The full RAND Corp report is here.Updated 1:17 PM EST | BAGHDAD — The Iraq war has produced a flood of articles, books, studies and reports about the troubles that followed the initial military success. In recent months, the United States Army has added to the collection with the release of an unclassified, two-volume history of the planning and execution of the occupation.
In February, The New York Times’s Michael R. Gordon obtained a draft of the first volume, a 2005 report on the planning for postwar Iraq. The study, prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, criticized the White House, the Defense Department and the State Department, among other government agencies. Despite being unclassified, the report was quashed for three years before finally being released on Monday.
Some of the material that Mr. Gordon reported on in the draft version of the report did not appear in the unclassified version released the public. “Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” the draft report obtained by Mr. Gordon read. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”
On Sunday, Mr. Gordon reported on the publication of the second volume of the Army’s unclassified history. Unrelated to the RAND publication, the nearly 700-page report, entitled “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign,” is available online at usacac.army.mil.
Here are some excerpts from the documents. If you find passages that you think are noteworthy, highlight them in the comments section.
After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq
Excerpt’s from the RAND Corporation’s 2005 report.
“The evidence suggests that the United States had neither the people nor the plans in place to handle the situation that arose after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Looters took to the streets, damaging much of Iraq’s infrastructure that had remained intact throughout major combat. Iraqi police and military units were nowhere to be found, having largely dispersed during combat. U.S. military forces in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country were not prepared to respond rapidly to the initial looting and subsequent large-scale public unrest. These conditions enabled the insurgency to take root, and the Army and Marine Corps have been battling the insurgents ever since.”
“It is not the case that no one planned for post-Saddam Iraq. On the contrary, many agencies and organizations within the U.S. government identified a range of possible postwar challenges in 2002 and early 2003, before major combat commenced, and suggested strategies for addressing them. Some of these ideas seem quite prescient in retrospect. Yet few if any made it into the serious planning process for OIF.
“They were held at bay, in the most general sense, by two mutually reinforcing sets of assumptions that dominated planning for OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) at the highest levels. Although many agencies and individuals sought to plan for post-Saddam Iraq, senior policymakers throughout the government held to a set of fairly optimistic assumptions about the conditions that would emerge after major combat and what would be required thereafter. These assumptions tended to override counterarguments elsewhere in the government. Meanwhile, senior military commanders assumed that civilian authorities would be responsible for the postwar period. Hence they focused the vast majority of their attention on preparations for and the execution of major combat operations. That both sets of assumptions proved to be invalid argues for the development of a new and broader approach to planning military operations, and perhaps a louder military voice in shaping postwar operations.”
On General Tommy R. Franks:
“General Franks saw major combat operations during Phase III as fundamentally distinct from Phase IV stability and reconstruction requirements, and as the military’s primary task. That mindset reinforced an understandable tendency at CENTCOM to focus planning on major combat as an end in itself rather than as a component part of a broader effort to create a stable, reasonably democratic Iraq. The result, arguably, was a military operation that made the latter, larger goal more difficult to achieve.”
“Military resources were allocated based upon a fundamentally flawed view of both the friendly and enemy situations that would exist during the transition from Phase III to Phase IV.”
On the Coalition Provision Authority:
“While personal relations were often good, failures of coordination and information sharing sometimes created significant tensions, most commonly between the civilian and the military arms of the occupation.”
On the National Security Council:
“If the NSC staff failed to consider alternative scenarios that might pose differing requirements, neither did it provide strategic guidance on various aspects of U.S. policy during the postwar period. Repeated requests for policy guidance from CENTCOM, Task Force IV, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), and others went unanswered, leaving each agency to make its own assumptions about key aspects of the postwar period. Key questions, such as whether the U.S. postwar authority would be military or civilian in nature, went unanswered throughout the planning process. When the NSC issued strategic guidance in late March 2003 (as will be discussed in Chapter Three), the war was already under way. As a result, the various planning processes that occurred across the U.S. government were neither coordinated nor guided by a set of consistent goals and objectives.”
“Above all, the NSC seems not to have mediated persistent disagreement between the Defense Department and the State Department that existed throughout the planning process.”
On the Department of Defense:
“The Department of Defense was named the lead agency for postwar Iraq in January 2003, on grounds that the civilian and military authorities in postwar Iraq would coordinate more effectively if they both reported to the Secretary of Defense, rather than having the civilian authorities reporting to State and the military authorities reporting to DoD. While this may have made sense in theory, it did not work in practice. DoD’s understandable emphasis on military operations led it to form ORHA, the civilian planning agency, only eight weeks before combat operations began, and more than a year after CENTCOM began military planning for the war. But DoD lacked the expertise and personnel necessary to address the civilian aspects of reconstruction, and it did not possess enough bureaucratic leverage to compel other U.S. agencies to provide experienced personnel. DoD’s lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution continued to pose problems throughout the occupation period.”
On the State Department:
“Press reports have widely described the Future of Iraq project as a State Department “plan” for the reconstruction of Iraq. Such a characterization is unwarranted. Plans require a concrete set of prioritized steps that should be taken in a given situation, and a plan ideally assigns responsibility for each of those steps. The Future of Iraq project did not contain any such prioritization; it was not something that could be taken off the shelf and immediately executed.”
On the Army and post-war planning:
“The situation has only gotten worse since the insurgency began. U.S. forces have had to assume that ordinary citizens may be potential belligerents, often leaving Iraqi civilians in the crossfire. A consistent majority of the Iraqi population identified security and safety as the most urgent issue facing Iraq throughout the occupation period.7 The failure to stabilize and secure Iraq has therefore had the inadvertent effect of strengthening the insurgency, as Iraqis witness many of the negative effects of the U.S. military presence without seeing positive progress on the issues that matter to them most. The insurgency has also been aided by the failure of U.S. military forces to emphasize the mission of sealing the country’s borders—a mission that still ranks relatively low on the list of important coalition missions—enabling critical foreign support to flow into Iraq.”
“Looking back, we can see that the failure to plan for and adequately resource stability operations had serious repercussions that affected the United States throughout the occupation period and continue to affect U.S. military forces in Iraq.”
“Few military voices besides that of Army Chief of Staff General Eric K. Shinseki called attention to the possibility of a major, long-term security challenge in post-Saddam Iraq. One reason other military voices remained muted was that the military operated within the prevailing assumptions set by senior civilian officials, which did not identify security as a problem.”
On Point II
Excerpt’s from the Army’s report.
“In June 2003 the United States made a dramatic change in the Coalition’s command structure. This transition began informally in late May when General Franks told both Lieutenant General Wallace, the outgoing V Corps commander, and the newly promoted Lieutenant General Sanchez, the inbound commander of V Corps, that CFLCC was pulling out of Iraq to refocus on its theater-wide responsibilities. Franks ordered V Corps to become the nucleus of the senior military command in Iraq designated as CJTF-7. This move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware.”
“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime, Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for US ground forces in Iraq.”
“CENTCOM and Third Army did only the barest planning for Phase IV of OIF. The CFLCC plan for this phase was not formally issued until the start of the ground invasion of Iraq. Few if any commanders at all levels had any idea what their missions in Phase IV were to encompass. Lieutenant General (Retired) Jay Garner and the ORHA, created 20 January 2003, barely had time to build a staff and do a limited analysis of its tasks before it deployed to Kuwait in late March. US civilian and military planning and preparation, even for what was assumed to be a relatively easy and short Phase IV, was inadequate. Though essentially a joint planning process, the Army, as the Service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “
It's mostly a confirmation of everything the Dirty Fucking Hippies has said: Not enough troops at first, no planning was permitted by the top dogs in the Pentagon in favor of the Magic Democracy Wand, and generalized incompetence all around.
