A few of you who know me well may remember that I’ve been working on a project for the last year about Operation Anaconda. Anaconda was the largest mission in the Afghanistan war to date and was the first incident in the "War on Terror" when U.S. troops were deployed to fight against a force with superior numbers and tactical superiority, in defiance of multiple U.S. military doctrines and both signals and human intelligence reports. I take a strong interest in Operation Anaconda both because it foreshadows the failures that followed it, and because it is an event which flies so strongly in the face of what is known and provable about military theory and practice that I hope that by studying it, we might as a nation learn from the mistakes there and avoid repeating them in the future.
So, perhaps you can imagine my outrage and despair when I read this post from military blogger Alex Horton, 22, of Frisco, Texas.
Two Companies Clearing Baqubah – Since Baghdad was the showcase of the war and Baqubah was brimming with super IEDs taking our Bradleys and Abrams tanks, it was decided that a unit needed to be sent there to assist the cavalry unit who averaged a death per week. But how many to send? Someone, somehow, somewhere decided that two companies of Strykers would be adequate to take down what Al Qaeda had deemed their headquarters in Iraq. What came about this oversight? Two hours into the first mission, my friend was killed in a massive IED blast that busted the hell out of the squad leader’s face, resulting in traumatic brain injury and facial reconstruction surgery. The vehicle commander tore his ACL from the concussion. Shrapnel being thrown around the inside of the truck caught one dude in the knee as a dude in the back hatch got rattled around, bruising his back as the other in the hatch was thrown completely out the vehicle. He’s been quiet since then, and was sent home soon after. Returning fire from us and the Bradleys killed an untold number of kids unlucky enough to be in the school next to our position. A wrecker sent out to pick up the destroyed Stryker was the next victim of an IED explosion, killing two men inside. Two more wreckers were sent out, one for the Stryker, one for the now totaled wrecker. As we pulled out that evening, local Iraqis, men, women and children, danced in celebration by the massive crater where the Stryker had been. At once we realized reinforcements were needed but we didn’t get any for two more months. Many more men were killed because we were stretched to our operational breaking point. But there was always more to do. Whoever made the decision to send less than an infantry battalion should be in jail right now.
I think jail is rather generous. I’d ship over one of the broken down Chevy Cavalier patrol cars that the Baltimore PD puts single officers in and let whoever made that choice police Baqubah in it.
We are now at the beginning of a month-long debate called, "Is our surge working?" This debate is taking place because everyone in America and beyond now knows that for years, despite the vociferous denials of the entire Bush administration and most of Congress, the war in Iraq has been prosecuted disasterously. After years of more disasters than I could possibly list from both the military and civilian leadership, our government has given up their attempt to persuade us that it was our eyes and ears and media lying to us. The new tack is that mistakes have been made (with great care to never actually point the finger at any person who may have made a mistake), but that our leaders and particularly our generals, share the ability of every American schoolchild to learn from their mistakes.
Which leads me to my title question. Is our generals cognitively disabled in some fashion? Because sending two companies to clear Baqubah five years after Operation Anaconda and all the mistakes that have come afterward is not simply the action of leaders who aren’t learning, but the action of leaders who are either functionally unable to learn from past mistakes or willfully repeating them for nebulous purposes. Outside of a game of Halo, this is a blatant recipie for disaster.
Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France during the First World War, famously is reputed to have said, "La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires." This is usually translated as meaning "War is too important to be left to the generals." Yet, if the past is any indictator, the Bush administration will do their best to persuade the American Congress and people that this was should be left to the generals, whom they have handpicked to tell us if the "surge" is working and what the next step for America should be. And if the past is any indicator, many of our "leaders" in the Democratic party will take the suggestions of the generals with the sort of seriousness reserved in medieval times for pontiffs and Cardinals, lest they be forced to actually have an opinion of their own about matters as trivial as war.
But even if Clemenceau’s advice was not sound in all circumstances, we should and indeed must take into account the sort of generals we have. Those who made the choice to send two companies to clear Baqubah have shown judgment that would be insufficient in a candidate for babysitter.
As we prepare to listen to their opinions about whether the "surge" has worked, and what the next phase in the war in Mesopotamia should be, we need to remember that. From Chief Warrant Officer Stanley Harriman, the first soldier killed in Operation Anaconda, to Staff Sergeant Jesse Williams of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, killed this past April in Baqubah, these leaders have learned little of how to make these missions succeed, and even less about how to preserve the lives of the soldiers under their command.
War is too important to be left to generals such as these.