"Combat Ineffective"

In a bloody ISIS attack on an Iraqi Army base just north of Fallujah on September 21, upwards of 500 government soldiers perished or disappeared, fleeing into the marshlands, the woods, or to the next base camp four miles away. Few were left behind alive, surrounded by militant fighters who by all accounts were supposed to be less equipped, less trained, and less organized than Iraq’s professional fighting force.

But the Iraqi security forces, into which American taxpayers poured some $25 billion over the course of a decade, had in the span of a summer, crumbled.

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Details emerging from survivors indicate that the Iraqi Air Force refused to provide air support to its comrades under fire on the ground.

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The September attack took place just 45 miles west of Baghdad.

  The American Conservative

I know! Let’s pour good money after bad.

American veterans and journalists who spoke with TAC say the army was corrupt, incompetent, and unmotivated from the beginning, and that top U.S. officials papered over this inconvenient fact for years in order to protect their commands and maintain public support for the U.S. intervention.

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Perhaps the most stunning defeat for the Iraqi Army came when the entire 2nd Division collapsed in June as ISIS took over the strategic cities of Tikrit and Mosul. “Positions collapsed without a shot fired,” wrote analysts Yasir Abbas and Dan Trombly for War on the Rocks. “They left behind weapons, vehicles, uniforms, and no government opposition to ISIL within Mosul itself.”

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All told, reports over the last month suggest that several Iraqi divisions—there were 14 to start—have just evaporated (American officials prefer to say they’re “combat ineffective”) since ISIS began its current march across Iraq.

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This is a long way from the rosy picture described by top U.S. generals like David Petraeus and his protégé Raymond Odierno (now Army Chief of Staff) just a few years ago. In June 2009, as the U.S. was readying the first phases of withdrawal, Odierno, then-commander of American forces in Iraq, told the media and Congress that Iraqi forces were ready to operate on their own.

And they did.

And who among you didn’t know the real score?

There is enough blame to go around, said Maj. Donald Vandergriff (Ret.), who has done contract work training Afghan security forces. He said the U.S. made the same mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq that it did in Vietnam over 40 years ago. “I’ve said all along, we keep trying to make these forces in our own image,” he said, and “they don’t take ownership because the system was forced upon them.”

But it is sooooo good for “defense” industry business.

Perhaps an even more pressing question: how do we expect the U.S.-trained Afghan military to perform against the Taliban when most U.S forces leave Afghanistan at the end of this year?

Answer: we don’t!