Abstract: Last summer, in response to a directive from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, the Joint Staff issued a short summary of lessons learned from the past decade of military operations. The document, entitled Decade ofWar, Volume 1 frankly and cogently acknowledges mistakes made over this period, and particularly during the first half of the decade, that is to say between the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and the surge of troops into Iraq in early 2007. Among the admitted deficiencies were the failure to adequately grasp the operating environment, a reliance on conventional tactics to fight unconventional enemies, an inability to articulate a convincing public narrative, and poor interagency coordination. The document is testimony to the capacity of the American military for self-criticism and eventual correction, albeit not always in time to avoid costly setbacks.This Joint Staff critique nevertheless fails to address two of the most serious errors of that first half-decade. The most glaring mistake was the decision to attack Iraq on the basis of an erroneous intelligence assessment. Surely there can be few greater failings than to invade a country by mistake. Blame for this failure has fallen principally on Central Intelligence Agency and its then Director, George Tenet. Yet among the multiple American intelligence agencies, several of the most important of which are lodged in the Defense Department and headed by serving military officers, only the tiny intelligence bureau of the State Department demurred from the judgments that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and indeed actual such weapons, neither of which turned out to be true.The second major point on which Decade of War is silent is any judgment regarding the level of forces originally committed to the post-conflict stabilization of Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq. The document acknowledges that the planning for this phase of both operations was inadequate, but it makes no mention of the most serious effect of that flaw, which was the failure to deploy forces numerous enough for the purpose in either country. As with the flawed assessment of Iraqi WMD, the Bush administrations civilian leaders were ultimately responsible for this error as well. Some senior officers, most notably then Army Chief of Staff Erik Shinseki, argued for a larger occupation force, but his was a rather isolated voice within the country's top military leadership.This second omission maybe the more consequential than the first, since it represents not simply a glossing over of a now widely acknowledged failure, but rather reflects a continued inability to come to closure on a still controversial issue. No one contests that American intelligence estimates on Iraq were flawed. As a result, measures have been put into effect to reduce the prospect of any repetition. By contrast, there is continued debate between those who argue that the United States put too few troops into Afghanistan and Iraq in the immediate aftermath of conventional conflict, and those who argue that it put in too many.By 2011 United States had ten times more soldiers in Afghanistan than it had in the year after its entry. In Iraq American commanders actually began to reduce the number of troops as soon as Baghdad fell. That decision was reversed as an insurgency developed, but the American troop presence in Iraq only reached its peak of 160,000 in late 2007, four years after the emergence of a violent resistance movement. In both countries, local insurgencies were thus given abundant space and time to recruit, organize, and intimidate the population, leaving the United States to belatedly reinforce its military presence only under threat of strategic defeat.Decade of War acknowledges those early military setbacks, but blames them solely on insufficient situational awareness, inappropriate tactics, poor public communications and inadequate interagency coordination. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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