Read on....
Today, the New York Times reported on the buried RAND Report that faulted pre-Iraq War planning. This disgusts me beyond words for so many reasons, but I want to respond to some passages of the Times article.
WASHINGTON — The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret.
That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.
After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called "Rebuilding Iraq." RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.
To me, the key point of this passage is the last sentence. As a cadet in college and as a junior officer in the military, after action reviews were drummed into my head. We must conduct reviews of our convoys, our training exercises, everything, so that we can learn how to do it better and improve on it the next time we did it.
For example, before I left active duty I was stationed in Hawaii with a field artillery unit. To do any sort of major live fire training, we had to ship our equipment from Oahu to the Big Island. This is a time intensive process that takes at least a week, but we did it three times in 18 months, and every single time we got better and more efficient at it. Why? Because we used the lessons from each successive shipment to improve the next time and ensure we wasted less time and got things done quicker.
My question here is this: How in the %#$* are we supposed to improve on the disastrous post-invasion planning in Iraq when the government-funded study is buried somewhere? So, we can just flop around and get more of our soldiers killed whenever we decide to invade Iran or Pakistan or wherever the neoconservative wingnuts would have us invade next.
The terrible thing here is that the decision to bury this report was made by people with stars on their shoulders along with civilians who don't know crap all about the military, and they don't like making themselves or the military look bad. But when they blatantly ignore and bury this report, they cost our soldiers lives, because then no one can use that information to improve in the future. Why does the Pentagaon hate our troops?
But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.
A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.
This just proves my previous point. No one likes a review of this performance that makes them look bad, but for all that is holy in this world, how the hell are we supposed to learn from our mistakes if we hide the report that tells us how to fix them? I hate this, because it led to teh death of one of my closest friends, one who was driving around in Fallujah in an unarmored Humvee 8 MONTHS AFTER THE INVASION!!!! because the idiots in the Pentagon had no idea an insurgency would spring up and didn't plan accordingly. Or the fact that my entire artillery unit drove 600 miles in Iraq from Kuwait to Kirkuk with exactly four truck with armored doors. That's four trucks out of over 100!!! That's some smoooth planning right there.
The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. "Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff," it said.
The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its "lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution."
The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of "uneven quality" and "did not constitute an actionable plan."
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a "fundamental misunderstanding" of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.
Where do I even start here? If you want to understand how completely fouled up this really is read Bob Woodword's books: Plan of Attack and State of Denial. They really reveal the complete incompetence of Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and Tommy Franks.
I don't even need to mention what a complete hack of a person Don Rumsfeld was as SECDEF. We all the know that numerous tales of incompetence and complete buffoonery that emanated from his office in the Pentagon.
I will say this know, and let it echo clear, Condi Rice is the most incompetent figure in an adminstration full of incompetence. She was an embarassment as the NSA--she had no spine and was terrified of disagreeing with Cheney on anything, read the Woodward books to understand fully her level of incompetence. And this is the women some on the right are positing as a potential VP candidate. What a sorry state of affairs.
Tommy Franks, the man who made the plan and walked away with a Medal of Freedom after he retired. But, sir, you tried to do less with more to appease the politcians and it has cost us dearly. Sometimes, you have to say to your leaders, "I need more to get this done." You know like, Dave Petraeus does, who gets his wish granted when Eric Shinseki was drummed out of the military for saying we needed more troops. The only problem now is that it is destroying our military do this.
The regulations that govern the Army’s relations with the Arroyo Center, the division of RAND that does research for the Army, stipulate that Army officials are to review reports in a timely fashion to ensure that classified information is not released. But the rules also note that the officials are not to "censor" analysis or prevent the dissemination of material critical of the Army.
The report on rebuilding Iraq was part of a seven-volume series by RAND on the lessons learned from the war. Asked why the report has not been published, Timothy Muchmore, a civilian Army official, said it had ventured too far from issues that directly involve the Army.
"After carefully reviewing the findings and recommendations of the thorough RAND assessment, the Army determined that the analysts had in some cases taken a broader perspective on the early planning and operational phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom than desired or chartered by the Army," Mr. Muchmore said in a statement. "Some of the RAND findings and recommendations were determined to be outside the purview of the Army and therefore of limited value in informing Army policies, programs and priorities."
What a surprise a civilian is sent out to explain why the report was buried, with some flimsy excuse about it being too broad a study. What a complete joke! This is disgusting, because, even if it the truth, shouldn't we have a working group with all the interested parties: State, NSA, CIA, Army, USMC, etc. to discuss who to improve this debacle? Who cares if it's "outside the purview" of the Army. As a junior leader, I would want my leadership to take every step to prevent this from happening ever again!!! But instead it is ignored and hidden and more young men and women will die while idiots like Timothy Muchmore ignore information that can help us now and in the future. What makes it all the more disheartening is that Mr. Muchmore is a retired armor officer. Shame on you Mr. Muchmore, I guess you forgot your duty to your soldiers and junior officers: TAKE CARE OF THEM!!!
Let me skip ahead to the recommendations:
Another problem described was a general lack of coordination. "There was never an attempt to develop a single national plan that integrated humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, governance, infrastructure development and postwar security," the study said.
One result was that "the U.S. government did not provide strategic policy guidance for postwar Iraq until shortly before major combat operations commenced." The study said that problem was compounded by General Franks, saying he took a narrow view of the military’s responsibilities after Saddam Hussein was ousted and assumed that American civilian agencies would do much to rebuild the country.
General Franks’s command, the study asserted, also assumed that Iraq’s police and civil bureaucracy would stay on the job and had no fallback option in case that expectation proved wrong. When Baghdad fell, the study said, American forces there "were largely mechanized or armored forces, well suited to waging major battles but not to restoring civil order. That task would have been better carried out, ideally, by military police or, acceptably, by light infantry trained in urban combat."
A "shortfall" in American troops was exacerbated when General Franks and Mr. Rumsfeld decided to stop the deployment of the Army’s First Cavalry Division when other American forces entered Baghdad, the study said, a move that reflected their assessment that the war had been won. Problems persisted during the occupation. In the months that followed, the report said, there were "significant tensions, most commonly between the civilian and military arms of the occupation."
The poor planning had "the inadvertent effort of strengthening the insurgency," as Iraqis experienced a lack of security and essential services and focused on "negative effects of the U.S. security presence." The American military’s inability to seal Iraq’s borders, a task the 2005 report warned was still not a priority, enabled foreign support for the insurgents to flow into Iraq.
In its recommendations, the study advocated an "inverted planning process" in which military planners would begin by deciding what resources were needed to maintain security after an adversary was defeated on the battlefield instead of treating the postwar phase as virtually an afterthought. More broadly, it suggested that there was a need to change the military’s mind-set, which has long treated preparations to fight a major war as the top priority. The Army has recently moved to address this by drafting a new operations manual which casts the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations as equal in importance to winning a conventional war.
It seems to me like all of these recommendations are things that are of critical importance to the Army, such as:
"Don't invade a country without a joint plan on how to care for its people, provide humanitarian assistance, and security"
or
"Don't invade without enough troops"
or
"Don't cancel the deployment of obviously needed troops"
or
"Don't try to occupy major urban areas with armored and mechanized forces who can't respond to emergencies"
or
"Don't bring so few troops that you can't provide security, leading to a burgeoning insurgency"
or, maybe
"Don't invade a country if you can't protect its borders and prevent foreign support to flow into said insurgency"
or
"Do have a manual to fight counter-insurgency operations that provide ACTUAL GUIDANCE on how to fight an insurgency"
It seems to me like there were plenty of Army-specific recommendations in this report. Imagine that they even created a new counter-insurgency manual to address the problems created by fighting an insurgency. Yep, it sure sounds to me like there was nothing in that report that could have been of use to the Army. What a ridiculous and cowardly response.
Neither General Lovelace nor General Melcher agreed to be interviewed for this article, but General Lovelace provided a statement through a spokesman at his headquarters in Kuwait.
"The RAND study simply did not deliver a product that could have assisted the Army in paving a clear way ahead; it lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army," he said.
A Pentagon official who is familiar with the episode offered a different interpretation: Army officials were concerned that the report would strain relations with a powerful defense secretary and become caught up in the political debate over the war. "The Army leaders who were involved did not want to take the chance of increasing the friction with Secretary Rumsfeld," said the official, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to alienate senior military officials.
Generals Lovelace and Melcher are the senior leaders who commissioned, then ignored this report. Sounds like high incompetence to me, except that both have since been promoted since igonring this report, Lovelace moving from Pentagon planner to the man in charge of Army forces in Iraq and Melcher to become in charge of Pentagon budgeting.
What a tortured response by Lovelace's lackey. General Lovelace shold be ashamed of himself, trying to justify this complete abrogation of his duties as an Army general. This report was chock full of ideas, as we can see even from a summary in a newspaper article. That he allowed it to be buried signals his lack of competence.
Oh, this last paragraph is the best of all. They hid the report because they didn't want to piss off Rumsfeld. Good God, stand up for principle you star-wearing losers. Presumably, some of you had to exhibit some form of leadership to get to where you were. Don't be afraid of Donald Rumsfeld. You're not there to make him look good, you're there to protect the Army from overbearing, arrogant a-holes who will send them to war completely unprepared and without enough protection and will then make callous excuses like "You go to war with the Army you have, not the one you want to have" or some tripe close to that.
And that is why I am the most pissed off. The generals in the Pentagon were too spineless to stand up to Donald Rumsfeld. All they wanted to do was protect their stars and their careers and it's cost us the lives of nearly 4000 brave men and women so far. And that is why, despite how proud I am of my service, I am completely embarassed by my "superiors" who are supposed to look out for me, not their careers. What a silly idea.
And the best quote of all:
The Army has asked that the entire RAND series be resubmitted and has said it will decide on its status thereafter.
How do I even respond to this? YOU ALREADY HAVE THE REPORT. Why do they have to send you another one. It's presumably in some filing cabinet. And I'm sure RAND could have 50 copies on every relvant desk by tomorrow if you wanted it. The sheer idiocy of this request boggles the mind and is obviously a delaying tactic to once again avoid the issue.
The Pentagon is a complete disaster area and it shows. Too bad we can't have some real leadership in there, leadership interested in learning from past mistakes and improving on them, so that MORE SOLDIERS don't die in the future.
Is that too much to ask for?
(cross posted a Vetvoice)