Some Inconvenient Truths, Conveniently Locked in a Safe
One of the great strengths of the American Army that was reborn in the wake of the disastrous Vietnam War has been a rigorous After-Action Review and Lessons Learned process that’s conducted after field training exercises and battlefield combat.
Not even two- and three-star generals are exempt from standing up and acknowledging their failures in the Army’s Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), where brigade, division and corps command groups test their skills at planning and conducting major operations in computer war games. A wily opposition force (OpFor) staff does its best to make life miserable for those being tested, much as a real enemy would on the battlefield.
If a general overlooks one or two of his mistakes, an OpFor colonel follows him to the stage and points them out for him.
This program, which began in the late 1980’s, has expanded to help prepare Army National Guard commanders and their staffs for what awaits them in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Foreign military observers have been astounded by a process that requires someone wearing stars on his shoulders to criticize himself in front of an audience of lower-ranking officers and sergeants.
So it should come as no surprise that not long after Baghdad fell early in 2003, the Army’s top commanders commissioned an After-Action Review of the planning and conduct of the invasion of Iraq and the post-war occupation and reconstruction effort. The Army hired the RAND Corp., a California-based research organization that’s done this kind of work for the U.S. military and government for decades.
The study was envisioned as a seven-volume examination of the Army’s role in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
What is a surprise is that nearly three years later, RAND’s warts-and-all report on post-war reconstruction, which was completed after 18 months and presented to the Army in the summer of 2005, is still locked in Pentagon vaults.
RAND normally prepares a classified version of such reports for internal use by the Army’s commanders and a public version that covers the high points of what was found and what was recommended for the media and academic researchers.
Both versions of the volume of the report titled “Rebuilding Iraq” are locked in the same vault, where they can do no good in educating officers or the American public to the realities that led to a near-catastrophic failure by both the military and civilians to plan for what would happen after we’d toppled Saddam Hussein’s government and assumed control of a fractured, feuding nation of 25 million people.
The trouble, it seems, was that RAND’s team of more than 50 civilian and military researchers followed the trail of the failure from the Army’s part of the Pentagon to former Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld’s offices and on to the White House and State Department and elsewhere in the Bush administration.
The New York Times got its hands on a draft copy of the report and says that the RAND Corp. researchers found problems with virtually every organization involved in planning the war _ not exactly a surprise to anyone who’s read the newspaper articles and books published on a war that’s about to enter its sixth year with no end in sight.
The study blamed President Bush and, by implication, his national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, for failing to resolve differences between rival agencies, i.e. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Colin Powell’s State Department.
Rumsfeld demanded and got sole authority for the Defense Department to oversee post-war operations in Iraq, despite what the report called the military’s “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”
Powell’s State Department produced a huge study on post-war governance and reconstruction that Rumsfeld’s people ignored even though they did no planning of their own. RAND found that State’s effort was of “uneven quality” and wasn’t “an actionable plan.”
RAND said that now-retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of the Central Command was in charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what was necessary to secure Iraq after Baghdad fell and assumed that U.S. civilian administrators would handle reconstruction.
At the heart of the costly failure to plan for a lengthy occupation of Iraq was an assumption by Rumsfeld and the White House that we could begin withdrawing American troops by the early summer of 2003 and so there’d be no need to plan for securing the country or rebuilding an infrastructure that was ancient and crude before the war and much worse afterward.
RAND’s report with its unpleasant truths landed on top Army commander’s desks at a time when President Bush and his merry band were trying to ward off a rising tide of criticism of their conduct of the war and creating yet another fairy tale, which debuted in the fall of 2005 as the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”
The Army brass had no intention of dropping that volume on the desk of their volatile boss Rumsfeld, and simply locked it away in hopes that it would be forgotten.
The official explanation for why the study was hidden? “Some of the RAND findings and recommendations were determined to be outside the purview of the Army and therefore of limited value in informing Army policies, programs and priorities,” an Army spokesman told The Times.
What it really was when you think about it was an inconvenient and dangerous truth, much like the one a preceding Army Chief, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki told a Senate committee on the eve of the war. No one listened to him, either.
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers
The emperor must not be told he’s wearing no clothes.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
“The study blamed President Bush and, by implication, his national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, for failing to resolve differences between rival agencies, i.e. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Colin Powell’s State Department.”
The Crimean War has it Cecil Woodham-Smith (The Reason Why); “our” wars already have their chroniclers; however, to lock away a Rand assessment that places the blame squarely on the self-serving idiots that orchestrated them ensures that they are indeed “of limited value of informing [ANY] policies, programs, and priorities” important to the health of this nation.
Bush recently told Chris Wallace that “history takes a long time for us . . . to reach.” While I’m pretty sure that no one really knows what he means, some actions guarantee that which it seems to mean.
Let the NYT publish the draft version; such action might go a long way toward helping its foundering reputation.
I agree with the above comment, the NYT should publish the draft version.
This crew were the ones who said, when they were running for office in 2000, that they were all for personal responsibility and accountability. They meant, for little people. Isn’t it amazing how they continually get away with incompetence and corruption that leads to to thousands of deaths (of Americans, all others are irrelevant)…and the very worst they ever have to face for it is condemnation in print somewhere? Accountability is for little people.
The Army has turned into a tool for domestic politics, and nothing about it, especially not the average soldier, really matters to the top brass, except how well it serves the neo-con agenda.
4000 of our brave soldiers have died, and tens of thousands have been crippled to make George W. Bush a “War President.”
It’s no wonder the Pentagon doesn’t want to discuss the details.
Joe Galloway is one of the best friends our soldiers have ever had, and if you ask yourself who else speaks for ordinary soldiers in the national press, the answer is…
Nobody.
During WWII the Japanese ran a wargame of their upcoming Midway campaign, and to their dismay the “Americans” defeated their attack. They then rigged the game to make sure the right side won. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t rig the real battle.
Who knew Donald Rumsfeld was a Japanese naval officer?
Ain’t it great that we taxpayers pay fees to corporate consultants for reports that go in a locked vault?
Hard to imagine that Republicans couldn’t even find an outfit to pay that would pat them all on the back in a quid pro quo for money, but evidently they couldn’t. So they paid Rand anyway and buried the criticism.
Good grief.
HELLO !
Yet another discussion of “mistakes” that have been made in Iraq ?
If any of the genius types involved in military operations or writers from the incompetent complicit corporate media bothered to study international law, the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq is a war crime !
This the inconvenient truth !
maybe they should get Bill Krystal & Richard Perle to write a new report? According to these two, everything is fine and went according to plan…
What plan? Plan? Plan? We don’t need no stinkin’ plan!
Who else speaks for 1 Million dead Iraqis in this Amerikkan genicide [more appropriately called the Illegal Iraq Occupation] in the national press???? the answer is…
Nobody.
Last week Congress stood up to Bush after
“Potomac Primary”… they got a spine?
Refused his demand for retroactive immunity on
domestic spying. They also issued subpoenas for
meirs and boulton contempt of congress.
… Is this the beginning of
a spine stiffening ….??
This is the new “Pentagon Papers” in need of a latter-day Daniel Ellsberg to expose it. This time though it will have to be published on the Internet since the NYT and WAPO are firmly leashed and muzzled by those now running them.
Ellsberg has gone around the country speaking to any world-affairs council type groups that would host him discussing what he did and why it is necessary for such a disclosure to happen again in our day.. It will be interesting to see if there are any takers.
This year of presidential election would be a dandy time for such a discussion to take place. Stranger things have happened since nobody expected Ellsberg to do what he did until after it was a done deal. Let us hope lightening will strike twice!
Militantliberal–
The actual reason the Japanese lost Midway was because the US had cracked their code and were able to know both where and approximately when they would strike next. This enabled the US to have what naval forces remained (primarily aircraft carrieers)in the general vicinity to most effectively respond to the attack.
Why oh why oh why are we still adhering to the Rove paradigm frame “Iraq War?”
THERE IS NO GODDAMN WAR!
There is ONLY an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation.
Congress HAS NOT declared WAR on any nation on Earth.
Words are, duh, important. People hear WAR, and they bow to the Commander in Chief of the Military. People hear ILLEGAL OCCUPATION, and they demand it end.
There is NO WAR, understand? Stop f**king enabling the lunatics already!!!!
Does anyone really think that if our military just disappeared tomorrow, that the U.S. would be invaded? If the U.S. can’t even handle a few, disorganized and poorly armed Iraqi insurgents, how do you think a lessor power would fare in conquering the richest nation in the world with over 300 million privately owned guns lying about?
The military exists for only two reasons; to punish corporate America’s enemies and to siphon off tax dollars to enrich the wealthiest .001% of the populace.
Re:frank1569 I agree with you completely, however even the phrase ‘illegal occupation’ seems somewhat sanitized. The closest comparison I can make to Bushies invasion is to the Third Reich’s excuse for invading Poland in September 1939 in which the Reich said that they had to “stop the Polish incursions into sovereign German territory”. I prefer something like the ‘corporate led assault’, the ‘phoney war’ or even the ’sneak attack’. I’m at a loss of words though to accurately describe this travesty.
Lessons Learned reports were actually done during the Vietnam War, but I do not know if they were analyzed and corrective action taken. I do know there have been multiple incidents in the Iraq war that revealed that Lessons Learned were not. Example: http://www.newssafety.com/stories/miscagencies/iraq14.htm (I note that his conclusion that the truck drivers were trying to kill them is hardly certain, others have noted that they were probably long distance drivers of a rival tribe. Also, I disagree with other opinions, but much can be learned from this report and his book, One Bullet Away.)
Galloway does not address a number of deficiencies in US military leadership that were known at the end of the Vietnam war (ref: About Face, David Hackworth). Some were fixed, some were not. A significant problem that remains is the incredible level of dishonesty in the officer corps, which increases with rank. While this was known after Vietnam, it still exists now. Honesty is required in some things, but mendacity expected in others. One key to officer advancement is knowing when honesty is expected, and when lies are. Maj. Gen. Taguba’s career ended because he did not lie in his Abu Graib report. His later regret was not that he was retired for his honesty, but that he was betrayed by not being told to be dishonest.
Another problem is the low level of standards expected of individuals and units. A phrase from my days in the military-industrial complex comes to mind: “We have met the revised objectives.” This statement was put in every research report when the original objectives were not met. During WW2 and the Civil War, for example, the US military was forced to become competent. However, this only happened after it was educated by an initially more experienced an competent enemy. Since US troops can move at will and suffer very low losses, they say that is good enough. The MHAT report reveals that many in the military are not mentally capable of carrying out a successful counterinsurgency campaign.
There are many other problems, of course. Collectively, the US military acts with tremendous cowardice, although there have been many individual actions in which they acted bravely. The Rules of Engagement are written so that the life of a US soldier is worth many tens of Iraqi civilians. Fick’s “strategic corporal” has access to huge amounts of firepower, but otherwise is expected to obey orders rather than think strategically. Another major problem is that while the military is loyal to itself and obeys the President of the US, it is not necessarily loyal to the US itself. The US Constitution is totally ignored except for a single clause. A lack of professional integrity is another major problem; lawyers, doctors, nurses, chaplains and others gave up their professional integrity for the sake of following orders.
US military officers are impressive, and have tremendous integrity within a certain context, but only within that context. They do put on a good show. John Wayne played a great hero, but that was just acting; he was no Lew Ayres.
Who are these military chicken shyts?
Why would anyone need the RAND group to tell them the war and occupation was a deadly trap, one that would disgrace us all?
I seem to remember being one of millions who said that -and walked in the middle of the street waving signs so people would be sure to notice what we were saying- BEFORE this stupid story started!
Remember that day?
Feb. 15 2003, right?
The largest co-ordinated gatherings of human beings in recorded history for any single purpose?
Try to remember this Great Event in History while they spend this spring and summer blasting you with B.S. about the “political realism” of permanent bases and occupation, failure to impeach, etc.
All the B.S. from the top tells us is that the Change will have to come from the bottom.
—————————————-
Feb 15 shows us this Movement for Change is growing and adapting, the current polls tell us the same.
The so-called “mainstream media”’s greater and greater retreat into a land of make-believe, sensationalism, and trash, is not only a sign of its growing corruption, but also its growing irrelevance.
The People have constructed canals connecting the Headwaters to new channels, and the Mainstream now recieves a more limited flow.
The Agents of Control are attempting to put the squeeze on the new adaptations of the Movement, but it’s way too late for that.
———————————–
Sept. 11 gave the People a big shock, but many of them snapped out of it quick, and now they seem to be getting most of the rest to come around too.
The tiny Minority that have yet to wake up are mistakenly seen to be of more significance than they are because they are concentrated in positions of Power.
But their abuse of that Power, and their record of seizing that power against the Will of the People, will soon be the End of them.
—————————————
Remember that 2-15 came AFTER 9-11.
Remember that 2-15 is only one of the signs of a great Movement.
Remember that without this Movement there would be no Progress.
Remember that the People have the Power, even if they don’t know it yet.
And finally, remember to have Hope, Despair is only for those who see all Ends.
-matti
> The actual reason the Japanese lost Midway…
is irrelevant.
The point was that when faced with what the simulation was telling them, the Japanese chose to rig the game so they won. They lied to themselves.
The US has done the same thing. When an OpFor commander sank the US Navy the first day of a simulated battle, they simply refloated the fleet and carried on. Eventually they had to countermand his orders. His guerilla forces had to schedule ’surprise attacks’ because the attacks were too disruptive to the smooth running of the game. The Pentagon was pleased with the result because it confirmed that OpFor forces were no match for US forces.
Matti said:
The so-called “mainstream media”’s greater and greater retreat into a land of make-believe, sensationalism, and trash, is not only a sign of its growing corruption, but also its growing irrelevance.
The People have constructed canals connecting the Headwaters to new channels, and the Mainstream now recieves a more limited flow.
The Agents of Control are attempting to put the squeeze on the new adaptations of the Movement, but it’s way too late for that.”
I like this quote so much I’m going to put it in my great quotes file. Just as someone above points out that calling it a war legitimizes an illegl occupation and affects how people see it, someone recently commented someowhere that we should stop calling it the mainstream media, because they really are not in the mainstream–we should call them the corporate media. But the quote above is a lovely metaphor.
My Dear Peeps:
We can all sit around here jabbering to the choir demanding that justice be done, however, how do we get the American public off of their duffs and into the fray.
There is nothing in this “assault “on Iraq or Afghanistan that is inconvenient to them….That is unless your son or daughter has been sent over there to kill their sons and daughters.
Oh, wait a minute; they think inconvenience is having to pay $3.50 for a gallon of gasoline. Oh, that’s right! Damn! Didn’t you know the oil under sand in Iraq belongs to the United States…err rather BIG OIL. That is what people think is inconvenient.
You may call this travesty by any other name, but when you go into another country with the sole intent to suck the nation dry of its valuable recourses and kill anyone in your way…it is called WAR. Yes, I understand the “rule of law”. But does anyone else?
Yes, where are our Daniel Ellsbergs? With all due respect to Barack Obama, he is not our “great white hope”. If he gets into office, by the time they get through with him and his family, he will be a better Republican that Bill Clinton. When you become President of the Untied States, and after you get in to office, do you ever wonder what “they” threaten you will unless you follow their agenda?
Poet, you’re wrong.
The British cracked the Axis code. The U.S. then almost gave away the secret by shooting down the plane carrying Adm. Yamamoto. An insignificant victory and hardly worth the risk of letting the Axis powers know we were reading their mail.
Apparently by then Rumsfeld had switched sides and was with the American military, so he didn’t mind risking the whole war for a personal vendetta.
LOL Militaryliberal. Unkanny is right. Quibbling about this misses the whole point.
Hi Gollygee–
You are mistaken–the shooting down of Yamamoto’s plane occurred AFTER (April 1943) the Battle of Midway (June 1942). The point that the Japanese changed the rules of their war game in order to satisfy the command plans is well taken and typical of military establishments.
However, even with some foreknowledge of where and approximately when the attack would take place, the Americans barely won that battle and so that does not speak too badly for Japanese planning and execution. Had they not lost 4 aircraft carriers and a cruiser and their personnel they might well have succeeded.
As for the breaking of the JN 25 code, it was a joint American and British project. The US was very lucky because the replacement of that code with another was delayed by the Japanese until after the battle of Midway instead of before which had been the original Japanese plan.
By the time of Yamamoto’s shooting down that code had been replaced by another which also had to be subsequently decripted. One more note, Rumsfeld was still a young child during WWII and had no active part in that conflict.
Again .. “mistakes” were NOT made in the “post-war planning.”
Cheney knew in 1991 that taking out Saddam would create a power vacuum & unleash sectarian violence & keep US troops on the ground for many years, but it wasn’t until they stole the White House in 2000 that he and Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown & Root and the other war profiteers had maneuvered themselves and the US Military into position to maximize profit from the post-invasion chaos.
It was no “mistake” - they’ve done everything in their power to both protract the conflict and increase its cost.
Re Midway: the US chose the narrow passage at Midway as the place to take out the Japanese fleet. Had the Japanese fleet made it past Midway, into the open Pacific, the US would have had its hands full and would not have been able to devote energy & materiel to the European front; the US victory at Midway was the turning point of the war for that reason. And indeed, it was made possible by the Brits having broken the Axis code. The Japanese battle ships & aircraft carriers were “sitting ducks” unable to maneuver in the narrow passage; once the lead ship was disabled all of them were trapped.
News to me that the Japanese war games predicted defeat at Midway, cuz as far as the Japanese were concerned there was not supposed to be a “Battle of Midway” .. it WAS a surprise attack.
Before we attacked Iraq, they played war games with OpFor, Some OpFor smart ass used a motorcycle to run messages and blew off normal communications.
If I remember right, that was not allowed so they just eliminated it as a possibility.
For all this high minded diabtribe, I still say this. If you want to stop this war, then fix it so the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of the social elite are forced to fight in this lash-up. Fire the Blackwaters and other contractors and start the draft. We’ll have a new approach so fast it will make your head spin.
www.TheCenterStrikesBack.com