The New Iraqi Army: Rectifying a Mistake?

The first battalion of the New Iraqi Army (NIA) is due to enter service, having graduated in September from a training program at Qaraqush (or Kirkush) in northeastern Iraq. The new force is meant to be the nucleus of a proposed force of some 30,000 to 40,000 men, which the US now believes can be trained and fielded by next year, originally having envisioned a two-year process. Having previously announced the dissolution of the old Iraqi Armed Forces, the US now acknowledges the need to include experienced officers and men (untainted by the less pleasant aspects of the old regime) in order to create a New Iraqi Army.

Many analysts, including some military analysts who supported the war in Iraq and a great many Iraqis, now consider that the complete dissolution of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the end of the war was a mistake. In fact, there is some confusion about the US approach at that time, with initial indications being that the US was prepared to maintain a few formations from the old Army which had placed themselves under coalition control, but with the official line now being that there were no organized forces available at the time, the old Armed Forces having disintegrated.

This Dossier looks at the nascent New Iraqi Army and some of the developments since the end of the war.

In the first days after the end of major combat operations in May, there was some talk of maintaining a sort of rump force of the old Iraqi Armed Forces as part of the nucleus of a new force. As with many other initial statements made after the fall of Baghdad, initial intentions have changed considerably and so has the rationale.

The old Iraqi Armed Forces had become a rather hollow force by the time of the war, with the losses suffered in Desert Storm in 1991 never made good, with the regular Armed Forces neglected as Saddam Hussein built up his special pretorian forces such as the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard, and with sanctions limiting the availability even of basic military equipment. But the Iraqi Armed Forces did have a lengthy history, stretching back to those Sharifian officers from the Arab Revolt who came with King Feisal I to Iraq in the 1920s. The Iraqi Army also had a history of involvement in politics from the time of the Bakr Sidqi coup in 1936 through the 1960s. But Saddam Hussein never served in the military, and his regime was based on a network of coercive security services and special pretorian formations, not on the regular Armed Forces.

The US had sought to persuade some entire units of the Iraqi Armed Forces to come into the coalition camp as the war began. Leaflets, broadcasts, and apparently, quiet contacts with commanding officers by US covert operators, sought to guarantee the safety of entire military units if they remained in barracks and did not join the fight. It is still unclear to what extent this was any sort of success. Certainly some regular Iraqi units never saw combat, and simply disintegrated or went home. But in the initial days after the end of the war, there were some indications that the US had, or thought it had, a loyal remnant that could be used for a new force.

The US, following the occupation, merged the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Military Industrialization into a new Ministry fo National Security and Defense and in a May 15 statement listed, among its four key goals, “bringing thirty thousand Iraqi soldiers back to active duty.” (This statement is still available under the Ministry’s page at the Coalition Provisional Authority’s website at http://www.cpa-iraq.org/ministries/defense.html.) According to that website, “Three separate groups of officers have been contacted (one of the officers was a comptroller) and they have a roster of thirty thousand Iraqi soldiers who got the fliers dropped during the war and then capitulated. The first possible media event is paying these soldiers twenty dollars each to join an interim defense force. The primary purpose would be border patrols and joint patrols with coalition forces.” But eight days after that statement’s date, Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, “Dissolution of Entities”, ordered the dissolution of not only all the intelligence and party security organizations but also “The Army, Air Force, Navy, the Air Defence Force, and other regular military services”.

Today, however, the US Advisor on defense matters for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Walter Slocombe, and other Pentagon officials say that there was no such loyal remnant available. In a September 17 briefing at the Pentagon, Slocombe said that “if there were those contacts, whatever their content, they did not result in organized units standing by in an organized way, which I expected to be the case. I mean, it just didn’t happen.”

In the same briefing, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Lawrence de Rita added that “What happened was that they were either destroyed — a lot of the units were because they chose to fight — or they disbanded . . . we captured early on, in the course of the conflict, a very small number, relatively speaking, relative to the full size of the Army, 8,000 or 10,000, 12,000 people. So we didn’t have large units turning themselves in for further cooperation.”

How these various accounts of the status at the end of the major combat phase are to be reconciled is unclear. What is clear is that the CPA did, indeed, formally dissolve the old Iraqi Armed Forces as a whole, with a provision for a one-time termination payment for service members. The same Order Number 2 which dissolved the Army also announced that “The CPA plans to create in the near future a New Iraqi Corps, as the first step in forming a national self-defense capability for a free Iraq. Under civilian control, the Corps will be professional, non–political, militarily effective, and representative of all Iraqis.”

The “New Iraqi Corps” was the genesis of what is now being called the New Iraqi Army. The reason for the change in title, apparently, was the belated realization that NIC in Arabic would tend to be pronounced nik, which is in fact a very vulgar Arabic verb for the sexual act. NIC rather quickly was changed to NIA.

Slocombe, a former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, now the Advisor to the CPA on defense matters, is profiled below. There is no Minister of National Security and Defense in the newly-appointed Iraqi Cabinet. Those duties are maintained by the Coalition Armed Forces.

Critics have suggested that the dissolution of the Army in May may have exacerbated an already difficult problem of the dispersal of Iraqi weaponry as troops simply took their small arms home with them. Obviously, too, some potentially potent weapons, including RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade launchers, mortars, and mines fell into the hands of the Ba‘athist or military diehards who continue to fight the US. Military stores were essentially looted, and few heavy weapons seemed to have survived the US air war: one early estimate said only 18 operational tanks remained to the Iraqi Army at the end of major combat.

Rebuilding is obviously going to be a major, and an expensive, task; critics who feel the Army should not have been dissolved certainly have a point. At the time, there was considerable pressure from Iraqi exile groups, particularly from the Iraqi National Congress’ Ahmad Chalabi, to disband the old Armed Forces. But as the guerrilla resistance intensified, it became obvious that there was no long any institution capable of providing internal security (other than the Coalition forces themselves, designed for major combat), and that in fact an Army of between 400,000 and 500,000 men had been thrown on the unemployment rolls. Certainly no one anticipates the NIA ever reaching those levels: Iraq was on paper at least one of the most militarized societies on earth. It officer corps was even more bloated (dating from those pre-1991 days when the Army numbered a million or more).

Now the Coalition is beginning to build back an Army. Initial indications were that the intention was to do this from scratch, but it is now clear that veterans are indeed being drawn upon. The first battalion, which is due to be commissioned around October 4 and which was visited by media in mid-September, reportedly includes former soldiers from the Iraqi Army as well as former Kurdish peshmerga fighters from the two main Kurdish groups.

27 Battalions
That first battalion reportedly includes some 67 officer candidates and 684 soldiers recruited at recruitment centers in Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. The US hopes to have at least four battalions trained by early in 2004, with an ultimate force level of some 27 battalions, each with 800 men, divided into nine brigades or three divisions. (The battalions will all be mechanized infantry, with three battalions to a brigade and three brigades to a division.) When support forces are added to these line troops, the total strength of the NIA is expected to be in the 30,000 to 40,000 range: about the same size the US was talking about as early as May, but brought into being somewhat differently. The US now welcomes ex-soldiers unless they were senior Party officials or served in the Special Republican Guard or the various intelligence and security services. At the moment, however, the US is not accepting applications from officers who held rank above that of lieutenant colonel, though that may subsequently change.

According to Slocombe and other US briefers, the original plan was to train these 27 battalions over a two year period, but based on the experience of the first battalion, it is now hoped to do it in one. Vinnell Corporation, a US company known for, among other things, training the Saudi Arabian National Guard (and now a part of Northrop Grumman), is training the first battalion, though at some point training is to be handed over to Iraqi personnel.

The three divisions will, as noted, be mechanized infantry. There will be a small coast guard, and apparently small armor and artillery units attached to these. At his Pentagon briefing, Slocombe asked “do we expect Iraq to defend itself with three light infantry divisions?” and answered no, that it was anticipated that an Iraqi government would eventually invest in a larger force, but that the present force was intended to “create a base, a nucleus, a seed” for a future Iraqi Army.

Initial training is reportedly concentrating on training officers and NCOs. The training cycle is some six to eight weeks, and concentrates on leadership and basic military skills.

Sectarian Divisions
Press reports indicate that the first battalion now about to enter service will consist of 60% Shi‘ites, 25% Sunni Arabs, 10% Kurds, and 5% other (Turkmen, Christians, Sabaeans, Yazidis). The Kurdish proportion in this first unit is low because some Kurdish troops were withdrawn by their tribal leaders after beginning training. Though the battalion itself will be multi-ethnic and multi-communal, individual platoons will be ethnically cohesive.

This has raised a few eyebrows; it stems clearly from the problem which has also faced the Coalition in creating the Governing Council and the Cabinet, of how to divide up responsibilities and perquisites among the various competing communities.

It may be that so long as the battalion itself is integrated there will be few problems. Memories of the Lebanese Army, once communally based, are likely to haunt any such approach to military organization. During the Lebanese Civil War, the fact that some Lebanese Army brigades were overwhelmingly Maronite, or Shi‘ite, or Druze led to those brigades cooperating closely with militias loyal to that communal faction; when the Lebanese Army finally fractured in early 1984, its individual brigades joined their own factional side and one mixed brigade, the Fourth (mixed Maronite and Druze), splintered and was finally disbanded altogether.

As for the Iraqi battalion, its ranks and officers will be paid better than under the old regime. A private first class will earn 99,000 Dinars or about US $70 per month, while an officer cadet will receive 149,000 Dinars or about US $100 permonth. Under the old regime private soldiers earned about 22,000 Dinars or US $11 per month, while offier cadets earned 80,000 Dinars or $44 per month, according to information provided by the US.

Equipment is another matter, since so much of the old Iraqi Army’s equipment vanished in the collapse. The US has reportedly bought some 40,000 AK-47s manufactured in Eastern Europe from a “third country” in order to equip the NIA.

In addition to the NIA, the US is also strengthening the Iraqi police and create a Civil Defense Corps for security operations.

While the question of whether the Iraqi Army should have been dismantled in May (or whether in fact it simply evaporated) will no doubt remain subject to debate and disagreement, the decision to open the ranks and the officer corps of the NIA to former Iraqi soldiers and officers does appear to rectify at least part, though only part, of the damage done. A leaner, better trained Army, as promised by the planners, remains to prove itself.

Profile: Walter B. Slocombe
Senior Advisor for Defense and Security Sector Affairs, CPA

The man in charge of building up the New Iraqi Army is Walter B. Slocombe, served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Clinton Administration, with extensive experience both in government and the private sector. He graduated from Princeton in 1963 and then studied Soviet politics as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford from 1963-65. He then took his law degree summa cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1968, where he served as Note Editor for the Harvard Law Review. He then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas at the US Supreme Court.

In 1969-70 Slocombe served in the Program Analysis Office of the National Security Council working on strategic arms control and other issues. In 1970-71 he was a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and in 1971 began practicing law at the Washington law firm of Caplin & Drysdale, making partner in 1974. From 1977-1979, during the Administration of President Jimmy Carter, he served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA), and from November 1979 to January 1981 as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. In both of these positions he was also Director of the Department of Defense’s SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) Task Force. In January 1981 he returned to his practice at Caplan & Drysdale.

With the return of a Democratic Administration under Bill Clinton, Slocombe served as Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from June 1, 1993, having previously served since January as a consultant to that office while awaiting Senate confirmation. In July of 1994 he was nominated to be Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and held that post from his confirmation in September 1994 to the end of the Clinton Administration.

He returned to his practice at Caplin & Drysdale until appointed as Senior Advisor for Defense and Security Sector Affairs to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq this year.

Slocombe has published a number of articles and monographs on strategic arms and strategic planning, as well as legal publications dealing with tax law. He has also served as a consultant to the RAND Corporation and the Strategic Air Command’s Technical Advisory Committee, served on the Advisory Panel for the Office of Technology Assessment’s study of strategic command and control and as Chairman of OTA’s study of the defense industrial base, as well as serving on various boards.

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