War game battle in middle of Iraq invasion

Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor:

The Iraq war was barely a week old when General Tommy Franks threatened to fire the U.S. Army's field commander.
From the first day of the invasion, in March 2003, American forces had tangled with thousands of Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. General William Wallace, who was leading the Army's 5th Corps toward Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.
Soon after, Franks phoned Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the head of allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve Wallace.
The firing was averted after McKiernan flew to meet Franks. But the episode revealed the deep disagreements within the U.S. high command about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.
The dispute, related by senior military officers and their aides in interviews, had lasting consequences. The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nasiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard.

...
There is much more in this long excerpt from a book on the war. The book seeks to blame Rumsfeld for not putting enough troops in to squelch the insurgency. Tommy Franks refuse to cooperate with the authors so his side of the story is most likely found in his own book or in follow up interviews in response to this book.

The controversy sparked over Wallace's comments came from reporters who thought they were more significant than they really were. The fact that an enemy does not act in accordance with an earlier war game analysis is not even news. Enemies always attempt to disrupt attacks by doing something unexpected. What combat leaders constantly have to do is observe what is happening and adapt their forces to deal with it. That is what Franks and ultimately Wallace did.

The authors suggest that wiping out the Fedayeen before proceeding to Baghdad would have killed off the insurgency before it had a chance to get going. There are several things wrong with this suggestion.

First is it makes a gift of time to an off balance enemy allowing him more time to prepare his defenses against your conventional forces moving toward the capitol. It would be repeating the mistake of failed generals like Santa Anna who wasted time and resources on destroying the forces at the Alamo and Goliad rather than persuing Sam Houston's main army which later defeated his exhausted soldiers at San Jacinto.

Second, the insurgency has never been based in the area where they were fighting the Fedayeen. It has always been based in Western Anbar which was never on the invasion route.

There is an argument to be made that having more troops on the ground after the invasion would have made it easier to suppress the enemy insurgents, but the operation immediately followed an operation in Afghanistan where fewer troops were used and there was no major insurgency.

While I was not particularly surprised by the insurgency, it is very similar to the Hezballah war with Israel in Lebanon, I was more suprised by the lack of a significant insurgency in Afghanistan where the terrain and the history of the people would indicate a much more robust response by the enemy than actually occurred. Given the choice, I would much rather fight this battle in Iraq which does not have the terrain that gives the enemy a place to hide.

I also think it very important to defeat the insurgency, not just for the war on terror, but defeat it as a concept that can be used in future wars with the US. As long as we are not committed to defeating insurgencies, we give our enemies hope. You win wars by destroying that hope.

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