Iraq War Compels Pentagon to Rethink Big-Picture Strategy

[NNN0LHI]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050311/ts_latimes/iraqwarcompelspentagontorethinkbigpicturestrategy&cid=2026&ncid=1480

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq (news - web sites) is forcing top Pentagon (news - web sites) planners to rethink several key assumptions about the use of military power and has called into question the vision set out nearly four years ago that the armed forces can win wars and keep the peace with small numbers of fast-moving, lightly armed troops. snip

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon unveiled a new agenda that promised to prepare the military to fight smaller wars against terrorist networks and to swiftly defeat rogue states.

With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushing for a "lighter, more lethal and highly mobile fighting force," the Pentagon scrapped as outdated the requirement that the U.S. military be large enough to simultaneously fight two large-scale wars against massed enemy armies. And it spent little time worrying about how to keep the peace after the shooting stopped.

Something happened on the way to the wars of the future: The Pentagon became bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupation. Though the rapid assault on Baghdad in March 2003 went smoothly, it is the bloody two years since that have diverged from the Pentagon's blueprint.

more

[liberal N proud]

1. This could be the first in many stories pushing the need for a draft

[DeaconBlues]

2. 1500+ dead, 11000+ wounded later

They decide the Powell doctrine is not a bad idea after all. These people must have rode the short bus in school.

[Why Syzygy]

3. smaller wars against terrorists networks?

How is that smaller?

Swiftly defeat rogue states?

Who defines "rouge"?

This is captain bizarro bushcon goes to the capital.

: PULLING HAIR OUT:

[whistle]

4. The pentagon operates under the misconception that high...

...technology war against peasant insurrections will bring these societies to complete submission. They have totally miscalculated as they did in Vietnam and as the Germans did in Europe during WWII.

[bpilgrim]

5. the best and the brightest ALWAYS think they got EVERYTHING figured out

so there is no need to plan for FAILURE.

peace

[leveymg]

8. These people are neither. Bundy. McNamara & the Rostows

suffered from hubris. The Johnson Administration was Tragedy.

The Shrub regime has been scripted by the global oil and arms cartels. This a cheap Reality Show.

[whistle]

18. You aren't suggesting that Pentagon military planners are the...

...best and brightest that America has to offer here are you? They are simply the most compliant to the demands of a corporate fascist state and our war mongering leaders.

[bpilgrim]

23. of course not

but they and the M$MW do... and you got to admit they do have the mantle of leadership now and are at the least some of the most powerful people, unfortunately, on the planet.

peace

[leftchick]

9. Well when you have these folks making the decisions....

It all makes sense...

[leveymg]

10. Thanks for that vicious circle chart. Neat!

You should try to get this into wider circulation. Please repost it under General Discussion with a snappy heading.

My suggestion: "Diagram: Bush's Intelligence Community For Idiots"

:thumbsup: :dem:

[leftchick]

12. It has been posted before. It is a great MOJO article from 2004

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

<snip>

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004 Issue



The Intelligence Chain
How a Pentagon intelligence unit created to build the case for war against Iraq funneled faulty information up the chain of command, often all the way to the White House.



It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

... much more

[whistle]

19. Is there a link to this chart

[leftchick]

31. yes from Mother Jones...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

Link to the article "The Lie Factory"


http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

This link is to the "Intelligence" chain referenced in the article.

[BrotherBuzz]

20. Second verse, same as the first....

[cliss]

21. At this juncture, I would like to quote from Stan Goff:

(retired Special Forces Sergeant from the US Army):

"...one thing that stands out in my mind is how badly many of the operations went, and how important it is for the US military to spend huge sums of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are examples.

Real emblems of stupidity in planning and execution. That's why I tell people not to buy into the hype about US mnilitary invincibility. Person for person, and dollar for dollar, the US military is the most inefficient in the world.

And the most fragile. They are fragile because of their overwheling dependence on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out of a pampered consumer culture where real physical hardship is anecdotal. Sustained hardship, as we are seeing in Iraq, devastates morale."

I rest my case.:smoke:

[leftchick]

32. excellent quote cliss!

I had never seen that one! Will wonders never cease!

[bemildred]

33. Mr. Goff is well worth reading anywhere you find him. nt

[rooboy]

6. Who would have thought a senile old businessman...

wouldn't have any idea on how to run a huge, sophisticated military machine? It's a surprise to me. :eyes:

[ixion]

7. a bit about that 10-30-30 construct

I thought these paragraphs were particularly interesting albeit terrifying in their ignorance.


The 10-30-30 construct said that the U.S. military should plan military actions to seize the initiative within 10 days of the start of an offensive, achieve limited military objectives within 30 days, and be prepared within another 30 days to shift military resources to another area of the world.

Many Pentagon officials fear that the success Iraqi insurgents have had in preventing a U.S. troop reduction in Iraq could be the new rule, rather than the exception.




I think this is a prime example of neocon day-dreaming implemented as policy, because it completely ignores, or is ignorant of, historical context. Check me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's a commonly understood concept that occupied territories will resort to guerrilla tactics to achieve their objectives. I mean, seriously, that is Military History 101, is it not?

In that regard, these to paragraphs show both the devious intent (Pax Americana in a 70 day cycle) and their astounding ignorance (by being surprised that the response to shock and awe was guerrilla warfare).

These idiots are so far gone, it's really amazing to me that people actually still credit them for being competent, when they've demonstrated so admirably that they are just the opposite.

[jmcgowanjm]

11. So the 11-31-31 construct will drop the Pentagon to it's knees

To keep UsMil on the initiative for 11 days
31 days to achieve any objective
31 days to shift mil resources.

Time is never on the side of the invader.

On the other had, the AMS remains in close contact with
the Sadrist movement of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. They
are united on the basics: Americans out, with a fixed
timetable. Muqtada is exceptionally well positioned: he is
just waiting to publicly call the bluff of the Najaf religious
Valhalla - which has propelled the UIA and Jaafari to
the limelight - if there is no pressure from the new
government for a US
withdrawal.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC11Ak03.html

[bemildred]

13. Gee, you mean hallucinatory power fantasies don't lead to good strategy?

FWIW, it is the AMS - al Sadr connection that I have my eye on.
If we get a full scale civil war, which is the way I lean with
the Kurd-Shiia-stooge "agreement", the other side is going to be
the Shiia and Sunni nationalists.

I saw that piece you linked, very interesting.

[jmcgowanjm]

15. I just don't see civil war, bemildred

For the simple reason that a civil war
immediately brings in Turkey and Iran,
while blurring the border w/ Jordan, Syria, SA,
Kuwait.

The US seems to think that these factions will be too
busy to fight US. The only way Iraq can be partitioned
is w/ US support, but siding w/ US for support
automatically makes you a target.

That seemed to be the gist of the arguement to me,
anyway.

yours in support,

James

[bemildred]

17. You're an optimist.

For the simple reason that a civil war
immediately brings in Turkey and Iran,
while blurring the border w/ Jordan, Syria, SA,
Kuwait.

So, what's not to like?

But time makes fools of us all.
:thumbsup:

Debka has some interesting propaganda on this right now:

http://www.debka.com/article_print.php?aid=996

[jmcgowanjm]

24. I'll see your Debka prop and raise it

Ukraine has the sixth-largest contingent in the US-led coalition
in Iraq after the United States, Britain, South Korea, Italy
and Poland.

They're leaving.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=38508

Opec has no capacity to lift quotas, says Algeria

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/business/2005/March/business_March236.xml§ion=business&col=

"We do not agree on postponing this matter until
after the constitution, we must agree on the issue of Kirkuk
now," Barzani said, the day after the election-winning Kurds
and Shiites said they were about to cement an agreement
for governing the country.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=38429

But the momentum is hard to stop. Ankara has been
informed that the Kurds will pocket 75% of the northern
oil revenues and grant the Turkomen 25% to support
their self-ruling enclave.

http://www.debka.com/article_print.php?aid=996

To summarize;

The Kurds want to cut a deal w/ the Turkomen
at the same time they deal w/ the Shi'ites.
The world, in this case, Turkey and Israel,
need the oil now, but the Sunnis control the
oil pipeline routes out.

And we're only talking about this because the US,
which is losing foreign troop support daily, is only
nominally in control.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Resistance
is defeating the US.

All of the border countries would risk
destabilizing their borders,
fluid enough already.
Best wait for the US to run out of blood and treasure.
The oil will still be there.

Keep your sunny side up!

Contrariwise, continued Tweedledee, if it was so, it might
be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't that's
logic.
Curiouser and curiouser ...

[bemildred]

25. It's a puzzle all right.

War is a useless enterprise too, as Uncle Sugar is so busy
proving once again. The notion of a Kurd-Turkmen deal was
very interesting, creative even, it shows a vein of practicality
that augurs well for the future. A federal arrangement where
everybody gets to run their own business and everybody gets a
share of the action would look pretty good after years of
Bremerization and Negropontageddon I expect.

[chlamor]

26. bemildred and jmcg... need their own show

Lightning minds and well informed.

[bemildred]

28. This is our show. TV is so last century, you know?

Have a beer on me.
:beer:

[jmcgowanjm]

34. Thank you, but I must remember to take out the trash

Lumpen dinken-group think is popular because it is easier
than private thinking and the stakes are lower.

Still and all, the compliment has been
recieved. Thank you.

James

[reprobate]

29. Everybody gets a share EXCEPT Uncle Sugar.

It looks like its turning out just like many here predicted. However, I can't see all this happening as peacefully as some.

[bemildred]

30. It's far from a slam dunk.

But jmcgowanjm raises a good point, the oil is needed, and it ain't
going anywhere in large quantities while the fighting continues. Oil
infrastructure is a piece of cake to attack.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

14. Somebody needs to tell Rummy that

"lighter" does NOT mean "leave all the vehicle armour at home"...

[bpilgrim]

27. numb-nuts think we scared the shit out of the rest of the world by gettin

bogged down in TWO quagmires with two of the weakest nations on the planet :crazy:

they are setting us up for colossal failure and pain.

peace

[Norquist Nemesis]

16. Ahhh, the beginning of a fond farewell for Rummy?

Somehow, I don't think he's going to last much longer. So many investigations, all with blame pointing directly to his "leadership". And now...he'll have to re-consider and quite possibly be required for some 'introspection'. That will make his head explode!

He'll leave before he admits blame, mistakes, or accountability for anything.

[LeftHander]

22. The power of BUSH compels you...

The Power of Bush compels you...
The Power of Bush compels you...
The Power of Bush compels you...
The Power of Bush compels you...
The Power of Bush compels you...
The Power of Bush compels you...