Precedented

I haven't had a chance to look at the just-released Army study of the Iraq War (just finished meeting some demanding deadlines at work, and the PDF for the study is STILL downloading). However, I'll pass along one preliminary observation.

Yesterday, I heard Donald Wright, one of the authors of the report, on The News Hour. I was listening to it on the car radio, which can be hazardous to your health if you hear someone say something so stupid that you almost lose control of the vehicle in anger and disbelief. When asked to explain the avalanche of bad decisions in 2003 to 2005 that made the Iraq war the nightmare that it has been, Wright said that the Army was unprepared for an "unprecedented" kind of war.

Unprecedented. Mull that word over for a moment. Unprecedented. Happily, you're not driving this blog post while reading this post (but if you are, you're already endangering yourself and other drivers.)

Unprecedented.

Sure, he used contemporary Army jargon about "full spectrum operations." In Iraq terms, that means simultaneously handling offensive operations, defensive operations, population security, civic action projects, and a bunch of other stuff. Wow, that's tough. Never faced anything like that before, Wright said.

Unprecedented, only if you overlook the Vietnam War.

Comments

[Mojo]

One of the few advantages of spending most of the first five years of my Air Force career on Army posts was that the libraries had a great selection of books on "revolutionary" and "counter-revolutionary" warfare. Although this was in the immediate post-Vietnam era, I was the first person to check many these books out in years and sometimes the only person ever to check them out. Forgetting about Vietnam has a long and distinguished pedigree in the US military.

[Curmudgeon]

Wright deserves a little credit. At the top level, the objective for Iraq was to destroy it as a functioning country and then remake it as Utopia as envisaged by hard right ideologues. This is pretty much an unprecedented political-military objective in US history and has few successful historical precedents save for the colonization of the Americas. What the US civilian leadership wanted to do to Iraq is so far out there in unprecedented la la land that it's completely unsurprising the boots-on-ground component turned into an epic disaster.

[J.]

It's not a bad report. My biggest criticism (and one I didn't voice fully in my post) is that it's typical of how the Army focuses on tactical/operational exercises and completely misses the strategic purpose for what they are doing. We may be good at tactics but we still suck at strategy.

Oh, also absolutely nothing on WMD stuff. Tre' depressing for me.