Vietnam collection (lessons plus)

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Here is the earlier thread on Tom Rick's new book Fiasco.

Rick's will be participating in an online Q/A Monday at 1300 (ET) (24 July) sponsored by the Washington Post - go here to submit questions.

Washington Post staff writer Thomas E. Ricks will be online Monday, July 24, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his new book and to answer your questions.

Thomas Ricks has covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post since 2000, reporting on activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

His book, FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, will be published by Penguin Press in July 2006.

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...is already taking exception - sight unseen - Do You Have A Bad-News Bias If Your Iraq Book Is Titled 'Fiasco'?.

Some of the commentary implies Ricks only interviewed the same-old anti-Iraq war retired officers and that he was a "Baghdad Green Zone reporter" - both of these assumptions are untrue.

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'It Looked Weird and Felt Wrong' - Fighting the Insurgency One Unit's Aggressive Approach by Tom Ricks.

Today's installment focuses on the Army's 4th Infantry Division and is the second of two articles adapted from Fiasco.

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I participated in the online Q&A with Tom Ricks today. Here are the questions I submitted - only number 2 got picked-up for an online answer.

1. In the article adaptation of FIASCO you mentioned the Army’s Command and General Staff College and School of Advanced Warfare curriculum changes. Are you aware that the Marine Corps’ Command and Staff College also completely revamped their curriculum to address the very problems you outlined?

2. Where does the crux of the blame for the FIASCO lie? There were a lot of efforts to incorporate lessons learned and new “ways” of thinking into military concepts, doctrine, education and training prior to OIF. Why did these efforts fail to take?

3. Considering counterinsurgencies have historically taken many years to complete and most, if not all, have had their share of failures and lessons learned, is it possible that we are fully capable of seeing this through to a successful completion given time? How much time and will the American public support a long-term effort?

4. You mentioned Galula's book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I would also recommend a down and dirty piece that lays out COIN in a tactical and practical format - Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. Kilcullen is a retired Australian lieutenant colonel now working for the US State Department. Earlier you mentioned 10-15 years in Iraq. That is if we get it right. Do you see a trend that the “one- third that are trying but not really getting it and the one-third just want to kick a little butt” are being pushed aside or are we permanently handicapped by not being fully combat effective?

Also, counterinsurgencies require all elements of national power and in most cases the military element is secondary to success. How do you view the other (non-DoD) agencies efforts? Is the military doomed to taking on the whole spectrum of Small Wars by default?

Here is one Q&A I found interesting:

Quantico, Va.: First, I'd like to complement you on the large body of balanced material you've produced over the years.

I vividly remember a conversation I had with my Battalion Commander in Camp Lejeune about three years before the war started. I was a Marine Platoon Commander and we were conducting a formal professional discussion with all of the battalion officers on Dien Bien Phu. The subject turned to training for low intensity conflict (which includes counter-insurgency) and our ability to prepare for it adequately. The consensus was that we didn't have the time to prepare for the range of missions we might encounter and that we should focus on traditional high intensity combat. The theory was that we could always scale back but not up.

I think that, collectively, the entire U.S. military probably made the same decision. Thus, when the war evolved into an insurgency we started at a huge deficit. The result was that you ended up with a situation where every commander may have a completeley different idea of how to fight the war in Iraq. Your story of Major General Odierno is just one example of a failure to understand the nature of the conflict. Stories of very senior commanders being upbraided by LtGen Petaues (then the commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command), for instance, have made the rounds among junior officers. My question is this - do you really think that the services are making their best effort to adapt to the nature of the war considering the significant mental challenges that need to be overcome? For instance, we don't reward officers for serving as embedded trainers with Iraqi units. Many senior officers haven't even internalized the tenets of Manuever Warfare, the central warfighting theory of the Marine Corps, do you really think we can get all services to internalize the principles of counter-insurgency?

Tom Ricks: Thanks. Would you take our friend in Corpus Christi aside for a quiet chat?

Seriously, I think you raise good points. Counterinsurgency is tough--especially because it runs so contrary to much the US military has taught over the last two decades. For example, classic counterinsurgency doctrine says to use the minimal amount of force necessary to doing the job, rather than use overwhelming force. And it also says to treat the people well, even prisoners.

One senior officer in Iraq told me earlier this year that about one-third of his subordinate officers "get it," one- third are trying but not reallly getting it, and one-third just want to kick a little butt. That means your force is probably less than half effective, and part of it is counterproductive.

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25 July Washington Times commentary - Freeing Iraq by Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (ret.).

Colonel Anderson's take on Fiasco...

Writing a critical analysis about a war in progress is always a risk. But in a long war, such as the one in Iraq, there is a market for such analysis. Tom Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post has taken a shot at in "Fiasco," which is his take on Phase IV of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Phase III, the military defeat and removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, effectively ended on April 9, 2003. Phase IV, Stability and Security Operations in military parlance, goes on today. Mr. Ricks' look at the situation is a hard and unsparing one.

Although the book is primarily about Phase IV, Mr. Ricks briefly surveys the conflict's first three phases to include the road to war. The chapter that deals with the sometimes personal conflict between retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is particularly illuminating...

Mr. Ricks believes the war to have been mismanaged at both the strategic and tactical level, and he identifies culprits. He clearly believes that the incompetence and arrogance of Douglas Feith, the former Pentagon policy czar, and Paul Bremer, the American proconsul for the first year of the war, were major causes of the flawed implementation of the occupation...

Mr. Ricks flatly accuses Gen. Tommy Franks of abrogating his command responsibilities following the fall of Baghdad by concentrating on his transition to retirement at a time when strong guidance was sorely needed...

At the operational level, Mr. Ricks does not let senior military leaders off the hook for ineptitude in conducting counterinsurgency operations. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander during the first year of the war, gets poor grades for micromanaging tactics without giving his subordinates clear commander's intent statements regarding the strategic and operational objectives.

Maj. Gen. (now Lt. Gen.) Ray Odierno comes under very harsh criticism for creating more insurgents than he killed through his division's iron-fisted handling of the civilian population. It was Maj. Gen. Odierno's troops who captured Saddam, and Mr. Ricks credits him for that. The author is also harsh with the military system as a whole, which refused to prepare for counter-insurgency in the wake of Vietnam, a war that the system chose to forget rather than to learn from.

The book does have heroes, however. Lt. Gens. Jim Mattis, Dave Patraeus and Marty Dempsey get high marks for mentally adapting to the insurgency. Because all three are still involved, he has some optimism that they can lead to better operations in the future.

Mr. Ricks sees the individual soldiers and marines as real heroes and generally writes off many tactical problems to lack of proper leadership from their seniors. He clearly believes that they have been more adaptive than the senior Pentagon leadership and many of their generals...

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New York Times - From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong

Editor and Publisher - Tom Ricks of 'Wash Post' Explores Iraq 'Fiasco' in Book, Articles

[Steve Blair]

What I find interesting about much of this discussion is how many people seem to be surprised by this (I'm not referring to board members, obviously). Even a casual student of history would have noticed the services, especially the Army, ran very quickly away from the counterinsurgency lessons they could have learned from Vietnam. Franks' conduct during Operation Anaconda was also questionable, a trend he carried over into Iraq it seems. Working with the Air Force, I even see them saying that they can "win" a counterinsurgency from the air!

Given the nature of the organizations, I suppose it's inevitable. The Army was very heavily imprinted with the business school and mass production mentality of its senior leaders during World War II and after, and the Air Force has always been possessed by a need to proclaim itself capable of winning, on its own, ANY war it happens to face. This doesn't apply to all members of either service, but there is an organizational culture and identity that encourages these views and approaches. What is to me the most disappointing aspect of it is that our forces currently contain some of the brightest recruits they've ever had. These people are ready and willing to do the job, and for the most part quickly adapt to changing situations if they're given proper background and some guidance. That they could be let down so seriously by their senior commanders is very depressing.

[Jones_RE]

I think senior army commanders have largely avoided counterinsurgency for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's largely the province of the Special Forces or the Marines with their banana wars experience. Second, is the main stress placed on maneuver war.

In the early to mid 1970's, the Army was reborn after Vietnam. The officers at that time woke up and saw just how powerful Warsaw Pact forces had become. Maneuver warfare offered the only doctrine capable of standing off such a large army. Previously, the Army had gotten by on mass, especially massed firepower. This worked great until they noticed the much greater mass just to the east.

With a focus on defeating a massed threat that was always considered to be practically superior, and with literally the fate of the world hanging in the balance, is it any wonder that the army dropped its study of everything else? We talk about the focus on high intensity warfare in western Europe as if it were some kind of grand strategic mistake. Yet given the level of threat posed by Warsaw Pact ground and nuclear forces, how can you blame them? The Soviets might have seen all this small wars preparation and light infantry stuff and decided we were pushovers. The United States is a great power because of our focus on big wars - the defining feature of a great military power is the ability to fight that kind of war, after all. That US forces remained ignorant in the twenty first century is a matter of simple negligence - that they wilfully turned all of their attention to thousands of Soviet tanks thirty years ago was a matter of accomplishing their mission.

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... Cobra II.

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Taking It to the Streets by Michael O'Hanlon.

It is not an exaggeration, or at least not much of one, to say that with his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks has changed the debate over Iraq. Others have criticized much of the decision-making of the Bush administration—on going to war in the first place, on hyping Saddam's purported links to al-Qaida and his progress in pursuing nuclear weapons, and most of all on the shoddy, cavalier preparation for the post-Saddam stabilization of Iraq. But almost all these previous critiques focused on President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other civilian leaders of the Bush administration.

Ricks hardly spares the war's civilian architects, but his is the first major book to take on the U.S. military as well. Ricks critiques its acquiescence in the development of the war plan that paid little heed to "Phase IV," the postinvasion activities needed to rebuild a shattered state, with a particular focus on CENTCOM Commander Gen. Tommy Franks. And he goes well beyond that, also severely scrutinizing the performance of U.S. armed forces on the streets of Iraq in the period since April 2003 when Saddam was deposed—until now a neglected, if not largely taboo, subject. That is what makes his book different, and important.

To be sure, Ricks is precise and selective in his criticisms of the military. He goes out of his way to say that most individual soldiers and Marines worked very hard, endured great sacrifice, and displayed remarkable courage during their deployments to Iraq. (Though he occasionally criticizes the mega-bases that provided cheeseburgers and CNN and workout rooms in true American style, saying that they kept GIs too far from the indigenous populations they should have been working to protect.) And there are numerous individual military heroes in Ricks' historical account—Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, as well as Army Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis (I am using their ranks at the time of their original service in Iraq).

Yet the chief contribution of the book is to stoke a debate over the performance of the American military. In this vein, Ricks focuses his sights most intensively on four uniformed officers: CENTCOM Cmdr. Tommy Franks, 4th Infantry Division Cmdr. Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno (who ran operations around Tikrit and other areas north of Baghdad in 2003-2004), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, and America's top commander in Iraq in the early going, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

The main lesson the military took from Vietnam, according to Ricks, was not to improve counterinsurgency techniques, training, and doctrine, but simply to avoid that style of warfare in the future. Ricks has a fairly convincing body of evidence to substantiate this allegation, including the testimonies of several important Army leaders and intellectuals who confirm that field manuals and other doctrine have not placed any real focus on counterinsurgency in the 30 years since Vietnam ended. As a student of the military myself, I would concur with this judgment. Peacekeeping of the type done in the Balkans in the 1990s was hardly the same thing, so our recent experiences there did little to alleviate the problem (except to the extent they may have influenced the education of the Petraeuses of the world at the individual level).

The substantive heart of Ricks' critique is that Franks, Odierno, Myers, and Sanchez failed to understand counterinsurgency warfare; repeated many of the mistakes made in Vietnam, including the overuse of destructive force; and put America as well as its coalition partners on a path that may well lead to defeat...

How does Ricks prove his case? It is here that the book reaches its limits, not through any fault of Ricks' so much as the difficult nature of his enterprise. By necessity, most of Ricks' evidence comes by way of anecdote from individual soldiers and Marines and quotations from well-placed military officers and other officials. In this pursuit, Ricks is doggedly thorough; there are many anecdotes and many quotations, including some from Anthony Zinni, former Pentagon official Dov Zakheim, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

But in the end, testimony from soldiers, no matter how compelling, is not proof that the problems Ricks describes were as pervasive as he alleges, nor proof that the misapplication of American military power was the defining characteristic of the mission. Ricks' thesis is summarized by his subtitle "The American Military Adventure in Iraq." (If there were any doubt, he clarifies on the book's opening page that "this book's subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that the U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation.") Having read this and many other books about Iraq, I say that I found his thesis more persuasive than I might have expected. But Ricks deliberately dwells on the negative. There is much more on Abu Ghraib and Fallujah than on Mosul or the Shiite heartland or Basra, for example, and more citations in the book's index about someone like Odierno than about Petraeus and Chiarelli combined...

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Washington Post - The March of Folly by Daniel Byman.

... As the title implies, Fiasco pulls no punches. Sure enough, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith come off badly in Ricks's account. But so do most Democratic members of Congress (whom Ricks labels not doves but "lambs" for their failure to oversee the executive branch) and the media, particularly the New York Times, which failed miserably to probe the Bush administration's war justifications and postwar planning. Ricks is also particularly scathing toward L. Paul Bremer, who led the civilian occupation authority in Iraq in 2003-04. Ricks quotes one colonel who described the efforts of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

Troubling as these failures are, they are by now reasonably familiar; what's far less well-known is the bungling of the senior military leadership. With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein's fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, "flunks strategy," Ricks writes; the war's commanding general designed "perhaps the worst war plan in American history." Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who's since been promoted to take Myers's old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration's political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

As a result of the lapses of the top brass and the haughtiness of Rumsfeld's men, the U.S. military came into Iraq inadequately prepared -- and hard-pressed to adapt. From the start, it failed to recognize that ensuring public order was the key to postwar success. As one general puts it, "I was on a street corner in Baghdad, smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by -- and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back."

As the insurgency deepened, the Pentagon's military and civilian leaders first ignored it, then worsened it by using wrongheaded tactics. By emphasizing killing the enemy rather than winning over the people, the U.S. military made new enemies more quickly than it eliminated existing foes. Mass arrests and other attempts to intimidate Iraqis backfired, swelling the insurgents' ranks. U.S. units and troops deployed to Iraq turned over quickly, shuttling in and out of the country with little attempt to build a coherent intelligence picture of the situation on the ground or to sustain hard-won relationships with the local Iraqi officials trying to make their country work. Cities such as Mosul and Fallujah were liberated from insurgents and then abandoned; inevitably, the insurgents took over again. Such mistakes are depressing but not entirely surprising: The U.S. military has forgotten many of the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare that it learned bitterly in Vietnam and elsewhere. Having neglected counterinsurgency in the military's training and education programs, we should not be shocked that we are ill-equipped to wage it.

Indeed, the picture Ricks paints is so damning that it is, at times, too charitable to say that the military and civilian leadership failed. Fiasco portrays several commanders as misguided but trying their best, but others -- particularly the hapless Franks -- appear not to have tried at all. Worse, the overall war and occupation effort lacked the high-level White House coordination essential to victory, allowing Bremer to operate on his own, making major decisions without consulting the Pentagon or the National Security Council, let alone his counterparts on the military side of the occupation.

These failures feel particularly raw given the sacrifices, grit and determination of the heroes of Ricks's book: the junior and noncommissioned officers risking their lives in Iraq's streets, as well as the few innovative senior officers, such as Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who have shrewdly tried (as the New Yorker's George Packer has put it) to win "over the civilian population by encouraging economic reconstruction and local government." Whether getting supply convoys past insurgent strongholds, identifying ways to defeat the rebels' dreaded IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or deciding whether to cow or charm local leaders, creative officers often invented new tactics and strategy on the spot...

[Culpeper]

Taking out the surprise of an insurgency developing after Saddam fell I find a lot of similarity in America's tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan as described by David Galula. Overall, I would think we didn't apply good counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam from a civil perspective (we did cream the opposition militarily, which didn't win the conflict). The opposite is true in Iraq. Based on my observations I can see the 80% civil and 20% military formula for a successful counterinsurgency has been unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is more ironic is that Mr. Galula's book was published in 1964. I find no reference to it as source of information as well as the USMC Small Wars Manual during the Vietnam period, though both are very popular today within the military. It seems we have radically changed our tactics from those of the Vietnam period and to good measure. As for a civil war breaking out in Iraq? An insurgency is a civil war. No one should be surprised of the sectarian violence that is occurring. Iraq has been in a civil war basically since the Baathist Fascist Party gained controlling power decades ago. And our military has always had a history of going into military action ill prepared and adapted and improvised from there. From starving our Continental Army, to the Union's winter campaign at Fredericksburg, to the Spanish Flu epidemic of the Expeditionary Forces, to the hedgerows of Normandy, to the ill equipped military to hold back the North Koreans when they stormed the south, to Operation Anaconda, to playing catch up on civil affairs in the "wild west" of Iraq. And as tragic as casualties are by this time in Vietnam, as well as Korea, our military suffered over 30,000 KIA in each conflict. I credit our low in comparison casualty rate at the present time to a change in tactics. I think we have learned from mistakes in the past and American lives have been saved in the process. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a well oiled counterinsurgency, whether it is being successful or not, because the enemy gets a vote as well. And with the counterinsurgency having a indigenous government in place that controls the propaganda I would bet the counterinsurgency is going better than most would think. For crying out loud, they blow up a recruitment line, they clean up the mess, and get right back in line.

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Bing West e-mailed his review of Tom Rick's book Fiasco. This review will appear in the 11 September issue of National Review. Here is an excerpt:

(Mr. West, who served in the Marine infantry in Vietnam and later as assistant secretary of defense, is the award-winning author of several military histories, including The Village: A Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam and No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. He has been to Iraq nine times, accompanying over 20 battalions on operations.)

... Ricks builds a devastating case, with a focus exclusively upon the military aspects of Iraq. He portrays systemic failures of political-military leadership, of a kind not seen since World War I. The scale is vastly different, of course, but there are undeniable similarities—both in the initial unwillingness to adapt and in the unswerving loyalty accorded to self-assured incompetents. At the end of 2004, President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to Gen. Tommy Franks and Amb. L. Paul Bremer. Ricks does not mince words about his opinion of those three men: “The U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly (Bush), with a flawed plan for war (Franks) and a worse approach to occupation (Bremer).”

Ricks’s premise is that invading Iraq turned into a military mess that could have been avoided...

... a portrayal of Franks, then head of Central Command, as abusive and impatient, “a cunning man, but not a deep thinker,” who “ran an extremely unhappy headquarters.” Franks, according to the author, had no plan for the occupation, and no intention of remaining the commander responsible for implementing it.

In the middle section of the book, Ricks explains in detail how the U.S. military, once confronted with an insurgency, responded in 2003 and 2004 with sweeps, raids, and arrests that only inflamed the opposition. He lays the blame on three factors. The first was the appointment of Paul Bremer as the president’s proconsul. Bremer wielded his wide-ranging powers decisively but not judiciously. His key failure was to disband the Iraqi army, an error the American military did not appeal to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld to overturn. The second mistake was the appointment by Central Command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. Sanchez was out of his depth, at loggerheads with Bremer, and incapable of developing a comprehensive campaign plan. This led to the third error: unilateral American offensive operations...

... Gen. Tony Zinni is quoted time and again, damning the civilians for geopolitical naïveté, but Ricks does not let the generals escape criticism: He points out that it was not Rumsfeld but rather the Joint Chiefs and Central Command who dismissed Zinni’s operational plans as half-baked...

Iraq marked a sea change in the American way of war. “Force Protection” meant minimizing casualties—so that over three years, there were fewer fatalities than in that one awful day of 9/11. Mess halls morphed into “dining facilities” offering salad bars, pizza bars, fast-food counters, Middle East cuisine, or good, old-fashioned steak and lobster, followed by ice cream, at a cost of about $34 a meal. Soldiers slept in air-conditioned rooms, chatted on the Internet, and played video games. We chose to fight a war that a veteran of Vietnam would not recognize. (Thrown into the cauldron of Fallujah, though, U.S. soldiers and Marines displayed courage and aggressiveness equal to any American generation.)

Somewhere between 1966 and 2006, the conditions of war and the acceptability of misery and friendly casualties had changed. We didn’t have enough troops in Iraq partly because of how we chose to fight the war; Ricks blames this on shortcomings in military doctrine, but it may be equally attributable to the current mores of American society...

Secretary Rumsfeld has said repeatedly that the U.S. military does not do nation-building. He is mistaken. In Iraq, building a nation is exactly what Gen. Casey and his subordinates are trying to do. It is the only way to succeed. The U.S. military has undertaken that staggering task because the rest of the U.S. government did not show up for this war.

If, in the end, Iraq emerges intact and moderate, it will not be because of its political leaders. It will be because the Iraqi army, modeling its behavior to live up to the standards of the American army, is able to defeat both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militia. Of course there will be all kinds of political deals; and underlying each of them will be the cold calculus of who will prevail in a fight. The Iraqi Army - not its national assembly or its police or its religious and political personages - is the last, best hope for Iraq.

While acknowledging that the U.S. military is beginning to get it right, Ricks concludes by asking whether it is too late to head off a low-level civil war that will result in a fragmentation of Iraq equivalent to that of Lebanon in the mid-1980s (or perhaps today). Ricks’s pessimism rests on his doubt that America will sustain its effort. That happened in Vietnam after the Tet offensive in 1968; although battlefield conditions markedly improved over the next two years, attitudes had hardened against the war and against our South Vietnamese allies...

With the critique offered in Fiasco, Ricks makes a solid contribution to our shared understanding.

Bing has much more to say - be sure to check out the entire review in the National Review. I will give a heads up when it goes online.

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Fiasco reviews:

Weekly Standard by Max Boot

This is a good book with a bad title. Anyone picking up a volume called Fiasco, with a snarky subtitle referring to "The American Military Adventure in Iraq," might expect another tome from the Michael Moore School of Policy Studies, with its level of analysis restricted to bumper-sticker slogans like "Bush Lied, People Died."

In fact, this is a carefully researched account of the Iraq war by one of America's premier defense correspondents--Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post. His findings of pervasive high-level ineptitude, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, will be much harder for reflexive defenders of the Bush administration to dismiss than the usual farrago of ideologically motivated accusations from political adversaries.

Los Angeles Times / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Tony Perry

His book is not a screed but a well-researched, strongly written account of the miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had access to top officers and their planning as well as "after-action" documents. More important, he was accorded candor.

Much of the mess, he concludes, began with the Army and the Pentagon bureaucracy, their institutional rigidity, a lack of planning for combating an insurgency and poor personnel choices.

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SWC member Merv Benson's review of Fiasco on Prairie Pundit.

Thomas Ricks take on the Iraq war focuses on the post major combat operations phase of the war up to early 2006. Unlike many critics of the war, his judgment is not impaired by a desire to see the US lose in Iraq, nor does he try to push an agenda against the political leadership. While he attempts to focus on the military response to the enemies attempt to recover from the loss in the major combat operations phase of the war, he does not always hit the mark.

He is very unfair to Tommy Franks and Rifle DeLong whose staff came up with the original war plane. He is much too generous to Tony Zinni whose plan was not used. Ricks is least plausible when describing the war plan as the worst plan in history. That is quite a statement for a plan that succeeded in toppling Saddam in record time.

Unlike the authors of Cobra II Ricks does not speculate that the Fedayeen that were encountered on the way to Baghdad became the insurgency. No, Ricks is persuaded that the US created them. He seems enamored by those in the military who believe that being nice to the enemy will win friends. He uses anecdotal evidence drawn from the military equivalent of a police blotter to highlight cases of alleged abuse of Iraqis. Many of the anecdotes lack perspective. They are like the snapshot that captures a reaction without the context of what prompted the reaction. They also lack the perspective of how they fit in the overall context of the war...

Much more at the link...

[Tom Odom]

He seems enamored by those in the military who believe that being nice to the enemy will win friends.

really Merv

this is counterspin that I would characterize as a 10 second sound bite analysis of an extremely complex issue. Do you adhere to the Attilla the Hun school of thought, kill 'em all and let God sort it out? I mean that sounds snappy and cool to some folks but unless you really get them all, you are not going to win. And even if you could, please tell me how to fit that into the 21st Century and the US role in the world. The center plank of COIN is winning the support of the population. I suggest you look seriously at history and doctrine on COIN.


Tom

[marct]

Hmmmmm,

Okay, I just read your review, Merv. Honestly, I'd love to sit down for a few beers and talk with you about it but, since that's not an option, I'll stay away from a long post and just make a few comments.

In fact, he makes little to no mention of the enemy's substantial violations of the Geneva Conventions while at the same time devoting too much time to the yo-yos of Abu Ghraid.

Al-Queda hasn't signed the Geneva Conventions, nor are they likely to. Why should they play by our rules?

Leaving that aside for a sec., their whole goal is political, not military victory. Anything that they can do to show that the coalition forces cannot provide security and a stable, livable environment helps them meet that goal. The more that they can show the "immoral" nature of the "occupation by crusading forces", the better they are able to sell their "story" to the Muslim world. And who is going to disagree with that story when disagreement means death?

really Merv

this is counterspin that I would characterize as a 10 second sound bite analysis of an extremely complex issue. Do you adhere to the Attilla the Hun school of thought, kill 'em all and let God sort it out?

Arghhhh!!!!! Tom, I expected better historical accuracy . That wasn't Attila, that was the Papal Nuncio at the siege of Carcassone.

Marc

[Tom Odom]

Charlie Beckwith (founded Delta) reportedly had that on his desk name plate

Another candidate would be King Richard the Lionheart

I felt that way myself (honestly) so many times in Rwanda that I understand the appeal

best

Tom

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Finally getting caught up in updating the SWJ Library. Tonight's additions include two Vietnam War-Era handbooks. Hat tip to Council member Jedburgh for sending these in to the SWJ! Many thanks...

Military Assistance and Training Advisory Course (MATA) Handbook for Vietnam - US Army Special Warfare School Handbook, January 1966. Reference material for the military advisor in Vietnam. Reflects doctrine as taught at the Special Warfare School in the 1960's and early '70's. The handbook was prepared for use in the MATA courses of instruction and served as a ready reference for advisors in Vietnam.

Handbook for Military Support of Pacification - US Military Assistance Command Vietnam handbook, February 1968. Developed as a basic reference document. Designed for use by US, RVN and other other coalition military personnel.

[SWJ Blog]

Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam

Entry Excerpt:

Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam
by Heather M. Brown

Download the Full Article: Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Americans became increasingly concerned with the strategic decision-making of U.S. leaders regarding the military’s presence in Vietnam. One of the most controversial decisions of the era was ratified on 7 January 1962, when the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army were given authorization under Operation RANCH HAND, to deploy the herbicides 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetate (2,4,5-T) and 2,4-dicholorophenoxyacetate (2,4-D), commonly known by its code name, Agent Orange, on South Vietnam. Operation RANCH HAND directed the herbicide spraying project from U.S. Air Force C-123 twin-engine aircraft, U.S. Army helicopters and infantry hand sprayers.

Download the Full Article: Defense by Defoliation: The Necessity for Agent Orange in Vietnam

Heather Marie Brown received her undergraduate degree from Texas State University-San Marcos in December 2010 as a double-major in History and Political Science.



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