Grange: U.S. needs to adjust 'tactics, techniques'
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Retired Brig. Gen. David Grange, CNN military analyst
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(CNN) – A helicopter crash killed 16 U.S. soldiers and injured 20 others near Amiryah, Iraq, on Sunday. Witnesses reported seeing missile trails when the Chinook twin-engine transport helicopter went down, evidence perhaps of a surface-to-air missile, but the official cause of the crash is under investigation.
CNN's Bill Hemmer talked to retired Brig. Gen. David Grange, a CNN military analyst, early Monday about what the U.S. military could do to stave off future attacks.
HEMMER: Curious now, what can the military do, if anything, to avoid the attacks that we saw on Sunday?
GRANGE: Well, the only thing, Bill, ... is you adjust your tactics, your techniques, your procedures to try to throw the enemy off balance. These are small groups of enemy forces. This isn't a large offensive. It's a small insurgent movement. And they have the advantage, because most guerrillas can attack at their time and place of choosing. And you have to take that away from the enemy.
And so what the military did was adjust its tactics and procedures. It will increase a surge in relentless pursuit to kill and capture insurgents, and at the same time, with the other hand, display compassion, continue to display compassion with nation building and changing the quality of life of the Iraqi people.
HEMMER: With that scenario, if that's the case, does that force the U.S. troops to withdraw from the duties they're doing right now, to knock it off down to 90 percent or even 80 percent? And if so, what's the impact of that going forward for reconstruction in Iraq and hunting down essentially the bad guys in Fallujah and Tikrit?
GRANGE: Well, there's forces dedicated to both types of missions, the nation-building side, and the other is the offensive military operations, as well as some defensive operations to protect key infrastructure. But until the transition to the Iraqi police force, the civil defense forces, and their new Iraqi army is actually robust enough to take over a lot of these duties, then the coalition forces -- Americans, Polish, British -- have to do these duties until that happens, and that's a little built down the road. So, they're stretched a bit to accomplish all these tasks.
HEMMER: Do you think it was a mistake to dismiss the Iraqi army back in May?
GRANGE: It's a mistake to leave people unemployed. When you have someone, regardless of how miserable their lifestyle was, has a job or something they do every day, and all of a sudden that's gone, then you have people hanging around, and bad things happen. You want to employ people immediately, even if it's planting desert roses along the Baghdad highway or being a part of a new fledgling army. You have to do something. And so maybe it was a little bit of a slow start, but now the surge is on. The pace has doubled in transitioning this Iraqi army into something, one controlled by democratic governance. But that is key, that transition, and it's a little bit behind.
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U.S. soldiers search through the rubble after Sunday's crash that killed 16 U.S. soliders and injured 20 others.
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HEMMER: Have you given much consideration to what towns like Tikrit and Fallujah look like when this war is eventually over? Is this the modern-day Chechnya, after the devastation we've seen there in the capital city of Grozny?
GRANGE: I don't think it's exactly like Chechnya. But obviously, these are bad areas that always have a core of loyalists to the old Saddam regime, or ties to terrorist organizations, and they are ties to terrorist organizations. So there's always going to be some of that around in the future, no matter how successful the coalition forces are.
But there's just a big surge now because the religious month of Ramadan, because the enemy smells a sense of will deteriorating both in the United States and the Iraqi people, and that's why it's critical to continue the surge on the coalition side right now so that will does not change.
