'Big Red One' HQ will deploy to Iraq

[frigidmagi]

ArmyTimes

The 1st Infantry Division headquarters will deploy to Iraq in the coming weeks as the U.S. expands its war against the Islamic State, officials announced Thursday.

The Big Red One, of Fort Riley, Kansas, will be the first division headquarters to go to Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

About 500 soldiers will deploy in late October to the Central Command area of operations, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said Thursday in a briefing with reporters.

About 200 of those soldiers will be in Iraq as part of the 475-troop increase announced Sept. 10 by President Obama, Kirby said.

Of that group, 138 will be in the Baghdad joint operations center, 68 in Irbil, and 10 at the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, he said.

“They will have command and control of ongoing advise and assist efforts in support of Iraqi and Peshmerga forces, and continue to help us all degrade and destroy [the Islamic State],” Kirby said.

The remaining 300 soldiers from 1st Infantry Division headquarters will be based in the CENTCOM AOR; Kirby would not specify where they will be stationed. These soldiers will support the rest of the headquarters element, “but right now there’s no plan to put them inside Iraq,” Kirby said.

The deployment of the 1st Infantry Division soldiers will increase the U.S.’ capacity to target the Islamic State and coordinate the activities of the U.S. military across Iraq, according to a news release from the division.

“As brave, responsible and on-point soldiers in the ‘Big Red One,’ we stand ready to deploy anywhere in the world to protect the United States of America, her citizens and her allies,” said Maj. Gen. Paul Funk, the division commander, in a statement. “We are ready for anything because we know we have the nation behind us.”

The soldiers are preparing for a one-year mission, according to the division.

The division headquarters will join its 1st Brigade Combat Team in the region; the brigade deployed to Kuwait in June as part of the regular rotation of forces there. The brigade serves as Army Central’s contingency response force, a long-standing capability for the volatile region. So far, the brigade has not been tasked for the fight in Iraq and leaders have said this is not the start of a new ground combat mission.

In Iraq, the 1st Infantry Division headquarters is expected to be responsible for coordinating the efforts of the 1,600 troops President Obama has already sent there. Many of these troops are advising and assisting the Iraqi Security Forces, others are providing extra security, while others are providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

The headquarters also will head up the joint operations center that since July has been run by Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, the deputy commanding general for operations for U.S. Army Central. The 1st Infantry Division soldiers will replace troops who have been in Iraq since June, according to information from the division.

The 1st Infantry Division headquarters last deployed to Iraq in January 2010, where it served for 12 months in Basra as the headquarters element for U.S. Division-South.

The division headquarters next deployed to Afghanistan in April 2012. During that tour, the headquarters assumed authority of Regional Command-East and was responsible for operations throughout 14 provinces in eastern Afghanistan. At the time, the division was led by then-Maj. Gen. William Mayville, who is now a three-star and director of operations for the Joint Staff.

Today, the 1st Infantry Division is led by Funk, an armor officer who is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In recent months, the division has remained busy even as it has been downsizing as part of the service’s ongoing drawdown.

The division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team was the first brigade to be aligned with a geographic combatant command under the Army’s regionally aligned forces concept. The 2nd BCT was aligned with Africa Command and spent more than a year sending small groups of soldiers to AFRICOM’s area of operations for military-to-military engagements, exercises and other theater security cooperation activities as needed by the AFRICOM commander.

The brigade recently handed off the mission to the division’s 4th BCT.

Meanwhile, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was inactivated this summer, and the division’s 1st BCT remains in Kuwait for its nine-month tour.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno recently discussed the importance of the service’s two-star division headquarters.

“The complexity of the environment that we have to operate in now, and probably the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, we need these headquarters,” he said. “If you ask me one of the stress points in the Army, it’s our headquarters.”

The Army has 10 division headquarters, including two in Afghanistan and one in Korea.

On Monday night, the U.S. mounted its first airstrikes in Syria, targeting the Islamic State and also the Khorasan group, a little known terrorist cell.

Monday night’s massive air assault hitting 22 targets across Syria was a historic operation that signals a new expansion of a war that is likely to last for years.

U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft dropped precision-guided missiles on two separate and distinct extremists groups, targeting command-and-control headquarters, barracks, training camps logistical nodes and other sites, defense officials said.

“You are seeing the beginning of a sustained campaign,” Mayville, in his capacity as the Joint Staff’s director of operations, told Pentagon reporters Tuesday.

[Norseman]

Am I the only one who goes "baaaaaaad idea" when I see news like this?

It's like by hook or by crook they will drag you back in.

[LadyTevar]

But someting has to be done, for humanitarian reasons if nothing else.

[General Havoc]

Should we instead do nothing? And let these medieval psychopaths butcher everyone they don't like. They are literally massacring children with knives for being the wrong sect of Islam.

[Josh]

At least they know the neighborhood.

[frigidmagi]

My own thought is I completely agree we got to stop these guys. They're murderers and slavers. That said, I worry because it looks like we're sliding into this without a plan, or clear cut objections or even an honest discussion on what they should be.

That usually leads to failure.

[General Havoc]

I ask again, should we not go in? Should we do something else instead? Keep up with the bombings and keep the ground troops out of it? Best I can tell, this unit is just a command and control point for anything we either have there or choose to feed into there in the future? Is there a reason this particular unit should not be in Iraq?

Before we decide if this is a bad or good idea, it might be best to actually define what this is.

[Lys]

Here's what I would propose as a plan: Provide air support and materiel resources to Kurdistan, Iraq, and Syria in their fight against the so called Islamic State in order to stop and eventually roll back its advance with the end goal of destroying its ability to hold and administer territory, allowing the states that we are supporting to move in and reassert control over those areas.

Here's what Obama has been doing: Ineffectually dilly-dallying around for months doing not much of note, telegraphing his intent to bomb the shit out of ISIL long enough ahead of time as to give the intended targets time to try and take measures to protect their fixed assets from air attack, and then making air attacks on a desultory scale such as to fail to actually bomb the shit out of anything.

[Josh]

I ask again, should we not go in? Should we do something else instead? Keep up with the bombings and keep the ground troops out of it? Best I can tell, this unit is just a command and control point for anything we either have there or choose to feed into there in the future? Is there a reason this particular unit should not be in Iraq?

Before we decide if this is a bad or good idea, it might be best to actually define what this is.

Inaction sucks. Ineffective action is even worse.