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Features: By Michael E. O'Hanlon Next time, listen to the generals The post-invasion phase
of the Iraq mission has been the least well-planned American military
mission since Somalia in 1993, if not Lebanon in 1983, and its consequences for the nation have been far worse
than any set of military mistakes since Vietnam. The U.S. armed forces
simply were not prepared for the core task that the United States needed to
perform when it destroyed Iraq’s existing government — to
provide security, always the first responsibility of any sovereign
government or occupier.
The standard explanation for this lack of preparedness
among most defense and foreign policy specialists, and the U.S. military as
well, is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the rest of
the Bush administration insisted on fighting the war with too few troops
and too Polyannaish a view of what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam was
overthrown. This explanation is largely right. Taken to an extreme,
however, it is dangerously wrong. It blames the mistakes of one civilian
leader of the Department of Defense, and one particular administration, for
a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the
field. Under these circumstances, planners and high-ranking officers of the
U.S. armed forces were not fulfilling their responsibilities to the
Constitution or their own brave fighting men and women by quietly and
subserviently deferring to the civilian leadership. Congress might have
been expected to do more as well, but in fact it did a considerable amount
of work to highlight the issue of post-invasion planning — and in any
case, it was not well positioned to critique or improve or even know the
intricacies of war plans. On this issue, the country’s primary hope
for an effective system of checks and balances on the mistakes of executive
branch officials was the U.S. armed forces.
The broad argument of this essay is that the tragedy of
Iraq — that one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern
military history was followed almost immediately by one of the most
incompetently planned occupations — holds a critical lesson for
civil-military relations in the United States. The country’s
Constitution makes the president commander in chief and requires military
leaders to follow his orders. It does not, however, require them to remain
mute when poor plans are being prepared. Nor does it require them to remain
in uniform when they are asked to undertake actions they know to be unwise
or ill-planned.
This argument is not intended to suggest that military
leaders are always right on matters of war simply because they are
professionals in that arena. Often they are wrong. Eliot Cohen’s book
Supreme Command
(Free Press, 2002),
dramatizing several periods in history in which civilian leaders have
usefully challenged their military establishments not just on military
strategy but on operations and tactics, was convincing in its main thesis.
Reportedly the book was read before the Iraq war by President Bush and
received a good hearing elsewhere in the administration as well.
But if military affairs are too important to be left to
the generals, they are also too important for key decisions to be left just
to the civilians. In the ongoing debate over the proper roles of uniformed
personnel and their constitutionally superior civilian bosses in American
national security decisionmaking, it is probably now time for a correction
in favor of an enhanced role for the military voice.
It is of critical importance to the United States that
civilians and military personnel share responsibilities. They must not
pretend that their jobs can be neatly separated into two broad and distinct
bins — high strategy, the primary province of civilians, and military
operations, where the uniformed services possess the nation’s
principal expertise. There are usually no clear red lines separating
strategy from operations. Clausewitz depicted war as a continuation of
policy by other means; Sun Tze wrote that the greatest form of military
victory was the one that required the least battlefield action. What these
observations have in common, from these two great yet very different
military theorists, is a recognition that broad strategy and military
operations are inherently intertwined.
So civilians and military personnel must of necessity
encroach on each other’s policymaking territory. The question of how
wars are conducted affects decisions on whether to fight them, meaning that
civilians must concern themselves with the technical subjects in which the
armed forces specialize. Likewise, the political goals of the
nation’s conflicts — and the political assumptions on which
plans for them are shaped — fundamentally affect the tactics and
operational plans available to the military to prosecute them, meaning that
military planners and commanders must also think about and understand
strategy.
Missing: “Phase iv” in Iraq
Unfortunately, in the Iraq operation, the U.S. defense planning system did not
work. Indeed, it failed badly in planning for the aftermath of
Saddam’s fall from power. The first three phrases of the operation,
including the buildup, initial preparatory actions (largely by covert
teams), and the main air-ground thrust, were impressive. But what is now
commonly called Phase iv was handled so badly that its downsides have now largely
outweighed the virtues of the earlier parts of the operation. In other
words, while it has achieved a worthy goal in the removal of Saddam, on
balance the U.S. operation in Iraq has probably become a sub-par
performance of the U.S. armed forces.
It would be unfair to blame all the troubles in
post-Saddam Iraq on the lack of a proper stabilization plan. Given the
history of Western colonialism in the region and other factors, it was
bound to be difficult for any coalition of Western countries to invade,
occupy, and help rebuild Iraq. Moreover, many of the mistakes made during
the occupation — dissolving and then not attempting to reconstitute
the Iraqi army, taking de-Baathification to an extreme, keeping the
occupation in the hands of Washington and reconstruction contracts in the
hands of supporters of the war, frequently changing plans for elections and
the transfer of sovereignty — cannot be fairly blamed on the military
plan. Rumsfeld may share some responsibility for these mistakes as well,
but war planners generally do not.
Nor was the problem excessive civilian intervention in
the war plan per se. Indeed, Rumsfeld was on solid ground in demanding a
fundamental reassessment of a plan for invading Iraq that, when last
formally approved in the mid-1990s, would have required half a million troops and more than
half a year of preparation.1 Rumsfeld also allowed himself to be talked out of some of
the bad ideas he or others around him may initially have held about how to
win such a war. Notably, the initial hopes among some civilians that a war
plan could be executed with only a few tens of thousands of American troops
were ultimately dashed by a responsible military planning process. By this
standard at least, the invasion force that was ultimately employed was in
fact not small.2 Rumsfeld and, to an even greater degree, Director of Central
Intelligence George Tenet had usefully involved themselves in war planning
in Afghanistan as well.3
The problem was simply this: The war plan was seriously
flawed and incomplete. Invading another country with the intention of
destroying its existing government yet without a serious strategy for
providing security thereafter defies logic and falls short of proper
professional military standards of competence. It was in fact
unconscionable.
Lest there be any doubt about the absence of a plan,
one need only consult the Third Infantry Division’s after-action
report, which reads: “Higher headquarters did not provide the Third
Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase iv. As a result, Third Infantry
Division transitioned into Phase iv in the absence of guidance.” A broader Department of
Defense report on the war similarly observed that “late formation of
Department of Defense [Phase iv] organizations limited time available for the development of
detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination.”4
Why did the Bush administration fail to recognize that
overthrowing Saddam could shatter Iraq’s security institutions and
thus leave responsibility for maintaining civil order in the hands of the
American-led coalition? It is not hard to hypothesize. The explanation
surely includes the administration’s desire to portray the Iraq war
as a relatively easy undertaking in order to assure domestic and
international support, the administration’s disdain for
nation-building, and the Pentagon leadership’s unrealistic hope that
Ahmed Chalabi and the rather small and weak Iraqi National Congress might
somehow assume control of the country after Saddam fell. But it is harder
to understand why the uniformed American military effectively went along
with this set of assumptions.
Many people outside the Pentagon did recognize and
emphasize the centrality of the post-Saddam security mission. Some were at
the State Department, though State’s Future of Iraq Project produced
an extremely long and somewhat unfocused set of papers.5 Other analysts were also
prescient, and much more cogent, in their emphasis on the need to prepare
for peacekeeping and policing tasks. One of the more notable was a study
published in February 2003 by the Army War College. It underscored the importance not only of
providing security but also of taking full advantage of the first few
months of the post-Saddam period when Iraqi goodwill would be at its
greatest.6
These think tank studies and reports did not, of
course, develop precise estimates of how many troops would be needed to
stabilize post-Saddam Iraq or lay out detailed rules of engagement for
restoring security. But General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, provided
Congress some clear advice on the former point when he estimated that
“several hundred thousand” troops might be needed for the
overall operation. And formal planning mechanisms were available for such
purposes, notably the large planning staff at Central Command in Tampa,
Florida, if only they had been properly instructed to develop detailed
plans.
Previous centcom plans for overthrowing Saddam had indeed given attention to
this issue. They were not perfect. Throughout much of the 1990s they relied on a
brute-force approach to seizing Iraq that had its own downside, such as the
likelihood that surprise would be totally sacrificed during a lengthy
buildup period. And a major revision of the war plan begun late in the
decade by General Tony Zinni may not have ever been completed.7 But they laid a
groundwork that could have been built upon in the year leading up to the
March 2003 invasion.
Instead, they were effectively discarded. According to General Tommy
Franks, while planners spent many hours in discussions about Phase iv, and while Franks himself
always cautioned that this stage of the operation could take years, it was
ultimately assumed that much of the regular Iraqi army would survive and be
available to play a large role in keeping postwar order.8
Recent American experience in the Balkans provided
modern-day experience with the challenges of post-conflict stabilization
missions, making naïvete about their typical nature an unacceptable
excuse. To be fair, it should be noted that many aspects of the Balkan
peace plans and ensuing stabilization and reconstruction effort could be
developed sequentially — after battlefield victories were achieved in
the more classic sense. That is because there were still cohesive, if
battered, indigenous security forces in place in Bosnia and Kosovo,
allowing for something akin to a classic surrender and transfer of
responsibility. Power vacuums did not result as they did in Iraq. In Haiti,
a robust stabilization plan was lacking as well.9 However, these
examples are no excuse for the poor planning for the Iraq operation. For
one thing, much had been learned from these experiences that should have
been applicable to Iraq. For another, a power vacuum should have been
foreseeable in Iraq. Even if the invasion plan was designed to “cut
off the head of the snake” and leave much of the rest of Iraqi
security institutions unscathed, there was no prudent way to assume that
this goal would be neatly achieved. Military force is a blunt instrument of
policy; the hope that it can be surgically precise is usually wrong and
always dangerous.
Many basic tasks that should have been seen as
necessary in Iraq — policing the streets, guarding huge weapons
depots, protecting key infrastructure, maintaining public order —
were simply not planned for.10 Instead, such planning as there was, conducted largely out
of the office of Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was reportedly
unfocused, shallow, and too dependent on optimistic scenarios that saw
Ahmed Chalabi (or perhaps some of Saddam’s more moderate generals)
taking charge without the need for a strong U.S. role in the stabilization
mission. Even as it became apparent that the initial assumptions were
wrong, the Pentagon was unresponsive. The initial post-invasion chaos was
famously attributed by Donald Rumsfeld to the fact that
“freedom’s untidy.” In fact, only the U.S.-led coalition
military forces were in a position to stabilize the anarchic conditions.11
Admittedly, many of the critical tasks involved in
stabilizing Iraq had more of a State Department flavor to them than a
military one — getting reconstruction going quickly, employing
unemployed Iraqis, figuring out a proper de-Baathification strategy,
determining a process to select new Iraqi leadership. So again, military
planners do not deserve principal criticism for the shortcomings here. In
his recent book, General Franks is thus on reasonable ground in saying he
wished that Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell had forced their
respective departments to work better together, since the Pentagon needed
the State Department’s help. But uniformed planners knew the command
arrangements and were aware of the relative marginalization of the State
Department in the process. They also knew how important it was that someone have responsibility for
these types of political and economic tasks. In that sense, they were too
willing to be quiet in the hope that somehow the problem would sort itself
out.12
How much did it really matter that the coalition got
off to a poor start in securing post-Saddam Iraq, allowing chaos to reign
in much of the country for weeks before fully responding? In fairness, we
cannot know for sure. In a country rife with weapons and still plagued by
the continued presence of thousands of Baathists from Saddam’s
various elite security forces who had melted into the population rather
than fight hard against the invading coalition, violent resistance was
likely. Porous borders and foreign fighters exacerbated the situation.
There are, however, several powerful counterarguments
to the claim that post-Saddam Iraq was destined to be chaotic. First,
porous borders and large unprotected weapons caches were to a large extent
preventable. A more complete “Phase iv” operational blueprint would have done much to secure
them through better planning and, quite probably, more troops. As the head
of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Ambassador Paul Bremer, later
argued, “The single most important change . . . would have been
having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout.” Bremer
claimed to have “raised this issue a number of times with our
government” but to have been overruled.13
Second, although violent resistance from hard-core
Baathists and jihadists was perhaps inevitable, the willingness of Iraqi
“fence-sitters” to take up arms against the coalition out of
frustration appears to have increased over time. Indeed, while estimates of
the strength of insurgencies are never reliable, it is nonetheless striking
that the Iraq resistance was estimated to number only 5,000 hardened fighters in mid-late 2003 but later thought by some
U.S. officials to approach 20,000 in size by mid-2004. Wasting those precious first weeks and months gave this
third group — the fence-sitters — a perceived rationale to take
up violence too.14 It created a dynamic in Iraq in which high levels of street crime
combined with the growing insurgency increased the population’s
insecurities, which then also impeded economic recovery activities. With
the security environment and the economy both stagnant, dissatisfaction
grew, and the resistance thus had more potential recruits to draw upon.15
Finally, opinion polls in the occupation’s early
months showed a general happiness among Iraqis that Saddam was gone. That
translated into a certain goodwill towards occupation forces, or at least a
willingness to tolerate their presence as a necessary means of ensuring
stability.16 Wasting this moment of Iraqi cooperation was to lose
something that could never be recovered thereafter. This was not just a
matter of winning a popularity contest. The general population’s
willingness to provide intelligence on the resistance, always a key
ingredient in any successful counterinsurgency, is also always a function
of the perceived risks of doing so. Citizens are more likely to provide
information when convinced it will help defeat an insurgency; they are less
likely to take such risky steps if they see the tide of battle favoring the
rebels. If a major effort had been made to nip the resistance in the bud,
that effort could have developed self-perpetuating momentum.
None of these arguments is conclusive, but, especially
when taken together, they are highly suggestive: Establishing early
momentum would have made a huge difference in the subsequent course of the
coalition’s counterinsurgency operation.
Entering into this conflict without a readiness to
quickly restore order in post-Saddam Iraq was the military equivalent of
going into open heart surgery without extra units of blood on hand just
because the head surgeon insisted that he had devised a new procedure that
would make such precautions unnecessary. One might say to the surgeon,
perhaps your new technique is good and worth employing, but why should we
be so confident about an untried method that we throw caution to the wind?
Why not prepare for the possibility of perfectly foreseeable complications,
even if we hope that the new method will make such precautions unnecessary?
The same sort of question should have been posed in regard to the Iraq
invasion. Whatever forces were on hand should have been fully prepared for
the mission of keeping order once the Baathists were defeated, with proper
pre-war training and proper planning that was then conveyed to officers on
the ground.
Whose responsibility?
The mistake here was primarily of the Bush administration’s making.
Indeed, much of the prevalent view within the uniformed military is that
the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Cheney vision of modern warfare, as well as their
strong preconceptions about how easy it would be to depose Saddam, deserve
the blame for centcom’s lack of readiness to handle the challenges that began to
present themselves in Iraq on April 9, 2003 when Saddam’s statue fell in Baghdad. This
perspective is mostly right. It is also too simple.
The uniformed military in fact shares some of the blame
for the mistakes made in planning the Iraq stabilization mission. That is
partly because General Tommy Franks in the end was the author of the plan.
Even if he was under pressure from Secretary Rumsfeld to produce a certain
concept, he had every opportunity to voice his objections. It is also
because the joint chiefs of staff, with the apparent exception of Army
Chief of Staff Shinseki, reportedly blessed the plan as well. It is also
because no member of the armed forces of the United States went public with
his objections or resigned in protest even though the plan was the military
equivalent of medical malpractice.
The U.S. military’s overall performance in the
Iraq mission has been impressive, courageous, and admirable. Only a very
small fraction of military officers had the opportunity to understand and
object to the shortcomings in the war plan; only they can be even partially
blamed. Unfortunately, their willingness to turn a blind eye to a badly
constructed Phase iv plan
is costing the country — and most of all their own comrades in arms,
who are still fighting and dying in Iraq — very dearly. Whether or
not it was an understandable mistake, it is one we must collectively strive
to learn from now so that we can avoid similar mistakes with comparably
tragic consequences in the future.
Who in the military officer corps should have done a
better job? Primary responsibility must lie with General Tommy Franks and
those elements of the joint chiefs of staff who blessed the warfighting
concept. They gave their professional imprimatur to a military strategy
that was innovative and solid for the invasion phase of the war yet
negligently incomplete for the aftermath.
Second, those officers who did limited planning for the
post-Saddam phase of operations at centcom should have realized that their efforts were not receiving
proper emphasis, support, or visibility. In the end, their efforts were not
successful. centcom did
not have an overall framework for ensuring at least a modicum of security
throughout most of the country that was conveyed to forces on the ground in
advance. As a result, most division commanders had not worked out concepts
of operations for the period after the Baathist regime fell. Their key
officers had to resort to improvisation in whatever localities they found
themselves; lower-ranking individual unit officers had no idea what was
expected of them. Hospitals were looted, major buildings destroyed, shops
ransacked, and chaos allowed to reign as American soldiers stood by. Iraq
quickly became one of the most violent places on earth — not so much
in terms of the ongoing resistance, which while brutal was limited in scale
(especially at first), but particularly in the growing prevalence of street
crime throughout the country.
What should the military have done differently? For one
thing, it could have carried out detailed planning for the stabilization
phase of the operation informally at centcom even without explicit civilian permission. To avoid
direct confrontation with Rumsfeld, it could have been viewed not as
development of a formal plan but as backup analysis.
But that would probably not have been enough here.
Leaks to the media would therefore also have been justified under the
circumstances. Leaks are used on many matters of defense policy, sometimes
for reasons no better than to embarrass political opponents. The uniformed
military has itself leaked information about the readiness rates of
individual divisions (data that are supposedly classified), about its unmet
funding needs for weapon x or weapon y,
and about other such issues, so it is hard to believe that the uniformed
military is against such unauthorized releases of information as a matter
of principle. In this case, the leaks would have been designed to improve
the country’s war plans and core security interests and to help save
the lives of its troops — certainly worthwhile objectives by
comparison with the more frequent usages of leaks.
Finally, some military personnel probably should have
resigned. If my charges are right that the willful neglect of planning for
the post-invasion phase of the conflict amounted to professional
malpractice, it was unprofessional and unconscionable for the uniformed
military to stand by while such a plan was finalized and put into effect.
This measure would have been extreme for the people resorting to it,
requiring enormous individual sacrifice, but it would have been less costly
than seeing so many lives lost, at least some of them needlessly and as a
result of poor policy, since the invasion. And it would hardly have been
unconstitutional or un-American. Military personnel cannot legally and
constitutionally disobey orders while in uniform. That does not mean,
however, that they must remain in uniform when asked to do things that
violate either their ethics or their sense of proper professional conduct.
Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn have made a powerful
argument against resignations by military officers, which as they point out
can become tantamount to mutiny if done widely at a given moment in time.
Feaver and Kohn have an especially convincing case in regard to officers in
the field of operations. But when a relatively small group of military
personnel, in this case centcom planners for the post-Saddam mission in Iraq or any others
with particular insight into preparations for that period, are witness to
neglectful and irresponsible preparation, the situation is different. Under
extreme circumstances, their response should be too.17
It is also worth remembering that military officers do
not serve just the civilians of the executive branch in their advisory
capacities. Of course, they do owe loyalty to that branch, and in
particular the chain of command going from the secretary of defense to the
president, on matters of war and in response to direct orders. But they
also owe the Congress and the country their best advice. When General
Shinseki offered the Congress his estimate that several hundred thousand
troops could be needed to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, he may or may not
have been substantively correct (and Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary
Wolfowitz were within their rights to publicly debate the facts of the
matter with Shinseki in the ensuing days). But he was categorically in the
legal and political right to offer the Congress his unvarnished counsel.
Other crises
If there is still any doubt about whether military officers should
be shy about entering into national debates on matters of strategy and the
use of force, a quick review of two other crises may help solidify the
point.
First, consider nato’s 1999 war against Kosovo. General Wesley Clark, who contributed to the
prevalent but incorrect U.S. belief that Slobodan Milosevic would be easy
to intimidate through a few days of light bombing, subsequently got it
right. Realizing that nato had to prevail in the conflict and that his own civilian superiors
allowed for no other possibility in their public utterances, he therefore
had his staff examine options for escalation up to and including a possible
ground war. He also sought to discuss the ideas with the White House and
the Congress. Livid with Clark’s unsanctioned planning activities and
his willingness to share his military advice with others, Secretary of
Defense William Cohen fought Clark at every bureaucratic turn and
ultimately relieved him of command early. But Clark was right, putting the
nation’s need to win its wars ahead of standard decorum. If the
Clinton administration did not want to hear about ways to ensure that the
war could be reliably won, that was its mistake, and Clark was correct not
to accommodate that mistake. After all, he never questioned any command
given to him; he simply did his homework to develop backup military
strategies to serve the Clinton administration’s own stated and
unflinching goal of winning the war.18 To give the uniformed military too much credit here would be
a mistake; most of the joint chiefs reportedly fought the idea of
escalation (and perhaps of any intervention in the Kosovo crisis in the
first place) and may even have leaked their views to newspapers. But all
the more reason why Clark was right to voice his opinions.19
In 1993, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General
Colin Powell objected to the casual talk he was hearing about using
military force in unspecified ways for unspecified battlefield objectives
in the Bosnian war. The Clinton administration came into office rightly
convinced, in my eyes, that the first Bush administration was too callous
in its views of the Bosnia conflict. Secretary of State Jim Baker’s
statement that “we don’t have a dog in this fight” was
morally wrong and strategically mistaken, and any military officer who
categorically took this position, resisting proper planning or discussion
of any and all military options as a result, was going too far, even to the
brink of insubordination — as Admiral Leighton (Snuffy) Smith
reportedly did.20
But Powell’s position was different and more
defensible. He recognized that the Clinton administration, still searching
for its national security sea legs in its first year or two in office, was
more intent on “doing something” than on developing a serious
plan for intervention that had a good chance of succeeding, and after
Vietnam and Lebanon he was opposed to using the American armed forces in
such a militarily vague way. Soldiers’ lives and the country’s
security interests were at stake.
Powell was right to voice his objections clearly and in
a way that became public. He was not straying into strictly civilian
territory; he was not disobeying orders; he was not violating proper
civil-military relations. Nor was he even opposing the use of force for
limited purposes, even though his famous “Powell Doctrine” is
often misinterpreted as arguing against such endeavors. Before the Powell
Doctrine was famous, Powell underscored that, as Clausewitz argued, all
wars are limited and that many limited uses of force are appropriate and
successful.21
Rather, Powell was addressing a subject in which
military tactical considerations were of critical importance for reaching
an initial strategic judgment on whether to intervene or not in the first
place. Perhaps there was a reasonable way to intervene early in the Bosnian
civil war, but all Powell did, rightly, was to point out that he had never
heard a convincing proposal. Had he resisted helping the Clinton
administration explore such proposals, he would have been wrong; had he
actually disobeyed orders, he would have been insubordinate. But he did
neither.
On a final note, and a somewhat different matter, some
have criticized the increased foreign policy role of the U.S.
military’s regional combatant commanders during the 1990s.22 Indeed, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld appears to have been one of the critics, as he objected to
their previous title of regional “cinc” or commander in chief, given that the trappings of
that term are usually reserved for the president. But critics have often
been unclear as to whether the cincs did too much or whether the State Department and other
instruments of American foreign policy had atrophied to the point where
they did too little. Since these cincs were never accused of insubordination and never accorded
the right to make American foreign policy, the claim that they had somehow
usurped civilian authority is hard to sustain. Moreover, the argument of
former Secretary of Defense William Perry that military-to-military
exchanges and cooperation in operations such as the Bosnia peacekeeping
mission were good for U.S. relations with countries such as Russia is
rather convincing.23 On balance, while the critics were right to question why the
cincs had often
become so much more effective than other parts of the U.S. government, they
went too far in suggesting that the cincs and their associated commands were too powerful in any
absolute sense.
So in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, Powell was right, and
Clark was right, and the cincs were effective instruments of American foreign policy. They were
prepared to challenge their civilian superiors — not on direct
orders, but in ongoing policy debates where the civilian authorities would
have preferred silence but had no political or legal right to insist on it.
Alas, the uniformed military did not do as well in recent times. Had
General Franks or General Myers acted similarly when the Iraq war plan was
devised, the country would have been better served.
1 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), 8, 37 2 Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (CSIS, 2003), 149-165. 3 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (Simon and Schuster, 2002), 201-251. 4 David Rieff, “Who Botched the Occupation?” New York Times Magazine (November 2, 2003). 5 Michael Elliott, “So, What Went Wrong?” Time, October 6, 2003, pp. 34-37. 6 See Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (Army War College, February 2003); see also Edward P. Djerejian, Frank G. Wisner, Rachel Bronson, and Andrew S. Weiss, Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq (Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2003), 5-6, and Ray Salvatore Jennings, “After Saddam Hussein: Winning a Peace If It Comes to War,” U.S. Institute of Peace Special Report 102 (U.S. Institute of Peace, February 2003). 7 See Tom Clancy with General Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, Battle Ready (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004), 18-22. 8 “[O]ur planning assumption was that we would guide the Iraqi interim government in building a military and a paramilitary security force drawn from the better units of the defeated regular army. These units would serve side-by-side with Coalition forces to restore order and prevent clashes among the religious and ethnic factions . . . .” Tommy Franks, American Soldier (HarperCollins, 2004), 419. 9 See for example, James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (RAND, 2003), 71-128. 10 For more, see Cordesman, The Iraq War, 493-508. 11 George Packer, “War After the War: What Washington Doesn’t See in Iraq,” New Yorker (November 24, 2003). 12 Franks, American Soldier, 424, 544. 13 CNN, “Bremer: More Troops Were Needed After Saddam’s Ouster” (October 5, 2004), available at www.cnn.com. 14 Jim Krane, “U.S. Officials: Iraq Insurgency Bigger,” Philadelphia Inquirer (July 9, 2004). 15 For trends in Iraq in this period, see then Brookings Institution’s Iraq index at www.brookings.edu/iraqindex. 16 See Iraq index at www.brookings.edu/iraqindex. 17 Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, “Conclusion: The Gap and What It Means for American National Security,” in Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (MIT Press, 2001), 468-469. 18 See Dana Priest, The Mission (W. W. Norton and Co., 2003), 249-250, and Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Brookings, 2000). 19 Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Harvard University Press, 2003), 279. 20 David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (Scribner, 2001), 349. 21 Colin L. Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 72:5 (Winter 1992/1993). 22 The classic book on this, and a very valuable and insightful book indeed, is by Dana Priest, The Mission. 23 See Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Brookings, 1999). |
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