Fighting Force Is Giving Way to Police Force

It is a role the U.S. military takes on reluctantly, and one it fears will last for months or years.

The reluctance is driven by the military's belief that soldiers trained to kill are not well suited to keep the peace, the political sensitivity of American forces imposing order on another society, and the lack of a tradition among U.S. forces of involvement in police work on a large scale. Even military police are not trained as police in the civilian sense of the term; their duties are primarily to handle prisoners of war and maintain order on military bases.

"You can control a city of 5 million people, but you can't police it," said a senior defense official of the challenges facing U.S. troops in Baghdad. "We gave a lot of medals in the last three weeks to guys who know how to pull a trigger and hit something. It's hard to turn around and tell those same guys not to pull the trigger but read them their rights instead."

But with the U.S. unwilling to cede power quickly in Iraq to regional authorities, as it did in Afghanistan, it appears for the time being that the military has no other choice.

Already, Marines in Baghdad are operating joint police patrols with Iraqi civil authorities, and the widespread looting and mayhem appears to be subsiding. The Pentagon, which has more than 2,000 civil affairs and military police specialists attached to forces in Iraq or standing by in Kuwait, is planning to deploy more.

The civil affairs units, made up almost entirely of reservists, are charged primarily with helping rebuilding efforts. The units include doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and health-care workers.

More civil affairs teams, already stretched thin from a series of deployments to Afghanistan, are on standby to deploy to Iraq, military officials say. Hundreds of soldiers trained as military police accompanying the 4th Infantry Division have crossed into Iraq from Kuwait since Monday. Other active duty and reserve units are awaiting deployment orders.

At the Pentagon on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was vague about how many more civil affairs and military police units will join troops in Iraq. But he said the proportion of such units is likely to increase now that combat operations in Iraq are all but over.