Knife Fights by John A. Nagl

Author:John A. Nagl
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Stability operations are a core US military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organization, training, education, exercises, material, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning. [Italics mine]

This was a huge change from the attitude in the Pentagon prior to the invasion of Iraq, which had all but forbidden the very activities that DoD 3000.05 now put on an equal footing with planning for, training in, and conduct of combat operations. But important as the words were, they would not be implemented by the man who was serving as the secretary of defense at the time the directive was signed.

My doctoral dissertation had centered on the importance of an individual leader at the top of the organization who recognized the need for organizational change, encouraged subordinates to innovate, and then drove the rest of the organization to adopt the best practices that had been identified. General Sir Gerald Templer had been such a change agent in Malaya, while William Westmoreland had stymied many innovations that showed great promise in Vietnam. By the time Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland, the American people had lost faith in the effort, and the changes Abrams was able to implement were too little, too late.

Even General Westmoreland, however, who has recently been labeled “The General Who Lost the Vietnam War” by former Army officer Bob Sorley, did not exert as pernicious an effect on organizational innovation during the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did during the war in Iraq. From his initial insistence on reducing the number of troops involved in the invasion well below the number that would be required to secure Iraq once the Saddam Hussein regime had crumbled, to his requirement that his Department of Defense rather than the Department of State be tasked to oversee postconflict operations followed by a complete failure to prepare to assume those responsibilities, Rumsfeld’s role in the planning and preparation for the Iraq War was spectacularly bad. These mistakes were closely followed by his acceptance of Paul Bremer’s decrees to disband the Iraqi Army, radically de-Ba’athify Iraq, and prohibit local elections; Bremer reported to Rumsfeld, and the secretary was therefore responsible for the decisions that created and inflamed the insurgency in Iraq.

Frustration with the war in Iraq and with the leadership of Secretary Rumsfeld peaked in the summer of 2006 with the publication of articles like Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold’s “Why Iraq Was a Mistake” in Time magazine; the secretary’s stubborn insistence that we weren’t fighting an insurgency and refusal to send more troops to improve security or build a bigger Army and Marine Corps to relieve the strain on the force had boiled over.

But as Paul Yingling and I were discussing, it wasn’t just the SECDEF whose performance was lacking; the Army’s general officer corps had failed to prepare the Army for the war it was actually

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