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Army History Finds Post-Saddam Plans Flawed

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The Washington Post

Published: June 30, 2008

WASHINGTON - WASHINGTON - A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.

The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who wrote the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like after that triumph.

"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," wrote Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."

The results of those errors, they added, were that U.S. forces and allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.

Their analysis is to be released today, but the 696-page document was posted Saturday night on the Army's Combined Arms Center's Web site.

The study calls into question the focus of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on issues such as a modernization of the U.S. military, rather than on the war.

It also reports that Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers have demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan that they "are a fully capable, and indeed, an absolutely essential part of the Army."

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