thedrifter
03-13-06, 06:50 AM
Strategy
Haste, politics and squabbling generals - fatal blunders on road to Baghdad
The following is an edited excerpt from Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor
Monday March 13, 2006
The Guardian
The war was barely a week old when General Tommy Franks threatened to fire the Army's V Corps commander.
From the first day of the invasion, American forces had tangled with thousands of Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. General William "Scott" Wallace, who was leading the army troops towards Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.
Soon after, Gen Franks telephoned Lieutenant-General David McKiernan, the head of all allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve Gen Wallace.
The firing was averted after Gen McKiernan flew to Gen Franks' headquarters in Qatar to support the V Corps commander. But the episode revealed the deep disagreements within the US high command about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.
The dispute, related by numerous military leaders and their aides in interviews, had lasting consequences. The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nassiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard.
The paramilitary Fedayeen were numerous, well-armed, dispersed throughout the country and seemingly determined to fight to the death. But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, Gen Franks and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, saw them as little more than a speed bump on the way to Baghdad.
Three years later, Iraq has yet to be subdued. While America's war strategy has been well documented, the conflicts and concerns about how some of the key decisions were made has previously been unknown. As US forces prepared to invade Iraq in March 2003, American intelligence was not projecting a major fight in southern Iraq.
CIA officials told US commanders that anti-Saddam tribes might secure a vital Euphrates river bridge and provide other support. Tough battles were not expected until army and marine troops began to close in on Baghdad.
The intelligence agency believed that many of the towns in Iraq were "ours", recalled Major General Rusty Blackman, who served as Gen McKiernan's chief of staff. After he heard the CIA assessment, one army commander told his officers that they might encounter joyous parades in towns such as Samawa and Nassiriya.
Almost from the start, however, the troops found themselves fighting the Fedayeen, other militias and Ba'ath party paramilitary forces.
After the marines fought in Nassiriya Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Apodaca, a Marine intelligence officer, drafted a classified message concluding that the Fedayeen would continue to be a threat. Many had sought sanctuary in small towns that were bypassed in the rush to Baghdad. The colonel compared the Fedayeen to insurgencies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia and warned that unless American soldiers went after them in force, the enemy would continue their attacks after Baghdad fell, hampering efforts to stabilise Iraq.
At the land war headquarters, there was growing concern about the Fedayeen as well. Major General JD Thurman, the chief operations officer, argued for delaying the push to Baghdad so that US forces could concentrate on the threat in the south.
At a March 28 meeting at Jalaba airfield in southern Iraq, Gen McKiernan consulted his army and Marine commanders about the situation. According to notes taken by a military aide, Gen McKiernan concluded that the United States faced two "centres of gravity": the Republican Guard, who were arrayed near Baghdad, and the paramilitary Fedayeen.
Gen McKiernan decided to suspend the attack into the Baghdad area defences for several days while continuing air strikes and engaging the Fedayeen. When he returned to his headquarters in Kuwait, though, he learned of the furore over Gen Wallace's comments to the press.
"The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against, because of these paramilitary forces," Gen Wallace had said to the New York Times and Washington Post.
To Gen Franks, the remarks were tantamount to a vote of no-confidence in his war plan. It relied on speed, and he had told Mr Rumsfeld that his forces would take Baghdad in less than two weeks.
In Washington, Gen Wallace's comments were seized on by critics as evidence that Mr Rumsfeld had not sent enough troops. More than a year earlier, he had thrown out the initial war plan that called for at least 380,000 troops and had pushed the military's central command to use fewer soldiers and deploy them more quickly.
At a Pentagon press conference, the defence secretary denied that he had any role in shaping the war plan.
Privately, Mr Rumsfeld hinted at his impatience with his generals. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican lawmaker and a Rumsfeld adviser, forwarded a supportive memo from Colonel Doug Macgregor, who had long assailed the army leadership as risk averse.
In a blistering attack, Col Macgregor denounced the decision to suspend the advance. Replying, the secretary wrote: "Thanks for the Macgregor piece. Nobody up here is thinking like this."
Gen McKiernan, for his part, was stunned by the threat to fire Gen Wallace. "Talk about unhinging ourselves," he told Lieutenant-General John Abizaid, Gen Franks' deputy, according to officials at Gen Franks' headquarters.
At Gen Franks' headquarters in Qatar the next day, Gen McKiernan and others made the case against removing Gen Wallace. He survived, but the strategy debate was far from over.
Determined to spur his ground war commanders to renew the push toward Baghdad, Gen Franks flew to Gen McKiernan's headquarters on March 31, where he delivered some harsh criticism. Only the British and the Special Operations Forces had been fighting, he complained.
The most memorable moment came when Gen Franks said that he did not want to hear about casualties, even though no one had mentioned any, recalled several participants in the meeting. He put his hand to his mouth and made a yawning motion, as if to suggest that some casualties were not of major consequence to the attack.
By April 2, US forces were closing in on the capital. Even before the war, Mr Rumsfeld saw the deployment of US forces more in terms of what was needed to win the war than to secure the peace. With the regime broken, he began to press for cancelling the deployment of the 1st Cavalry Division - some 16,000 soldiers. Gen Franks had favoured having the additional troops, but eventually relented. He later acknowledged the defence secretary was the impetus behind the decision. "Don Rumsfeld did in fact make the decision to off-ramp the 1st Cavalry Division," Gen Franks said in a 2004 interview.
Gen McKiernan, who was the senior US general in Iraq at the time, was not consulted about the decision. Though unhappy about it, he did not protest.
Three years later, with thousands of lives lost in the tumult of Iraq, senior officers say that cancelling the division was a major mistake, one that reduced the number of American forces just as the Fedayeen, former soldiers and Arab Jihadists were beginning to organise into an insurgency.
"The Ba'athist insurgency surprised us and we had not developed a comprehensive option for dealing with this possibility, one that would have included more military police, civil affairs units, interrogators, interpreters, and Special Operations Forces," said retired army general Jack Keane, who served as the acting chief of staff during the summer of 2003.
"If we had planned for an insurgency, we probably would have deployed the 1st Cavalry Division and it would have assisted greatly with the initial occupation. This was not just an intelligence community failure, but also our failure as senior military leaders."
Ellie
Haste, politics and squabbling generals - fatal blunders on road to Baghdad
The following is an edited excerpt from Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor
Monday March 13, 2006
The Guardian
The war was barely a week old when General Tommy Franks threatened to fire the Army's V Corps commander.
From the first day of the invasion, American forces had tangled with thousands of Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. General William "Scott" Wallace, who was leading the army troops towards Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.
Soon after, Gen Franks telephoned Lieutenant-General David McKiernan, the head of all allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve Gen Wallace.
The firing was averted after Gen McKiernan flew to Gen Franks' headquarters in Qatar to support the V Corps commander. But the episode revealed the deep disagreements within the US high command about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.
The dispute, related by numerous military leaders and their aides in interviews, had lasting consequences. The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nassiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard.
The paramilitary Fedayeen were numerous, well-armed, dispersed throughout the country and seemingly determined to fight to the death. But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, Gen Franks and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, saw them as little more than a speed bump on the way to Baghdad.
Three years later, Iraq has yet to be subdued. While America's war strategy has been well documented, the conflicts and concerns about how some of the key decisions were made has previously been unknown. As US forces prepared to invade Iraq in March 2003, American intelligence was not projecting a major fight in southern Iraq.
CIA officials told US commanders that anti-Saddam tribes might secure a vital Euphrates river bridge and provide other support. Tough battles were not expected until army and marine troops began to close in on Baghdad.
The intelligence agency believed that many of the towns in Iraq were "ours", recalled Major General Rusty Blackman, who served as Gen McKiernan's chief of staff. After he heard the CIA assessment, one army commander told his officers that they might encounter joyous parades in towns such as Samawa and Nassiriya.
Almost from the start, however, the troops found themselves fighting the Fedayeen, other militias and Ba'ath party paramilitary forces.
After the marines fought in Nassiriya Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Apodaca, a Marine intelligence officer, drafted a classified message concluding that the Fedayeen would continue to be a threat. Many had sought sanctuary in small towns that were bypassed in the rush to Baghdad. The colonel compared the Fedayeen to insurgencies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia and warned that unless American soldiers went after them in force, the enemy would continue their attacks after Baghdad fell, hampering efforts to stabilise Iraq.
At the land war headquarters, there was growing concern about the Fedayeen as well. Major General JD Thurman, the chief operations officer, argued for delaying the push to Baghdad so that US forces could concentrate on the threat in the south.
At a March 28 meeting at Jalaba airfield in southern Iraq, Gen McKiernan consulted his army and Marine commanders about the situation. According to notes taken by a military aide, Gen McKiernan concluded that the United States faced two "centres of gravity": the Republican Guard, who were arrayed near Baghdad, and the paramilitary Fedayeen.
Gen McKiernan decided to suspend the attack into the Baghdad area defences for several days while continuing air strikes and engaging the Fedayeen. When he returned to his headquarters in Kuwait, though, he learned of the furore over Gen Wallace's comments to the press.
"The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against, because of these paramilitary forces," Gen Wallace had said to the New York Times and Washington Post.
To Gen Franks, the remarks were tantamount to a vote of no-confidence in his war plan. It relied on speed, and he had told Mr Rumsfeld that his forces would take Baghdad in less than two weeks.
In Washington, Gen Wallace's comments were seized on by critics as evidence that Mr Rumsfeld had not sent enough troops. More than a year earlier, he had thrown out the initial war plan that called for at least 380,000 troops and had pushed the military's central command to use fewer soldiers and deploy them more quickly.
At a Pentagon press conference, the defence secretary denied that he had any role in shaping the war plan.
Privately, Mr Rumsfeld hinted at his impatience with his generals. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican lawmaker and a Rumsfeld adviser, forwarded a supportive memo from Colonel Doug Macgregor, who had long assailed the army leadership as risk averse.
In a blistering attack, Col Macgregor denounced the decision to suspend the advance. Replying, the secretary wrote: "Thanks for the Macgregor piece. Nobody up here is thinking like this."
Gen McKiernan, for his part, was stunned by the threat to fire Gen Wallace. "Talk about unhinging ourselves," he told Lieutenant-General John Abizaid, Gen Franks' deputy, according to officials at Gen Franks' headquarters.
At Gen Franks' headquarters in Qatar the next day, Gen McKiernan and others made the case against removing Gen Wallace. He survived, but the strategy debate was far from over.
Determined to spur his ground war commanders to renew the push toward Baghdad, Gen Franks flew to Gen McKiernan's headquarters on March 31, where he delivered some harsh criticism. Only the British and the Special Operations Forces had been fighting, he complained.
The most memorable moment came when Gen Franks said that he did not want to hear about casualties, even though no one had mentioned any, recalled several participants in the meeting. He put his hand to his mouth and made a yawning motion, as if to suggest that some casualties were not of major consequence to the attack.
By April 2, US forces were closing in on the capital. Even before the war, Mr Rumsfeld saw the deployment of US forces more in terms of what was needed to win the war than to secure the peace. With the regime broken, he began to press for cancelling the deployment of the 1st Cavalry Division - some 16,000 soldiers. Gen Franks had favoured having the additional troops, but eventually relented. He later acknowledged the defence secretary was the impetus behind the decision. "Don Rumsfeld did in fact make the decision to off-ramp the 1st Cavalry Division," Gen Franks said in a 2004 interview.
Gen McKiernan, who was the senior US general in Iraq at the time, was not consulted about the decision. Though unhappy about it, he did not protest.
Three years later, with thousands of lives lost in the tumult of Iraq, senior officers say that cancelling the division was a major mistake, one that reduced the number of American forces just as the Fedayeen, former soldiers and Arab Jihadists were beginning to organise into an insurgency.
"The Ba'athist insurgency surprised us and we had not developed a comprehensive option for dealing with this possibility, one that would have included more military police, civil affairs units, interrogators, interpreters, and Special Operations Forces," said retired army general Jack Keane, who served as the acting chief of staff during the summer of 2003.
"If we had planned for an insurgency, we probably would have deployed the 1st Cavalry Division and it would have assisted greatly with the initial occupation. This was not just an intelligence community failure, but also our failure as senior military leaders."
Ellie