No force has a tougher reputation than the US Marines. But the Marines who are headed to Iraq this spring say they intend to avoid the get-tough tactics that have been used in recent weeks by Army units.
Marine commanders say they do not plan to surround villages with barbed wire, demolish buildings used by insurgents or detain relatives of suspected guerrillas.
The Marines say they do not plan to fire artillery at suspected guerrilla mortar positions, an Army tactic that risks harming civilians. Nor do the Marines want to risk civilian casualties by calling in bombing strikes on the insurgents, as has happened most recently in Afghanistan.
"I do not envision using that tactic," said Lieutenant General James Conway, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, who led the Marine force that fought its way to Baghdad and will command the more than 20,000 Marines who will return to Iraq in March. "It would have to be a rare incident that transcends anything that we have seen in the country to make that happen."
The upsurge in guerrilla attacks on American troops in Iraq has prompted Army units in the Sunni Triangle in central Iraq to adopt a hard-nosed approach -- and spawned a behind-the-scenes debate within the US military about the best way to quash the insurgents.
While some Army commanders insist the hard-nosed tactics have been successful in reducing enemy attacks, other military officers believe they are alienating Iraqis and thus depriving American commanders of the public support and human intelligence needed to ferret out threats.
In an interview at his headquarters at Camp Pendleton, Conway was careful not to criticize the Army. Still, he indicated that he plans to pursue a very different strategy.
The Marines, Conway says, will try to design their raids to be "laser precise," targeted on the enemy with a maximum effort made to avoid endangering or humiliating Iraqi civilians.
Starting next March, nine battalions of Marines will be deployed. In addition to infantry, the Marine force will include light armored reconnaissance units, engineers and Cobra attack helicopters. The Marines will also take command of a brigade from the Army's 1st Infantry Division, which is also deploying in the spring.
Marine commanders have stressed the need to be sensitive to local traditions. Marines here have been told to remove their sunglasses and look Iraqis in the eye when they speak with them. A select group of Marines has been selected for intensive Arabic language training. The Marines will use Iraqi, not American, names to delineate the zones assigned to specific units and will try to align them with Iraqi administrative districts. To limit the disruption to the local populations, the Marines also plan to set up their bases outside of Iraqi cities.
But the Marines at Camp Pendleton are also prepared to fight, if necessary.
"We carry an embedded offensive capability in every convoy," said Major General James Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division. "To us you don't drive on through, you stop, you hunt them down and you nail them."
Conway says, for instance, that if the Marines fire artillery shells, they will be special illumination rounds to light up terrain, not destroy targets. On Nov. 25, Army units near Tikrit responded to fire from an enemy mortar only to discover that the mortar rounds came from a site near a residential area; the Army later announced it had begun an investigation into reports that civilians were injured by the Army's artillery fire.
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