Crime and Justice International Magazine - Sam Houston State University

“Military Police have become one of the most important armed forces components for creating stability in threatened states or areas. In this role, however, military law enforcement leadership is a two-edged sword, and especially so in wartime. Outstanding leadership can help advance a new or struggling democracy, while weak—or reprehensible—leadership may well change the outcome of the struggle.”

— Colonel Arnaldo Claudio on

a Central MP Lesson from Iraq

Military Police Skills and Evolving Threats

The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States sparked fundamental changes in focus and structure for US military forces, national intelligence organizations, and a number of civilian local law enforcement organizations. For the Army’s Military Police Corps, the ensuing US war on terrorism in remote theaters and complex operational environments around the world immediately placed a premium on the unique skills, structure and capabilities possessed by military law enforcement units, even as they were still in the process of assessing future conflict requirements in the wake of the Cold War. Colonel Arnaldo Claudio—a career Military Police (MP) officer whose observations and perspectives are set out below—highlights some of the operational challenges faced by post-9/11 military law enforcement, addresses the contributions and challenges faced by MP units, and underscores the importance of leadership and even-handed, consistent, and intelligent approaches to military policing in even the most brutal counter-insurgency environment.

Army Military Police—formally established on 26 September 1941 on the foundation of a “provost marshal” lineage dating back to the American Revolution—have long performed important peacetime law enforcement functions ranging from physical security of military property, operating military prisons and confinement facilities, enforcing laws and discipline, preventing crime, conducting investigations, and performing a host of traditional law enforcement services familiar to civilian police departments. In wartime, MPs were traditionally tasked to accomplish key combat support missions that included maneuver and mobility support, battlefield circulation control, enemy prisoner of war detention, and area security operations. The importance of these responsibilities began to intensify some four decades after the MPs Corps’ creation.

Col. Claudio notes in this regard that, beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s, two kinds of broad developments spurred changes in MP capabilities and concepts. On the one hand, potential battlefield requirements generated by the high-water mark of the Soviet threat in the 1980s resulted in a re-examination of mission focus and the development of a more robust MP combat capability as part of their support missions, and in addition to traditional law enforcement functions. MPs were seen as a commander’s first and sometimes primary counter to Soviet and Warsaw Pact special operations and diversionary forces. These numerous enemy assault teams and tactical units were expected to saturate NATO rear areas and attack vulnerable lines of communication, command and control facilities, logistic targets and other infrastructure sites. Emerging concepts of “non-linear battlefields” in which there were no longer stable front lines gave MPs demanding missions in which emphasis was placed on fighting the rear battle, ensuring that tactical units and supplies reached the main battle areas, and if enemy forces were too large to be defeated, to delay and disrupt enemy forces until major combat units could be redeployed to assist in their elimination.

In addition, Claudio observes, “force protection” requirements in peacetime as well as war gained new prominence as terrorist attacks like the June 1996 terrorist truck bombing at the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Saudi Arabia. This terrorist bombing took the lives of 19 US servicemen and left some 500 injured—it added real world intensity to the force protection role. As a consequence of all of these potential challenges, MP “combat” components were upgraded in mobility and weaponry, including tailored M998 “Humvee” (High Mobility, Multi-Purpose, Wheeled Vehicle) configurations, some with new crew-served automatic weapons. (Personal MP weapons include typically the M4 5.56mm collapsible stock carbine accommodating an M203 grenade launcher, various scopes and night vision viewer; Beretta 9mm sidearms; and Remington 12 gauge shotguns for urban/riot use. Heavier and effective firepower resources in inventories at the start of Operation Iraqi included the MK19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher, M2 Browning .50 cal machinegun, M249 5.56mm Squad Automatic Weapon, and the TOW missile system, all of which can be Humvee-mounted.)

The second development—which Claudio considers just as difficult, important and especially critical to the Iraqi theater today—were the growing MP requirements in support of most phases of peacekeeping operations; policing areas torn by ethnic, religious or other low intensity conflict; and managing the huge number of refugees, displaced persons or enemy prisoners and detainees generated by conflict, war, or profound hardship. In particular, these actions included Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada, 1983), Operation Just Cause (Panama, 1990), Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (i.e., the First Gulf War, 1991), Operation Restore Hope (Somalia, 1992-93), Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti,1994), Bosnia Peace Operation (beginning in 1995), the Haitian and Cuban refugee operations at Guantanamo, Cuba (periodically in the 1990s), and Operation Joint Guardian (Kosovo beginning in 1999) among others.

All of these operations further defined requisite MP skills, contributed lessons learned and confirmed the opinion of combined arms commanders that Military Police were extraordinary high value resources. As Claudio emphasizes, this was not just for their growing combat support capabilities founded on firepower and mobility, but their contributions to providing for public safety amidst residual violence and criminality. Key contributions in addition specifically included building public confidence and trust for civilian populations and otherwise applying nuanced police approaches to security problems that combined both military and law enforcement dimensions. There were, as Claudio observes, soon more mission requests from commanders than there were MPs.

Overall, at the turn of the millennium, envisioned Army operational environments were characterized by asymmetric threats from adaptive, if less technologically capable enemies; transnational security phenomena including terrorism and organized crime; ethnic and religious conflict; population disruptions and complex humanitarian emergencies; and enduring traditional military requirements that had by no means disappeared. The MP Corps that existed on 10 September 2001 was one shaped by the developments addressed earlier, widely employed in past conflicts and emergencies, and at the time Operation Iraqi Freedom got underway in March 2003, were training to deal with a number of projected operational environments.

The start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 20 March 2003, its initial operational successes, and subsequent transition into the extremely complex and demanding counterinsurgency and stability operation today, requires little further discussion here. MPs—experienced and well prepared—capably performed the many combat support missions for which they had been trained and structured. This included the management of many thousands of enemy combatants and other suspected terrorists or criminals—a growing number—in more than a dozen detention facilities.

The exceptional Military Police support to every phase of early operations, however, was severely scarred with the revelations and photos of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad Central Confinement Facility, better known as Abu Ghraib. The facility was under the control of the 800^th Military Police Brigade, commanded by Military Police Corps Brigadier General (BG) Janis Karpinski. The now well-known abuses between October and December 2003 comprised in the words of official reporting “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses”, and while limited in scope and centered in one section of the facility, caused grave damage to US prestige, moral authority and legitimacy that still reverberates.

Colonel Claudio emphasizes that this aberrant and disgusting conduct was regretted and detested nowhere more than in the Military Police Corps itself, which adopted almost as a mantra, the promise of “no more Abu Ghraibs”. Official investigations and reports took note of peripheral contributory causes. These included factors like inadequate MP-to-detainee ratios that were predicated on dealing with a far different kind of detainee population. By this they meant detainees from organized militaries that exercised at least some measure of self-regulation, rather than the intractable insurgent, terrorist and criminal detainees that formed much of the prisoner population. In addition, residual doctrinal weaknesses, confusion over the mandated separation of corrections and military intelligence interrogator functions, and inadequate training for some of the personnel most directly involved in the abuses were cited. Claudio and much official reporting as well, however, places the primary cause squarely on an inexcusable major leadership failure that included especially the general officer commanding the 800^th MP brigade and other officers and NCOs within the brigade chain of command. The Claudio quote leading off this article stems in part from the lessons of Abu Ghraib, which Claudio believes was the single most important event to embolden jihadist insurgent activities, rally popular Iraqi and regional opposition, and intensify international and US domestic opposition to the US/Coalition war effort. As Claudio notes, it raised the “detention” issue to the level of strategic importance, moving it from an important support mission to a critical one.

The military undertook short-term remedial measures and set longer-term institutional measures in motion as well. These included most immediately the creation of Task Force 134—a staff headed by a general officer that exercised supervision and oversight of detention operations—and the development and early application of doctrinal and training correctives. When Colonel Claudio assumed the position of Multinational Coalition Corps (MNC-I) Provost Marshal in February 2005, he was instrumental in pushing for further changes for managing a detainee population that had grown to about 10,000 people. Claudio pushed for—and was instrumental in implementing—a new approach in which MP brigades were organized along functional lines, rather than performing multiple missions. Multiple missions diluted brigade focus, as MPs responded to the numerous, diverse law enforcement and combat support requirements generated. In the new approach, one of the brigades—about 4,000 personnel—would be dedicated to detention operations. The other brigade was then focused mainly on the growing, critically important requirement of training Iraqi police and highway patrol, with MP missions like maneuver and mobility support and law enforcement missions carried out by elements of the 4,000 soldiers in the second brigade. This new approach fulfilled MP and Corps/Coalition expectations, both in the detention and in advancing long-term training dimensions. The ‘no more Abu Ghraibs’ imperative was fully realized under the new approaches, even as the detainee population grew and the Iraqi Government took over more and more of the detainee operations.

Some critics suggested that since those Abu Ghraib command and enlisted MPs most directly involved in the abuses were Reserve Component soldiers, this may have been a contributing factor. That assertion cuts no ice with Claudio, who expresses nothing but deep admiration for the active duty, Reserve, and National Guard MPs. He also includes in this “one team, one fight” view the diligent soldiers from other Army branches who have augmented MP resources in the theater and are known as ILO (in lieu of) MPs. There is a stellar example of performance and courage from newly mobilized MPs Claudio cites, and that is an engagement by elements of the Kentucky National Guard’s 617^th Military Police Company not long after he assumed his MNC-I Provost Marshal position.

On 20 March 2005, 3 armored Humvees of the 617^th MP Company’s second squad were shadowing a supply convoy of 26 vehicles, mostly 18-wheelers, on an Iraqi road designated Alternate Supply Route Detroit. The MPs remained just out of sight, with close convoy protection provided by three interspersed gun-trucks. A flurry of dust and activity from the direction of the convoy indicated to the MPs that it had likely encountered an improvised explosive device, an ambush, or both. The MP squad, with 3 MPs per vehicle plus the squad leader, raced for the convoy and entered an ambush site where the supply column was taking heavy automatic weapons fire from a large number of insurgents. The insurgents immediately engaged the squad with automatic weapons and RPGs as it arrived, but were quickly flanked and subjected to heavy return fire from the MP’s M2 .50 cal and M-249 5.56 machine guns; MK19 40mm grenade launchers; and hand grenades and MP4 personal weapons used by MPs who dismounted. The MPs cut off terrorist access to waiting escape vehicles (with trunks open in evident preparations for taking hostages) and in a nearly 45-minute firefight annihilated the terrorist grouping, killing 27, wounding 6, and capturing another. None escaped from the ambush site. The MPs also captured a large number of automatic weapons and ammunition supplies from the ambush area, as well as a number of RPG rockets and launchers. The action was credited by all observers and the command as superb, resulting in the award of a Distinguished Service Cross (the second highest award for valor) to squad leader Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein, 2 Silver Star Medals (the third highest valor award), 3 Bronze Star Medals (with “V” for valor device), 3 Army Commendation Medals (with “V”), and 4 Purple Hearts. Among those receiving the awards was the first female soldier (Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester) to receive a Silver Star since World War II. In Claudio’s view, so much for the distinction some have tried to make in quality of active, Reserve, or National Guard MP soldiers.

Colonel Claudio developed a point of view and concept for future military law enforcement operations in Iraq that he shared with senior Army and Coalition leaders during his tenure as MNC-I Provost Marshal and subsequently. Claudio’s views are based not only on his Iraqi experience, but his direct roles in conflicts in Colombia, El Salvador, and Panama among others, where assignments dealt with insurgency, terrorism, organized crime, and in the latter case a criminal regime that had lost legitimacy with the population. From a military law enforcement perspective, he believes that the most essential ingredient for success in insurgencies and the extreme violence that often accompanies and follows guerrilla wars is the even application of the rule of law and the effective provision of security for the population. This includes in particular an emphasis on the policing of communities and creating the indigenous security forces that will equitably provide for the public safety of the population as they seek to establish their own versions of democracy and rebuild economies and lives. He is adamant that with a strong public safety base, counterinsurgency efforts will fail, and he believes that in Iraq military law enforcement has a central role in this. He set out the following synthesis of some of his views as they apply to Iraq:

Colonel Claudio points out that General Petraeus has added many military police soldiers during the course of the troop “surge” begun earlier this year because of the critical skills they bring in the ways discussed above. This has included the addition of approximately 2,200 MPs thus far, the introduction of a third MP brigade headquarters as part of the surge, and implementation of Claudio’s recommendation that a general officer position be created to give additional authority and control to military law enforcement operations. The detainee dimension of operations has remained a major US mission with 24,500 detainees classified as threats to security now in US custody and nearly that number transferred to the Iraqi jurisdiction.

Overall—while Colonel Claudio recognizes the potential dangers, challenges and political uncertainties ahead—he believes that the US counterinsurgency effort is utilizing the capabilities of military law enforcement well. He also thinks that military law enforcement’s position as a high value resource for combat support in counterinsurgencies and the war on terrorism has been ratified and reinforced. Finally, he argues that the MP role in helping create a stable security environment suitable for fostering a law abiding civil society and carrying out civilian reconstruction will continue to be of central importance in any future conflict. Underpinning it all, however, is skilled, effective and courageous leadership throughout military police units and commands.