When President Obama announced in Aug. 2010 the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, he complimented the soldiers who had served there for completing “every mission they were given.” But some of military’s most senior officers, in a little-noticed report this spring, rendered a harsher account of their work that highlights repeated missteps and failures over the past decade, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was a “failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define” the environment in which the conflicts occurred, leading to a “mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals,” says the assessment from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. The efforts were marked by a “failure to adequately plan and resource strategic and operational” shifts from one phase of the conflicts to the next.
From the outset, U.S. forces were poorly prepared for peacekeeping and had not adequately planned for the unexepected. In the first half of the decade, “strategic leadership repeatedly failed,” and as a result, U.S. military training, policies, doctrine and equipment were ill-suited to the tasks that troops actually faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These self-critical conclusions appear in the first volume of a draft report titled “Decade of War” — part of a multi-volume survey of “enduring lessons” from the past ten years of conflict. When completed, “it will be used by senior leaders” to develop U.S. military forces for the future, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Cindy Fields, a Joint Staff spokeswoman.
Fields said the 36-page, May 2012 report remains an internal document and is not available to the public, but a copy was posted Thursday on the website of a trade publication called "Inside the Pentagon" (accessible only to regular or trial subscribers).
Its criticisms are largely familiar to anyone who closely followed the two wars’ fitful progress or who read author Thomas Ricks’ seminal, bestselling 2006 account of the U.S. military’s early failings in Iraq, bluntly titled “Fiasco.” An internal Army War College assessment in 2005 cited in Ricks’ book reaches similar conclusions.
