Army's History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon

[astro]

Interesting new report by the Military. It does give me some renewed faith in the US Military that we can be self critical about our failures with an eye toward improving in the future.

The study, “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign,” is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq’s decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army’s Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.

“The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began,” write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect.”

[Tamerlane]

Broadly speaking even the military, as tightly structured as it is compared to civilian institutions, is not a monolith. I’d take with a grain of salt any analysis from a currently serving field officer or spokesperson for such, simply because the nature of their position requires a certain amount of politicking. Not saying they are automatically lieing of course - just that being fully candid is not their job, nor even always necessarily appropriate in an absolute sense.

However military analysts/historians removed from that milieu ( especially temporally ) have a lot less to gain by whitewashing mistakes. It still happens, but a lot of officers trained as historians realize just how self-defeating that can be. You gotta learn from your fuck-ups - the days when superior elan alone would carry an army to victory are long past ( if they ever existed at all ).