Quote Originally Posted by AmericanPride View Post
I'll throw out a few ideas:

(1) Not emphasizing to the political leadership the military resources that would be required to conduct such a mission; one general did that in his testimony to Congress and was promptly fired. Everyone else subsequently cowered.
(2) Not having a long-term plan of occupation; in Iraq, the plan was to push the regime out of power and hope for spontaneous democratization, which failed to materialize after the whole Iraqi government was dismantled indiscriminately. And in Afghanistan, the reliance on the Northern Alliance and ANSF proved equally problematic in a state with very little history of centralized political control. Notwithstanding the political policies aimed at making good politics instead of good strategy, someone somewhere in the military bureaucracy should have placed a contingency plan of some kind on the shelf rather than wait until orders from their political masters.
(3) The ad-hoc and troublesome pattern of 6-18 month rotations that destroyed any operational continuity in whatever plan that was visualized.
(4) Focusing on the political end-state (democratization) at the expense of the military end-state (disarmanent and/or defeat of the opposition). Victory on the battlefield comes before the collection of the spoils of war!
(5) Minimizing the enormority of the conflicts at hand while gathering all the benefits (i.e. budget, new powers, etc) that came with it. Institutionally, DoD was never put on a 100% war-footing - there was still competing priorities with the "small wars" (i.e. in procurement) that shaped strategic decisions. Following procedures and future force visions were never completely subordinated to the war effort.
AP,

First off apologies for the delay in responding. I don't think any of the above comments reflect on our professional military education. Not to defend the numerous military errors that were made by an excessively conventional military whose leaders at the operational level failed to adapt to their environment, we ultimately failed at the strategic level and even if our officers were better at the operational level (and they need to be) I believe we still would have failed because our strategic aims were unrealistic and our civilian leaders as you stated above didn't mobilize sufficient forces or ask Americans to pay for the war (war tax). It was a half hearted effort politically.

Taking your points one by one,

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.

2) 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.

3) Different schools of thought on this, but according to some studies soldiers begin losing their combat effectiveness if they're in combat more than 6 months at a time. This may not apply to the non-combat arms types, and the conclusion of these studies may be flawed, but at least there was a reason for it. Also doubt we could have retained our recruitment levels if Joe, Mike, Bob, etc. thought they were going to be deployed for multiple years without a break. The professional force has a lot of advantages, but also some disadvantages if you think you need to employ them like conscripts. 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.

4) Agree that we pursued a very politically correct doctrine that didn't address the reality of the enemy has a vote, and the reality that not everyone in the world desires to be like us. I still it is imperative that the political objective be supreme and that all military operations ultimately support achieving that objective. If the political objective was flawed and I believe it was critically flawed and couldn't be achieved, then our military operations were doomed to fail before they started. I also think you may be under estimating how much fighting we did, but to what end? The same can be said about our aid projects, a lot done, but to what end? Both were executed based on false assumptions. Our biggest fault was not admitting it sooner. We kick ourselves for pulling out of Beirut and Somalia after minor set backs, but maybe in hindsight we should applaud the strategic decision makers that realized the limited utility of military force in these situations and decided to cut our loses? I don't know, but being stubborn is not the same as being courageous, and in fact it can be cowardly.

5) Generally agree, but the reality is we are/were the global cop and the security interests/threats we had prior to 9/11 never went away, so based on the scope of our self-imposed responsibilities we couldn't afford to focus entirely on OIF and OEF-A, but we definitely could have done more and should have in my opinion. We executed both wars on the cheap relying our asymmetric advantage in kinetic fight, while forgetting that advantage would do little for us once we transitioned into the occupation phase. We shocked and awed ourselves more than our adversaries. On the other hand, I disagree with Secretary Gates comments about the Pentagon not purchasing the mine resistant vehicles quick enough. I think they're were good reasons for doing so, because those vehicles were hardly decisive and simply reinforced our bad tactics of drive by COIN. If you want to defeat IEDs you need to control the populace and terrain, and that means sending in sufficient forces to do so. We never had the political will or wisdom to do this, and instead passed blame to the Pentagon for not wanting to dedicate limited funds (again no war tax) on a vehicle that had limited utility.