Countering Lind-dinistas - if the mission is impossible, don't blame me

[AmericanPride]

1) Some uniformed leaders spoke up, and as you said they were not listened to by the likes of Rumfield. This doesn't represent a failure of our military education system. Other factors point to where our education should be improved, but this isn't it.

I think it raises some important issues regarding the dynamics of the civil-military relationship and the actions available to military officers who find themselves in this situation. I don't think military education is the fix for this - though perhaps better institutional communication and civilian education (on both sides) would facilitate more functional relationships.

Absolutely, but I suspect if we dug into this we didn't have a plan based on civilian guidance. Also hard to develop an occupation plan when you didn't have the forces to facilitate effective occupation operations.

I'd be interested to know what plans, if any, existed before 2003 or 2001 regarding executing an occupation of Iraq. And this goes back to point one - this a political question or a military question?

I think the real argument isn't so much the annual rotations (quicker for SOF), but the lack of continuity in approach/objectives between the different units.

Let me clarify that I do not mean that individual soldier rotations should be extended. But there has to be a way organizationally to maintain continuity - I don't know what that looks like or what we've done in the past. Maybe that means small unit formations (battalion and below) rotate in theater as a unit on a regular schedule (6-12 months), while headquarters formations remain in place and rotate servicemembers individually.

Just a few random thoughts.

[Bill Moore]

AP,

Overall it is a policy question and then the strategy (whole of government) to achieve the policy goals. I can't describe what I was privy to until I validate it is now unclassified (I assume it is, and has already been written about), but overall I think our strategy was based on an assumption that the Iraqi people would embrace us, embrace democracy, and that the transition would be easy because this is the natural drift of civilization. We just needed to remove Saddam to let it blossom. If that was the underlying assumption then we didn't need a plan, we just needed to remove Saddam.

There is no excuse for poor officership in combat, but my point remains no matter how great our officers could have been it wouldn't make a difference if the policy objective and underlying assumption were deeply flawed from day 1. GEN Petraeus has a famous quote that goes along the line of "tell me how this ends" which indicates he experienced similar frustrations with the policy goals.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Link to finished product.

http://warontherocks.com/2014/05/dem...obayashi-maru/

[JMA]

Well done Stan, good article. I responded as follows:

Mark May 6, 2014 at 2:28 pm ·
Rather than add the task of achieving “political objectives by other means” to the already long list of skills required by the officer corps would it not be more intelligent – in the light of near universal failure of national building efforts – to just accept it is not a military task?

A significant contributing factor in the demise of the British military has been the 'can do' response to any challenge by the military to the politicians when it was quite clear the objective could not be achieved. Is the same problem happening in the US?

Link to finished product.

http://warontherocks.com/2014/05/dem...obayashi-maru/

[TheCurmudgeon]

Well done Stan, good article. I responded as follows:



A significant contributing factor in the demise of the British military has been the 'can do' response to any challenge by the military to the politicians when it was quite clear the objective could not be achieved. Is the same problem happening in the US?

I am not sure if the conditions that existed in this country from 2002-3 were unique or if that 'can do' response is just inherent in the attitude of the American military. Certainly, at other times, less drastic courses of action prevailed. We did not invade Iran when our Embassy was taken. We also did not nuke China during the Korean War. Those were probably as much a result of the civilian leadership at that time as it was the military advice given.

I do think that it is important that senior military leaders understand the nature of political legitimacy and democratization at least at the level I discuss in the piece if for no other reason than to temper the ambitions of those who might want to try this kind of action again.

I don't think that, if anyone in the military had told the civlian leadership that democracy in Iraq was not possible, that the leaderhip would have accepted that answer or would have passed it on up the chain of command. If they had they would have met the samd fate as General Shinseki.