Iraq: Go native?

U.S. Marine reserve officer Josh Manchester offers his six-point plan for winning in Iraq.

1. Dramatically expand the training and advisory efforts. Expand their numbers, funding, and facilities.
2. Create a crash program to develop a massive Arabic linguistic capability within the US military. This is the United States. We put men on the moon. Why don't we train 20,000 or more American military personnel proficient in Arabic in the next 12 months?
3. Give Maliki 60 days to remove the Shi'ite militias from positions of influence in the government. If he asks for help of some kind in doing so, provide it. Give him one last chance to prove that stopping the sectarian killing is more important than satisfying those who hunger for it.
4. If he can't do it, then declare Iraq's security forces to be in receivership. What does this mean? It means that the security forces of Iraq no longer answer to the Iraqi government, they answer to the US military. The government will still exist. It will still be a democracy. But it will temporarily lose control of its military. After doing this, purge the Iraqi forces of those loyal to Shi'ite militias.
5. Create combined US-Iraqi forces. Here's where the go native part really kicks in. ...create a situation such that the American forces and the Iraqi forces are one and the same. American forces in small numbers live, eat, sleep, fight and die with their Iraqi counterparts. It will keep the Iraqis honest about not killing each other in wanton bloodshed. And it will earn incredible benefits for the Americans in terms of intelligence gained and cultural lessons learned.
6. Redeploy as many FOBBITS as possible. What's a Fobbit? A FOB is a forward operating base, and a fobbit is the derogatory term used by combat arms troops to refer to the support personnel who inhabit such gargantuan bases. ...as much as possible, integrate the logistics of the forces that have gone native with the Iraqis with the Iraqi logistics.

These changes would be dramatic. It takes guts to tell a sovereign government that we're relieving it of its military. But by going native, the US can destroy or neutralize the Shi'ite militias; restore confidence in the Iraqi armed forces; increase our language and cultural proficiency, which is a huge force multiplier; and over time we can gradually cede the military back to the Iraqi government. Just for good measure, it would probably be a good idea to surge a large number of troops in to tamp down violence in Baghdad while the go native plan gets ramped up. But within 6 to 12 months, the US presence would be smaller, and more effective, violence in Baghdad will be much lower, and the insurgency will be even more beleaguered than it is now.