Okay so Operation Swarmer hasn't lived up to its billing.  No fighting, no shots fired, no airstrikes, most of the people detained were released, the uncovering of a few weapons caches is pretty common anywhere you go in Iraq and as Pat Lang notes an operation of a similar size during the Vietnam War wouldn't have even been given a name.  Chris Albritton suggests that airlifting a force of 1500 troops (700 Iraqis, 800 Americans) to a sparsely populated area was clearly a public relations stunt to give the media pictures of the Iraqi military in action so the White House can come up with a "non-timetable" timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq.  Albritton also notes that even if you believe the operation was intended as more than a media stunt it doesn't say much about the capabilities of Iraqi military intelligence and the interior ministry who supposedly provided the intelligence that prompted the operation. 

My only question is after three years in Iraq, why the hell are we still doing big sweep operations like this?  The uselessness of big "search and destroy" type sweep operations in combatting an indigenous insurgency was supposedly one of the lessons learned by the generation of military officers who cut their teeth in Vietnam and I was under the impression that made it into the US military tactics and fighting doctrine studied by every service academy plebe and officer school candidate yet every couple months brings a new one.