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66 <a href="http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette">www.mca-marines.org/gazette</a> M a r i n e C o r p s G a z e t t e • M a y 2 0 0 9 IDEAS & ISSUES (FUTURE WAR) Similarly, military commanders, de- termined to overcome all obstacles, loathe failure and rarely criticize each other, lest unit morale suffer. Although driven from Long Island and New York City in mid-1776, Washington’s report to the Congress greatly understated the disaster. Frustrated by resistance to change in German tactics prior to World War II, GEN Heinz Guederian, who went on to achieve fame as a bril- liant commander, complained that “tacticians tell lies too, but the lies only become evident after the next war has been lost.” In Iraq, setbacks were often met with silence, a blank page, or were de- ferred to be dealt with later. For in- stance, in 2005–06 there weren’t sufficient forces in Ramadi, while huge swaths of Diyala Province went unpa- trolled. But in the command chronolo- gies and assessments of the campaign plans, those glaring defects weren’t ad- dressed. It was not that commanders didn’t know the score. At one point, a senior general told me, “the issue was in doubt.” He asked me not to write that, and it was not included in the campaign assessment because he was concerned about the political and morale effects. Although I have no doubt that he verbally informed Rums- feld about the tenuous situation, he was determined to succeed. That is why our military is the best in the world. Yet that same organizational culture causes a dilemma in candidly assessing risk. The second systemic problem was the diffusion of risk management re- sponsibility. In Iraq the system lacked an independent risk assessor reporting to the President. In wartime a Secretary of Defense must decide what his chief role is. Melvin Laird as secretary in the early 1970s performed the role of skill- fully extracting U.S. forces from Viet- nam. James Schlesinger in the mid-1970s took the role of moral leader, bucking up the Services as Viet- nam fell apart. Mr. Rumsfeld sought to transform the Services into an agile, high-tech force, a role quite different from the plodding tasks of nation building that he consistently opposed. He used logic rather than direct orders to align his views about quickly getting out of Iraq with those of the top generals. But logic inside the Pentagon had little im- pact in Iraq. In substituting debating skills for indepth study, Rumsfeld over- looked his role as risk manager. In the 1970s Secretary Laird had an analyti- cal office that critically assessed the mil- itary reports from Vietnam. Rumsfeld set up no such independent office. In addition, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Commander, USCent- Com, or both, should have provided risk assessments, independent of the coalition commander in Baghdad. In early 2007, after taking over for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Robert M. Gates demanded evaluations of Iraq from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and USCentCom. The USCentCom commander dispatched an admiral to Baghdad, where his lack of on-the- ground expertise and suspicions about his agenda fueled antagonism. US- CentCom’s approach to risk assessment was seen as a hatchet job to undercut the new commander in Iraq, LTG Pe- traeus, who had already directed his staff to provide candid trend analysis. Eventually, the USCentCom com- mander lost the confidence of his civil- ian superiors and resigned. The lesson is that risk assessment must be con- ducted in a collegial but arm’s length manner by acknowledged experts. In addition to organizational culture and the assignment of single command responsibility, the third problem be- deviling risk assessment is irrelevant or flawed measures. Again, the 2008 fi- nancial crisis provides an analogy. Fi- nancial traders issued unrepayable loans that were so complicated that senior bank officials did not know how much of their own capital was in- volved. The mathematical risk models were based on gobbledygook that Zinni would rightly call garbage. Iraq assessments suffered from sim- ilar fuzziness. Because the mission in Iraq was nation building, slogans, such as “the military is only 20% of the problem,” emerged, and plotting progress became as fuzzy as the mission itself. Each 6-month assessment had a different format, a new set of staff writ- ers, and an idiosyncratic selection of subjects that encompassed governance, politics, polling, economic develop- ment, electricity production, unem- ployment rates, civilian casualties, improvised explosive device explosions, fuel production, elections, and the rule of law. It was hard to distinguish be- tween the trivial and the important. Risk assessment and measures of ef- fectiveness were addressed interchange- ably, when in fact the two factors were quite different. Measures of effective- ness answered the question: what’s going on in this country? Data in- cluded the amount of free electric power distributed, sewers dug, civilian deaths, enemy attacks, fuel delivered, political parties registered, elections held, prisoners released, etc. Most were lagging indicators that told you what had happened, not why it had hap- pened or what was likely to happen. Risk assessment, on the other hand, looks at the future. It should focus on the odds of succeeding, given a con- strained number of American forces and resources. In the planning before invading Iraq, Vice President Richard Cheney told The News Hour, “We un- derestimated the ability of the Iraqi population” to organize and to govern itself after Saddam was removed.9 This fundamental error in assessing how Iraqi society would respond occurred despite the efforts of the world’s best intelligence service. Once we were in Iraq the critical variable in assessing the risk of subdu- ing the insurgency was gauging the in- tensity of the Sunni solidarity with the insurgents. There was no reliable method for measuring that. For in- stance, after the battle for Fallujah in late 2004, the on-scene senior Ameri- can commander said, “We’ve broken the back of the insurgency.”10 Instead, the war intensified. All military staffs analyze alternative “courses of action.” The tricky aspect is deciding at what point to change from
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