The Pentagon Papers, without the secrecy

The Army's decision to bury a 2005 RAND Corporation study of the Iraq war misadventure is cause for outrage on many levels. One of them is the damage inflicted on the US Army itself.

Honest warriors are better warriors
The impressive performance of the US Army depends on a lot more than just cutting-edge technology. The US military in general has a tradition of scalding self-criticism that takes many forms. For example, officers are responsible for writing after action reports (AARs) that depict recent military operations in the most brutally honest terms possible. If an AAR about a clear-and-secure operation in Karbala omits important details, soldiers in a similar engagement won't have the chance to learn from past successes and failures. Given that there isn't a clear, neat boundary between the last operation in Karbala and the next one, the soldiers you may be short-changing may be bunking right next to you.

Since AARs provide insight into an officer's character and skills, they play an important role in personnel decisions. The quality of the personnel, far more than the technology, is the key to the US Army's success.

Let's play a semantic game: instead of calling the RAND report a study, let's call it an after action report. The importance of the study in organizational learning might make a little more sense, using that language. Without AARs, soldiers don't change their behavior as much as they need to. Without a government-wide AAR, the big bureaucracies involved in the Iraq war displayed much the same inertia.

Falling back on old habits
According to The New York Times, the RAND study criticized practically every organization involved in the Iraq invasion and occupation. That wide dragnet became the study's death warrant, since it blamed too many highly-placed officials, in and out of uniform, for the war's mistakes. While the study was never secret, the Army just decided not to publish it. The bogus rationale is highly transparent:

“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.

Of course, "future planning by the U.S. Army" for any conflict like Iraq will involve many agencies beyond the Army itself. There's no way to compartmentalize counterinsurgency in the military. The State Department leans on governments to make changes that will steal political appeal away from the insurgents. Intelligence agencies collect information that might have military implications. Aid organizations, inside and outside the government, contribute resources and expertise needed to rebuild the country.

These parallel efforts do not separately, magically turn into a unified counterinsurgency strategy. Only by overcoming the natural centrifugal tendency among military and civilian bureaucracies does the US government have a prayer of succeeding at counterinsurgency.

Of course, the Army might decide, as it did after the Vietnam War, to avoid these conflicts. Fool the US military once into fighting a messy, unpopular war that doesn't fit the Army's conventional military mold, shame on the civilians. Fool them twice, and shame on the military. Fool them three times...Career military officers undoubtedly prefer not to finish that sentence.

Taking this war, and the next one, seriously
Public criticism of the war effort would have helped the Army, not hurt it, in two important ways. First, publishing the study would have indicated that the Iraq war was important enough to take seriously. A serious effort is founded on trust--in the public, that it will continue to support an important war, despite early mistakes; in the military and other parts of the government, for rectifying those mistakes.

Second, publication of the study would have indicated that this type of war is going to happen again, and worth handling better next time. Unlike the Vietnam War, the Iraq War could be the jolt to make "little wars" an important, expected part of the military's repertoire. The military would not, next time, stand as alone as it did this time: other agencies would be expected to play their parts better, and in concert with the military. Never again would officers be digging around for 30 year-old books about guerrilla warfare. Never again would civilian officials in the mold of the Coalition Provisional Authority be working in one universe, and the US military in another.

Treat the RAND study as an AAR on a grand scale, and you will see it immediately in a different light. Anyone who really cares about the US Army would have demanded its publication, however bad it made a Rumsfeld or a Rice look.

Comments

[Barry]

"The US military in general has a tradition of scalding self-criticism that takes many forms. "

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhht.

That may apply to Captains on down, but does it apply to, say, 3- and 4-star generals?

What you're seeing is that the RAND report, among other things, basically said that the high ranks of the Army didn't prepare for the war, and didn't adapt to what was going on until they were forced to. It's not something that the top brass want to hear, and frankly, they don't *have* to hear it. They can retire to cushy jobs in the military-industrial complex, and let the next cohort of officers deal with it. Who, in turn, will have all incentives to do the same thing.

They guys with the real incentives are the captains and majors, who will be dealing with this sh*t for the next several years, and possibly in a new war before they retire 10 years down the road. But they don't have the clout to do that, if the generals don't want to.

I'm sure that there's been an incredibly amount of informal AAR going on for the past few years amongst the Captains and Majors, which they've carefully kept the generals from hearing, lest some mid-level officers find their careers staked out on an anthill to die. But it won't be the generals doing it.

So far as I know, the Army's reaction to Vietnam was to (a) pledge no more guerrilla wars and (b) construct a history where the Army won, only to have victory snatched away.

Similar people, similar situations - similar actions.