The Belmont Club on Barry McCaffrey’s Iraq Analysis
Read the entire post. (hat tip Tigerhawk)
I pulled a reserve training tour in SOUTHCOM January-February 1995 when GEN McCaffrey was the theater commander. He is an outstanding officer.
5/3/2006
7 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
The most interesting part of this post: both in the quoted portions of General McCaffrey’s report, and in Wretchard’s commentary, was the discussion of the major media’s position. The media is clearly failing badly on this story: partly, as both Wretchard and General McCaffrey point out, because of institutional deficiencies (unwillingness to send the stars, and second-stringers in country who don’t really do reporting), and the dangerous environment. I disagree though, that, in General McCaffrey’s words, the press will “…be objective in reporting facts if we facilitate their information gathering mission.†I believe that there is so much editorial distaste for the administration and the war that objectivity has gone right out the door, and that some persons consider it almost a duty to slant coverage of news from the fronts. Finally, if, as General McCaffrey wrote “[t]here is a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces towards the U.S. media…†this is a very ominous trend for the future, particularly if we lose this war.
Comment by El Jefe Maximo — 5/3/2006 @ 2:08 pm
I read critique after critique regarding inadequate troop strength and poor planning in the immediate aftermath of the Ba’ath regime being removed from power. But one thing that I repeatedly see omitted from any analysis of OIF is a critique of how we used the troops who WERE on the ground. I was with 3rd ID in OIF I. When we moved into Baghdad to occupy it, our mission was nebulous, which is a charitable way of saying that we had no clear task or purpose. Sure, we did get tasked to round up looters and enforce curfew, but that was it. That seemed driven by people at very high echelons who could clearly see that looting and general lawlessness was a problem. But nobody any further down the chain took any initiative. They were all too busy reveling in their lightning victory and trading war stories. While the Iraqi people waited around for some leadership or guidance, while they told us day after day that Ali Baba was gathering in Fallujah, we did nothing. A few junior leaders took some initiative and did some community policing, but many units were without any purpose whatsoever and more or less roamed the city, looking for internet cafes, restaurants, and Laundromats to compensate for their inadequate CSS that was either in redeployment mode or had never left Kuwait. Units criss-crossed into and out of one another’s sectors with impunity. I can’t count the number of times when someone in my sector told me that Soldiers came into their homes and stole their TV and air conditioner. I was accustomed to hearing exaggerations and lies from people, but those were believable and sounded like two things that unsupervised Soldiers lacking moral mentoring would be most likely to grab and I knew that other units were passing through our sector without making any coordinations. I think that a bad situation in Baghdad and the rest of the country was made much, much worse due to the failure of field grade and company grade officers failing to grasp what was happening around them, taking little to no initiative in the absence of adequate orders, and failing to provide the most minimal of supervision to their units. More effort was put into writing awards than in taking control of the situation. The Civilian leadership and Generals are the guys who are overall in charge, but one must assume at least some degree of competence in junior officers as well. When I hear activists whining that Rumsfeld did this or Wolfowitz did that, all that I will ever be able to envision are the nightly gatherings of the officers in my battalion who got together to watch movies all night as Baghdad slowly went to Hell under the watch of an ill-prepared and over-tasked 1st AD.
Comment by Tim Mathews — 5/4/2006 @ 2:38 am
One would guess that leaving the Washington/democrat cesspool and returning to West Point clears ones thinking process.
Comment by Go Stros — 5/4/2006 @ 9:45 am
Wow, Tim M’s comments are scathing. My own disagreement with the good General is on reconstruction: Aid teaches corruption. He wants more aid money so our troops can reconstruct more. This is a mistake. More loans should be given to Iraqi cities, and organizations and companies, so that THEY can reconstruct, THEY get credit, THEY worry about security; and when they pay us back the borrowed money, they can say THEY rebuilt Iraq. Iraq needs Iraqi heroes, fighting and rebuilding.
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad — 5/4/2006 @ 3:43 pm
I wouldn’t label activists who critique Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz as “whining”. The fact is that they sent in all thesee troops without any plan. It may have been officers watching movies all night, but it is the responsibility of the people at the top.
Comment by PoliticalCritic — 5/5/2006 @ 5:16 pm
My main problem with those Generals and other retirees doing the cricizings is two fold: first- they are on reserve status and are not going through the Chain of Command to voice their problems, second - they are complaining about a way of war that is going away and *refuse* to cope or comprehend how to deal with it. The Civilian leadership makes policy and the overall decisions, the bottom tier at the pointy end carry out orders… the middle tier, in its entirety, still is in a Cold War/Vietnam mold of trying to do as little as possible and still retain their positions. General McCaffrey by pointing out that the US has the greatest and most flexible military capability in the world and has that this set of the Armed Forces has the highest morale at any time of the Republic forces an examination of where those doing the complaining are coming from. Those worthies are coming from the middle-tier that is supposed to *adjust* command structures and force structures to comprehend what is needed for the immediate and long-range future of the US Armed Forces. It is not that there was *no* plan for the Armed Forces in OIF, it is that the middle tier did not *adjust* to the change from a heavy 3-pronged assault to a light and fast 2-prong assault against an enemy that was fatally out of position. When one carps about the US Armed Forces and lack of plans, you are *not* pointing at the Civilian Leadership. You are pointing directly towards those that draft the plans, the outlook, the supporting logistics… all of it from top to bottom. These individuals have NOT been trained to quickly react and adjust to a massive and fluid changing scenario where overwhelming success requires such. Somewhere between the JCS and the Theater Commands there is a problem. Our Generals do not train as much or as hard at *their* jobs as the soldier that takes the field does for *theirs*. That absolutely, and positively, MUST change. And if some of these fine folks don’t want to change, then best move them to a place where they are out of the way and can do no harm. The complaints of not having forces to *secure* the fast moving US Armed Forces falls squarely and directly upon them. By not realizing this and identifying it as *the* problem and informing the Civilian Leadership that this middle-tier needs heavy and hard training, they failed in their duties. And the sour grapes we hear continue to make poor whine.
Comment by ajacksonian — 5/6/2006 @ 1:53 pm
Critiquing Generals I was reading Austin Bay’s blog and followed a link to Belmont Club which had a review of General Barry McCaffrey’s analysis of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a very good review by McCaffrey and a good analysis by Wretchard at Belmont Club. But, …
Trackback by The Mind of Mathews — 5/7/2006 @ 6:59 pm