The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Unfortunately, the remarkable advances that were steadily made in American air warfare capability after the first Gulf War of 1991 and were so amply demonstrated in early 2003 have since been almost completely overshadowed by the subsequent insurgency and sectarian violence that prevailed in Iraq for four years after the three weeks of major combat that brought down Hussein’s regime.75 Only in 2007 did Gen. David Petraeus develop and implement a new approach stressing long-proven principles of counterinsurgency warfare aimed at providing genuine security to the Iraqi people to supplant the counterproductive brute-force approach that a succession of previous U.S. joint force commanders had used throughout the preceding four years of the allied occupation of Iraq. The steadily mounting political, economic, and human costs of that deadly turmoil tended, for a disturbingly long time, to render the initial three-week campaign in March and April 2003 an all but forgotten (and, to many, even irrelevant) achievement. The persistence of that civil strife led former secretary of defense Melvin Laird to offer a sober reminder to observers of all persuasions that “getting out of a war is still dicier than getting into one.”76 It also bore discomfiting witness to the “initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation” of the second Bush administration’s leading national security principals that lay at the root of the ensuing devolution of events.77

  Certainly, credible witnesses had warned of just such a festering predicament. Among numerous others, William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation wrote presciently: “When American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin. It will be fought in Iraq, in part, as an array of nonstate elements begin to fight America and each other. . . . This kind of war, fourth-generation war, is something American and other state armed forces do not know how to fight.”78 Ever since postcampaign developments in Iraq first began to turn sour, a legion of respected commentators have dissected and documented the hastily improvised, underresourced, and ineffectual attempts at stabilization in Iraq undertaken at the outset by the Bush administration.79 Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson observed on this score: “None of the people in Washington who had led the nation into a preemptive attack by a small invasion force nearly bereft of allies wanted to believe that the conflict could drag on for months, perhaps tying up most of the Army’s ten divisions and bleeding the nation of money and manpower.”80

  All the same, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee three months after the coalition took down the Ba’athist regime and well into the steadily intensifying postcampaign insurgency, Secretary Rumsfeld continued to appear either unmindful of or indifferent to the need for a sufficient allied presence on the ground to ensure the prompt social and political stabilization of Iraq and to provide adequate security for the Iraqi rank and file. Expressing the contrary view, Rumsfeld declared: “In the 21st century, mass may no longer be the best measure of power in a conflict. After all, when Baghdad fell, there were just over 100,000 American forces on the ground. General Franks overwhelmed the enemy not with the typical three-to-one advantage in mass, but by overmatching the enemy with advanced capabilities and using those capabilities in innovative and unexpected ways.”81 The error that both Franks and his superiors in the administration made, however, was to assume—against more than ample prior expert advice to the contrary—that a parsimonious commitment of allied ground troops to meet the immediate needs of regime change would also suffice to end the war satisfactorily and to achieve the coalition’s broader goal of bringing a functioning democracy to Iraq.

  Whether or not one believes that going to war against Hussein’s Iraq was in the best interests of U.S. and international security, the overwhelming consensus today among informed commentators with the benefit of hindsight is that CENTCOM’s campaign plan, encouraged and approved by the Bush administration, failed both completely and unpardonably to anticipate and address the needs of postcampaign stabilization and attempted democratization that have continued to demand American and allied attention ever since the end of major combat in 2003. That manifold failure, as well as such subsequent sins of commission on the administration’s part as the ill-advised wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi army and police force and the forced displacement of all Iraqi civil servants with any senior Ba’ath Party connections into the ranks of the unemployed, overlooked the most fundamental tenet of democratic nation-building theory, namely, that an indispensable precondition of successful political modernization must be the establishment and growth of effective state institutions of governance.82 Indeed, it would not be a reach to say that the first edicts of the Coalition Provisional Authority that were put into place in Iraq by the Bush administration under Ambassador Paul Bremer in the immediate aftermath of the Ba’athist regime’s collapse had the direct and intended effect of doing precisely the opposite.

  Today, in large part because of those misguided rulings and, even more so, of CENTCOM’s and the administration’s shared failure to see to the needs of ensuring public security in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s collapse, most would concur with Thomas Friedman’s judgment that the war “was not preordained to fail but was never given a proper chance to succeed.”83 Thomas Ricks put the same point in a different way in his postmortem on the American-led invasion: “Speed didn’t kill the enemy—it bypassed him. It won the campaign, but it didn’t win the war, because the war plan was built on the mistaken strategic goal of capturing Baghdad, and it confused removing Iraq’s regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.”84

  To be sure, the United States and its allies brought to an end not only the iron rule of a dictator who had brutalized his people for more than thirty years, but also the continuing regional security challenge from Ba’athist Iraq that had occasioned a costly American and British military presence in Southwest Asia ever since the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm. The flawed and incomplete way in which that laudable objective was pursued, however, points up most uncompromisingly the crucial importance of never forgetting the abiding rule that no plan, however elegant, survives initial contact with the enemy. It also provides a sobering reminder that any exhaustive plan for a complete regime takedown must anticipate and duly invest against the most likely political consequences in addition to planning the campaign’s course and outcome through the major phase of combat operations. Johns Hopkins University strategist Eliot Cohen interjected perhaps the most incisive judgment yet rendered on this account when he wrote at the end of 2006: “From the outset of the Iraq war, much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made. . . . We have not come to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commander of those forces. We have known these things—but we have not done these things.”85

  On that point, a thoughtful treatise by Frederick Kagan that appeared in 2006 spotlighted “the primacy of destruction over planning for political outcomes” that had predominated up to that time in American military thought since Desert Storm. That focus, Kagan wrote, had occasioned a counterproductive situation in which the nation’s military transformation efforts to date had entailed “a continuous movement away from the political objective of war toward a focus on [merely] killing and destroying things.” Such misplaced emphasis, he suggested, was quintessentially reflected in the revealing label “Phase IV” (the then-envisaged follow-on to the major combat phase, or “Phase III,” of Iraqi Freedom), which treated postwar stabilization and consolidation operations almost as an afterthought to the “decisive combat operations” that American military planners viewed as the “main mission.”

  Such an approach sufficed handily for Operations Desert Storm, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force during the 1990s, but those were li
mited undertakings aimed at coercing desired enemy behavior, not at the more demanding task of removing one government and replacing it with another. However, Kagan argued, if the nation’s military engagements in its ongoing war against Islamist extremism are going to continue to be wars of regime change, as was clearly the case in both Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, then the first concern in operations planning “should be determining what the political end state should look like in as much detail as possible,” because “military victory over the incumbent government is . . . only the prelude to the operations that will actually determine the outcome of the effort.” Accordingly, Kagan insisted, “Phase IV,” or whatever the regime replacement activity is to be called, is “not subordinate to or even equal with ‘decisive combat operations.’ . . . It must predominate.”86

  Andrew Krepinevich offered a comparable observation even earlier, while the dust from Phase III was still settling, when he wrote that “the U.S. military’s preference to do what it does best—defeat enemy forces in the field and then quickly depart—must be overcome. The practice of crafting quick exit strategies must yield to a willingness to develop a comprehensive strategy for winning both the war and the post-conflict period that follows.” Krepinevich also was among the first to suggest candidly after the initial flush of allied self-congratulation had worn off and the new reality of post-Hussein Iraq had begun settling in that “as can be seen in the wake of the coalition’s victory in Iraq, those who practice regime change incur consequences as well as certain moral and political responsibilities.”87 Finally, he rightly noted that the campaign experience had pointed up the criticality of continued U.S. access to overseas basing options, a luxury often taken for granted that had begun to appear in growing jeopardy since the end of the Cold War in 1991. As a case in point, he observed, CENTCOM’s unexpected loss of the use of Turkish territory at the last minute sidelined some one hundred American aircraft that had been slated to take part in the campaign and disrupted planned U.S. tanker operations to support the Navy’s carrier air wings deployed in the eastern Mediterranean. Rebasing those tankers in Bulgaria, said Krepinevich, “provided an acceptable, if not entirely satisfactory, solution.”88

  The successful conduct of Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase presaged a new era of warfare for the United States in two ways. At the same time that the experience heralded the nation’s final mastery of high-intensity conventional warfare, it also brought Americans face to face for the first time since Vietnam with a refined mode of fourth-generation asymmetric warfare that is likely to be the defining feature of conflict in at least the world’s most unstable and ideologically riven arenas for the indeterminate future. This newly emergent challenge, against which the United States remains inadequately configured in most respects despite steady improvement since 2003, is distinguished by nonstate and transnational actors and associations, loosely knit cells of self-generating action groups, dispersed and nonlinear operations without fronts, concurrent attacks on all elements of friendly governments and economies, sheer violence and disruption as its proximate goals, and terror as its primary instrument of choice.89 As one of the best assessments of this burgeoning form of post–Cold War conflict put it, fourth-generation warfare “uses all available networks—political, economic, social, and military—to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. . . . It does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will.”90

  Whatever errors the Bush administration’s most senior leaders may have made by failing to insure adequately against the most likely needs of the endgame, however, there can be no denying that the allied combatants in all services who prosecuted the campaign at the operational and tactical levels, thanks in considerable part to the enabling contributions of CENTCOM’s air component as described in the preceding chapters, performed in an exemplary way when it came to the execution of Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase in March and April 2003. A former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot wrote of that experience that none of what ensued afterward “should detract from what was done and learned during [the three weeks of major combat in] Operation Iraqi Freedom. The successes were spectacular in a way that was unlike anything seen before.”91

  The air component’s contribution toward that outcome bore powerful witness not only to the many investments that the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, along with their RAF and RAAF counterparts, had made in the hardware ingredients of their combat repertoires since Desert Storm, but also to such crucial intangibles as the cutting-edge aircrew training at the postgraduate level provided by the USAF Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nevada; the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center with its integral Topgun program at NAS Fallon, Nevada; and Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One at MCAS Yuma, Arizona. The air component’s banner performance further resulted from the repetitive case-hardening of allied aircrews and their commanders at all levels that had been inculcated over the course of the preceding decade through recurrent, realistic large-force training exercises, exacting operational readiness inspections and tactical evaluations at regular intervals in between, unrelenting frankness in training mission debriefings, and continuous joint and combined enforcement of the northern and southern no-fly zones over Iraq. All of that finally culminated in an opportunity for CENTAF to exercise those investments in high-intensity combat under the leadership of an able and aggressive air component commander and with the help of the most experienced CAOC staff in the history of air warfare.

  Against that positive and gratifying backdrop, however, must be juxtaposed the exceptionally costly and arguably avoidable sectarian violence and sustained insurgency that the United States and its coalition partners were subsequently forced to contend with for more than six painful years as a result of the Bush administration’s ill-considered going-in plan for achieving an orderly regime change in Iraq. If there is any enduring lesson to be drawn here with respect to the role and utility of air power in modern warfare in light of that subsequent bitter experience, it surely must be that even the most capable air weapon imaginable can never be more effective than the strategy it is intended to underwrite.

  As Colin Gray insightfully noted in this regard in 2007, for air power’s inherent advantage “to secure strategic results of value, it must serve a national and . . . overall military strategy that is feasible, coherent, and politically sensible. If these basic requirements are not met, [then] air power, no matter how impeccably applied tactically and operationally, will be employed as a waste of life, taxes, and, frankly, trust between the sharp end of [a nation’s] spear and its shaft.” More to the point, Gray went on to insist, a nation’s overall campaign strategy can be so dysfunctional that it “cannot be rescued from defeat by a dominant air power, no matter how that air power is employed.”92 By all signs from the continuing unease that so many around the world have felt since 2003 as a result of the nation’s still-undecided gamble in Iraq, this dictum remains no less pertinent to the challenges that the United States and its leaders face across the conflict spectrum today and for the foreseeable future. Those challenges entail not only our continuing counterinsurgency preoccupations of the moment, but also the all but certain prospect of higher-intensity showdowns against more able opponents who can be counted on to test us for higher stakes in years to come.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1.Those two operations were initiated to protect Shiite populations in the south of Iraq and the Kurdish peoples in the north by prohibiting, among other things, Iraqi fixed-wing aircraft operations south of the 32nd parallel (and, after 1996, the 33rd) and north of the 36th parallel. Southern Watch operations were conducted mainly from bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; Northern Watch sorties flew mainly out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The two combined operations denied the Iraqi air force
the use of two-thirds of Iraq’s airspace. From their inception in 1991 until the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom twelve years later, American and British (and, until December 1998, French) forces flew more than 200,000 armed overwatch and combat support sorties to police the two no-fly zones.

  2.The term “joint” refers to the cooperative involvement of two or more U.S. armed services in a combat, peacekeeping, or humanitarian operation. “Joint and combined” refers to both multiservice U.S. and allied participation in such operations.

  3.For a fuller development of this point, see Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), especially 233–278.