Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 5

The expectation that Iraqi commanders in the south would surrender and even bring their forces over to the side of the Americans by the thousands proved wrong: not one commander did so. "We were absolutely convinced, in a lot of ways, that this guy was going to capitulate with all these southern forces," Gen. Thurman, the operations director for the ground invasion, said later. "We were told that by the CIA. We were told that by... intel reports, in the a.s.sessment. And that isn't what happened. We had to fight our way through every town."

Public debate over troop strength In the following days the long-running debate about whether there were enough troops in the invasion force, which mainly had occurred behind closed doors, burst into the open. It would continue to be argued for years.

The issue was driven into public view by the Jessica Lynch debacle, in which a poorly trained and led support unit got lost in Iraq in part because of a lack of troops to direct convoy traffic at key points. Early on the morning of March 23, Lynch's unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, was at the tail end of a slow-moving six-hundred-vehicle convoy when it missed a turn and drove into Nasiriyah, where it ran into a series of ambushes. Of thirty-three soldiers in the lost section, eleven were killed, nine were wounded, and seven captured. The unit "was not trained to be in the situation they were in, was not equipped to be there, no GPS [Global Positioning System, a satellite-guided navigation system], no radios, no training on crew-served weapons, only one crew-served weapon in there, no night vision" gear, was the harsh but accurate judgment later delivered by Gen. Peter Schoomaker after he became Army chief of staff.

That night brought another ugly surprise, when the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment was hammered when it carried out an attack deep behind the front lines. Its mission was to destroy the armored vehicles and artillery pieces of the Medina Division northeast of Karbala before they reached the front. But the helicopters never really engaged the enemy unit, and instead turned back after running into a storm of rifle fire. One helicopter was lost and its two crewmen captured. Of thirty-two aircraft that returned to base, thirty-one had been hit by enemy fire. One aircraft alone had twenty-nine bullet holes, according to the Army's history. It was a shock to Army aviators who liked to think of their AH-64 Apaches as flying tanks. The defeat would reverberate through the Army for years. Early in 2006, the Army quietly disclosed that it had concluded that the Apache was so vulnerable to rifle fire that it would no longer have a major role in attacks deep behind enemy lines.

The two setbacks combined to sharpen questions among defense experts about the wisdom of going to war with the force Rumsfeld had dictated to the military. Most notably, Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the 1991 war, was sharply critical at the time. "In my judgment, there should have been a minimum of two heavy divisions and an armored cavalry regiment on the ground-that's how our doctrine reads," said the hard-bitten soldier, who to the irritation of the Pentagon had become a frequent commentator on television. "They chose to go into battle with a ground combat capability that was inadequate, unless their a.s.sumptions proved out."

Another Gulf War commander agreed. "It is my position that we would be much better off if we had another heavy division on the ground, and an armored cavalry regiment to deal with this mission in the rear," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Rhame, who had led the 1st Infantry Division in 1991.

A third Gulf War veteran, the retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, said that he was especially worried that the lack of troops could undercut the postwar occupation. "The stability of the liberated areas is clearly an issue," he said. "The postwar transition has to begin immediately in the wake of the attacking forces, and they seem to be short of forces for those important missions at this time."

The chorus of criticism got under Myers's skin; he was in the difficult position of being a career pilot and Air Force officer responding to the views of men who had been senior commanders in ground combat. He responded with uncharacteristic ferocity in a Pentagon briefing. "My view of those reports-and since I don't know who you're quoting, who the individuals are-is that they're bogus," began the usually bland Myers. "I don't know how they get started, and I don't know how they've been perpetuated, but it's not been by responsible members of the team that put this all together. They either weren't there, or they don't know, or they're working another agenda, and I don't know what that agenda might be."

He then went on to hint that such criticism was unpatriotic, coming during wartime. "It is not helpful to have those kind of comments come out when we've got troops in combat, because first of all, they're false, they're absolutely wrong, they bear no resemblance to the truth, and it's just, it's just harmful to our troops that are out there fighting very bravely, very courageously," Myers said.

Additional troop cuts One likely reason for the antagonism in Myers's comments was that there were intense discussions under way at the Pentagon of just that issue, of how many more troops to send to Iraq. "That week was bad juju," recalled a planner on the Joint Staff who partic.i.p.ated in a series of briefings to Rumsfeld that became a running discussion of whether all the additional troops on the deployment list were really needed. The military overwhelmingly believed that all the troops on the list should be sent. This officer recalled one briefing that came not long after the Jessica Lynch mess in which Abizaid, speaking in a secure video teleconference, said to Army Lt. Gen. Walter "Skip" Sharp, the J-5, or director of plans and strategy, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Hey, Skip, I think we're going to need the whole force package." A few weeks later, when planners at Combined Joint Task Force-7 did a formal troop to task a.n.a.lysis, they concluded that they needed a force of 250,000 to 300,000-almost double what they had on hand at the time.

The war plans called for additional forces to be sent after the fall of Baghdad, noted Conrad Crane. But the two top civilians at the Pentagon remained skeptical. "I don't see why it would take more troops to occupy the country than to take down the regime," Wolfowitz said in one meeting, recalled the officer involved in Pentagon planning. Rumsfeld had similar reservations about whether the 1st Cavalry Division was really needed, the officer said. It and the 1st Armored Division had been in the plan as insurance in case some of the lead forces in the invasion were hit with chemical or biological weapons, said Agoglia. With the pa.s.sage of time, when it became less likely that the U.S. invasion force was going to be attacked, pressure increased from the Pentagon civilians to stop moving those two follow-on divisions.

At one point, the war planner spoke up to urge that the military "fly in the 2nd ACR now-at least one squadron, and the whole regiment, if you can." The point he remembered making to Rumsfeld was that the invasion force needed to do a better job of protecting its lines of communication, and that the regiment would be ideal for operating independently, securing key intersections, and reconnoiter-ing routes. Even with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in the pipeline, senior military officials in both Washington and on the ground in Iraq worried as Baghdad was about to fall that the force lacked combat depth. Wolfowitz remained strongly opposed to sending the two heavy divisions, the 1st Armored and the 1st Cavalry.

After one meeting, the senior officers involved in the discussion trudged downstairs to the offices of the Joint Staff. Casey, who by that point had been promoted to the important job of director of the Joint Staff, looked at his two key subordinates-Sharp, the J-5, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, the J-3, or head of operations-and said, "I think we just lost the 1st Cav." Casey indicated that he thought the running argument was eroding relations with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and so needed to be brought to an end, another Joint Staff officer recalled.

Top officers feared that if the discussions dragged on, Rumsfeld would decide that the 1st Armored Division really wasn't needed either. So they made the argument to Rumsfeld that it was essential to send it, and to keep the 1st Cav on hold, possibly for sending in midsummer. The defense secretary ultimately agreed to that hedge plan. But there was an edge of bitterness to that session: "As we're walking out the door of the office, the secretary is behind his desk and he looks up and says, 'G.o.ddamit, I wonder how long it's going to take this this to get in the newspaper.'" Years later, this officer remained unhappy with his role in those discussions. "They did not take best military advice," he said. He felt that he had succ.u.mbed to a process in which he had compromised his judgment, making bids and agreeing when Rumsfeld okayed just half of what he believed was truly necessary. "There's a bargaining that goes on," he said. "To this day I feel I let people down, because we bargained.... I failed." More than two years later, he added, "I have angst every day about that. We didn't get it right, and fifteen hundred troopers"-the number of U.S. dead in Iraq at the time he was speaking-"have paid a price for that." to get in the newspaper.'" Years later, this officer remained unhappy with his role in those discussions. "They did not take best military advice," he said. He felt that he had succ.u.mbed to a process in which he had compromised his judgment, making bids and agreeing when Rumsfeld okayed just half of what he believed was truly necessary. "There's a bargaining that goes on," he said. "To this day I feel I let people down, because we bargained.... I failed." More than two years later, he added, "I have angst every day about that. We didn't get it right, and fifteen hundred troopers"-the number of U.S. dead in Iraq at the time he was speaking-"have paid a price for that."

In all these weeks of arguments over troop deployments, the voice that he thought was missing was that of Gen. Franks. "The military could have gotten it if the combatant commander had come down on it firmly and said, 'I want the whole force package.'"

Col. Kevin Benson, the chief planner at CFLCC, the headquarters for the ground invasion force, would later argue that the decision not to send additional troops was the tipping point that led to the subsequent insurgency. "You know, "there was probably a moment"-and now this is Benson's personal opinion- "there was a moment where some of my Arab friends told me that if we'd have kept the lid on, we probably wouldn't have had these problems. OK, conjecture. How do we keep the lid on? Well, we continue the force flow. We don't stop. We leave everyone in place."

Another, more insidious effect of these endless arguments with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz was its opportunity cost, said Agoglia. "Every friggin' request, they wanted to see the numbers, they wanted to know how many reservists," he recalled. "It delayed every move, and sucked energy out of Centcom staff. It was ridiculous. There is only so much capacity a staff has, and this was bulls.h.i.t. It sucked the energy out of long-term thinking."

If anything, commanders on the ground were even more deeply concerned than the Joint Staff about their thinness. Gen. Thurman expressed his regret a few months later to an official Army historian over the small size of the force on hand. Despite pushing from him and his superior, McKiernan, the ground force commander, the 1st Cavalry Division had been dropped at the last moment. "It's turning out right now that we need these forces," Thurman said in mid-2003.

McKiernan, in his own official debriefing later that June, sounded almost wistful. "I think everybody's going to come to the conclusion that we came to early on": He needed more troops than he had. "While we might not have needed them to remove the top part of the regime, and to get into Baghdad, we needed [them] for everything after that." Dropping the 1st Cavalry Division hadn't been his idea, he noted elsewhere in the interview. "It would have been nice to have another heavy division," he said. "Well, it would have been more than nice-it would have been very, very effective to have another heavy division fresh going into the fight."

Some feared that lines of communication would be cut. That worry landed square on Col. Teddy Spain, the commander of military police in the operation. In combat operations, one of the major missions of MPs is to make sure those lines are kept open and free from attack. But Spain was sorely missing the troops that had been knocked out of the plan months earlier. Had he retained all twenty companies of troops that he originally had in the war plan, he said later, "I could have guarded those MSRs [main supply routes]. I don't think Jessica Lynch and the 507th Maintenance Company would have happened. I truly believe that had I had those a.s.sets, I would have had troops right behind the 3rd ID, securing the route."

Chalabi's worrisome chums Another disquieting note was that as the U.S. military invaded Iraq, U.S. intelligence picked up indications that Ahmed Chalabi's organization was conveying information about U.S. troop movements to the government of Iran. "I don't want to say what the source was, but there was some evidence that there was an operational relationship" between Chalabi and Tehran, said a senior U.S. military intelligence officer. It was during the first ten days of the war, "about the same time that we saw solid evidence that Iran had a plan-operators in the south, people moving back and forth." The difference between Tommy Franks and Tehran, he said grimly, was that "the Iranians had a good Phase IV plan."

A Central Command official had a less malevolent interpretation of the communications between Chalabi's organization and the Iranian government during the invasion. "It p.i.s.sed me off that they were talking to the Iranians," he said. But, he continued, it was hardly a shock, in part because the U.S. government also was in touch with Tehran through the British government. The Iranians had signaled, for example, that if a U.S. pilot went down in their territory that they wouldn't fire on U.S. combat search and rescue aircraft sent to fetch him or her. Also, he said, it was important to convey the message to Tehran that the U.S. government wasn't interested in widening the war, and had no plans to take "a right turn" on the way to Baghdad. "So," he concluded, "it wasn't necessarily a bad thing" for Chalabi to tell the Iranian government about U.S. troop locations.

Asked much later about his relations with the Iranian government, Chalabi said, not completely clearly, "I did not pa.s.s any information to Iran that compromised any national security information of the United States."

Despite these tremors, Chalabi still looked like the Pentagon's choice to lead postwar Iraq. In early April, the U.S. Air Force flew a few hundred members of Chalabi's militia to southern Iraq. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, envisioned a major role for them. "These are Iraqi citizens who want to fight for a free Iraq who are, who will become basically the core of the new Iraqi army once Iraq is free," said Pace, the nation's number-two military officer. "They are the beginning of the free Iraqi army."

A statement issued by the Iraqi National Congress in Chalabi's name said that the number of fighters "is expected to increase quickly." As it happened, the force actually proved ineffective and did little. The official history produced by the Army Special Operations Command blamed its stallout partly on internal divisions in the U.S. government. "The U.S. Defense Department championed Chalabi and the FIF [Free Iraqi Fighters], and saw them as a transitional force to be used in lieu of the police," it reported. "The State Department, on the other hand, saw the FIF as nothing more than the military arm of the INC." That a.s.sessment, while accurate, is incomplete. Another more important division, one within the military establishment, actually crippled this force. Pentagon civilians, most notably Wolfowitz and Feith, supported the training of Iraqi forces, while Central Command dragged its feet. Chalabi later maintained that Abizaid, then one of Franks's two deputies, had told him not to fly to southern Iraq. "I did it anyway, and he was very angry," he said.

It isn't clear why Rumsfeld and his subordinates were unable to make Central Command more responsive to civilian control. In principle, the training of Iraqis was exactly the right course-and ultimately the one that the U.S. military would settle on as the exit strategy for Iraq. But in the spring of 2003 the U.S. military wasn't yet interested. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, Franks's other deputy, called the training effort "a waste of time and energy for us." He reported of Chalabi's militia, "While some of them were helpful in small battles, we received many reports of their looting and thievery in Baghdad."

The sandstorm pause The charge northward from Kuwait to the outskirts of Baghdad generally went swiftly but was sufficiently troubled, with long and vulnerable lines of supply, that just one week into the invasion some U.S. commanders began issuing warnings. "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against,"

Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps and a candid man, told reporters. That remark briefly became hugely controversial.

On top of that, a huge sandstorm and rainstorm descended on Iraq on March 24 and lasted for three days, grounding the invasion force's helicopters and miring many troops. "It was like a tornado of mud," Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said a few weeks later.

But even then, the U.S. military was able to use sophisticated radars and other sensors to peer through, with devastating effect. Late one night during the tempest, a Republican Guard missile unit concealed its FROG-7 launcher vehicles deep in a palm grove in the Sabaa Abkar, or Seven Virgins, area on the northern suburbs of Baghdad. They were off the road, cloaked by the trees, by the darkness, and by the dirt-laden winds of the storm. Even so, they were hit by two enormous bombs, and then by a spray of flesh-shredding cl.u.s.ter bomblets.

Omar Khalidi, a Republican Guard captain, said that this aerial attack demoralized his men enormously. "They were hiding and thought n.o.body could find them," he said. "Some soldiers left their positions and ran away. When the big bombs. .h.i.t their target, some of the vehicles just melted. And the effect of the cl.u.s.ter bombs was even greater, because they covered a larger area." The only way their concealed vehicles could have been detected, Khalidi wrongly calculated, was by betrayal-a powerfully damaging conclusion for troops under fire to reach. "Most of the commanders were sure it was through spies, because it was impossible to find through satellite or aircraft. Even if you drove by it, you couldn't find it."

Likewise, when Qusay Hussein ordered three elite Republican Guard divisions to move southwest of Baghdad to confront the American offensive, American bombers destroyed them before they could even get near the U.S. forces. "This affected the morale of the troops," an Iraqi general staff officer later told the Washington Post's Washington Post's William Branigin. "The Iraqi will to fight was broken outside Baghdad." William Branigin. "The Iraqi will to fight was broken outside Baghdad."

"Thunder runs "

On April 3, the 3rd Infantry Division took Saddam International Airport, on the western fringe of Baghdad. Two days later it launched the first of two "thunder runs"-monstrous charges of tanks and other armored vehicles-into the capital. These probes showed the U.S. Army at its best, taking tactical risks that paid off handsomely. Most notably, they led to an abandonment of the U.S. plan to cordon off the city and move in slowly Rather, the two thunder runs led to the swift collapse of the regime.

The opposition to these audacious forays was fierce. When the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, commanded by Col. David Perkins, drove into the city for the first time just after dawn on the morning of April 5, it was slammed repeatedly with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and rifle fire "at effectively point-blank range along nearly its entire route," according to an Army War College report. "Every single vehicle in the column was. .h.i.t at least once by Iraqi RPGs, and many took multiple hits."

Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, one of Perkins's battalion commanders, later described their first run into the city as "eight hours of continuous fighting." At one point, one unit at a key intersection appeared in danger of running out of ammunition and being overrun.

The first attack consisted of an armored column built around twenty-nine tanks that swung up a major highway, Route 8, that cut into the southwestern part of Baghdad, a mix of industrial areas and square, two-story, adobe-style houses, and then veered out to catch the arrow-straight four-lane expressway to the sprawling international airport west of the city. In these battles, Franks's maxim that "speed kills" did indeed apply. Perkins observed that the Iraqi defenders were only prepared to fight in one direction, so a fast move through their lines tended to disorient their response. "If I could push through, and get in behind them, and then reattack out from the center, what I was doing was reattacking from a direction that they weren't used to defending from, and it was very hard for them to turn around and redefend," he recalled later.

The tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles arriving at the airport at the end of the first run appeared to be in flames because the intense shooting had set fire to the backpacks and other gear that U.S. armored soldiers carry on the outside of their vehicles. The 3rd Infantry Division estimated that it killed two thousand enemy fighters during this mission. Its official history offers no figure for the number of civilians killed, but Iraqis said there were many. "I was emotionally spent," said Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, who commanded an armored battalion in the first attack. "One of my tank commanders had been killed. I had a soldier shot in the eye, shot in the forehead, shot in the shoulder, shot in the back, shot in the face___________ I just needed time for myself. One of the other battalion commanders from 1st Brigade came over and ... asked me, Are you okay?' And I said, 'I don't know.'"

On April 7, the second foray cut through to Saddam's palace complex in the center of Baghdad, on the left bank of the Tigris, and decided to stay. The American military believed it had taken Baghdad.

Franks flunks strategy To understand that mistaken conclusion, it is necessary to step back and examine Gen. Tommy Franks, the senior U.S. commander in the war, and particularly his misunderstanding of strategy. That is a grand-sounding word, and it is frequently misused by laymen as a synonym for tactics. In fact, strategy has a very different and quite simple meaning that flows from just one short set of questions: Who are we, and what are we ultimately trying to do here? How will we do it, and what resources and means will we employ in doing it? The four answers give rise to one's strategy. Ideally, one's tactics will then follow from them-that is, this is who we are, this is the outcome we wish to achieve, this is how we aim to do it, and this is what we will use to do it. But addressing the questions well can be surprisingly difficult, and if the answers are incorrect or incomplete, or the goals listed not reachable, then the consequences can be disastrous.

Why would the United States invade Iraq without a genuine strategy in hand? Part of the answer lies in the personality and character of Gen. Franks. The inside word in the U.S. military long had been that Franks didn't think strategically. For example, when the general held an off-the-record session with officers studying at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in the spring of 2002, not long after the biggest battle of the Afghan war, Operation Anaconda, one student posed the cla.s.sic Clausewitzian question: What is the nature of the war you are fighting in Afghanistan? "That's a great question for historians," Franks sidestepped, recalled another officer who was there. "Let me tell you what we are doing." Franks proceeded to discuss how U.S. troops cleared cave complexes in Afghanistan. It was the most tactical answer possible, quite remote from what the officer had asked. It would have been a fine reply for a sergeant to offer, but not a senior general. "He really was comfortable at the tactical level," this officer recalled with dismay.

Franks's plan for making war in Iraq was built around U.S. technological and mechanical advantages. "Speed kills," the general insisted to his subordinates as they wrote and rewrote the ma.s.sive plan. It sounded good-like a tough-minded way of slicing through all the bureaucratic nonsense. But it reflected the larger misconception of the war at hand. Speed didn't kill the enemy-it bypa.s.sed him.

It won the campaign, but it didn't win the war, because the war plan was built on the mistaken strategic goal of capturing Baghdad, and it confused removing Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country. The result was that the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d'etat more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.

So where Franks's plan should have been grounded in a wide-ranging strategy, it instead was built on a series of operational a.s.sumptions, many of which proved incorrect. Probably the single most startling pa.s.sage in his memoir is his description of "nine slices representing Iraqi centers of gravity in Iraq," which is an abuse of Clausewitz's definition of the key target in war. He relates how in December 2001 he sketched a "working matrix" of targets in Iraq-leadership, internal security, and so on-along with the tools he intended to use against them-"operational fires," "operational maneuver," "SOF operations," and so on. This was, as the names of those tools indicate, a relentlessly operational approach, a collection of tactics-nothing more, nothing less, and certainly not a strategic formulation for what he wanted Iraq ultimately to look like and how he planned to achieve that end. When he showed this chart to Gen. Renuart, he said proudly, "This is what you call your basic grand strategy." It was an amazingly wrong a.s.sertion. The chart had little of strategy in it. In the way Franks used the term, there were so many centers that they added up to nothing, no one real center of gravity. In describing these numerous centers of gravity, Franks inadvertently underscored his lack of strategic understanding.

Col. Agoglia, the Central Command planner, argued that Franks is more thoughtful than the general's own account makes him seem. In his view, Franks had come to the unhappy realization that his civilian bosses-Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and others in OSD-simply lacked the capability to discuss Iraq usefully in military terms. "There was no use discussing 'centers of gravity' with people in OSD who didn't understand centers of gravity. Franks knew what a center of gravity is. OSD didn't." The centers of gravity matrix, Agoglia insisted, was "looked upon as a way of explaining to OSD what we were thinking." Franks didn't trust his civilian overseers at the Pentagon. "He had an ability to translate to the folks at OSD, who weren't very brilliant, the intent of the plan. But Franks also had to play close hold with them, because they were always pushing him for less." This was especially true of Wolfowitz, Agoglia said, who suffered from a "complete and total lack of understanding" of what was needed to invade Iraq. For example, "We knew knew we needed more troops to consolidate than to get there"-a position we needed more troops to consolidate than to get there"-a position Wolfowitz would repeatedly reject in the spring of 2003, before, during, and even after the invasion.

There is no doubt that Franks executed the mission given him. As a military professional, he should have done more to question that mission and point out its incomplete nature. Ultimately, however, the fault for the lapse in the planning must lie with Rumsfeld, the man in charge. In either case, it is difficult to overstate what a key misstep this lack of strategic direction was-probably the single most significant miscalculation of the entire effort. In war, strategy is the searchlight that illuminates the way ahead. In its absence, the U.S military would fight hard and well but blindly, and the n.o.ble sacrifices of soldiers would be undercut by the lack of thoughtful leadership at the top that soberly a.s.sessed the realities of the situation and constructed a response.

From Saigon to Baghdad Franks was a product of his Army, and his faults reflected those of that inst.i.tution. The Army went into Iraq with a considerable amount of hubris, a circ.u.mstance notably different from that of the first Gulf War, whose leaders had been the junior officers of the Vietnam War and had gone to the Mideast determined not to go down in defeat again. Gen. McCaffrey recalled that his a.s.sistant commander, then Brig. Gen. Terry Scott, said as that war began, "I hope we don't f.u.c.k this up like we did Vietnam-I'd rather die than go through twenty years of that again." In contrast to McCaffrey and Scott, the commanders of the 2003 war had known mainly success-in Panama in 1989, in Kuwait in 1991, in Haiti in 1994, in Bosnia in 1996, in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2001. The one exception was Somalia, which they tended to count as a tactical success that then was undermined by the missteps of the Clinton administration.

Franks's war plan combined aspects of many of those post-Vietnam operations: the armored fist of the tank-heavy thrust into Kuwait, the speed of the overnight takedown of Panama, the precision bombing of the campaign in Afghanistan. The Army would go into Iraq harboring few doubts about its abilities. "Information dominance" and "information superiority" were popular phrases in the military. "I think these guys were overconfident," going into Iraq, said Danielle Pletka, the former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Jesse Helms and longtime Iraq hawk. "We entrusted far too much political responsibility in Iraq to our military commanders. I don't think they knew anything about the politics of the region."

An invasion plan that focused too much on the fall of Baghdad to the exclusion of other tasks necessary to securing the victory had some of its intellectual roots in the fall of another Asian city nearly thirty years earlier: Saigon.

Every military strength contains the seeds of its own weakness. Make a weapons system too strong and it will be slow or will consume so much energy in moving that it requires a burdensome supply chain to keep it fueled. Make it too light and fast and it will be dangerously vulnerable when it breaks down, which is inevitable. Make it too successful and commanders will stick with it too long, until its weaknesses are revealed by the enemy. Likewise, the flaws of the 2003 plan for the U.S. invasion of Iraq arguably had their roots in one of the great success stories of the U.S. military, its impressive recovery-physical, spiritual, and intellectual-in the fifteen years after the end of the Vietnam War. Open the memoirs of any modern Army general, from Schwarzkopf to Franks, and there is likely to be a major section devoted to the Vietnam War and the galvanizing effect it had had on the writer.

The modern U.S. Army was born in the ashes of that war. A new generation of weaponry-the Apache attack helicopter, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the M-l Abrams tank-was introduced. Army training was revamped at the National Training Center (NTC), out in the high Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border. Rampant drug abuse and pervasive indiscipline were dealt with effectively. Also, those who stayed tended to be persistent, tough, determined, and devoted to the Army. Like Gen. Shinseki or Colin Powell, they could be stubborn, even dogged and single-minded, in defending the inst.i.tution they had spent their lives rebuilding.

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 establishing 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 Washington 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 Washington 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 Washington, 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 Washington Post. Washington 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 Washington Times Washington 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.