John Spencer argues that “concrete contributed to reducing the complexity of the urban environment, served as a major tool in establishing stability, and functioned as a powerful weapon against enemies using safe havens within the city.” He further claims that “no other weapon or technology has done more to contribute to achieving strategic goals of providing security, protecting populations, establishing stability, and eliminating terrorist threats.” Maj. In his MWI article, “The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield is Concrete,” Maj. The widespread employment of concrete on the streets of Baghdad offers an illustrative example. However, what appear to be militarily successful tactical innovations can inadvertently compound strategic failures and erode progress toward a political objective. While policy debates take place at the strategic level, stop-gap measures and temporary solutions are constantly tried and tested in a process of tactical innovation that attempts to compensate for strategic challenges. This is not a reflection of US service members, their efforts, or their sacrifices, but rather a function of the ambiguity typical of a COIN mission, time constraints, and poor quantitative metrics with which to assess mission progress. While US COIN efforts produced an array of tactical successes, the overall result cannot be construed as a total success. Population-centric counterinsurgency primarily emphasizes securing the population instead of targeting the enemy and seeks to reinforce the legitimacy of the government while reducing insurgent influence.
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These same divisions will threaten Iraq long after ISIS is defeated if a political solution that incorporates and adequately represents all sects and ethnicities is not further developed. The concrete barriers emplaced during the “surge” dramatically slowed sectarian violence-for a time-but also cemented the sectarian and ethnic divisions that empowered Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s power grab, contributed to government corruption, and set the conditions for the rise of ISIS. However, by 2014, just after Kilcullen’s explanation, civilian deaths in Iraq had returned to 2006–2007 levels. We put troops on every street corner.” The US military’s counterinsurgency campaign-and the concrete barriers that were an integral part of it-certainly brought impressive, measurable short-term improvements to the security situation in Baghdad.
![concrete barrier concrete barrier](https://www.nanokotewa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/image7-1.jpeg)
We brought in more than 100 kilometers of concrete T-wall. “We did it by killing the city,” he responded. David Petraeus during the Iraq War, was asked how the US military reduced violence in Baghdad by 95 percent. In 2013, David Kilcullen, an advisor to Gen.