Fiasco

WaPos Thom Ricks new book Fiasco hits the usual suspects (Rumsfeld, Bremer) in his scathing review of US occupation of Iraq. But he also lays plenty of (deserving?) blame on the professional military, particularly the Army.

As one Army officer (and Georgetown SSP grad) noted to me, this is the beginning of finger pointing at and within the Army about what went wrong.

There is no doubt that failures OIF Phase IV go well beyond the mistakes of the Bush/Rumsfeld civilian leadership. Despite all the Army learned in Vietnam about counter-insurgency (COIN), the primary lesson the Army took was “we don’t do small wars.” And so it stopped training in them and thinking about them. This approach continued even in the wake of Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The primary Army delusion (endorsed by the Clinton Administration by the way), was that the big war was the tougher mission so if you prepared for that, you could handle the low intensity mission.

That mistake was sorely exposed in Iraq.



But it is encouraging how far the Army has come in recognizing its own shortcomings and the need to transform to meet the new environment.

The post-Vietnam delusion that the US Army could avoid messy low intensity guerrilla wars has finally been discarded and the Army is addressing its shortcomings in bold ways. You have to give credit for this to Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomacher and the SOF mindset he brought to the Army. Schoomacher also ensured that the key intellectual and training centers of the Army were led by the more innovative senior officers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Gen Wallace in TRADOC, GEN Petraeus at the Combined Arms Center or BG Cone at the National Training Center. The results have been the most transformational shift in the military in the Rumsfeld era (ironic given RumsfeldÂ’s promotion of the concept with no regard for the low intensity environment).

Schoomacher created a series of task forces to examine stability and reconstruction operations and the irregular challenges of these environments. He tasked these groups to come up with actionable recommendations on how to build Army capability in STABOPS and COIN. The recommendations were not shy, with a controversial consensus forming that the Army needed to dramatically alter training and education to put greater focus on cultural awareness, language, public affairs/psyops, and civil affairs in addition to existing military skills. In addition the recommendations suggested that the Army develop the capability to conduct all aspects of stability operations for an initial period including traditional civilian missions such as reconstruction, economic assistance, humanitarian aid, and civil society building.

Is the Army better at SARO/COIN than they were only a couple years ago? Most definitely. Part of it is the new initiatives by Schoomacher. Part of it is the effect of multiple tours in SW Asia by most officers. Of course the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting tougher too.

Key questions ahead: How do we distill the complexity of the irregular environment into digestible training programs for field commanders and soldiers? Getting smart at the headquarters and school houses isn't enough. We need to figure out how to effectively train it at the unit level. Should SARO/COIN be a dominant part of US Army training for years in the future or should we return to a focus on conventional major combat operations? Are Iraq and Afghanistan models for future warfare or anomalies?