Urban Asymmetric War in Najaf

This video from YouTube, documenting a firefight between a group of Marines and an insurgent sniper, demonstrates a number of the challenges facing U.S. forces in Iraq. While moving through a cemetery in the city of Najaf (160 km south of Baghdad), a group of Marines came under fire from a Soviet-made Dragunov (SVD) semi-automatic sniper rifle. The sniper, who was discovered to be hiding in a hotel a few hundred yards away, was able to totally suppress a sizable group of Marines, killing one soldier.

In the end, it took the concerted effort of the Marines and two M1A1 Abrams tanks -- probably expending hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of ammunition and fuel -- to fight off the single shooter with his inexpensive rifle. The hotel from which the sniper had been firing was mostly destroyed, yet the sniper himself was not killed and only forced to flee.

In urban operations such as this one, U.S. troops are susceptible to fire from all directions, including from elevated positions in buildings. In addition, when they come under fire, the troops are forced to carefully choose their targets, since the densely populated urban environment makes civilian casualties a major possibility.

While some of the difficulties faced by the troops in this situation are common to virtually all engagements with skilled snipers (i.e. the ability of one shooter to suppress large groups, the difficulty of accurately directing counter-sniper fire), these difficulties are aggravated and added to by the need for U.S. forces to minimize damage to infrastructure, avoid civilian casualties, and generally react in a very restrained manner. When every action of the troops has a potential negative effect on the attitude of the Iraqi population, the need to carefully measure the effects of all actions can seem to take precedence over the more immediate necessities of the engagement. This greatly decreases the effectiveness of American forces, however failure to act in this way would seriously harm the efforts of the U.S. and fledgling Iraqi government.

Since U.S. forces are attempting to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure and economy in order to increase stability and eliminate the forces that feed the insurgency (unemployment and poverty, for example), all the insurgents have to do is foment chaos and instability, which is much easier to achieve than the more constructive goals of the coalition forces. They have been remarkably successful in doing this, while the massive, well-trained and well-equipped U.S. forces have been incapable of translating their conventional military supremacy into meaningful political gains.

Viewed as a microcosm of the larger predicament of U.S. forces in Iraq, this engagement is revealing. With minimal resources, the insurgent was able to inflict unacceptable losses on the Marines (since virtually any loss is seen by the West as unacceptable), force the Marines to expend a relatively large amount of resources, and increase the atmosphere of chaos and instability (the destroyed hotel, the fear among Iraqis generated by the engagement, etc). Throughout Iraq, insurgents have achieved these goals on a larger scale by hindering economic growth, preventing political progress, and deepening sectarian divisions between Iraqis. They have also forced the United States to expend massive resources (almost $429 billion in 4 years) and have inflicted politically-unacceptable losses of 3,441 killed and 26,000+ wounded American troops.

By any conventional metric, the insurgency in Iraq has been a complete failure. The insurgents have not decisively won a single battle against U.S. forces, and have suffered hugely disproportionate numbers of casualties. As was seen in Vietnam, however, unconventional forces are capable of sustaining massive losses, and need not win decisive victories on the battlefield in order to defeat the more central objectives of an occupying force. All this goes to show that the prospects of victory or defeat in Iraq depend on much more than the number of troops on the ground or even their effective use in battle. If political reconciliation and progress continue to prove elusive, the endless queue of insurgents will continue to grow, and America's currently-weak political will to continue the fight will disappear entirely.