Originally Posted by
Me
When I returned to Germany in 2004, fresh from my first 15-month tour in Iraq, I was convinced there had to be a better way to fight this kind of conflict. A year of operations in Baghdad and three months fighting the first Sadr rebellion made it clear to me that our strategies and methods were inadequate to meet the demands of the environment. Looking down the military history and theory aisle, I spotted a worn black book with a Huey helicopter depicted on the front. It was titled, somewhat generically, “The Army and Vietnam.” The dust jacket discussed how the Army had failed to adapt to the environment in Vietnam. Knowing Vietnam was our last fight against an insurgency, albeit in a very different context, I checked out the book — the first time anyone had done so since 1991.
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I have read few books in my life where reading the contents angered me. I found myself angry not at Krepinevich’s words, but because it often seemed I could simply strike “Vietnam” in the text and replace it with “Iraq” and the narrative would have been the same. Like the Army in Vietnam, we focused on large-scale operations to shape our area, believing that if we killed or captured all the enemy in our sector, we could go home. We failed to realize the fight was for the loyalty of the population, which we had placed secondary to engaging the enemy in battle. For example, as I left Iraq in 2004, we were leaving bases close to the population, the opposite of what was successful in counterinsurgency practice. I was irate because I couldn’t believe that my superior officers, graduates of institutions such as the School for Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College, Army War College and similar institutions would make the same basic mistakes the Army made 40 years ago and repeat them to a fault during the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I now know that the Army, either through action or neglect, purged itself of those hard-won lessons between 1973 and 2003. Likewise, we remained institutionally ignorant of the hard lessons the French and British learned in their own small wars. As a result, we squandered our first year in Iraq, conducting counterproductive operations that were at odds with historically successful counterinsurgency principles.
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