War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires Drastic Change
Douglas A. Macgregor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
19 December 2004
Dispensing with reality is not uncommon in Washington, but in wartime,
it is downright
dangerous and that is exactly what has been going on to date in Iraq.
It is one thing to go to war
with the Army and the generals you have, as Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld argued a few
days ago. Nearly two years later, however, both should be different and
they are not. That's the real problem.
Americans are discovering that the Desert Storm formula for quick,
cheap victories over
incompetent enemies was always an illusion. Despite its initial showy
successes on television
reminiscent of the first Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom was
fundamentally flawed. Other than
removing Saddam Hussein from power, Operation Iraqi Freedom lacked a
coherent strategic design. When American forces finally reached Baghdad
in April 2003, the
military offensive
simply dissipated.
We were lucky. Without the relatively short three week campaign to
defeat a very weak opponent
mounted in Somali-like pickup trucks or "technicals," the U.S. Army
would have shot its bolt,
plunging into a war for which there was too little body armor,
ill-prepared leaders and very few
ready, deployable combat troops. Even with 640,000 soldiers on active
duty in today's U.S.
Army, 40% of which are reservists, the Army's generals are still unable
to squeeze the required
combat capability out of an anachronistic Cold War ground force.
Americans are beginning to
ask what happened in the 12 years between Desert Storm and Iraqi
Freedom? The answers are
grim.
The notion of a bloodless victory in 1991 reinforced misguided notions
of how Army forces
should fight. All future Army operations in Southwest Asia had to look
like Desert Storm hence, Rumsfeld's fight with the generals. These
illusions exacted a
price. Despite 12 years of
experience in Southwest Asia since Desert Storm, surprisingly little
was done by a succession of
Army Chiefs of Staff to prepare the Army, its soldiers or its
equipment, for the complex tasks
that would confront them during intervention in an Islamic country.
Nothing was done to refit the Army's 8 hour, gas-guzzling tanks with
new fuel-efficient engines.
Nothing was done to reorganize an anachronistic supply system. Nothing
was done to reduce the
superfluous bureaucratic overhead of Army three and four-star commands,
to convert spaces for
clerks into spaces for soldiers who deploy and fight. The one
significant change was the
collective decision by the Army's four-star generals in 1998 to cut 25%
of the Army's combat
troops an action with profoundly negative consequences in Iraq where
battalions and brigades
are too small to do the job.
Fast-forward to 2003 and we see American soldiers arrive in Baghdad
with no detailed maps of
the city, no new rules of engagement to follow, no new civil order to
impose. Chaos and
criminality ruled for 30 days while the Army generals stood motionless.
General "Tommy"
Franks, USCENTCOM Commander, and Lieutenant General Dave McKiernan, 3rd
Army
Commander, did not plan backward from victory. Their obsession with
fighting a weak, inept
enemy seems to have obscured the criticality of keeping the real
objective in mind to replace
the old bad regime with a better one.
Without attainable political objectives beyond the vague goal of
transforming Iraqi Arabs into
Anglo-Saxon democrats, the Army's division commanders soon became
provincial governors
inside static division sectors on the Vietnam model. The alternative a
less intrusive
presence on the Army's Special Forces model linked to local tribal and
clerical authorities but
backed by powerful mobile armored reserves capable of quickly smashing
real opposition was not seriously considered. Iraqi soldiers, police
and government
workers who might have
filled the security vacuum on the local level, became part of the
resistance when we rewarded
their non-defense of Saddam Hussein's regime by throwing them out of
work.
The results were disastrous. When the generals occupied Saddam
Hussein's old digs in Baghdad
sending a chilling message to Arabs that they had exchanged an Arab
dictatorship for an
American one, the liberation was transformed into a hated occupation.
We didn't get it.
Most of the generals and politicians did not think through the
consequences of compelling
American soldiers with no knowledge of Arabic or Arab culture to
implement intrusive measures
inside an Islamic society. We arrested people in front of their
families, dragging them away in
handcuffs with bags over their heads and then provided no information
to the families of those
we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and
incarcerated thousands of Arabs,
90% of whom were not the enemy. But they are now.
Through the summer and fall of 2003, whenever journalists noted the
rising crescendo of
violence and hatred in Central Iraq, the generals were quick to point
to huge areas of the country
that were quiet. However, the commanding generals did not direct the
reallocation of significant
ground combat forces from quiet areas to crush the known pockets of
resistance in Central Iraq
when it was much easier to do so.
While the lethality of every weapon in ground combat went up, the level
of armor protection,
firepower and off-road mobility for our soldiers in Iraq went down as
tanks and armored fighting
vehicles were replaced with HUMMVEEs.
In April, the outburst of violence across Iraq temporarily suspended
these romantic notions
because General John Abizaid realized that with fewer than 100
operational American tanks,
American control of Iraq was at risk without the protection and
devastating firepower of
American armor. Within days, additional armor was flown into Iraq from
Germany and it was
temporarily back to basics including heavy armor, with lots of
firepower and net-centric
capabilities as an enhancement, not as a substitute for fighting power.
Today, there are nearly 600 American tanks in Iraq and the casualties
sustained by the Armored
force in fights from Falujah to Mosul have been extremely light
compared with the thousands of
American soldiers and marines killed or wounded in light infantry and
support units.Yet, the
passion for sending soldiers and marines into the teeth of the enemy on
foot or in wheeled
vehicles persists with deadly results for our soldiers and marines
What we are witnessing in Iraq is a symptom of a very familiar problem
- peacetime military
leadership under wartime conditions. Peacetime leaders are selected,
trained and groomed in a
system that promotes those who protect the system, adhere to process
over results and give their
superiors the answer they want to hear, "Yes."
So now what? Can we just muddle through, putting bandaides on gaping
wounds, adding armor
to HUMMVEEs instead of using the thousands of tracked, armored fighting
vehicles sitting in
storage? Can we keep on taking casualties while killing large numbers
of Iraqis, hoping a new
Iraqi government will eventually emerge that can control the country?
When the January
elections confirm Iraq's Shiite majority in power, many experienced
observers think civil war is
likely to follow. American soldiers and marines will be caught in the
middle. What then?
It was Winston Churchill's rare gift to discern quickly what changes
were implied by wartime
conditions, and how policy should be adapted to meet new conditions.
Churchill raged against
the rigidity of mind in the senior ranks of the British Army during
both World Wars. Sadly,
without the intervention of a leader like Churchill, there is no
guarantee that war will induce
realistic change in the forces fighting the war on the ground in Iraq
any time soon.
Controlling and managing the resources of a nation including its armed
forces to the end that its
vital interests are promoted and secured against enemies, actual or
potential is what the president
and Congress do. But vague expressions of support for the creation of
new democracies where
none exist do not constitute strategy. If America's goals were to seize
and hold territory, to
increase the world's population under American authority, then
intrusive military occupations
lasting decades designed to forcibly transform foreign states into
reflections of America would be
the right response in war.
But these are not America's goals. Arabs, not Americans, must govern
Arabs. At a price of 5.8
billion dollars a month, conditions in Iraq also cost a great deal of
American money, money we
must borrow from foreign sources to finance our growing deficit.
As the 911 Commission report indicated, it was wrong to allow the
nation's intelligence agencies
the freedom to define their own programs and priorities, control their
own funding lines, and then
rate their own effectiveness. French President, Georges Clemenceau,
argued during WW I, "War
is too important to be left to the generals." After losing hundreds of
thousands of Frenchmen in a
muddled war of attrition, Clemenceau could no longer afford to dispense
with reality. The
question is: How much longer can we afford to do it?
The author is a former Army Colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat
veteran who authored
three books. His latest is Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing
the Way America Fights
(Praeger, 2003).
c. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Citation: Douglas A. Macgregor, War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires
Drastic Change," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 December 2004;
Original URL:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/newswatch/story/74639B5932FF098686256F6F004B7C45?OpenDocument&Headline=War+Strategy%3A+Dramatic+failures+require+drastic+changes&highlight=2%2Cmacgregor