IRAQ: Sabotage emphasises need for new army

Analysis

Saboteurs inflicted serious damage at the weekend on the pipeline from the Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, forcing its closure just three days after it had reopened for the first time following the fall of President Saddam Hussein's regime. Repairs are expected to take up to two weeks, and to cost the country 7 million dollars a day in lost revenue. In other acts of sabotage, opponents of coalition rule interrupted the water supply in central Baghdad while six Iraqis were killed and 59 wounded in a mortar attack on a prison guarded by US soldiers.

The attacks coincide with moves by US contractor Vinnell to train a new Iraqi federal army. Vinnell is an arm of Northrop Grumman which also trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard. However, lack of coordination between the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, and the US and coalition divisional commanders in Iraq's provinces are encouraging the development of parallel armed forces at the federal and local level. The proposed 40,000-strong US-trained federal army will be required to underpin the authority of a future Iraqi government in around 24 months time; yet it will arguably not be large enough to undertake its numerous missions, which include border and key point security, the neutralisation of unexploded ordnance and land mines, and the exercise of government authority.

Size and structure. The creation of the army will be overseen by the Clinton-era undersecretary for defense and current CPA adviser on security, Walter Slocomb and led by the former commander of the US Army's Infantry School. The process began on June 23, one month after the CPA abolished the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, military and security courts, and Republican Guard, flooding Iraq with over 400,000 unemployed military personnel. The creation of a 40,000-strong army was conceived as a means of reducing tension among the largely Sunni officer class. Other measures to reduce the sense of lost entitlement include payments to former military personnel.

US training of the federal army began in mid-July, and the aim is to produce the first 1,000-strong federal army battalion by October 9. A 12,000-strong division-sized force is due to be formed by January 2004, and the full 40,000-strong force is scheduled to be operational by July 2004. The first recruits have arrived at the training centre near Mosul, where they signed up for an initial term of 26 months. The small size of the force will allow recruitment to be tightly controlled. It excludes former Ba'athist officers who attained the rank of colonel or above, or personnel who held membership of the top four tiers of the Ba'ath party -- although the latter disqualifier will be applied with discretion as many veterans of the Iran-Iraq war were given automatic high-level membership.

CPA administrator Paul Bremer stated that the federal army should be "professional, non-political, militarily effective, and truly representative of the country". However, these aims will be difficult to satisfy simultaneously. The ethnic make-up will be particularly challenging. The primarily Sunni Arab composition of the officer class will have to be broadened, while the predominantly Shia rank-and-file will have to encompass greater numbers of Sunnis, Kurds, and others. It is unclear whether units will be ethnically integrated for the first time or remain effectively segregated on ethnic lines.

Undermanned. At 40,000-strong, the federal army is woefully undersized. The headquarters element should be at least 10,000-strong, to facilitate intelligence, training, transport, signals, engineering, and medical services, but is currently only 4,000. The field force of 36,000 troops will consist of three 12,000-strong divisional formations. The size of this force -- compared to Turkey's 515,000 troops, Iran's 520,000, and Syria's 380,000 -- means that Iraq will remain essentially defenceless without a US security guarantee. Even border security along Iraq's extensive frontiers will strain the capabilities of such a force.

Parcelled out between border areas, key infrastructure, and minefield clearance missions, the dispersed force will be weaker than local militias when it deploys, sending a dangerous signal concerning the weakness of central authority. There are over 70,000 relatively experienced and well-armed Kurdish peshmerga under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government factions. In addition, the Shia Badr Brigade has 10-15,000 fighters, while a number of Mojahedin-e Khalq camps remain functional and the Iraqi National Congress and Iraqi National Accord each have smaller militias. On top of this, US and UK-sponsored militias have been established in each major city to keep order and protect infrastructure by local commanders in conjunction with mayors, faction or community leaders or mosques. The federal army will represent just another large militia.

Force multipliers. One solution to the small size of the federal army would be to equip it with force multipliers -- advanced intelligence and command and control capabilities to detect threats early; air and land vehicles that could allow it to concentrate rapidly where needed; and advanced weaponry to give it qualitative advantages. Under present plans, the federal army will rely on US intelligence and will boast relatively modern communications. It will have its own wheeled and tracked vehicles (recovered from Iraqi divisions that surrendered), but will not be supported by either an air force or helicopter forces. The latter could provide both high mobility and a major addition to combat power for relatively low cost, having survived the war relatively well and being one of the few elements of the Iraqi military to have shown consistently high levels of operational efficiency.

Expansion constraints. There are both political and economic constraints on any rapid expansion. In the political sphere, the United State must maintain a delicate balance by building up Iraqi defensive capabilities and satisfying the corporate interests of the military and its powerful tribal associates without allowing offensive capabilities to develop. The political stability of the country and of civilian rule must develop first, and few of Iraq's neighbours would welcome the rearmament of a potentially revanchist Iraqi military establishment.

This will reduce both the funding that the CPA puts into defence and the sophistication of equipment that Iraq is allowed to procure or return to service (particularly helicopters and aircraft). In numerical terms, the recruitment base of the military is large but will be difficult to screen if the force expands rapidly. The most militarily useful parts of the former military -- air and helicopter forces and special forces -- were in many cases the most complicit in regime crimes. A larger military would also be difficult for the CPA and the future Iraqi government to monitor and control. Both bodies lack the network of security and intelligence oversight that the Ba'ath party extended into the military ranks. Instead, the CPA and Iraqi government will train the smaller 40,000-strong cadre in Western military ethics and keep a close eye on their development through Vinnell's training staff.

Spending limits. Assuming that military professionalisation and political reliability can be ingrained into the Iraqi military by July 2004, the army could start building to an appropriate eventual size for a qualitatively improved military of 200,000 full time personnel plus reserves. However, small, professional forces are expensive and Iraq's defence budget is unlikely to support a major enlargement of the 40,000-strong cadre force for many years. Under the new CPA half-yearly budget, allotted defence spending is just 165 million, with an extra 66 million dollars of one-off demobilisation expenses (see IRAQ: Post-war budget highlights financing gap - August 5, 2003). Around 120 million of the total was incurred by the unscheduled decision to build a 40,000-strong force, indicating that initial CPA intentions had been to spend roughly 45 million on Iraq's defence this year, compared to 223 million on supporting militias and 150 million on re-establishing the police force.

Defence spending is unlikely to account for more than 5% of government expenditure in the next few years. Based on optimistic estimates of 10 billion dollars in government revenues per year, this means that a mere 500 million will be spent on defence, compared to expenditures of 10-22 billion during previous periods of rearmament in the 1970s and 1980s. While US military aid will come on-stream from 2004 -- including training and educational aid, and the cost-free transfer of equipment and vehicles left in theatre after Operation Iraqi Freedom -- it is likely that the federal army will not be significantly expanded until Iraqi government revenues have radically increased.