War in Iraq

Planning and Execution

Thomas G. Mahnken, Thomas A. Keaney, Thomas G. Mahnken, Thomas A. Keaney

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415420754
• eBook ISBN: 9781134104192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume provides a collection of insightful essays on all phases of the Iraq War: both US-led major combat operations to defeat the Ba'athist regime as well as efforts to reconstruct the country and defeat the insurgency.

Written by leading scholars on the Iraq War, many of whom have practical first-hand experience of the war, the book includes a Conclusion by leading US strategic thinker Eliot Cohen. This is the first work on the Iraq War to incorporate an understanding of the Iraqi side of the war, based on a systematic analysis of captured Iraqi archives.

War in Iraq will be of great interest to students of the Iraq War, small wars and insurgencies, international security and strategic studies in general.

Part I
Defeating the regime and occupying Iraq

1
America’s anabasis

Isaiah Wilson

While a young man, the Greek historian Xenophon participated in the expedition led by Cyrus the Younger against his older brother, the emperor Artaxerxes II of Persia, in 401 BC.

The Greeks were victorious in battle, but with the death of their leader, Cyrus, found themselves in a strategically precarious situation. The Greek Ten Thousand found themselves deep in hostile territory, near the heart of Mesopotamia, far from the sea, without a plan for the war that was now upon them, and without leadership. They finally fought their way north through hostile Persians, Armenians, and Kurds to Trapezus on the coast of the Black Sea and then sailed westward and back to Greece.¹

Xenophon recorded this expedition and the journey home in his work entitled The Anabasis (“The Expedition” or “The March Up Country”), a reference to an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. The work was an expression of the difficulties of waging expeditionary wars, and more specifically, of waging war in Mesopotamia.

The parallels between Xenophon’s anabasis, then, and our own anabasis that began back in March 2003 are intriguing:

• each was an expedition, a march up country;

• each began as an unequivocal tactical victory, but each devolved into a strategic quandry, to say the least;

• our own march up country traversed much of the same ground – literally and figuratively – as the Greek Ten Thousand’s;

• both fights were in the heart of Mesopotamia; and,

• Xenophon’s anabasis lasted close to ten years … our own katabasis (march out of country), many have proposed, may take just as long.

The Iraq War – America’s Anabasis – is giving witness every day not only to the challenges of expeditionary warfare in Mesopotamia, but also of the rise of what seems to be a new-age of war and peace; an era of long wars to which the United States seems to have a record of failures – incomplete wins. The Iraq experience follows in a long tradition of falling short of achieving “complete victory” in our intervention policies. This chapter focuses on planning – the planning (and in some cases, the apparent lack thereof) that laid the path to war upon which the United States and its coalition of the willing embarked in the third week of March 2003, a path that has, thus far, left our war policy far short of its grand objectives (a safe and secure Iraq embracing liberty and with no threat to its neighbors), and the inheritor of a Long War of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

If, as Clausewitz wrote, the first, the supreme act of policy judgment is to decide upon the kind of war upon which one is embarking, then the second is to plan accordingly.² Did the war we embarked upon in Iraq, beginning in March 2003, defy the post-modern realities of what war – regardless of its catalyst – was destined to be? If we got the purpose and aims of the war wrong, did we also get the approach to the war – our calculus for the intervention – wrong? Did the former beget the latter? Regarding the Iraq War, is our current policy anemia (our failure to “win the peace”) the result of our determining the wrong political objectives, or, did we have the right objectives, but merely fail to achieve them? Were we wrong in our cause, or simply in the effectiveness of our approach?

The war in Iraq is the latest in a long debate over how much manpower and materiel, not to mention time, is required to win decisively in our nations’ wars and interventions. The debate is the offspring of the traditional “guns versus butter” calculus that is a vitally important debate for any democratic nation to undertake prior to, and throughout, a war. This latest war in Iraq, however, has raised this discussion to a new level of relevance and importance. This is the case, in part, because of the elusiveness of the decisive victory that defense and military planners were convinced would come with the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime on April 9, 2003, and the “bog” of insurgency and anti-insurgency in which the United States and its military forces have found themselves since the President declared “mission accomplished” on May 1, 2004.

Was there a plan for the peace? Some say yes, others no. As an official early recorder of the war, serving from March to June 2003 as an historian and combat observer/interviewer for U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group (OIFSG),³ part of my duties were to collect data and first-hand soldier accounts of the war’s progress – to conduct an initial assessment of how well the plan was measuring up against the realities of the warfight on the ground. What I observed first-hand was the absence of an operational plan for that part of the war that came after the collapse of the Ba’athist regime on April 9, 2003. From this vantage point, I was also able to confirm what I had recorded as a historian months earlier: there was no operational plan for Phase IV operations in the U.S. war-plan for Iraq. The rest of this chapter will focus on the way in which this planning for the war developed.

The planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom

A campaign plan “Flawed By Design”⁴

There are two dictums that are commonly understood by those in the planning communities. The first is that planning does not occur in a vacuum. The second is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The planning that led to the execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) violated the first dictum and relied far too heavily on the latter. The result was an Iraq War campaign plan that wasn’t. A campaign plan by name only, one that was more reflective of a major combat operational plan than a holistic war plan and one where the actions and outcomes of the majority of its activities were left to hope (and the vote of the enemy) instead of to deliberate prior preparation.

Dr. Conrad Crane of the U.S. Army War College refers to the flawed planning process behind OIF as yielding “many plans, but not one.”⁵ This author has referred to this condition as an anemia of U.S. operational planning, resulting in the campaign plan that wasn’t.⁶ Overall, the campaign planning for the Iraq War suffered then, and continues to suffer to this day, from three major flaws.

Incomplete planning regarding purpose and political aim

The Iraq War is not a modern war, but rather a post-modern one. As an exemplar of a Clausewitzian modern war, the Iraq War would have been considered an unlimited war – a war devoted to the overthrow of an enemy regime. Once that political aim expanded beyond the aim of regime change to the aim of nation-building (change “of” regime⁷), the purpose and intent of the war went beyond the defining parameters of the modern paradigm. With this new aim, the Iraq War became a post-modern war, beyond Clausewitz’ wildest imagination. With the modern parameters (art and science) for determining whether a limited or unlimited war providing little to no relevance to this war in Iraq, the planning and decision making for the war fell suspect to subjective judgment. The Iraq War, consequently, has become a war of limited (scarce) resourcing, despite its absolute unlimited aim. The result of this policy mismatch is now an out-of-balance U.S. strategy, which loses more and more of its legitimacy both with the American and the Iraqi publics of concern.

Incomplete planning regarding timing

The Iraq War was initially a forward-planned intervention resourced and directed toward the attainment of a limited military object (toppling of Saddam) instead of a more comprehensive political objective. We essentially planned our way into a fight with Saddam instead of planning a way toward a better state of peace with the Iraqi people. As such, the timing of the campaign plan (i.e. when diplomacy would end and major combat operations begin) was arrived upon with an eye toward a pre-emptive military timetable instead of a more protracted and preventive “holistic” timetable. Political pundits, and devoted rejectionists of the war, have argued that peace was not given enough of a chance prior to the U.S. initiation of major combat. Despite the popular sound bite (“give peace a chance”), there is a grain of practical truth to this argument. If the initial parameters of the war campaign had been calculated and constructed with the broader, “change of regime” (reconstruction of a stable, safe, and secure Iraq), political aim instead of the much more limited change-in-regime (toppling of Saddam) endstate, the planning calculus for this more complex and Long War would have suggested a radically different staging and timing of the campaign plan and strategy for the prosecution of the intervention.

Based on the more limited “topple Saddam” objective, the calculus of war centered on Saddam Hussein and his state...

Table of contents

• Series: strategy and history
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Defeating the regime and occupying Iraq
• Part II Reconstructuring Iraq and countering the insurgency
• Index