Previously, I discussed the role of providing services (health, education, sanitation, etc…) in counterinsurgency. After security, services represent a critical component in winning hearts and minds and strengthening the legitimacy of the state. With threats to personal security in Iraq on the decline (but still high), the provision of services is gaining increasing importance and this fact has not gone unnoticed by the US military.
Iraq contains a massive and intricate irrigation system of canals and pumping stations. The water it supplies and the flooding it controls are essential to the agriculturally dominated southern Iraq. Much of this canal system was left unusable after the initial 2003 invasion, either through direct damage or simply lack of maintenance. The fields the canal system supports are a sizable proportion of the Iraqi domestic economy.
The fact that a provisional reconstruction team (PRT) is repairing the irrigation canals and their pumping stations is mildly interesting, but nothing to write home about. However, what stands out is the fact that they are using a valuable security resource in an unorthodox way to do it:
In order to help the GoI monitor and maintain the canals, 2nd BCT Soldiers came up with a high-tech solution. In addition to Soldiers performing foot patrols and SoI guarding key points, 2nd BCT Soldiers regularly keep a watch on the canals with unmanned aerial vehicles.
“We’ve done this with every single canal,” Clegg said. “We had (the MoWR) supply us a map, showing the direction of flow. Then we stepped it up with UAV coverage. This actually allowed us to see where the water is flowing.” [Emphasis mine]
Clegg says the images are declassified and shown to MoRW officials every week to give them the information they need.
Simply put, the PRT is using UAV surveillance flights to monitor the status of irrigation canal flows. This is the first example I have found of UAVs being used in a non-security function to improve services to Iraqi civilians. The use of UAVs, a much prized resource amongst commanders, hints at the new importance placed on providing services (particularly water); a ’service surge’ if you will. It is also a reminder of the remarkable flexibility of the US military.
Infant mortality rates (the number of children younger than one year that die per 1000 live births) are incredibly sensitive to disruptions in society. Even a minor disturbance in a region’s economic, social, and political system can create a parallel, observable effect in infant mortality data. Two political scientists, M. Rodwan Abouharb of Louisiana State University and Anessa L. Kimball of Université Laval, offer one of the most comprehensive datasets on infant mortality rates:
Systematic data on annual infant mortality rates are of use to a variety of social science research programs in demography, economics, sociology, and political science. Infant mortality rates may be used both as a proxy measure for economic development, in lieu of energy consumption or GDP-per-capita measures, and as an indicator of the extent to which governments provide for the economic and social welfare of their citizens. Until recently, data were available for only a limited number of countries based on regional or country-level studies and time periods for years after 1950. Here, the authors introduce a new dataset reporting annual infant mortality rates for all states in the world, based on the Correlates of War state system list, between 1816 and 2002. They discuss past research programs using infant mortality rates in conflict studies and describe the dataset by exploring its geographic and temporal coverage. Next, they explain some of the limitations of the dataset as well as issues associated with the data themselves. Finally, they suggest some research areas that might benefit from the use of this dataset. This new dataset is the most comprehensive source on infant mortality rates currently available to social science researchers.
Download the Codebook
Download the Dataset
At approximately 10:00am on May 3rd, the United States fired three precision-guided weapons at a small building next to Sadr General Hospital in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad. The building is alleged by coalition forces to be a “criminal element command and control center“. The first munition struck the small building, the second struck the hospital’s ambulance parking lot and broke the hospital’s water line, and the third hit a generator used by the neighborhood but not the hospital.
McClatchy’s Leila Fadel and Shashank Bengali described the damage:
Sadr Hospital, one of two main hospitals serving the massive Shiite Muslim slum, is operating on a backup water supply that wasn’t expected to last longer than 48 hours. On Sunday afternoon, a main street outside the hospital was flooded as workmen tried to repair a series of underground pipes that ruptured when the missiles targeted what U.S. military officials described as a militia outpost a few yards from the hospital.
“If there are no more attacks, we might be able to fix it. We don’t know,” said a hospital security official who gave his name as Abu Sajjad. “Otherwise, in two days we will run out of water and the hospital can’t go on.”
The official said that the U.S. strike also damaged 15 ambulances and forced many hospital staff to flee. Not everyone returned to work Sunday, leaving a Spartan emergency ward nearly empty of doctors.
The airstrike betrays an understandable ignorance in coalition forces towards the nature of health care delivery. While coalition forces avoid targeting hospitals directly, this does not protect the ability of the hospital to function. The rational for not striking hospitals is to keep them operating and providing health to the local population. However, any hospital’s functions are reliant on a large network of facilities and services. This network includes ambulance facilities and water lines. Most of these network nodes exist outside the hospital’s physical perimeter and whose presence is not calculated into airstrike planning. If policy makers truly want to maintain access to healthcare during armed conflict they must consider not only the hospital’s physical facilities but also key nodes in the area’s health care network, regardless of whether or not they fly the red cross.