Contemporary Military Strategy and the Global War on Terror: US and UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq 2001-2012 by Alastair Finlan

Author:Alastair Finlan [Finlan, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Iraq War (2003-2011), Military, Political Science, History, Afghan War (2001-), Security (National & International), Terrorism, General
ISBN: 9781628927955
Google: fdyrBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2014-06-19T07:43:37+00:00

The Rumsfeld factor, war planning, and Operation Iraqi Freedom

The role and influence of Donald Rumsfeld in the military planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom stands out as a prime causal factor of many of the shortfalls that beset the coalition forces during and after the invasion of Iraq. In stark contrast to Operation Enduring Freedom, the proposed invasion of Iraq in November 2001 had an existing war plan to deal with this contingency. It was called OPLAN 1003–98 and it had been heavily revised in the aftermath of Operation Desert Fox in 1998 when Central Command (CENTCOM) under General Anthony Zinni, Franks’ predecessor, had realized that the limited strikes against Saddam’s regime had caused far more damage than anticipated and regime collapse may well be a likely occurrence in the near future.41 Such a scenario posed the danger of how would CENTCOM deal with an imploded Iraq and the implications for close allies in the region and their borders. According to Gordon and Trainor, “Zinni developed the plan further. CENTCOM’s OPLAN 1003–98 called for three corps, some 380,000 troops in all. [. . .] Their job would not only be to dispatch Saddam’s Republican Guard [. . .] maintain law and order, and, in general to prevent chaos.”42 This plan was well known to General Franks as he served with General Zinni in CENTCOM at the time as the commanding officer of the Third Army43 and his initial plans followed this template relatively closely with roughly, though slightly less, the same number of troops involved.44 To some extent, a mild tinkering with the plan made sense because under normal circumstances years of preparation would go into producing such a critical document in which thousands of lives would be at stake.45 The first briefing of this amended plan to the Secretary of Defense occurred in early December. Cockburn provides an interesting overview of how the presentation by General Gregory Newbold, Director of Operations on the Joint Staff, especially the numbers of troops was received by the Secretary of Defense who retorted, “absurd,” [. . .] “We don’t need nearly that many” and suggested a figure of “no more than 125,000” that left the general “stunned” because “the group was in a position of fixing numbers of troops before there was a strategy in place to use them.”46 In his memoirs, the Secretary of Defense notes of the original plan that “it was a stale, slow-building, and dated plan that Iraqi forces would expect. A decade had come and gone since the Gulf War, yet the war plan seemed to have been frozen in time.”47 In truth, this assessment was hardly accurate because OPLAN 1003–98 was updated in 1998 (hence the designator “98”), just three years earlier, but its principles rested soundly on what had worked in the past and as such it was a sensible course of military action. Nevertheless, it was starkly out of kilter with Rumsfeld’s transformational agenda to change how the Department of Defense operated bureaucratically, but also on the battlefield.

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