Questions for the generals

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling says our generals have not done a good job in Iraq in an article in the Armed Forces Journal. His arguments apparently resonate with many field grade officers, i.e. majors and colonels.

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America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.

Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

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Many of these same officers personally assured the President that they had everything they needed to win before the war started, then took a different tone when the going got tough. There was a debate among the generals on whether a small foot print would force the Iraqis to step up . The small footprint generals believe that a large US force would result in the Iraqis, letting the US do all the work and never taking ownership of the country. The fact turned out to be that they were not capable of taking ownership on the time line those planners anticipated.

By the time that became clear, the political support for the war had eroded. Earlier in his article Yingling talks about the importance of political support to the success of a war. What seems to be missing is an understanding of the generals that they have some responsibility to come up with a plan that can be effective while maintaining that political support.

One of the big problems in this war effort and Yingling does not really address it, is that our enemy is conducting half the war in the media battle space and we are barely engaged in that battle space. It is as if an enemy invades a country from two directions and the generals only fight him on one front. There is still no one in charge of the media battle space in the US war effort, nor are there any forces for anyone to be in charge of.