Military Classics Seminar, Review of Gordon & Trainor\' Cobra II

Mark D. Mandeles, presentation to the Military Classics Seminar, 20 March 2007, Fort Myers’s Officer’s Club. Michael R. Gordon & General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). I. Introduction The first meeting of the Military Classics Seminar, in October 1958, featured Donald Armstrong’s review of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. The choice of that book as the Seminar’s inaugural topic was probably influenced by the presence of a few of the Seminar’s historians who may have been Thucydides’ research assistants. Of course, that was before my time. It’s interesting that during the Vietnam War, the Seminar reviewed only one book about the on-going conflict. In 1969, we discussed Selections, an edited volume of Ho Chi Minh’s writings. In 1975, the Seminar reviewed Edward Lansdale’s In the Midst of War: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia. Both of these books provide participants’s views of events and their efforts to influence historical outcomes. And so, here we are, and my assignment amounts to being the first at the Seminar to review an on-going hot and controversial topic, Michael Gordon and Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. The title is based on the code name for the land campaign, which alluded to the code name of the first large-scale Third Army operation led by Gen. George Patton.i This book describes and reports on a very sad and costly episode in our history. Over the last eight months, I’ve fretted about this evening’s discussion. I no longer remember what I was thinking when I volunteered for this task. The easiest part of my talk tonight is to provide a summary description and evaluation. The book describes the invasion and early occupation of Iraq in 24 well-written and easy to read chapters, and an epilogue. The narrative ends in summer 2003. There are 17 maps, and an appendix containing documents on the planning and execution of the war and the situation in Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s regime. Michael Gordon, the senior New York Times military correspondent, had the great luck of being embedded in Gen. David McKiernan’s Coalition Forces Land Component Command. From that vantage point, Gordon had access to McKiernan’s staff, and they also answered questions for months afterward. Gordon also was provided access to other senior officers and their staffs. In the U.S., Gordon and Trainor traveled extensively to visit with many military units, including Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, CENTCOM’s headquarters in Tampa, Nellis AFB, U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, and the war colleges. They interviewed Condi Rice, Richard Armitage, the nowretired CIA analyst Paul Pillar, Gen. Jay Garner, and various unnamed persons who provided sensitive documents not otherwise available publicly. Some persons chose not to cooperate, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gen. Tommy Franks gave a single hour-long interview, but rejected requests for follow-up sessions. Vice President Richard B. Cheney also rejected a request for an interview. Like Gordon and Trainor’s The Generals’ War, a book I reviewed here in 1995, Cobra II is excellent. If one is to read, say, two or three books about the current war in Iraq, I recommend Cobra II without reservation. I say this despite noticing that

Amazon.com has advertised my most recent book paired with Cobra II, and I am grateful to Gordon and Trainor for helping to enhance my sales. My plan tonight is to begin by noting a couple of pitfalls of describing and analyzing current events to which many have attached visceral meaning, then provide a more detailed summary of Cobra II, and finally, to say a few words about our senior civilian and military leaders. When I reviewed The Generals’ War, I introduced the book by noting that my experience as a U.S. GAO defense analyst, for what still seems like the longest two and a half years of my life, provided lessons which I tried to apply as a member of the Gulf War Air Power Survey. ii Analyzing a recent military campaign places a heavy diplomatic burden on the author. And there are no easy ways to heft this burden. The differences between operator and policy analysis subcultures will always make for strained relations between the two groups. Military officers are responsible for operations; policy analysts look at these operations as a source of data or means to an end—i.e., understanding how particular outcomes occurred. The probing and questioning necessary for the policy analyst to perform his task, if not put tactfully, can easily be construed by the operator as criticism of his decisions or performance. Documenting mistakes—even minor errors—for hindsight analysis contains the implicit criticism that, if the policy analyst were in charge instead of the generals, these mistakes could have been avoided. Furthermore, historians and analysts, by reviewing the minutia of operations, can cause information regarding activities at theater headquarters or other places to be known to national command authorities and others. This information can be troublesome on various matters, including disagreements about budget priorities before Congress, disputes over roles and missions, and so on. Thus, it is almost inevitable that on issues such as how reputations are made and how resources are divided up in Washington, D.C., such books as The Generals’ War and Cobra II may raise the hackles of some Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom veterans, families, and their friends. I believe that Gordon and Trainor carried this burden well in both of their books. A second issue concerns whether, given the uncertainty and stress that surrounds all command decisions, any criticism is legitimate. Here, I still believe that we should identify and root out our errors so that we may do better the next time. It seems to me that uncertainty, fatigue, emotional and psychological stress, imperfect information, and the complexity of modern military operations involving large, complicated man-machineorganizational systems are unavoidable features of reality. While military commanders— and elected leaders and appointed officials—cannot eliminate these aspects of their reality, they must make arrangements to anticipate and cope with it rather than submit to it. I believe that Gordon and Trainor were judicious and even-handed in their identification of bad luck, errors, the mismatch between expectations and reality, and plain intellectual incompetence. II. Gordon and Trainor’s Major Arguments

What were Gordon and Trainor’s main points? After describing and reviewing pre-combat planning, the conduct of the campaign, and the immediate aftermath of war, they argue that President Bush and his team made five errors of strategic and operational judgment.iii First, Rumsfeld and his generals misunderstood the principal military threat. Gen. Tommy Franks and his staff prepared to face the Republican Guard, and assumed that bypassed units would not pose a problem. Yet, the paramilitary Fedayeen fought tenaciously in Nasiriyah, Samawah, Najaf, Kifl, Diwaniyah, and Baghdad. The CIA also failed to anticipate the effectiveness of the Fedayeen or to notice that they were hiding arms caches throughout southern Iraq. Rumsfeld and Franks believed that Baghdad was Iraq’s center of gravity for the initial land campaign, and that resistance would crumble with Baghdad’s seizure. Instead, the paramilitary Fedayeen were very different from the tightly controlled and purposely fragmented Republic Guard. The Fedayeen’s mid-term and short-term goals and sequence of actions were determined by their contact with coalition forces, and not controlled directly or specified in advance by Saddam or his son, Qusay. Gordon and Trainor argue that the entire Sunni Triangle or, more broadly, the entire Iraqi people, were the “center of gravity.” They conclude that “the Fedayeen would not be defeated and the war not won until the Sunni region was under control, and the Iraqi population supportive or at least not actively antagonistic.” Second, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld put too much confidence in American technology, Special Operations Forces, and clandestine operations. On the one hand, Gordon and Trainor note that Saddam’s regime was surprised by the small size— and the decision to invade with a small force. “Speed was a vital element of the campaign,” and the rapid Army and Marine pace allowed the seizure of bridges critical to the capture of Baghdad. Further, Gordon and Trainor demonstrate that well-trained U.S. forces were given a decisive advantage by improved precision-guided munitions and associated reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities. On the other hand, they argue that after the fall of Baghdad, mass was required to seal the victory. Providing security, which was the military’s responsibility, was—and is—the necessary enabler of economic reconstruction and development, and civic and social renewal. The failure to provide security made everything else we have attempted tenuous and unstable. The military technology and numbers of troops we deployed were ineffective against a loosely-coupled enemy dispersed over a large area. Critical security tasks, such as sealing the borders, guarding the many arms caches, finding and exploiting suspected WMD sites, and developing good working relationships with locals, could not be accomplished with a lean force. However, Gordon and Trainor add that even if we had sufficient numbers of troops, we lacked the “right sort of troops for the postwar phase.” The U.S. needed more civil affairs units, military police, and interpreters. Third, military leaders did not adapt to battlefield surprises. There were many “indications in the first days of the war that the United States was involved in a different war than it had anticipated.” One has to wonder, for all the talk about command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies providing situational awareness, when and how do we talk about the leadership and command function of recognizing when the plan’s assumptions no longer apply to the situation on the ground?

Gordon and Trainor show that the “first Marine killed in action . . . died at the hands of an Iraqi dressed in civilian clothes who fired from a pickup truck.” In the opening days of the war, American troops confronted roadside bombs, suicide car bombs, foreign jihadis, and ambushes, and they began to adapt to enemy tactics. The troops’ rapid adaptation was not mirrored by Gen Tommy Franks’ thought processes. Franks did not speak or think clearly. He “never acknowledged the enemy he faced nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing. He denigrated the Fedayeen as little more than a speed bump on the way to Baghdad and never appreciated their resilience and determination. Franks threatened to fire Scott Wallace, the V Corps commander, when he noted publicly that his soldiers were battling a different enemy than the one that had been featured in the military’s war games.” Gordon and Trainor conclude that “in his book, American Soldier, Franks claims credit for a winning strategy. At best he had won the first round of the war thanks largely to his subordinate commanders, but neither he nor they had won the war.” Gordon and Trainor also apply the same perspective to evaluating Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s intellectual leadership. “Rumsfeld failed to heed his own counsel on defense planning.” Given the administration’s “repeated assertions that Saddam’s regime was allied” with terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, it should have “been planning to wage a counterinsurgency and conduct antiterrorist operations as soon as Baghdad fell.” Fourth, American military structures are dysfunctional. Rumsfeld and Franks dominated planning, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were marginal and accepted that role. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen Richard Myers, was a team player and did not argue with the assumptions underlying war planning. Army Chief of Staff, Gen Eric Shinseki, did not press the issue of troop numbers inside the JCS. Vice President Richard Cheney never challenged the realism of Rumsfeld’s expectations. Although Colin Power doubted the sufficiency of the number of troops slated for the invasion and asserted that the U.S. would encounter great difficulties in a postwar Iraq, he failed to persuade President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld of the validity of his concerns. Gordon and Trainor conclude that the nation would have been better served had Powell objected when Rumsfeld moved to control postwar planning. I think Powell’s behavior is consistent with the designed ambiguity of his views during the Persian Gulf War. The absence at the highest levels of government of thorough discussion and debate about assumptions, cause-effect relationships, and predicted outcomes was compounded by the ad hoc character of organizations established to supervise and guide postwar Iraq. Gordon and Trainor observe that “no military headquarters or staff was selected in advance to secure postwar Iraq. The summer of 2003 was one of turmoil in which McKiernan’s command, which was focused on the Middle East region, was supplanted by a command led by Ricardo Sanchez, a junior three-star general whose last assignment was in Europe. The changeover occurred as Franks was nearing retirement and preparing to hand CENTCOM over to John Abizaid, and as Jay Garner and his team were replaced by L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority.”

The fifth error flowed from the Bush Administration’s disdain for nation-building. Shortly before the start of the invasion, Administration officials provided the president with comprehensive briefings on postwar Iraq, but these events probably were not created to stimulate debate about assumptions and the types of evidence adduced to support national policy. The failure to organize a civilian constabulary for immediate duty in Iraq was a deliberate decision, and this decision rejected Justice and State departments’ recommendations to establish a constabulary. When faced with dashed expectations, the administration’s leaders moved from one hastily conceived solution to another, all the while hoping it would not have to do the hard work of rebuilding a new Iraq, and without committing itself to the much higher troop levels used in other postwar conflicts. Tellingly, Gordon and Trainor report that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Franks spent most of their time on “the least demanding task—defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces—and the least amount on the most demanding—rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq.” To make the administration’s preemptive war strategy work, administration leaders assumed opponents and critics would fill the security and nationbuilding void. The critics and opponents, however, happily stayed away from postwar Iraq. III. Conclusion What are we to make of Gordon and Trainor’s indictment of senior civilian and military leaders? Although I agreed with the goal of deposing Saddam, I believe the strategy for doing so has been flawed on so many levels as to almost defy belief. One cannot decide whether an intervention at a given place or time is good or bad without a lot of empirical analysis,iv and if one thing is clear from Cobra II, it is that inadequate and insufficient empirical analysis guided the formulation of policy. As I read Cobra II, I recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s verdict on Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people. Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .”v Working in an OSD planning office for the last four years, Gordon and Trainor’s description is consistent with what I have observed. Yet, I remain conflicted and confused about the role of analysis in salvaging whatever we can. It seems to me that of all the disasters of Iraq, one of the worst may be the “lessons” that we'll draw from it. The disasters so far are real enough; as is our responsibility in them. We should be mindful, however, of our history in which we rushed to draw the wrong lessons from previous conflicts. In Vietnam, for example, we drew incorrect lessons from Korea. In the early years of U.S. involvement, we expected another conventional invasion across a parallel separating a Communist North from a non-Communist South. To repel it military planners centered almost all our effort on organizing some 140,000 South Vietnamese in large conventional Army divisions. In the process they created commanders of vast independent political power and so increased the danger of military coups. Trying to govern, control, or guide these independent military commanders reinforced Diem's natural suspiciousness, nepotism, and unwillingness to delegate power; and reduced further the chance that the Vietnamese, in spite of internal attack, would be able to advance in economic and political self-development and to operate under the rule of law.

That situation, in turn, encouraged subversion, terror and counter-terror, and helped reduce the potential for a discriminate response. American advisors believed they were responding to a “lesson” of Korea. Lessons from such complex events require much reflection to be of value. But reactions to Vietnam, even more than to Korea, tended to be visceral rather than reflective. vi And so it is—and will be—with Iraq. It’s certainly very unfortunate that partisan finger-pointing, electoral considerations, and shrill cries of conspiracy theorists will obscure discussion of the effectiveness and organization of national security decisionmaking. In 1960 and 1961, Senator Henry Jackson led a Senate subcommittee examination of national security decisionmaking and organizations.vii I’ve read a good portion of the prepared testimony and transcriptions of the discussions. The hearings produced some insightful, and some misguided, analysis. Yet, the discussion was civil and thoughtful. I don’t see anyone in Congress today who can play the role Scoop Jackson played in leading a non-partisan discussion. I conclude with a couple of thoughts about intellectuals in power and the functions of strategic planning. First, economist Kenneth Boulding observed that “the intellectual in power . . . is frequently a dangerous man, perhaps because his very capacity for analysis often gives him illusions of certainty in the situations that are objectively uncertain. . . . Under conditions of objective uncertainty and subjective certainty we usually zero in on disaster.”viii Analysis influences the way the world is seen: “it has the power to delude, to misguide, as well as provide direction toward where we truly want to go.”ix And, we have many bureaucratic means to delude and misguide, including the use of PowerPoint which makes arguments supported by little evidence sound rigorous.x By citing Boulding’s caution I only try to show an important limit to analysis, and the requirement of vigorous debate to identify sources of error in assumptions and inferences. Second, military analysts have thought long and hard about properties of good strategic planning and analysis. Sun Tzu wrote, “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”xi Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon added that a major function of strategic planning is to conserve scarce managerial, engineering, and scientific attention for the problems that matter. He added that “in an uncertain world, forecasting must always be yoked with feedback.”xii Simon, Boulding, and Sun Tzu hope that leaders have the intellectual honesty and critical analytical skills to pay conscious attention to the relationship between means and ends, to make provision for error even as one hopes for the best, and to adjust policy when actions do not yield expected outcomes. We can’t rely on political leaders to have critical analytical skills or intellectual honesty. It’s worthwhile to think about the problem of national security decision making by taking some advice offered by James Madison in Federalist Paper 51:

But what is government if not the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. That’s all folks. Thank you very much. Notes i

Gordon and Trainor, 77. “Review of The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf,” Periodical: Journal of America’s Military Past, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 71–77. Originally prepared for Military Classics Seminar, Fort Myer Officers’ Club, Washington, D.C., November 1995. iii Gordon and Trainor, 497–506. iv Hans J. Morgenthau, “To Intervene or Not to Intervene,” Foreign Affairs (April 1967). v F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner Paperback, 1995), 187–88. vi Albert Wohlstetter, “On Vietnam and Bureaucracy,” D-17276-1-ISA/ARPA (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 17 July 1968). vii Organizing for National Security, Hearings before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1961). viii Kenneth E. Boulding, “Scholarly Rights and Political Morality,” in Charles Frankel, ed., Controversies and Decisions (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1976), 215–216. ix Richard R. Nelson, The Moon and the Ghetto: An Essay on Public Policy Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 14. x Nelson, 76. xi Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith, trans., (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 84. xii Herbert A. Simon, “Strategy and Organizational Evolution,” Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 14, Special Winter Issue, 1993, pp. 131–142. ii