Part 5 (2/2)

But the most significant post-Vietnam fix may have been doctrinal-that is, in how the Army thinks about how it fights. Arguably, the rebuilding began on the Golan Heights in 1973, as the Army's leaders, trying to figure out the path beyond Vietnam, watched the Arab-Israeli Ramadan War, or Yom Kippur War, with astonishment. Shocked by surprise attacks from Syria and Egypt, the Israelis quickly rallied and launched a counteroffensive, losing only 250 tanks and 772 troops as they destroyed 1,150 tanks and killed 3,500 of the enemy. Among those tracking this was Gen. William DePuy, the first chief of the U.S. Army's new Training and Doctrine Command, which was created in July 1973. DePuy, who in Vietnam had held the key position of operations officer for Gen. William Westmoreland, and also had commanded the 1st Infantry Division, developed ”an intense interest in the reform of tactics and training, in line with tactical lessons drawn from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,” wrote John Romjue in an official history of the evolution of modern Army doctrine. Three years later the Army revised for the first time since 1968 its core statement on how to fight, t.i.tled ”Operations,” but in those days more commonly referred to as Field Manual 100-5 (FM 100-5).

The 1976 version of this capstone doctrinal statement warned that the Army must aim to ”win the first battle of the next war.” That ultimately led the Army's thinkers to focus too much only on that first fight. During World War II, tanks had opened fire at an average range of 750 yards, but in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli tanks engaged at two thousand yards and more. This changed the shape of the battlefield and meant fighting in-depth, rather than just on a front, observed retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former commandant of the Army War College and later coauthor of an account of the spring 2003 invasion. ”It doesn't matter how much you put on the front line, because the lethality of weaponry is such that you can't just fight on the front line, you have to fight all echelons at once, in depth,” Scales said.

Ultimately, that long view across the battlefield meant focusing on the operational level of war-that is, looking beyond tactics to the entire area in which fighting is occurring. When the Army next revised FM 100-5, in 1982, it made that concept official doctrine. ”Between tactics and strategy, the manual inserts the intermediate level traditionally recognized by the German and other armies as the operational level of large units,” Romjue wrote. This operational level was defined as going after the enemy's center of gravity, whatever it was that made the foe most able to keep on fighting.

This new emphasis also was meant to address what the Army had decided was a major failing during the Vietnam War. Retired Army Col. Harry Summers, Jr., began On Strategy: A Critical a.n.a.lysis of the Vietnam War, On Strategy: A Critical a.n.a.lysis of the Vietnam War, perhaps the most influential book to come out of that conflict, by recounting an exchange he had had in Hanoi on April 25,1975, with a North Vietnamese colonel. perhaps the most influential book to come out of that conflict, by recounting an exchange he had had in Hanoi on April 25,1975, with a North Vietnamese colonel.

”You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” Summers said.

The North Vietnamese officer considered this a.s.sertion for a moment, and then responded, ”That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” Hanoi's center of gravity had not been on the battlefield.

The new focus on the operational level of war was meant to fix this disconnect, in which tactical success had failed to lead to an overall strategic victory.

The Army learned the lesson well-perhaps too well, Scales said. The new doctrine, the new weaponry, and the new att.i.tude of the Army all came together at the National Training Center. During the 1980s, the Army radically improved its combat abilities by providing tough realistic training there. It also used afteraction reviews-a kind of U.S. military version of Maoist self-criticism, enforced by carefully collected data-to make commanders address their weaknesses and mistakes. The lessons learned during mock battles at NTC were credited with paving the way for the swiff victory the U.S. military achieved in Kuwait in 1991, just sixteen years after the fall of Saigon. The 1991 war had the unfortunate side effect, though, of reinforcing the changes the Army had made-which made it an unchallenged force for short, blitzkrieg-style warfare against other states, but badly positioned for protracted ground combat, especially of an irregular or unconventional nature.

So for all the good it did, the NTC also planted some of the seeds of the flawed plan of 2003. In making performance at the NTC the measure of an officer, the Army tended to fall into thinking, mistakenly, that what makes a good battalion commander is what makes a good general. But the trainers at the NTC taught commanders how to win battles, not how to win wars. What came after the battle became someone else's business. By that point, the Army commander was focused on packing up his force and redeploying home, which is fine for a battalion commander but not for the top commander.

In learning how to be more operational, Scales said, the Army may have lost its hold on both the higher, strategic lessons of generals such as Eisenhower, as well as on the lower, tactical lessons of counterinsurgency that it had learned in Southeast Asia. Rather, it devoted its attention and effort to that midlevel of war-the operational art, as it came to be called. The NTC's scope covered only the fighting-defeating the enemy force, not figuring out what would follow. The plan for the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq reflected that view of war, emphasizing what it would take to get to Baghdad with little regard for what would follow. It was an operational plan, strategically deficient.

In an essay examining this issue, Army Lt. Col. Antulio Echevarria II concluded that Franks and other U.S. military commanders in 2003 had confused winning the battle of Baghdad with winning the war for Iraq. Today's commanders tend to see battles as an end in themselves, rather than properly as a means to a political outcome, he wrote. Echevarria was not just any Army officer but the director of national security affairs at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Inst.i.tute. This issue was at the core of his specialty. The result, he warned, was a military built and trained for the wrong job. ”Its underlying concepts-a polyglot of information-centric theories such as network-centric warfare, rapid decisive operations, and shock and awe-center on 'taking down' an opponent quickly, rather than finding ways to apply military force in the pursuit of broader political aims,” he concluded. ”The characteristics of the U.S. style of warfare-speed, jointness, knowledge, and precision-are better suited for strike operations than for translating such operations into strategic successes.”

That conceptual flaw, that lack of understanding of how to complete the job, may be the reason that after both the 1991 war and the 2003 invasion the U.S. military seemed to fall asleep at the wheel. After the end of the 1991 war, noted Rick Atkinson in Crusade, Crusade, his history of that conflict, there was a ”postwar American pa.s.sivity, a policy of drift and inaction.” A similar period of American drift would follow the fall of Baghdad in 2003. his history of that conflict, there was a ”postwar American pa.s.sivity, a policy of drift and inaction.” A similar period of American drift would follow the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

The doctrinal revamping of the Army in the mid-1970s had another long-term effect on the Army. After it came home from Vietnam, the Army threw away virtually everything it had learned there, slowly and painfully, about how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Under Gen. DePuy, noted Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who in the 1990s wrote a study of the Army and counterinsurgency and then a few years later fought an insurgency in western Iraq, ”the post-Vietnam army intentionally turned away from the painful memories of its Vietnam experience.” In his study Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, Nagl pointedly noted that the 1976 edition of FM 100-5, the Army's core doc.u.ment, ”did not mention counterinsurgency.” Nagl pointedly noted that the 1976 edition of FM 100-5, the Army's core doc.u.ment, ”did not mention counterinsurgency.”

So the Army that went to war in Iraq in March 2003 was well aware of its strengths, but like Franks, seemed blind to many of the conceptual weaknesses it was bringing to the fight.

Regime removalTwo images marked the fall of Saddam Hussein's government.

One was the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, insisting at loony press conferences that U.S. forces were being hurled back into the desert where early graves awaited them-even as the U.S. Army was setting up camp a few miles to the west at the Baghdad airport and the Marine Corps was approaching from the southeast. ”There is not any American presence or troops in the heart of the capital, at all,” Sahhaf said at a press conference at the Palestine Hotel on April 7. ”The soldiers of Saddam Hussein gave them a great lesson that history will not forget.” The next day he told reporters that U.S. soldiers approaching the city center ”are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks.” It was a bravura performance, his last before being taken into captivity for questioning by U.S. military authorities.

One little noted oddity of this is that U.S. intelligence concluded that Sahhaf, or Baghdad Bob, as soldiers dubbed him, actually thought that what he was saying was the truth. At the time, the Iraqi military was claiming that it had counterattacked the U.S. invasion force and destroyed about eighty tanks and other vehicles, killed four hundred U.S. soldiers, and taken two hundred prisoners. He said later that his information came ”from authentic sources, many authentic sources.”

”We believe he believed what he was reporting,” Army Col. Steve Boltz, the deputy chief of intelligence for V Corps, later said. Saddam Hussein's Iraq ran on fear, and bearers of bad news tended to suffer for what they delivered. ”No one would want to tell him the truth, so they lied to him.” Iraqi officers so feared the consequences of conveying negative news up the chain of command that they ”fell into telling the high command they were all okay,” Boltz concluded. One result of this systemic self-deception within the Iraqi hierarchy was that when a 3rd Infantry Division unit entering the capital captured an Iraqi general, the surprised officer said in an interrogation that ”he had no idea that U.S. troops were so close to Baghdad,” according to the division's official history.

The invasion's second memorable image was the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein in a square in downtown Baghdad on April 9. The few days that followed were ”as good as it got, the high-water mark of the invasion,” observed Rick Atkinson, the military historian who embedded with the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion.

This moment also brought one of the highest points in George W. Bush's popularity as president. The first big jump in his polls numbers came after 9/11, when his approval level shot from 55 percent to a stratospheric 92 percent. That slowly settled back down into the high 50s, but spiked back up to 77 percent with the fall of Baghdad.

Yet even as the enemy capital fell, there was a quiet chorus of concern, especially from seasoned Army officers. ”The hard part is yet to come,” retired Col. Johnny Brooks, an old infantryman, warned on the day Baghdad fell. ”We can easily win the fight but lose the peace.” The United States needed to move quickly to restore electricity and other basic services. ”If we do not give the people positive signals, and soon, that Iraq is getting better rapidly, and that they have hope, then the gunmen will start appearing and taking shots at U.S. military. Then the suicide bombers will appear.”

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, another infantryman, was even more specific about how things might go wrong. ”We should not lose sight of the fact that, from the opposing point of view, the war isn't over,” he told a group of defense-minded friends on April 18. ”I suspect that serious people somewhere-probably hiding out in Syria-are planning the counterattack, which I suspect will take the shape of popular demonstrations against U.S. occupation, feyadeen attacks on coalition troops and Iraqis who cooperate with efforts to establish a new government, and general operations to destabilize and deny U.S. efforts to move to a secure and reformed Iraq.” That would prove to be an extraordinarily accurate summary of the enemy concept of operations that would emerge in the following months.

Intelligence officials also were sending up rockets of warning. ”It is premature to be doing victory laps,” a senior military intelligence expert on the Middle East said at the time. ”The hard part is going to be occupation. The Israelis won in six days-but have been fighting ever since-for thirty years.”

Jeffrey White, a former a.n.a.lyst of Middle Eastern affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency, added, ”My worry is that we could see the beginning of some kind of resistance based on regime diehards, nationalists, disaffected tribal elements, etc.”

But in the view of Franks and other military commanders, the a.s.signed job had been completed. ”We designed success in negative terms-getting rid of the regime, instead of establis.h.i.+ng a democratic regime,” said Army Reserve Maj. Michael Eisenstadt, an intelligence officer and specialist in Middle Eastern security issues who worked in Central Command during the run-up to the war. ”When President Bush landed on that carrier with the 'Mission Accomplished' banner, it was right: The mission, as defined for the military as getting rid of the regime, had indeed been accomplished.”

Rumsfeld dismisses the looting As U.S. forces triumphed, Iraqis rose up and expressed their hatred for Saddam Hussein's regime in an extraordinary wave of vandalism. Mobs attacked government buildings across the country, carting off not just valuables but everything that could be pried off walls and floors. During this period it wasn't uncommon to see a pickup truck carrying doors, window frames, and piping from government offices.

”Stuff happens!” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld exclaimed at a Pentagon briefing on April 11, 2003, when asked about the looting. ”But in terms of what's going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over, and over, and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, 'Oh, my goodness, you didn't have a plan.' That's nonsense. They know what they're doing, and they're doing a terrific job. And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here.”

But that's not the way the looting felt to many of those on the ground in Iraq. During this period, the U.S. military was perceptibly losing its recent gains; it gave the sense that it really didn't know what to do next and was waiting to pa.s.s the mission to someone else. ”A finite supply of goodwill toward the Americans evaporated with the pa.s.sing of each anarchic day,” Lt. Nathaniel Fick, an elite force re-con Marine officer, wrote of being in Baghdad during this time.

”There wasn't any plan,” recalled a Special Operations officer who was in Baghdad at the time. ”Everyone was just kind of waiting around. Everybody thought they'd be going home soon.” Looking back on the period, he recalled it as a slow loss of momentum. ”It wasn't like all h.e.l.l broke loose. It was more like the situation eroded.”

Rumsfeld's fundamental misunderstanding of the looting of Iraq, and the casual manner in which he expressed it, not only set back U.S. forces tactically, but also damaged the strategic standing of the United States, commented Fred Ikle, who had been the Pentagon's policy chief during the Reagan administration. ”Some senior officials in Was.h.i.+ngton chuckled about a 'new spirit of freedom' that had suddenly sprouted... among 'grateful,' liberated Iraqis,” he wrote. ”America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode. To pacify a conquered country, the victor's prestige and dignity is absolutely critical.” This criticism was leveled by a man who not only had impeccable credentials in conservative national security circles, but actually had brought Wolfowitz to Was.h.i.+ngton from Yale during the Nixon administration.

The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn't care-or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively. In either event, the U.S. government response to the looting undercut the beginning of the U.S. occupation.

Watching the situation unfolding from his perch as a defense consultant in Was.h.i.+ngton, Gary Anderson was beginning to get worried. He had war-gamed this scenario, and he knew just how vulnerable the U.S. position was if it faced an intelligent and adaptive enemy. Anderson is a retired Marine officer, of whom there sometimes seem to be two main types: big guys who resemble offensive linemen in football, and more compact, wiry sorts who look more like knife fighters. Small, bandy-legged, and gravelly voiced, Anderson fit well in the second category. A life spent figuring out how to take down foes bigger than himself prepared the retired colonel well for his post-Marine specialty: acting the role of the enemy in military exercises, in what the Pentagon calls red teaming. In the sprawling U.S. defense establishment, there is a small but steady market for such faux foes, and it became nearly a full-time job for Anderson.

He had spent much of early 2003 figuring out how to best combat U.S. forces operating in urban environments. Where were the American military's vulnerabilities? What were the seams in the U.S. approach? How could such a high-tech force, wielding an overwhelming a.r.s.enal, operating freely on the ground, in the air, and far overhead in s.p.a.ce, be countered by an enemy lacking secure communications and possessing just explosives and light infantry weapons, such as AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades? Those were the questions Anderson was paid to address.

As he watched the U.S. advance into Baghdad early in April, he began to worry. He had played a very similar scenario just eight weeks earlier. ”We're f.u.c.ked,” he had said to his ”enemy” staff as he contemplated a U.S. attack on his conventional forces. ”We can slow them down, but they're coming to Baghdad.” What he meant in that barracks shorthand was that it was clear that there was no way a regular military force could stand up to the U.S. onslaught. So, he said, the first step was to slow the advance and make as much trouble for the Americans as possible. Second, his career officers and intelligence officials would take off their uniforms and disappear into the neighborhoods, stay in contact with some key subordinates, and ”tell our people to keep their weapons oiled.”

In late March he began to fear that Saddam Hussein's Baathist functionaries were following just that course. ”Phase I a.s.sumes eventual defeat in a conventional war,” he wrote in a prescient opinion article published in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Was.h.i.+ngton Post. ”The second phase would be a protracted guerrilla war against the 'occupation.'” Anderson suggested that the U.S. military needed to ”be prepared to react to an enemy game plan that may be different from our own.” It was an oddly pessimistic article to write as U.S. forces moved toward triumph. But it caught the attention of senior officials at the Pentagon. A few weeks later, a secretary in ”The second phase would be a protracted guerrilla war against the 'occupation.'” Anderson suggested that the U.S. military needed to ”be prepared to react to an enemy game plan that may be different from our own.” It was an oddly pessimistic article to write as U.S. forces moved toward triumph. But it caught the attention of senior officials at the Pentagon. A few weeks later, a secretary in Wolfowitz's office called Anderson. Would he be willing, she asked, to come in for a chat with the deputy defense secretary?

Though only a few inside observers like Anderson suspected it, the victory was already beginning to unravel. Publicly, at least, as late as April 28, Wolfowitz continued to minimize the need for U.S. troops. ”We're not going to need as many people to do peacekeeping as we needed to fight the war,” he told the Was.h.i.+ngton Times Was.h.i.+ngton Times that day, when there were 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Even as Wolfowitz spoke, Iraq was heating up. that day, when there were 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Even as Wolfowitz spoke, Iraq was heating up.

A fuse is lit in Fa 11ujah In late April U.S. commanders were growing concerned about activity in Fallujah and Ramadi, two conservative Sunni towns an hour to the west of Baghdad, on the western fringe of the land between the rivers. The area generally had been neglected in the war planning, which had focused on Baghdad. The only attention paid to al Anbar province was an effort to stop Scud launches against Israel from the remote western part of the province. The rest of it-far closer to Baghdad and able to influence events in the capital-seems to have been ignored. This is inexplicable, even for a war plan built around the narrow aim of knocking off Saddam Hussein's regime, because Fallujah was home to an estimated forty thousand former Baathist Party operatives, intelligence officials, and Iraqi army officers who should have been expected to defend their interests vigorously.

Central Command's planning for the postwar period, never good, was particularly inaccurate in predicting the likely state of the Sunni heartland north and northwest of Baghdad. ”Continued armed opposition to coalition forces unlikely once Saddam flees or is captured/killed,” stated a cla.s.sified Central Command briefing on Phase IV issues. The briefing notes attached in the PowerPoint are even more optimistic: ”Reporting indicates a growing sense of fatalism, and accepting their fate, among Sunnis. There may be a small group of diehard supporters that is willing to rally in the regime's heartland near Tikrit-but they won't last long without support.”

”This part of the Sunni Triangle was never a.s.sessed properly in the plan,” Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, recalled later in an e-mail.

Writing about operating in this part of Iraq during World War II, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, one of the greatest British generals of his time, remarked that Iraq is ”a cruel, hard, desolate land.” The Americans were about to find out why. On April 27 in Ramadi, Swannack recalled, a hand grenade was thrown from a crowd at 82nd Airborne soldiers, severely wounding two.

The next day there was an incident in which a number of Iraqis-between six and seventeen-were shot dead by U.S. troops. The event did much to poison relations in the town, ultimately leading the following year to two major battles there in which thousands of fighters died and well over a hundred thousand civilians were displaced. The facts of the April 28 incident are in dispute, as is often the case with such situations. Army officers from three different units offered different accounts, and an investigation by Human Rights Watch found discrepancies not only among the U.S. military accounts but also among the versions offered by different Iraqis. The most likely explanation of what happened is that Iraqi provocateurs took advantage of the demonstrations to shoot at U.S. troops and trick them into firing into the crowds.

As Swannack recalled it, on April 28, part of the division was based in a school in downtown Fallujah. The 82nd had been operating in Fallujah for five days. The Americans thought their presence was rea.s.suring. ”We came in to show presence just so the average citizen would feel safe,” Col. Arnold Bray, commander of the 82nd brigade in the area, told Human Rights Watch. But the people of the city- known for their cultural conservativism and a xenophobia considered intense even by other Iraqis-found the patrols unsettling and an insult to their personal dignity, perhaps the core value of Iraqi culture. April 28 also was the birthday of Saddam Hussein, and so a natural day for his loyalists to rea.s.sert themselves.

”Several Iraqis instigated a crowd and approached this school,” Swannack wrote. He continued: 5-6 instigators from within the crowd and on the roof of an adjacent building fired AK-47s at our soldiers within the school grounds. Our troopers returned very accurate and precise fires killing/wounding these 5-6 instigators. The crowd withdrew with the killed and wounded-AK-47 sh.e.l.l casings were found on the adjacent rooftop and from within the area where the crowd stood. A check of hospitals and morgue produced only these 6 killed as I remember.

The leader of the platoon of Charlie Company that was responsible for security in the school when the demonstration began, 2nd Lt. Wesley Davidson, said, ”The bullets started coming at us, shooting over our heads, breaking windows. It was coming from the street, the guys behind the taxicab and some in the street.”

Some Iraqi demonstrators told Human Rights Watch that people not near the school were firing rifles in the air, and they claimed that the demonstrators had no weapons. ”They suddenly started shooting at us,” said Falah Nawaar Dhahir, whose brother was killed.

Others said that there was no firing at all until the American soldiers opened up. ”There was no shooting and they suddenly started shooting at us,” said Mutaz Fahd al-Dulaimi.

The Americans said that six Iraqis died that day. The director of Fallujah's hospital, Dr. Ahmad Ghanim al-Ali, told Human Rights Watch that thirteen people were killed at the scene and seventy-five were wounded, with four of those dying in the following days. As with many such incidents, the differing accounts remain irreconcilable.

Round two in Fallujah The 82nd, said Lt. Col. David Poirier, had ”the itchy trigger finger.” Poirier was about to lead an MP battalion into Fallujah a few days later, in early May, when he was taken aside by Col. David Teeples, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, to whom he temporarily reported. ”Let me just pa.s.s on to you what happened when we did a RIP [relief in place] with 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne,” Teeples began, Poirier later recalled.

Teeples had been in Fallujah because the 3rd ACR was temporarily taking control of the city from Col. Bray's brigade. He said he was standing alongside Bray on the roof of a building in downtown Fallujah on April 30, watching a convoy of Bray's troops begin moving west to east on Highway 10, the main road, when the convoy encountered about one hundred demonstrators in front of a government building.

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