America's strategic planning failures in Iraq

Also not effectively viewed in considering the big-picture; was the potential impact on the Middle East and the Islamic world which has resulted in a decline for support, by many long-term ally nations, in the global war on terror (GWOT). Misread or more likely, not understood, was the connection between the invasion of Iraq, the long-simmering Arab-Israel conflict, and the impact military operations in Afghanistan. 

Not surprisingly, the personality of sometimes arrogant Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set a resulting tone.

Senior military leaders, and uniformed planners schooled in military science, were convinced that aggressive military action was viewed as a workable substitute for what should have been; effective coordination, and action, by all the agencies of government. In particular, the U.S. Department of State should have been much more deeply involved in mission planning.

The grand strategy, to seize weapons of mass destruction and depose the tyrannical despotic regime in Baghdad, drove the planning process.

Further, strategic assessments and on-going mission planning was ponderously slow to improve and to see the forest from the trees. Senior intelligence officers in the theater were, in hindsight, grossly incapable of thinking on their feet and performing that action in a rapid fashion.

In fact, Lieut. General William S. Wallace, the U. S. 5th Corps Commander, and initial ground forces leader during the, “run-up-to-Baghdad”, opined to the press openly.

Wallace portrayed himself, his planners, and all the U. S. forces as stunned to learn, not unlike a deer in the headlights of a car, that the enemy they found and encountered was not the one they trained for in pre-war combat operations exercises.

This, revelation on the part of Wallace was a clear and unfettered indictment of the quality of war-planning, largely supervised and overseen by him and his primary Corps staff leaders. More dangerously, it is a painful illustration of deficient mission planning than can spell defeat on any battlefield and the quality of reactive planning was no better than the pre-mission planning actions.

What is likely to be even more painful for the military, and the department of defense in the long run, is the fact that America's grandiose strategy for force transformation was flawed. With that said, one ought to keep in mind that military transformation should be threat-driven! It is obvious, that this modernization was not in direct response to known or suspected adversarial nation-states or non-nation threat actors.

America's military has changed direction from its high-tech driven version of a rapidly growing transformation in military tactics and weaponry. Instead, the military forces have fallen back to a, “human factors-driven”, counterinsurgency style of warfare dominated by the infantryman on the ground. The soldier, whose boots tread in foreign lands, faces old technologies, indigenous and area expertise, unorthodox approaches to long established conventional tactics, and an agonizing lack of cultural and sociological awareness.

As well as apparently forgetting the broader spectrum of strategic lessons, large and small, from America's wars of the past fifty-years, the U. S. military failed to learn from the lessons that should have figured more prominently, in shaping the military's future.

In hindsight, history has recorded that the United States, and in particular its senior military planners, have failed to detect and learn from the strategic complexities and inherent risks involved with combat operations. These operations, at the behest of the United States, have infrequently been mission focused to gain and ultimately possess or control territory.

I assert, however, it is not the fault or necessarily the responsibility of the senior military planner, to address the problems and challenges of conflict termination. Nor should the military planner be tasked with shaping a stalwart peace before, during, and after cessation of combat action. Such culpability falls to the executive office of the land, and the most senior of those close-in advisors.

One must attribute the failure to learn from history, to a varying extent, as the fault of historians who attenuate the significance of military history, for reasons that may be personal, political, or otherwise.

Let us not be challenged or guided by the failures of yesterday! Rather, the effort must be charged by the vigor and support that our soldiers need; political considerations notwithstanding. If our soldiers are to succeed on the battlefield, and in the collective global war on terror, our national will must remain free of eroding influences.

J. David Galland