Starting on June 16, 2006, “the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies launched a major counteroffensive aimed at improving security in the capital [Baghdad]. Dubbed ‘Together Forward,’ the operation involved some 42,500 Iraqi police and army personnel backed up by 7,200 U.S. troops. The Iraqi forces were instructed to erect new checkpoints, enforce extended dusk-to-dawn curfews and new restrictions on carrying weapons, and step up the frequency of their foot patrols. …But the Americans were operating more and more from big bases, removing themselves from the population and from the civil war being waged beyond the tall cement walls of their isolated bastions. …The offensive never really got off the ground. ‘They were dead in the water by midsummer,’ said [Andrew] Krepinevich, the counterinsurgency expert.”
– Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble, Page 49