What are the top 5 things we've learned from OIF

[Rob Thornton]

Hey Ski - your original points may have only come out in bullets - but I think your points have allot of depth. I wanted to highlight a couple of paragraphs from your follow on to discuss civil military relations.

In terms of the lack of planning in the beginning - quite frankly, if one is a war planner, one better have iron clad assumptions, and being willing to resign if political considerations are placed over military necessities if they cannot be resolved under the veils of secrecy. Clausewitz also stated that the military commander needed to inform the political authorities about the I likeliness of those political considerations being achieved (or not).

Failure to have the foresight and imagination required to develop these plans results in what we've seen over the last 5 years in Iraq. Yes, the enemy has a vote. And that's to be respected, and I vaguely remember something called a threat matrix from way back in the day. I wonder what the threat matrix for Iraq looked like in December 2002...and what it morphed into by 2004...

I think at the tactical level your assumptions will be stronger - at the operational level less so - and at the strategic level even less because of the role policy plays - so I don't know that there are any iron clad assumptions at the level where policy and strategy mix - every time we make one at one level - the inflexibility of policy at a higher level may ignore it - I think it depends on the existing civil military relationship. What happens if the General resigns? and then the next guy, and the next guy? What if he speaks his mind, but is then fired or marginalized and a less capable guy comes in - one who is more malleable to the civilian leadership and will never tell the emperor he has no clothes? Its not an easy question looking backwards - let alone trying to gauge how things will look in the future.

We have a planning system within the military at both the Army and Joint levels that lays out facts and assumptions, decisions and risks all with in a context that we understand (although it too can be ignored), but that system does not account for foreign policy decisions that are made in a vacuum - and which don't consider the potential long term domestic impacts at home - let alone those of the country or region we're trying to influence - consider our mixed bag policies toward Iran right now - and trying to sort out how that effects the rest of the region and beyond. You can lay out the facts and assumptions, but ultimately policy has to be able or willing to listen - so there is a policy ceiling I guess. Since politicians make policy - my guess is if there is a showdown in our system - policy will trump and as Sec Rumsfeld infamously once said - we'll go to war with the one we have (although I'm not sure he saw the irony in the statement).

Certainly there were planners who saw the OIF numbers and recognized the consequences and risk involved and said "Holy-bat-guano - we're going to screw the pooch on the back end of this thing" - but it didn't matter - somebody in the food chain eventually told them to shut up and color. It was not until the political conditions changed enough to where military leadership was able to make a case of the obvious - and ask for and get the resources it needed to implement the ideas it wanted to. I'd be willing to bet somewhere in the future - we'll look back at OIF and forget how we got it wrong - we'll have to go learn it all over again -we'll just get it wrong again for whatever reasons, and we won't know it until it looks different - it doesn't mean there won't be successes in between, or that we won't succeed in the long run - just that we'll miss the right of it in the beginning.

Ref the hardware, and organizational changes - I think those were needed - but for some reason we often think new stuff and rearranging furniture is the story - its got to be about people first. The tendency to put the stuff first probably has something to do with trying to apply business models to war by policy makers, and a fascination with technology over people - I guess its just easier to wrap arms around MTBF type stats, then putting faith into leadership if your trying to sell political risk.

Best, Rob