Posted by Polarbear,

Haditha is a case of “strategic legalism” and that is a symptom of bad strategy and not a bad command structure. The battalion operations and the squad’s tactic were excellent. The general’s strategy??? My opinion is fixing strategy is not a matter of fixing the command structure…it is a matter of fixing strategic leadership.
Flaws in military leadership exist, have existed and will continue to exist regardless of C2 structure. Lack of moral courage to change the criteria for becoming a senior officer (most important is character, is he is a self serving politician or a true warrior that believes in mission first, men next and finally him/herself) will probably continue, because as either you or Ken stated those who have the means to change the system are not about to do so, because they're a product of the current system.

I agree with most of your comments, and I am not going to pretend to have enough expertise in the legal arena to challenge either you or Mike. In that field I only ask questions and offer uneducated opinion. I think the Haditha issue was both a leadership and legalistic issue that turned into a national embarassment because of the way it was handled. It shouldn't have even been an issue, but again as either you or Ken pointed out the military tried to converge its values with civilian values. This was a war, not a police action and we can't afford to pause after shooting event where civilians die and investigate it. It will destroy us a fighing force. Can you imagine this level of control during WWII?

However, I still think you are intentionally avoiding the real issue of overall national strategy, which is the result of the national level command structure. Yes both Haditha and Abu Ghraib had strategic impact, but neither were part of a strategy. Let's not forget that civilian leaders like the Vice President and SECDEF openly endorsed enhanced interrogation methods, which probably clouded the perception of right and wrong by uniformed leadership at that time. Don't really want to go down that path, but it wasn't just military leadership that failed. There are numerous examples of leadership failures that had strategic impact, but few of these events (if any) were part of a coherent strategy, but rather the tragic result of human behavior when we're at war. We can't allow these events to derail us from the pursuit of the larger strategy (assuming it actually exists).

You said if a General Officer doesn't know how to execute counterinsurgency operations he should be told to retire? Another way to look at it is if he got to where he is by demonstrating competence in the required fields, then obviously COIN was not a required competency, and many before him should also be held to blame (I'll take it a step further, now we're raising a generation of officers that don't know anything but COIN, what will happen if they have to fight a real war?). However, I don't think it was the inability to execute COIN that was our strategic failure, but rather getting put in a position where we had to do COIN to begin with (in both Iraq and Afghanistan).

I don't want to cross any security lines, but I was involved in the initial planning for OIF and can state confidently there was clearly a strategic planning shortfall for what came after Saddam's regime fell. There was also a period of a few weeks/months after we occupied the major cities in Iraq where the military was largely operationally paralyzed in my opinion because we didn't know what our civilian leadership wanted. Out of necessity individual units started acting on their own, policing the streets, standing up local governments, etc. towards no particular end other than some semblance of stability while our national leadership decided on what next. Is that a failure at the General Officer level, or is the result of not having a national level strategy planning capability above the COCOM?