War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires Drastic Change

Douglas A. Macgregor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
19 December 2004

Dispensing with reality is not uncommon in Washington, but in wartime, it is downright dangerous and that is exactly what has been going on to date in Iraq. It is one thing to go to war with the Army and the generals you have, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued a few days ago. Nearly two years later, however, both should be different and they are not. That's the real problem.

Americans are discovering that the Desert Storm formula for quick, cheap victories over incompetent enemies was always an illusion. Despite its initial showy successes on television reminiscent of the first Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom was fundamentally flawed. Other than removing Saddam Hussein from power, Operation Iraqi Freedom lacked a coherent strategic design. When American forces finally reached Baghdad in April 2003, the military offensive simply dissipated.

We were lucky. Without the relatively short three week campaign to defeat a very weak opponent mounted in Somali-like pickup trucks or "technicals," the U.S. Army would have shot its bolt, plunging into a war for which there was too little body armor, ill-prepared leaders and very few ready, deployable combat troops. Even with 640,000 soldiers on active duty in today's U.S. Army, 40% of which are reservists, the Army's generals are still unable to squeeze the required combat capability out of an anachronistic Cold War ground force. Americans are beginning to ask what happened in the 12 years between Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom? The answers are grim.

The notion of a bloodless victory in 1991 reinforced misguided notions of how Army forces should fight. All future Army operations in Southwest Asia had to look like Desert Storm hence, Rumsfeld's fight with the generals. These illusions exacted a price. Despite 12 years of experience in Southwest Asia since Desert Storm, surprisingly little was done by a succession of Army Chiefs of Staff to prepare the Army, its soldiers or its equipment, for the complex tasks that would confront them during intervention in an Islamic country.

Nothing was done to refit the Army's 8 hour, gas-guzzling tanks with new fuel-efficient engines. Nothing was done to reorganize an anachronistic supply system. Nothing was done to reduce the superfluous bureaucratic overhead of Army three and four-star commands, to convert spaces for clerks into spaces for soldiers who deploy and fight. The one significant change was the collective decision by the Army's four-star generals in 1998 to cut 25% of the Army's combat troops an action with profoundly negative consequences in Iraq where battalions and brigades are too small to do the job.

Fast-forward to 2003 and we see American soldiers arrive in Baghdad with no detailed maps of the city, no new rules of engagement to follow, no new civil order to impose. Chaos and criminality ruled for 30 days while the Army generals stood motionless. General "Tommy" Franks, USCENTCOM Commander, and Lieutenant General Dave McKiernan, 3rd Army Commander, did not plan backward from victory. Their obsession with fighting a weak, inept enemy seems to have obscured the criticality of keeping the real objective in mind to replace the old bad regime with a better one.

Without attainable political objectives beyond the vague goal of transforming Iraqi Arabs into Anglo-Saxon democrats, the Army's division commanders soon became provincial governors inside static division sectors on the Vietnam model. The alternative a less intrusive presence on the Army's Special Forces model linked to local tribal and clerical authorities but backed by powerful mobile armored reserves capable of quickly smashing real opposition was not seriously considered. Iraqi soldiers, police and government workers who might have filled the security vacuum on the local level, became part of the resistance when we rewarded their non-defense of Saddam Hussein's regime by throwing them out of work.

The results were disastrous. When the generals occupied Saddam Hussein's old digs in Baghdad sending a chilling message to Arabs that they had exchanged an Arab dictatorship for an American one, the liberation was transformed into a hated occupation. We didn't get it. Most of the generals and politicians did not think through the consequences of compelling American soldiers with no knowledge of Arabic or Arab culture to implement intrusive measures inside an Islamic society. We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away in handcuffs with bags over their heads and then provided no information to the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90% of whom were not the enemy. But they are now.

Through the summer and fall of 2003, whenever journalists noted the rising crescendo of violence and hatred in Central Iraq, the generals were quick to point to huge areas of the country that were quiet. However, the commanding generals did not direct the reallocation of significant ground combat forces from quiet areas to crush the known pockets of resistance in Central Iraq when it was much easier to do so.

While the lethality of every weapon in ground combat went up, the level of armor protection, firepower and off-road mobility for our soldiers in Iraq went down as tanks and armored fighting vehicles were replaced with HUMMVEEs.

In April, the outburst of violence across Iraq temporarily suspended these romantic notions because General John Abizaid realized that with fewer than 100 operational American tanks, American control of Iraq was at risk without the protection and devastating firepower of American armor. Within days, additional armor was flown into Iraq from Germany and it was temporarily back to basics including heavy armor, with lots of firepower and net-centric capabilities as an enhancement, not as a substitute for fighting power.

Today, there are nearly 600 American tanks in Iraq and the casualties sustained by the Armored force in fights from Falujah to Mosul have been extremely light compared with the thousands of American soldiers and marines killed or wounded in light infantry and support units.Yet, the passion for sending soldiers and marines into the teeth of the enemy on foot or in wheeled vehicles persists with deadly results for our soldiers and marines

What we are witnessing in Iraq is a symptom of a very familiar problem - peacetime military leadership under wartime conditions. Peacetime leaders are selected, trained and groomed in a system that promotes those who protect the system, adhere to process over results and give their superiors the answer they want to hear, "Yes."

So now what? Can we just muddle through, putting bandaides on gaping wounds, adding armor to HUMMVEEs instead of using the thousands of tracked, armored fighting vehicles sitting in storage? Can we keep on taking casualties while killing large numbers of Iraqis, hoping a new Iraqi government will eventually emerge that can control the country? When the January elections confirm Iraq's Shiite majority in power, many experienced observers think civil war is likely to follow. American soldiers and marines will be caught in the middle. What then?

It was Winston Churchill's rare gift to discern quickly what changes were implied by wartime conditions, and how policy should be adapted to meet new conditions. Churchill raged against the rigidity of mind in the senior ranks of the British Army during both World Wars. Sadly, without the intervention of a leader like Churchill, there is no guarantee that war will induce realistic change in the forces fighting the war on the ground in Iraq any time soon.

Controlling and managing the resources of a nation including its armed forces to the end that its vital interests are promoted and secured against enemies, actual or potential is what the president and Congress do. But vague expressions of support for the creation of new democracies where none exist do not constitute strategy. If America's goals were to seize and hold territory, to
increase the world's population under American authority, then intrusive military occupations lasting decades designed to forcibly transform foreign states into reflections of America would be the right response in war.

But these are not America's goals. Arabs, not Americans, must govern Arabs. At a price of 5.8 billion dollars a month, conditions in Iraq also cost a great deal of American money, money we must borrow from foreign sources to finance our growing deficit.

As the 911 Commission report indicated, it was wrong to allow the nation's intelligence agencies the freedom to define their own programs and priorities, control their own funding lines, and then rate their own effectiveness. French President, Georges Clemenceau, argued during WW I, "War is too important to be left to the generals." After losing hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in a muddled war of attrition, Clemenceau could no longer afford to dispense with reality. The question is: How much longer can we afford to do it?

The author is a former Army Colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat veteran who authored three books. His latest is Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights (Praeger, 2003).

c. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Citation: Douglas A. Macgregor, War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires Drastic Change," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 December 2004; Original URL: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/newswatch/story/74639B5932FF098686256F6F004B7C45?OpenDocument&Headline=War+Strategy%3A+Dramatic+failures+require+drastic+changes&highlight=2%2Cmacgregor