Iraq Army’s Collapse May Hold Lessons for the Future by Chris Carroll, Stars and Stripes
The Iraqi army’s failure to fight after the United States spent some $20 billion and the lives of many U.S. troops to train and advise them holds a number of lessons, including some that may apply in Afghanistan.
The stunning collapse in the face of a far smaller al-Qaida affiliated force may have been sparked by internal political and ethnic divides, but bad planning and failed diplomacy on the part of the United States played a major role, defense analysts said…
… analysts said President Obama’s stated intention to end the war in Iraq led to continual downward pressure on the planned number of advisers, until it fell to a small fraction of what military planners originally hoped for.
When the administration settled on just over 3,000 troops to remain, plus another 1,500 on a rotational basis, al-Maliki may have considered it a “drop in the bucket” not worth negotiating seriously for…
Comments
The lesson from this "Fiasco" should be that No. 1 Nation Building (after destroying already in-place infrastructure) is not to be attempted by the USA, as we are very shortsighted & have an attention span of Ten-second Tom. No.2 We Do Not need to be getting involved with every country's problems if it Does Not directly threaten our National Security. No. 3 We are way to dependent upon technology, especially when fighting/training forces who still have not evolved past tribal/religious warfare, but can still whip our butts in the long run. No. 4 Out Intel sucks!
The author isn't saying we shouldn't do SFA or FID in the future, he is stating that if we simply pull out and don't sustain the forces we trained and provide them with technical support they don't have such as ISR we can lose everything we invested up to that point. He captures this when he quotes Cordsman in the last two paragraphs talking about the sustainment plan, or lack of one, for Afghan security forces.
There may certainly be a necessity to build a large supported nation security force based on the threat, but that is an expensive beast that needs to be downsized as soon as conditions permit. Ideally demobilized soldiers will have a soft landing and not be tossed into the growing abyss of unemployed creating the potential for significant organized crime. How many developing nation security forces can we afford to sustain, along with our own robust military? Necessity will drive the requirements, but that doesn't mean we don't start with the end in mind which is ultimately an effective security force that is effective and sustainable by the supported nation. Otherwise it ends up looking our unsustainable military-industrial complex that just keeps growing until strong leaders finally put the brakes on it.
I know some think we don't need SFA doctrine because we have FID doctrine, but clearly based on our historical poor performance we need SFA doctrine in a bad way. SFA is much broader than FID, and the real issue isn't training and equipping, but equipping and training intelligently. Authorities that are more flexible are definitely part of the answer, but additional authority without a better process won't result in much change.
We need to relook our assessment process from the strategic (ability of supported nation to sustain) to the tactical level (right equipment and training to get the job done), and then ensure assessments actually inform decisions so we don't stay on autopilot executing a failed program.
I don't think the Iraqi Army collapsed because of our poor training. It is more complex than that, with many social, political, and Machiavellian politics involved by a lot of actors. However, understanding that did we put too much faith in our dream of building partner capacity to work ourselves out of job? Do we put too much faith in this approach in other countries? If BPC/SFA/FID won't work in certain situations, have we seriously considered alternative solutions? We love to harp the "through, by, and with" myth, but fail to see that other nations are achieving their objectives through, by and with our support and we don't even realize we're getting played.
"States that rise unexpectedly, then, like all other things in nature which are born and grow rapidly, cannot have their foundations and relations with other states fixed in such a way that the first storm will not overthrow them; unless, as is said, those who unexpectedly become princes are men of so much ability that they know they have to be prepared at once to hold that which fortune has thrown into their laps, and that those foundations, which others have laid before they became princes, they must lay afterwards."
~Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch VII
People that blame the President reveal much about their own political bias. However, they also reveal a lot about how many, especially in the military, like to think. Mainly that who is in charge actually matters. In a culture that values command, this is a very comfortable place to think.
Who was in charge would have not influenced this the outcome here. GEN. Petraeus was produced by the same culture that produced his peers. The changes he made were important, but they were strategic decision on the margin, not at the core of the strategy. Whoever was placed in that position would have produced some marginal changes, but nothing really fundamental. The culture and thoughts of the organization that produce people are far more important than the people themselves.
Your post points to something that is very cultural in the US Army. Mainly the building of headquarters to deal with issues and problems. It is a terrible waste of resources, but also at marginal importance to why we failed in Iraq.
The start of the war saw much internal debate. However, the basic question of how does Iraq currently maintain internal stability was never really asked. The importance of Iraq's domestic intelligence apparatus was never understood. Moreover, when the insurgency begin, no one questioned the wisdom of replacing that with an American trained Army. What I would argue is that this result was going to happen and I don't see any real contemporary voices in 03 that were voices the real problems. One needed a change at the core of policy and strategy, but leadership was basically thinking the same thing with some marginal variation.
In sum, the institution is more important in understanding decision making than any person.
P.S. While half the officer corps were out-of-touch blusterers, three-quarters of civilians were even worse: living in the yellow zone (e.g., leaving a base only enough to avoid getting fired and losing $200K and rationalizing it as 'acclimating to the culture'...). Yes, MoveForward, your criticisms of civilian field workers (e.g., me) are basically valid. Thank God I am going back to the private sector in advertising.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4500479/liquidate-usaid
Blaming President Obama for the current problems in Iraq is like blaming John Jacob Astor IV for the Titanic. Inaction in Syria directly, and indirectly in Ukraine, aggravated this situation or, pehaps, invited its timing. Nevertheless, this is a crisis of al-Malarky's own making. President Obama is to be credited by making support contingent on big changes in a crippled polity. NOW for what I REALLY think...
A SOFA was not going to happen. For six months, I was in the strategy group plotting out the security partnership post-2011. The consensus was a sweet-sounding but utterly delusional 35-50,000 troops to be left behind. That was what the military commanders deemed appropriate -- felt the U.S. was entitled to dictate terms of that eventual partnership -- and that figure showed up in the press as 'expectations'.
The 5-20,000 soldiers claimed today is post-hoc revisionism to make the group-think seem realistic. I tried to raise the possibility of ZERO troops and then build from there. That sentiment went nowhere fast and I was looking for new work. The military command was replete with deadbeats in uniform willing to revel in the 'hero' accolades but never leaving the Green zone and making no serious effort to prod the security forces forward.
In fact, many of these uniformed deadbeats shrouded, via over-classification, the re-infestation of the Ministry of Interior by shi'ite death-squads (the main problem then and the main problem now). We had brilliant people -- no, I was not one -- who knew the score but were undercut by overly ambitious idiots putting their next promotion or their pensions (at the expense of 25-33% of the household hard-earned by 6-8 average American families) ahead of the mission (on behalf of those same people).
If I am sitting on my buttox to lock in a nice pension I have not earned, I will surely not get myself killed, will I? And then I can go and profit from an economically corrupt, but transparent and legal, military-industrial complex. Hell of a way to treat those non-coms, junior field officers and soldiers who had been killed during the surge. This was not the President. This Pentagon in-breeding cannot be placed on President Obama. GO BACK TO GEN. PETRAEUS and AMB. CROCKER as well as decorated veterans of field fighting.
The lesson is to not expect to be able to build an Army to hold a country together that was never held together by an Army in the first place. Saddam kept power by mainly using a domestic intelligence apparatus. The US coming in and rebuilding an Army and having that Army perform a mission of internal security, when the previous Army was mainly concerned about external threats, was never going to happen.
Nor was it going to be a solution to keep power the way Saddam kept power. In my view, the United States had two end states it could have pursued. It could have entered the country and had a very limited mission of finding and destroying any WMD. The Iraq War could have been nothing but an armed raid to remove WMD(or the uncertainty about WMD, as there was in fact none) The second choice would be to divide the country into logical sub-divisions that would allow internal control.
In either case, it would be a shame if training other forces is thought of as a "failure". Just because one answer doesn't work in one situation doesn't mean that the answer is always wrong.
I am sure the next incorrect lesson that will be drawn is that it is no use training host nation forces or conducting foreign internal defense. But before we denigrate those missions we have to ask what is or was the strategy and did we have balance and coherency among ends, ways, and means? But anyone who advocates working with host nation forces will now be delegitimized by this fiasco (or should I say the continuing fiasco).