Here's a few more glaring errors:
You don't speeka-da-language in Iraq.
Torture
Disolving the Iraqi army, forcing bathists out of power, trying to
privitize the Iraqi economy in the Republican model
Going in with too few troops for the day after
Fighting with 'state' over war plannning.
Faulty intel about Sadam and WMD
Not providing medical care for Iraqi civilians with your CASH/MASH units.
Isolating yourself from 'them' by living in a walled city in the Green Zone.
Excessive secrecy - which continues to today
.... the list is endless ...
----
Pentagon studying its war errors
Analysts assess tactics in Iraq, Afghanistan
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | August 16, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The US military establishment has quietly undertaken a
wholesale reassessment of its war strategy with a goal of identifying
the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and remedying them before
the next conflict.
This summer, high-level Pentagon officials ordered a pair of secret
studies to pinpoint the military's failures in the two conflicts, and,
according to one of the authors, ``the results won't be pretty" when the
findings are produced this fall. Last week, the Defense Department
invited about 50 of the nation's top counter insurgency specialists to a
closed-door meeting outside Washington to critique recent operations and
chart a way forward.
The studies, according to several Pentagon officials involved, have
found serious deficiencies across the board. For example, US troops in
Iraq have often used too much force when conducting operations in
civilian areas, unnecessarily alienating local populations. They cite US
commanders as being too slow to establish working relationships with
local allies, and note that providing security and safety for the Iraqi
people wasn't an early priority.
The military's continuing shortcomings in gathering accurate
intelligence about insurgents has particularly hampered its missions:
``We know relatively little about insurgent motivation and morale,
leadership, and recruitment," according to an unpublished study produced
in June by the government-funded RAND Corporation.
``This is a struggle for the soul of the Army," said Colonel Peter
Mansoor , a former battalion commander in Iraq who now heads the newly
established Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center in Fort
Leavenworth, Kan. ``A lot of work needs to be done to change the
mind-set of the force. For decades, we focused on high-intensity combat.
We are trying to shift the culture of the force and balance it better."
Top officers are literally re writing the book on how to conduct
counterinsurgency operations -- a skill that has atrophied in the three
decades since the Vietnam War but has become painfully relevant in Iraq
and Afghanistan, where winning hearts and minds has proved far more
difficult than killing enemy forces.
After preparing for generations to fight ``big wars" against large
conventional armies, the military is absorbing its toughest lesson of
the post- Sept. 11 world: It isn't prepared to wage small-scale,
guerrilla wars that have become the hallmark of Islamic extremists and
their allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
In classrooms, on training bases, and even on the battlefield, military
scholars and combat veterans are struggling to teach the world's most
lethal military force how to calibrate its immense firepower and avoid
the kind of heavy-handed tactics and cultural insensitivity that have
engendered so much ill will and helped fuel insurgencies in Afghanistan
and, especially, Iraq.
At the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., nearly half the curriculum
this fall is focused on guerrilla warfare and tactics to counter it,
marking the biggest academic overhaul in decades, according to military
officials. A heavy emphasis is being placed on the foreign cultures
where analysts believe US forces may find themselves operating in the
coming years: failed states in Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia
that may become breeding grounds for terrorists.
``We totally revamped the curriculum for 2006," said William Johnsen ,
dean of the war college, where hundreds of lieutenant colonels and
colonels spend a year training to become top leaders. ``We have adjusted
the courses to look a lot more at stability and counterinsurgency
operations so we can turn a conventional military victory into a larger
one."
The Pentagon will also participate in a State Department conference on
counterinsurgency later this year, the first step toward crafting a
government-wide plan to remedy the mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan and
avoid them in future guerrilla conflicts.
But it is among the senior officer corps, which includes many veterans
of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the soul-searching is most pronounced.
Mansoor, who is also author of a history of infantry divisions in World
War II, is helping fine-tune a draft of the Army-Marine Corps field
manual on counterinsurgency, which will become a 250-page bible for
field commanders.
The document is designed to fill what generals acknowledge is a major
gap in American military doctrine.
``It has been 20 years since the US Army published a manual devoted to
counterinsurgency operations, and 25 years since the Marine Corps
published its last such manual," write Army Lieutenant General David
Petraeus and Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis in a draft of the
document. ``With our soldiers and Marines fighting insurgents in both
Afghanistan and Iraq, it is thus essential that we give them a manual
that provides principles and guidelines for counterinsurgency operations."
The first draft of the manual combines a heavy dose of military science
and basic soldiering with history and politics. Drawing on lessons of
the past two centuries, it provides a blueprint for how to run a foreign
occupation where the central government is either weak or nonexistent
and well-armed insurgents are launching hit-and-run attacks from within
civilian areas.
It outlines ways to understand local culture, locate interpreters, train
a local police force and army to help provide security, bolster the
nascent government, effectively handle detainees, gather intelligence
about enemy forces from friendly citizens, and link combat operations
with humanitarian and other aid to rebuild the war-torn country -- and
peel the local population away from the insurgents to cut off the
enemy's source of support.
``The challenge is to train the force not what to think but how to
think," Mansoor said in an interview, saying that troops must get inside
the minds of the insurgents as well as those of the citizenry.
``Counterinsurgency is a thinking soldier's war. It is graduate-level
stuff. There is public relations, civil affairs, information operations.
It is not easy."
Although the US military establishment has focused largely on fighting a
conventional foe such as the former Soviet Union and its Eastern
European satellites, the armed forces have fought far more
counterinsurgencies than armies throughout US history -- from the
Barbary Wars of the early 1800s to Vietnam and conflicts in Central
America, Somalia, and Bosnia.
But the military as an institution -- backed by a powerful arms maker --
has nevertheless clung to the theory that its forces must be prepared
almost exclusively to fight large-scale conflicts with
multibillion-dollar weapon systems, specialists said.
``The military culture has been about the big war," said Andrew
Krepinevich , a retired Army officer and counterinsurgency specialist
who advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. ``That's been the case
for a long time. West Point studied the Napoleonic wars while fighting
the Indians after the American Civil War. These irregular wars were
viewed as exceptions to the rule. They thought if you could fight a big
war you could fight a little war."
But getting the military to apply the lessons of the insurgencies in
Iraq and Afghanistan is proving to be a battle in itself.
``It is like if you had told General Motors to stop building autos in
1975 and then told them to start building cars again now, but build 2006
models," Krepinevich said. ``It is not much of an exaggeration to say
that is where the military is right now."
.
|
