A Failure of Planning

A cash row has closed Baghdad Airport to civilian flights. The British company that provides security to the airport, Global, has withdrawn its services because it has not been paid by the Iraqi government for three months. The Iraqi transport ministry is often accused of corruption and currently a former minister is wanted for questioning over the issue. The situation for Iraqis is even worse, with many security troops going unpaid for months at a time.

Which leads one to wonder where the Iraqi security forces that should be doing this job by now are. And that leads one into pondering a far larger can of worms.

President Bush says he has a plan for Iraq.

"Our military strategy is clear: We will train Iraqi security forces so they can defend their freedom and protect their people, and then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
"The political track of our strategy is to continue helping Iraqis build the institutions of a stable democracy," he said.
The address came a day after Bush, during a visit to the White House by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, rejected calls for a timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

So can we now tell US troops in Iraq what their mission is? Well no, not really.

You see, there is a term for a military plan that has no waypoints, no steps by which one can mark progress attained and no timetable for accomplishment. The term is "wishful thinking". Soldiers at the sharp end must be strongly reminded of General George Casey's original campaign plan when he became top man in Iraq back in August 2004:

The top U.S. officer in Iraq, Army Gen. George Casey, issued his first campaign plan in August 2004, just one month after becoming commander of Multinational Forces Iraq or “MNF-I,” according to Air Force Col. Robert Potter, the general’s spokesman in Baghdad.

Officials privy to the document say it contained an array of lofty objectives, like bringing stability to the nation and transitioning security responsibilities to newly trained Iraqi forces. But it offered unit commanders virtually no guidance on how to implement the goals and laid out no time lines, officials say.

“You had a classified campaign plan,” said one retired officer who has worked in Iraq. “It was dense. It was strategically broad. It almost didn’t mean a thing...”
The military blueprint that Casey’s August plan replaced -- a January 2004 document issued by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top general in Iraq -- offered even less insight on how the U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort was to succeed, defense officials say...

By spring of last year, “the Sanchez campaign plan was thrown out” and officers in Iraq were being told “there was none,” recalls one officer who recently returned from the region.

Dean Esmay argues (Hat tip to Hark) that :

One of the more tiresome canards of the Iraq operation is that we had no plans for the post-war reconstruction. This is a flat-out false assertion.

And Dean is absolutely right. I would hope that I, for one, have never made the error of alleging that there was no planning whatsoever. It is a flat-out false assertion. What is a flat out true assertion is that "we", and by that I assume Dean means "the Bush administration" as I am fairly certain Dean himself wasn't consulted, failed to plan well for post-war reconstruction. As the post from Q and O which Dean references for his argument says:

Now, I'm sympathetic to claims that the Bush administration planned poorly, over-optimistically or inadequately for the Iraq postwar phase. I'd agree with many of those claims...

Was it adequate? Well, no. Many of our assumptions about international assistance did not obtain in reality. The Iraqis were more wary of us, the insurgents were more persistent, and the hidden caches of weapons far more widespread. All of which meant that our best plans didn't survive contact with the enemy.

Well, that's not a military cliche for nothing.

Jon Henke is right. No plan survives contact with the enemy. That's why plans have to be constantly updated, taking their cue from the realities as they are found and establishing detailled objectives which can then be attained or changed as circumstances dictate. That is what the Bush administration has always failed to do, by insisting like ostriches with their heads in the sand that things are not as they are.

Nor am I just decrying their efforts without offering an alternative. It's been a couple of months now since I set out what I think should be done now, in some detail, and I see no reason as yet to change that opinion. In fact, some of what I said back in April is being proven by the actions of local US commanders on the ground even if the Pentagon and their politician bosses do not yet get the idea.

So I repeat - while there has been no failure to plan, there has been a systematic failure to plan realistically, flexibly and effectively. The current administration and it's desk-driving generals are, I conclude, the wrong people for the job.