the Marine Corps has learned from the Iraq war?
A. I would not advocate that we look on this particular war as anything other than an anomaly. I'm not sure the Marine Corps is going to go the distance of 600 miles again. It's not in our doctrine to do that. We've proven that we can, given all the great things that our commanders did at virtually every level. But I would not advocate that the Marine Corps change its construct or reorganize its forces so that we could go 600 miles again. If we do that, then we have to sacrifice something.
Q. You sound like you feel that your forces might have been stretched too thin?
A. They were, they were. I told the [Coalition Forces Land Component Command operations officer] that when he told us to attack to Tikrit, after we had already taken a portion of Baghdad, I said, "That's about as far as the rubber band will stretch. We can do that, but we would be hard-pressed to go on to Kirkuk." Would we have found a way if ordered? Yeah, we would have, but it would have really exceeded the risk that we were ready to accept at that point that we could get all classes of supplies to our forces on a consistent basis.
Q. How about some more down-and-dirty lessons?
A. The Marine Corps, I think, will always need main battle tanks. They're probably the best tanks in the world, and we need to continue to have "X" number of tanks. There are those that would say the Marine Corps don’t need tanks. The battle tank is the gold standard in this part of the world. I suspect it is in other major parts of the world. We need to continue to have tanks. Also, we need to spend the next couple of years - all the services - to come up with an IFF [Identification, Friend or Foe] device that identifies friendly or foe to get away from this nonsense of "blue on blue." We're the most technologically advanced country in the world. Shame on us as we continue to kill our young people because we haven't developed something that either "beeps" or "squawks" or sends out a transmission or something that tells our troops "oops, that's a friendly vehicle." We lost Marines [in the 1991 Persian Gulf War] to the same aircraft that I suspect we lost Marines to this time, and we've just got to get better at it. There's tragedy in that, and I think the nation should not have to endure that.
from the Marine Corps Times 4 August 2003
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