Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, said one Army colonel he spoke with during a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission to Iraq last month expressed frustration that the system still had not adapted to the nature of the war.
"On the one hand, they're told success will come by protecting the population and winning them over," Sepp said. "But all the metrics that judge how successful they are as brigade commanders are based on killing enemy troops."
Advocates for changing course have argued that commanders have tried classic counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq just once, in the 2005 offensive in Tall Afar, where sectarian violence was stifled by flooding the northern Iraqi town with U.S. and local forces and dispersing them in small outposts throughout the city.
The commander of the offensive, Army Col. H.R. McMaster, is one of a group of officers advising Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Iraq strategy.
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peter.spiegel@latimes.com
Times staff writer Julian E. Barnes contributed to this report.
