Joint Chiefs reportedly recommending change in Iraq strategy

WASHINGTON — The nation's top uniformed leaders are recommending that the United States change its main military mission in Iraq from combating insurgents to supporting Iraqi troops and hunting terrorists, said sources familiar with the White House's ongoing Iraq policy review.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney met with the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday at the Pentagon to discuss different options.

The military leaders do not favor adding significant numbers of troops to Iraq, said sources familiar with their thinking, but favor strengthening the Iraqi army and also are pressing for a much greater U.S. effort on economic reconstruction and political reconciliation.

Sources said Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is reviewing a plan to redefine the American military mission there: U.S. troops would be pulled out of Iraqi cities and consolidated at a handful of U.S. bases while day-to-day combat duty would be turned over to the Iraqi army.

The recommendations were formulated by Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the outgoing top U.S. ground commander, officials said. The plan positions the U.S. military to move swiftly to a new focus on training, one of the key recommendations from several reviews of U.S. strategy, including from last week's report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

Under the plan developed by Chiarelli's staff, the military would shift about half of its 15 combat brigades away from battling insurgents and sectarian violence and into training Iraqi security forces as soon as the spring of 2007, military and defense officials said.

In northern and western Iraq, U.S. commanders are already moving troops out of combat missions to place them as advisers with lower-level Iraqi army units, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the military in Iraq, said Wednesday at a briefing in Baghdad.

Administration officials stressed that Bush has made no final decisions on how to proceed in Iraq.

But the new disclosures suggest that military planning is well under way for a major change from an approach that has assigned the bulk of responsibility for security in Iraq to more than 140,000 U.S. troops.

About 4,000 U.S. troops are now serving on 11-person military training teams embedded with Iraqi forces. The new plan would add 30 troops to each team, allowing them to provide supervision and mentoring down to the level of Iraqi army companies.

The remaining seven to eight brigades of U.S. combat forces would focus on three core missions: striking al-Qaida, strengthening security along Iraq's borders, and protecting major highways and other routes to ensure U.S. forces freedom of movement in Iraq.

A constant subtext in the meeting Wednesday, and the ongoing White House review, is the Joint Chiefs' growing concern about the erosion in the U.S. military's ability to deal with other crises around the world.

The chiefs also want to see a new push on political and economic issues, especially employment programs, reconstruction and political reconciliation, to help quell the problems that have fueled both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife, say defense officials and U.S. military officers in Iraq.

Pentagon chiefs particularly want to see U.S. pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to offer amnesty to Sunni insurgents, approve constitutional amendments promised to the Sunni minority, pass laws to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue, and modify the ban on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party taking government positions.