First, they found the "shock and awe" air attacks against the enemy leadership were a joke. They didn't succeed in "decapitating, isolating or breaking the will" of anyone. They said that Rumsfeld relied almost completely on air attacks to achieve a quick victory can't work without imposing unacceptable civilian casualties.
The study cautioned the Pentagon about the Rumsfeld doctrine that calls for a shift in the Army to a family of lightly armored fighting vehicles heavily reliant on networked systems of intelligence information. It seems that information has limited to commanders outside of the field of battle. The lower level commanders need the wide-band satellite communications to access the information and trained personnel to interpret the images to achieve a fast-moving tank column.
Not surprisingly, the Rand study sharply criticized the Pentagon for failure to plan in detail for postwar stabilization and reconstruction "given the expectations that the Iraqi government would remain largely intact, the Iraqi people would welcome the American presence, and local militia, police and the regular (Iraqi) army would be capable of providing law and order." They simply hadn't done their intelligence preparation with any sense of professionalism.
They recommend that in future conflicts the military and civilian resources needed to secure the peace and launch reconstruction be given primary focus and priority in resources. They also recommended that the State Department, not the DOD have the responsibility for planning the peace. They faulted DOD with "high-level micro-management, delay and disruption." They criticized the Rumsfeld effort as undermanned and inadequately trained to face the task of winning the peace.
Finally, "Iraq underscores ... the overwhelming organizational tendency within the U.S. military not to absorb historical lessons when planning and conducting counterinsurgency operations." They faulted the President and those closest to him for operating a closed decision-making process lacking the means to expose "senior officials to possibilities other than those being assumed in their planning."
David Ignatius in The Daily Star finds amazing parallels between Iraq and our own experience in our Civil War. Indeed, it's one of those lessons that Rand spoke of that the Pentagon just can't keep track of from the history books. He points out that the Union was not prepared for a strong insurgency with deep pocketted landowners supporting them. They had inadequate troops and training for the job.
There were multiple militias with differing motives including simple criminality. The landed leaders managed to convince the poor whites that poor blacks were their enemy.
Then the North gave up, withdrew, and chaos, racism and backward economies continues for nearly a century.
What lessons does this dismal history convey for American forces in Iraq? First, what you do immediately after the end of hostilities is crucial, and mistakes made then may be impossible to undo. Don't attempt a wholesale transformation of another society unless you have the troops and political will to impose it. Above all, don't let racial or religious hatred destroy democratic political institutions as in the post-bellum South. Giving up on Reconstruction spawned a social and economic disaster that lasted nearly a century. That's a history nobody should want to repeat, least of all the Iraqi insurgents.
The consequences of a similar outcome in Iraq involves much more than the future of Iraq, it involves the future security of the world. Iran is stronger and he has guarenteed a new generation of jihadis with battle training and experienced leadership. Thank you George Bush and the Neocons for making the whole situation a lot worse.
Thanks to Juan Cole for the links.
Rand Report | Lessons from the Civil War
Lessons from Iraq: Rand offers War 101 textbook
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - It isn't all that often that a think tank dependent on government contracts dares tell the emperor that he is naked, and that makes a recent Rand Corp. report to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on lessons learned in Iraq all the more remarkable.
The Rand report puts the finger on what went wrong there and makes "a case for change, and even urgency" in fixing those problems in a brief and frank distillation of what its researchers found in more than 20 studies focused on the Iraq invasion and what has followed.
Rand, although independent now, was originally formed by the U.S. government and is often hired by the Pentagon to conduct major research on military operations.
The Rand researchers found that the "shock and awe" air attacks against the enemy leadership did not achieve the advertised objectives of "decapitating, isolating or breaking the will" of that leadership. They added that future operations should not be predicated on expectations of fast regime collapse through air attacks because of a host of limitations, some self-imposed to avoid civilian casualties.
The study also cautioned the Pentagon to move very carefully as it shifts the Army to a family of lightly armored fighting vehicles heavily reliant on networked systems of intelligence information until such time as those fighting the war at lower levels have the wide-band satellite communications to access the information and trained personnel to interpret the images of what's waiting up ahead for a fast-moving tank column.
Rand said that division commanders and above were well served by the increased situational awareness provided by aerial sensor aircraft and satellite coverage in Iraq, but lower-level commanders actually fighting the battles didn't get the specific intelligence needed in time to make use of it.
Again putting a finger on a major problem, the Rand study sharply criticized the Pentagon for failure to plan in detail for postwar stabilization and reconstruction "largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult."
In fact, the study said, it is highly likely that in future operations the United States and its allies will quickly defeat outmatched opponents but then spend "months or years winning the peace." The Rand researchers recommend that the planning process for future interventions be stood on its head and the military and civilian resources needed to secure the peace and launch reconstruction be given primary focus and priority in resources.
The Rand study added, with understatement, "Some process for exposing senior officials to possibilities other than those being assumed in their planning also needs to be introduced."
In a separate section the report criticized National Security Council and Department of Defense coordination for Iraq operations. It said the NSC focused on military operations and humanitarian aid, while postwar planning was handed to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, and this approach "worked poorly."
The study recommended that in the future "such responsibility (for post-war reconstruction) reside with a senior State Department official who would be appointed as a special presidential envoy."
The report said that no one bothered to provide for the security of the Iraqi people after Baghdad fell "given the expectations that the Iraqi government would remain largely intact, the Iraqi people would welcome the American presence, and local militia, police and the regular (Iraqi) army would be capable of providing law and order."
In fact the burden of handling law and order in Iraq fell, by default, to U.S. and coalition military forces who were ill-prepared and unavailable in the numbers required to secure so unruly a nation and people.
The Rand researchers said in the future the U.S. military cannot assume that someone else will take that responsibility - and American soldiers need to be trained and prepared to handle law-and-order missions as soon as they have toppled the enemy regime.
The report added that "Iraq underscores ... the overwhelming organizational tendency within the U.S. military not to absorb historical lessons when planning and conducting counterinsurgency operations."
It recommended that in the future American forces assigned to this duty should be composed of troops with training and skills similar to special operations forces - people who know the language and culture of the country and the vital importance of political, economic, intelligence, organizational and psychological dimensions in defeating an insurgency.
The researchers also raised questions about the assignment of special operations forces in Iraq primarily to the mission of chasing down "high-value targets" when their expertise also includes training local forces so critical to a successful counter-insurgency operation. That skill was not used in Iraq.
At the very end, the 10-page Rand report even made cautious note of the confusion and failings of the sensitive process of sending active-duty and reserve troops overseas "led to high-level micro-management, delay and disruption."
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at jgalloway@krwashington.com
© 2005 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star
Thursday, May 05, 2005
What the American Civil War can inform us about Iraq
By David Ignatius
Daily Star staff
The most famous battlefield of the American Civil War might seem an unlikely place to look for lessons about Iraq. But as historian James McPherson led a group of Pentagon officials in a discussion of postwar reconstruction, some startling common themes emerged.
Pentagon officials gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last weekend for a conference on "Transition from Crisis." The meeting was organized by the Highlands Forum, a discussion group sponsored by the defense secretary and the Pentagon's research arm, DARPA. Usually, the group's meetings focus on the military implications of new technologies, such as nanotechnology or computer networking robotics. But this session was about how to rebuild societies, rather than defeat them militarily. It was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous "Pottery Barn Rule," revisited: You broke it, and now you own it. So how do you put it back together?
To prepare for the discussion, McPherson guided the army generals and Pentagon civilians along the rocky slope of Little Round Top to where the 20th Maine volunteers launched the mad bayonet charge that saved the Union army's flank, and then to the open field where Confederate General George Pickett made his disastrous charge against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. After walking the battlefield, McPherson and the group explored what had happened when the war ended - and the intriguing parallels between postwar Iraq and the postwar American South.
The Civil War, like the invasion of Iraq, was a war of transformation where the victors hoped to reshape the political culture of the vanquished. But as McPherson tells the story, reconstruction posed severe and unexpected tests: The occupying Union army was harassed by an insurgency that fused die-hard remnants of the old plantation power structure with irregular guerrillas. The Union was as unprepared for this struggle as was the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003. The army of occupation was too small, and its local allies were often corrupt and disorganized.
Reconstruction suffered partly because of a mismatch between a transformational strategy and haphazard tactics. Northern radicals like Representative Thaddeus Stevens wanted to break the old slaveholding aristocracy and remake the South into a version of New England, with former slaves and poor whites dividing up the plantations. But only weeks after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson was moving to protect the privileges of the old regime. Even after Johnson was impeached, the Union balked at enforcing the tough land-reform strategy evoked by the slogan "Forty Acres and a Mule."
For a time, it still seemed that reconstruction might work. "In 1870, things looked pretty good - if not rosy, at least optimistic," says McPherson, who won a Pulitzer for his 1988 narrative, "Battle Cry of Freedom." A black man was serving in the U.S. Senate and Northerners were investing in what they believed would be a new South.
But the insurgency was potent and took more than 1,000 lives. Along with the Ku Klux Klan, there were underground groups such as "The White Brotherhood" and "The Knights of the White Camellia," determined to preserve the old regime's power. White insurgents staged bloody riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The rebels also drew support from the remnants of irregular Confederate units such as Quantrill's Raiders, which spawned the outlaws Frank and Jesse James. "It was a matrix of lawlessness," says Oregon law professor Garrett Epps, who chronicles the period in a forthcoming book, "Second Founding."
The poison that destroyed Reconstruction was racial hatred. The white elite managed to convince poor whites that newly freed blacks were their enemies, rather than potential allies. There's an obvious analogy to the Sunni-Shiite divide that has poisoned postwar Iraq. In the South, the die-hard whites began to believe that if they held tough, the North would eventually abandon the campaign to create a new, multiracial South. And it turned out they were right.
By 1877, says McPherson, the North essentially gave up. Demoralized by the economic depression of 1873, Northern investors pulled back from projects in the South and turned their attention to the West. The troops occupying the South were withdrawn. White Southerners, defeated in war, had won the peace. The South slipped into more than 80 years of racism, isolation and economic backwardness.
What lessons does this dismal history convey for American forces in Iraq? First, what you do immediately after the end of hostilities is crucial, and mistakes made then may be impossible to undo. Don't attempt a wholesale transformation of another society unless you have the troops and political will to impose it. Above all, don't let racial or religious hatred destroy democratic political institutions as in the post-bellum South. Giving up on Reconstruction spawned a social and economic disaster that lasted nearly a century. That's a history nobody should want to repeat, least of all the Iraqi insurgents.
Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.
Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star
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