Iraq War Analysis

Disclaimer: This is an extremely long essay about our leadership's decisions in running the war in Iraq. I think some valid questions have been raised in with the war effort, however the questions being asked deserve a more thought out and supported essay than smarmy, ad hominem, one paragraph-at-a-time pot shots.

(Via Beautiful Atrocities) Andrew Sullivan, again, wanders into the big boy's poker game. This time he is biting at the heels of distinguished military historian, Victor Davis Hanson. (A little background to my extensive, highly educated and non-blogging readership: Sullivan believes that the problems we are seeing in Iraq today are the result of too few troops in theatre, and that Rumsfeld is the stubborn architect of this "disasterous policy," which has failed to seal the borders, provide security and prevent terrorist attacks; while Hanson sees, not with rose colored glasses, a war that has its share of mistakes, but has been tremendously successful). Amid the growing chorus of pundits that have demanded Rumsfeld's head, with Sullivan leading the charge, Hanson wrote an article in defense of the Secretary:

The blame with this war falls not with Donald Rumsfeld. We are more often the problem — our mercurial mood swings and demands for instant perfection devoid of historical perspective about the tragic nature of god-awful war. Our military has waged two brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been an even more inspired postwar success in Afghanistan where elections were held in a country deemed a hopeless Dark-Age relic. A thousand brave Americans gave their lives in combat to ensure that the most wicked nation in the Middle East might soon be the best, and the odds are that those remarkable dead, not the columnists in New York, will be proven right — no thanks to post-facto harping from thousands of American academics and insiders in chorus with that continent of appeasement Europe.

Andrew criticizes this notion:

Victor Davis Hanson's defense of Donald Rumsfeld is, as usual, full of his usual insights and perspective. But he ducks the main complaints. The most important is that the war immediately after the fall of Baghdad was seriously under-manned, and that this was obvious from the beginning. Hanson's defense is that the humber of troops is not as important as their successful deployment. But surely, the lack of troops did a couple of terribly damaging things: it prevented the occupying forces from getting a monopoly of violence across the country, emboldened the Baathist/Jihadist resistance, and alienated many Iraqis who could not understand why the greatest super-power's main achievement in Iraq was the initiation of chaos and insecurity. Both these undermined our objectives, were pointed out in time, and could have been rectified. Rummy refused to do anything, and, indeed, minimized with criminal glibness the disaster brewing. Secondly, Hanson suggests that there's no evidence that it was Rumsfeld's dcision to disband the Iraqi army. But that's irrelevant. Rumsfeld is ultimately responsible for the war. If Bremer called for the disbandment of the Baathist army and Rumsfeld objected, that army would still be intact. Bremer, remember, worked for Rumsfeld. If Rumsfeld had been over-ruled on such a critical matter, he should have quit. He didn't. He remains responsible. The Bush people can look the word "responsible" up in the dictionary if they need to.

World War II Examples

I want to present two historical events that occurred during World War II to put this argument in historical perspective--do note that I operate under the assumption that war plans can never be perfect, they are always limited on resources and success is most often a result of the execution of tactical goals that align with strategic/political goals, innovative uses of limited resources and, ultimately, are carried out by leaders that have the guts to see it through.

One of the major American failures of World War II centered around Japan's attack of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Shortly after the attack, a Congressional investigation was launched into why this surprise occurred and who was responsible for our lack of preparedness of a potential Japanese attack. The commission determined that General George C. Marshall and the War Department were responsible for the following: failure to notify the Pacific Fleet of the deteriorating U.S.- Japanese diplomatic situation; failure to guard the air fleet against air attack, as planes, because of War Department policy to guard against ground sabotage, were bunched together wingtip-to-wingtip; failure to provide Admiral Short, Pacific Fleet Commander, of intelligence gained from broken code on December 6th of a possible Japanese attack.

General Marshall was censured after the war as a result of this investigation. There were other fingers pointed at parties ranging from various commanders in theatre all the way to President Roosevelt. Pearl Harbor was a severe black-eye for America politically and militarily. But, did anyone deserve to lose their job over it?

My second example points to the Battle of the Bulge. There were two major failures of note here: the failure to recognize and prepare for the oncoming German offensive and the failure to provide U.S. troops with adequate gear to fight through the winter.

Like our operations in Iraq, success breeds other logistical problems. After the D-Day invasion in August, Allied forces stormed through France so feverishly, they extended past their supply lines. The rate of attack in combination with the lack of ports to receive shipments from England presented huge problems. Patton’s 3rd Army pushed so hard, his tanks often ran out of gas. In spite of these logistical problems, the Allied armies continued to push the German Army back into Germany from the west, the Soviets pushed the Germans back in the east, and the Luftwaffe had been completely destroyed allowing Allied bombers to hit targets in Germany with impunity. The situation looked very good, and in October 1944, Allied commanders (Eisenhower in particular) were optimistic that the war in Europe would be over before Christmas.

Unfortunately, Hitler would remind the allies that in war planning, the enemy gets an equal vote. On December 16, the Germans launched a 200,000 man counteroffensive that broke through the Allied lines. The failure to see this offensive was a major failure as the Germans concentrated troop positions within several hundred feet of Allied front lines. The German offensive hit hard and drove a wedge deep into Allied lines. American soldiers were stunned by this surprise and were soon running, demoralized and scared as the Germans hit them harder than anything they had experienced in the war to date. The Allies hastily moved to counter this unseen, and unplanned for, German offensive. The 101st Airborne was sent to occupy and defend Bastone, a crossroads town of enormous logistical importance. However, the 101st was not fit to fight through the winter, and were placed into the Ardennes Forest in subzero temperatures with no winter clothes, meager ammunition and no logistical support. Allied air supremacy was neutralized by bad weather, forcing the Allies to fight without adequate supplies and it allowed the Germans to surround the town without fear of being hit by bombers.

In the end, the 101st army held the town and Patton’s 3rd Army broke through the German lines in relief. The counteroffensive was successfully repealed, but the Allies would pay an enormous cost: 8,600 Americans and 200 British troops killed, 21,000 captured or missing and 47,000 wounded. The Germans suffered nearly 68,000 casualties, including 17,000 dead. The 101st would account for almost 5,000 of those casualties and trench foot and exhaustion pulled more men from the front lines that winter than enemy fire. Failure to plan for the counteroffensive and for winter battle in the end cost many more lives than necessary to ensure the eventual German defeat.

By the standards that Sullivan has set for Rumsfeld, General Marshall, General Eisenhower and War Secretary Stimson should have resigned or been fired, with President Roosevelt issuing an apology to the hysteric public for their failures listed above. Roosevelt did not do this, as he saw their performance in context with the successes achieved in the creation and mobilization of a modern army, the planning and execution of the largest amphibious land assault in history, and the suprise defeat of the Japanese at the Battle of Midway. Roosevelt, correctly, knew that he had the right men in the right places to ensure eventual and total victory over Germany and Japan. History would vindicate his decision to keep faith in his commanders.

Iraq War Planning

Some basic assumptions: war planning does not exist in a vacuum. Every war plan must factor in everything from logistics, to enemy responses, to the geopolitical situation, to geographical issues. The situation in the run-up to the war developed as follows:

• Kuwait was the only border country that would allow Allied ground forces to base an attack into Iraq. Saudi Arabia would not allow troops to attack from their soil; Iran, Jordan and Syria were out of the question.

• Turkey would eventually bow to European pressures and not allow the 4th Infantry to attack from the north.

• The limitations of Kuwait's deep water ports would require some tough decisions to be made. Logistics expert General Pagonis said, "The bottlenecks will be at the ports, so you're going to have to be extremely efficient in shipping the stuff. The lesson we learned [in Desert Storm] is to only ship what you need. We took over 400,000 short tons of ammunition and brought home 370,000. But in those days, we didn't know how big the [Iraqi] force was or how good they were. They know all that stuff now, so the Pentagon is not likely to flood the places with all kinds of resources."

• Intelligence was reporting that Saddam had given his commanders the order to attack the coalition forces with WMDs. Egypt and Jordan had both personally warned Franks that a WMD attack was inevitable.

General Franks, after Operation Desert Storm, began to develop his theory of true joint warfare. His belief was that troop strength is multiplied, as in in physics, where force is multiplied by velocity. With a combination of air and ground forces in joint operations, coalition forces could hit the Iraqis harder than if troop strength is numerically increase, but logistically unsupported.

The weapons of mass destruction threat was of utmost importance in the build-up. Franks was concerned that a concentration of 300,000 - 400,000 troops packed into a country that, in square miles is actually smaller than New Jersey, would leave them vulnerable to a successful WMD attack. Franks did the right thing in preparing for them against a WMD strik. A large, Desert Storm-like buildup in such a small geographic area would have been criminally negligent with the intelligence that they had then.

So, Franks was given the orders to attack and he did so with 170,000 men. He had the 4th Infantry in reserve, sitting off the coast of Turkey. Why didn't he use these troops that he would so desperately need in peacekeeping after the initial invasion?

Franks used them as a diversion. As Turkey publicly proclaimed that the U.S. would be prevented from attacking across their border, the CIA and special ops successfully implemented a disinformation campaign, through informants and spies, and convinced Saddam that Turkey was bluffing--they would "at the last minute" allow the 4ID to attack Iraq from their Northern border. As the attack began from the south, Saddam had kept a large portion of his Republican Guard north, knowing that the 4ID was waiting offshore. This allowed the 170,000 man army, barreling from south to north at unprecedented speed, to plow through and capture Bagdad before he could regroup. The time it would have taken for the 4ID to arrive in Kuwait and catch-up with the main strike force, Saddam would have repositioned his northern Republican Guard divisions and eliminated the U.S. advantage.

Again, Franks was proven right. Bagdad fell without a siege, the Baathists went into hiding and the Iraqi Army dissolved (even before Paul Bremmer stepped onto Iraqi soil). No one can truly account for how many lives, Iraqi and American, were saved because a siege wasn't needed. This was an unheralded success as he took advantage of an Iraqi army that didn't show-up to fight because they were so badly outmaneuvered. In three weeks, the coalition had defeated a battered, but numerically superior army, and had occupied most of the country. Clean-up operations were about to begin.

Here lies the conundrum--more troops would have lead to a bloodier initial stage to the operations. When the media was calling the war a quagmire after 2 weeks, imagine how they would have reacted had the two armies, in larger quantity, slugged it out in full force south of Bagdad. General Sullivan doesn't provide us any solutions or back-up to the contingency problems of his "more troops" argument. I think Sullivan wants to have his cake and eat it too. He is assuming that Iraq would have fallen in 3 weeks with 170,000 or 300,000 troops (which we didn't even have available). I disagree. If we had waited to build up to a larger force, Saddam would have had more time to prepare for an attack, and he would know when and where it was coming from. There would have been a lot more blood along with abundant international and leftist outrage as a result.

So, Andrew, while you were looking up the word "responsible" in the dictionary; Rumsfeld, Franks and Bush were reading their history books. They knew it was going to take an enormous effort, with a lot of sacrifice, to succeed in Iraq and that there would be unknowns that they could never plan for. There was an American Presidential election on the horizon that would try and spin some of their imperfect plans as "failures," yet they pushed on and did a hell of job. I recommend that you put your dictionary aside for a moment and instead, opt for the more useful history books to get some context. Then, after you read those, pick the dictionary back up and look up the word "courage." You may still not understand it, as courage is much less understood as a definition than it is just a way of being.

Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at December 27, 2004 03:30 PM | TrackBack