Brain Fertilizer

McQ summarizes up the significance of recent successes in Samarra, Iraq.

The most important part is right at the beginning:

In a remarkable display of skill, elements of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division and newly trained Iraqi national forces drove the terrorists from the city of Samarra last week. Killing over 100 of freedom’s enemies and capturing many more, our troops lost a single soldier.

The two-day sweep through Samarra incorporated lessons learned on the ground over the past several months especially the need to win swiftly in urban settings. Our soldiers performed flawlessly under difficult conditions. Iraqi commandos, backed by our Special Forces, liberated two key mosques before a hostile media could intervene on terror’s behalf. The city’s population is glad that their oppressors are gone.

This is very significant and highly important, because as I've stated several times before, the difference between Afghanistan's success and Iraq's little-success-in-sight is that we were increasingly able to turn over military actions to the locals in Afghanistan. It started with co-opting the warlords' private armies into a militia, and has continued with the training, organization, and development of a professional national military to displace the militias. It's working in Afghanistan, and we are finally getting the same process under way at speed in Iraq.

Sure, we've had setbacks there, and will have still more. But what does the best military in the world do when it encounters a setback?

The NTC has set up MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) training as an integral part of all rotations. Concurrent training is taking place at the home bases of units. CALL (combat arms lessons learned) are collected and disseminated throught the military giving up to the minute tips, tactics and techniques from lessons learned in Iraq. The best trained military in the world simply shifts focus, trains and retrains, and then takes on one of the most difficult military operations there is. If Samarra is any indication of success in that focus shift, I’d say they’re well on their way to digging the terrorists out of the "no-go" cities.