Insurgent attacks on American troops in Iraq have dramatically dropped since the beginning of a much-heralded troop surge, Fort Leonard Wood’s chief of staff said Friday during a monthly meeting of off-post civilian leaders.
Col. Dan Grey recently returned from Iraq where he headed the 20th Engineer Brigade’s reconstruction efforts and had the opportunity to closely observe the work of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American forces in Iraq. Grey said key information about military progress in Iraq isn’t getting relayed to the American civilian population.
“Having been deployed pretty recently, I’d be remiss if I don’t talk just briefly about Iraq,” Grey said at Friday’s meeting of the Committee of 50, an off-post organization that periodically meets to honor the post’s top enlisted personnel for their achievements in their roles as instructors, drill sergeants, or other positions on Fort Leonard Wood.
“What I really want to do is to speak to the folks here, because you don’t hear from the folks who have been over there,” Grey said. “Every day I sat through the battle update brief to Gen. Petraeus and kind of followed this. For the 2-1/2 years up until July of last year, there was a steady increase in the number of attacks against coalition forces in Iraq.”
Those attacks reached a peak of 1,600 attacks per week last July, but are nowhere near those numbers today.
“Between July of 2007 and December there was a steep decline. It went down over 65 percent of attacks, down to less than 600 per week,” Grey said.
A key factor in the swift drop in the number of attacks was letting Iraqi people get to know American soldiers on a face-to-face basis.
“I’ll tell you, Gen. Petraeus and Gen. (Ray) Odierno came in with a new way of looking at things. Really what that was, was getting our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out there amongst the populace. Instead of spending our time in these big forward operating bases, some of which have got 50,000 people between the military and the contractors, (we went) out into these small little coalition outposts and joint security stations,” Grey said. “Being out there, being part of the population, we were convincing Iraqis that we would protect them.”
That’s a major change from what was happening before, Grey said.
“Al-Qaeda would come in and basically tell these folks that, ‘If you tell on us, we will kill you and your entire family,’” Grey said. “Americans would show up for a few hours and then disappear.”
Moving American troops into areas where small groups of a few dozen troops can have regular contact with the Iraqi civilian population paid off, Grey said.
“We’re out there with them, they understand that we’re going to protect them, and then they provide us intelligence and tell us where al-Qaeda is, and the other insurgents,” Grey said. “Our coalition forces are now all the time going out there after them. We are offensive-minded instead of defensive-minded, and I’ll tell you, it’s making a huge difference.”
Grey said top commanders’ decisions are moving in the right direction, but credited the individual actions of enlisted soldiers with making a key difference.
“The reason we are doing so well, in my view, is because of those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out there,” Grey said. “Let me tell you what happens. They show up in a neighborhood, and the first ones who trust them are the small children. Within a day or two, they understand that these people are good. And the next ones to follow suit are the mothers. Call it maternal instincts, call it whatever, I don’t know, but they are the next ones who trust, and finally the men come on board.”