One of Ours

...You cannot overstate the importance of roads to the security and rebuilding mission in Iraq. Simply put, the roads are the arteries of Iraq, and the nation will die without them. They allow food, water, commerce, labor, and security forces to flow around the country. They also provide insurgents with a chokepoint to use to target and prevent the flow of these things. Thus, the fight over Iraq's roads is a fight for whether the U.S. can deliver food, water, medical care, security and reconstruction to the people of Iraq. The roads of Iraq have been the insurgents' battleground of choice for the past year, because this terrain supports their tactics of choice: hit-and-run ambushes and command-detonated improvised explosive devices ("IEDs"). For the foreseeable future, it's certain that these roads will continue to serve as key terrain for the battle in Iraq.

...As an operational planner in 4ID, we wargamed these kinds of scenarios in planning and command exercises quite a bit. The conventional answer is to allocate forces to route security -- MPs or infantry or scouts -- who can patrol routes constantly to detect and interdict insurgent ambushes before they're set. Another option is to conduct counter-reconnaissance patrols of key terrain which observes and controls the roads -- high ground on either side of the road, for example. However, as simple as these measures are, they require forces to be pulled from some other mission, and that was always the difficult inherent in these solutions.

It's true that there are 125,000+ U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq. It's also true that if you add up all of the mission requirements, force-protection requirements, support requirements and other requirements, you quickly find these troops depleted. Especially when you consider that only a fraction of these are actual "trigger pullers" who can effectively do a mission like route security. If memory serves right, our planning factor was that it takes one MP company to patrol 90km of road in a semi-permissive corps rear area. Given the threat in Iraq, I might reduce that territory slightly or boost the force slightly. Gen. Abizaid has requested two additional brigade combat teams with which to secure his routes and conduct other counter-insurgency missions. The 1st Armored Division and 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment have been held in-country for another few months. 2ACR is the ideal force for this kind of mission; its light cav MTOE and training are extremely well-suited to route reconnaissance and security. Before Iraq, that was probably a METL task for this unit. I think it's likely that we will use this unit and others to conduct running patrols of key routes in Iraq in order to get them all up to "amber" or "green" status.