The army ordered an unvarnished history of the Iraq war, and then let it languish
The army ordered an unvarnished history of the Iraq war, and then let it languish
WASHINGTON: Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno issued the marching orders in the fall of 2013. Some of the army's brightest officers would write an unvarnished story of their performance in the military. Iraq War.
General Ray Odierno in 2013 ordered an unvarnished story about the Army's performance in the Iraq War. Here with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in Baghdad in 2009.
Photo:
Jim Watson / ASSOCIATED PRESS
It would not be classified, he said, to stimulate the discussion about the intervention:one that deepened the role of the Middle East of the United States and cost more than 4,400 American lives. He arranged for the declassification of 30,000 pages of documents. For almost three years, the team studied these documents and conducted more than 100 interviews.
By June 2016, he had written a two-volume history of more than 1,300 pages. H.R. McMaster, Former President Trump's National Security AdvisorHe reviewed the tomes while he was a three-star general. He said in an interview last month that it was "the best and most comprehensive operational study of the US experience in Iraq between 2003 and 2011."
A working cover of the army report.
The title of the study: "The Army of the United States in the Iraq War".
It has not yet been published.
General Odierno retired before the team could finish the story, which then got stuck in internal reviews and procedures. Under the new leadership of the Pentagon, Army priorities shifted from counterinsurgency to opposing powers, such as Russia and China.. The top brass were concerned about the impact that the criticisms of the study could have on the reputation of prominent officials and on the support of Congress in the service.
The very existence of the study is little known outside the Army. The Wall Street Journal reconstructed its history through dozens of interviews with previous and current officials familiar with the effort, and reviews of internal memos and emails.
Only in recent months, Army officers debated whether the study should be accepted or rejected. After a high-level review last month, Army officers issued instructions to remove a preface stating that the study had been "commissioned" by the Army and to remove other signs that it had high-level sponsorship.
After the newspaper last week asked The successor of General Odierno as chief of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, about the handling of the study by the Army, reversed those movements and promised to write his own prologue. He says that although the study is not an official story and has gaps in areas such as special operations and enemy activities, the study team "did a very good job".
"We owe it to ourselves as an army to turn lessons learned as quickly and as accurately as possible," he says, "understanding that they will not be perfect." He says he hopes to publish the study before the end of the year. .
The saga shows the difficulty of the Army to participate in the self-criticism necessary to improve its military performance, say some familiar with the effort, including Frank Sobchak, the final director of the study team, who retired as colonel in August.
"We worked tirelessly for three years to complete an academic product that captured the lessons of war in a readable historical narrative," he says. "The fact that the Army has been paralyzed by apprehension for the last two years for publishing it leaves me disappointed with the institution to which I have dedicated my adult life."
Lessons from irak
One mistake, according to the study, was General Peter Schoomaker's decision, here in 2004, to proceed with a restructuring of the Army's combat brigades.
Photo:
Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images
The study states that senior United States officials continually assumed that the military campaign in Iraq would end in 18 to 24 months and did not deploy enough troops. He concludes that in planning the invasion, US officials assumed that neighboring states would not interfere and did not develop an effective strategy to dissuade Iran and Syria from supporting the militants.
He says that the Army made mistakes, like when the then Chief of Staff of the Army, General. Peter schoomaker We decided to proceed in 2003 and 2004. With a restructuring of army combat brigades.. That meant the Army had fewer active duty brigades to send to Iraq at a critical moment, according to the study, forcing it to rely on less competent National Guard units.
General Schoomaker, who retired from the Army in 2007, says the restructuring allowed the Army to expand its inventory of brigade combat teams. The National Guard said they had not seen the study and refused to comment.
Another mistake, says the study, was to consolidate US forces. UU On large bases, a decision of Gen. George Casey, who led the US and allied forces in Iraq from 2004 to 2007 before becoming Army chief of staff. That led to a security vacuum around Baghdad that the militants filled, according to the study.
General Casey did not respond to requests for comment. In his own story of the Iraq war, he said his goal was to shift the responsibility of securing the country to the Iraqis.
The study found that another mistake was to consolidate US forces into large bases, a decision of General George Casey, here with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad, 2006.
Photo:
Jim Watson / Getty Images
The new story greets the president The "surge" of reinforcements of George W. Bush in 2007 and the change to a counterinsurgency strategy supervised by General David Petraeus and General Odierno. He also finds that some commanders who successfully used counterinsurgency tactics while the Army was still pursuing their initial plan may have done so at the cost of their careers.
The study team was led by Colonel Joel Rayburn, who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and wrote a book on Iraqi politics before joining President Trump's National Security Council. Now, sent from the State Department to Syria and retired from the armed forces, he declined to comment.
Colonel Sobchak, who joined the project after a Special Forces career, took over the leadership of Colonel Rayburn's team. The remaining authors, who all served in Iraq, have doctorates in history, international affairs or public administration, including Colonel Matthew Zais, now director of the NSC for Iraq.
War foot
The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003 and, in two months, there were 150,000 US troops in the country.
August 31, 2010: President Barack Obama declares the end of the US combat mission in Iraq.
January 10, 2007: President George W. Bush announces the increase of troops and a brigade arrives a month.
General Ray Odierno is commander of the multinational corps in Iraq and oversees the surge.
Odierno is the maximum commander in Iraq.
August 31, 2010: President Barack Obama declares the end of the US combat mission in Iraq.
January 10, 2007: President George W. Bush announces the increase of troops and a brigade arrives a month.
Odierno is the maximum commander in Iraq.
General Ray Odierno is commander of the multinational corps in Iraq and oversees the surge.
January 10, 2007: President George W. Bush announces the increase of troops and a brigade arrives a month.
August 31, 2010: President Barack Obama declares the end of the US combat mission in Iraq.
General Ray Odierno is commander of the multinational corps in Iraq and oversees the surge.
Odierno is the maximum commander in Iraq.
January 10, 2007: President George W. Bush announces the increase of troops and a brigade arrives a month.
December 2006 to February 2008: General Ray Odierno is the commander of the multinational corps in Iraq and oversees the increase.
September 2008 to September 2010: Odierno is the top commander in Iraq.
August 31, 2010: President Barack Obama declares the end of the US combat mission in Iraq.
Some Army officers anticipated problems if the study was not published before General Odierno retired, which he did in August 2015. Conrad Crane, head of the historical services division of the Army's Heritage and Education Center, a branch from the Army War College, he wrote to the team in July 2015 after seeing a draft, saying: "You need to get this published while you still have GEN Odierno as champion. Otherwise, I can see a lot of institutional resistance to airing so many dirty clothes. "Mr. Crane says he supports his email.
Change of guard
With the two volumes written for the summer of 2016, the publication decisions were reduced to The successor of General Odierno, General Milley., who led a brigade in Iraq and maintained a higher command in Afghanistan. "Gen. Milley was very worried because of the sensitivities in the wonderful city of Washington, DC," says General Dan Allyn, deputy chief of Army personnel at that time and now retired. "Clearly, there were high-level leaders who were in position when these things happened, and there were concerns about how they were represented."
General Allyn says that Army leaders had to balance these sensitivities with the need to share the lessons of war and that he preferred publication.
The study team expected to present the first volume at an Army convention in October 2016 and the second a few months later. He would have two prefaces, by General Milley and General Odierno.
General Milley then told the team that he planned to read the full 500,000 word study before its launch and instructed the authors to expand their investigation by interviewing former high-ranking officials, such as former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
They did the interviews only to face another obstacle. General Odierno had eluded the Military History Center of the Army (the body is in charge of publishing the official accounts of Army conflicts) because it had the reputation of taking years to prepare stories. In 2012, General Lloyd Austin, the Army's deputy chief of staff, asked Richard Stewart, then director of the center, if he could put together a story about the war in Iraq in two years just to be told he would take five to ten. , says Mr. Stewart.
"We owe it to ourselves as an army to turn lessons learned as quickly and as accurately as possible," says Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley here in 2017.
Photo:
Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press
"He did not like the answer," says Stewart, now retired. "But I was not going to say three full bags when it was not going to happen."
The team planned to turn to the military history center for help with editing copies, maps and the final publication. Despite Mr. Stewart's previous response, some at the center believed he should be playing a central role.
In November 2016, one of its historians, Shane Story, wrote a memo asking if the study of Iraq was intended to "validate the increase" and, therefore, polish the legacy of General Odierno and the general Petraeus Mr. Story wrote that he did not follow the traditional practice of the center to rely primarily on official documents, suggested that he needed major revisions, and proposed that General Milley make the center an important partner.
The study applauds the change to a counterinsurgency strategy overseen by General David Petraeus, here in Baghdad in 2007, and General Odierno.
Photo:
Chris Hondros / Getty Images
Colonel Rayburn responded in a memo that the team relied on thousands of declassified documents, defended the study's description of the "increase" as a success and accused Mr. Story of "taking control of the project."
Mr. Story's challenge was put to rest. He says he was not aware of Mr. Rayburn's rebuttal to Army officers and refuses to comment further.
In an attempt to speed up the publication, Major General William Rapp, then commander of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, says he argued that his institution should publish the study instead of the history center. As the main service institution to teach officers on strategy, the war university had a long tradition of publishing contrasting opinions under the banner of academic freedom. The broadcast of the study under the auspices of the war university, he reasoned, would alienate General Milley from some of his controversial conclusions.
'Gold standard'
That did not help much. In an email to senior Army officials, Major General Rapp said that General Milley had expressed concern during a visit to the war college in May 2017 that the study could be "unbalanced" and stated that General Milley it would be "liberation". authority "to determine if it should be published.
General Milley says he initially wanted to make sure that the study "was not any kind of hero worship for any special group of individuals" and that a panel of external reviewers would evaluate its quality and impartiality, an idea that Major General Rapp and El study team supported.
In June, six reviewers wrote letters to the Army chief that described the study as fair and urged its publication. Seth Center, then a historian of the State Department, in his letter described the work as "the gold standard in official history." Mr. Center is now at the NSC, which said he declined to comment.
Major General Rapp says he thought the story was suitable for publication before leaving office in July 2017. "When I read it in the spring of 2017, I felt satisfied," says Maj. Gen. Rapp, who retired. the military and conferences at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "I was not going to make everyone happy. But if you wrote a story about the Iraq war that said the US Army was perfect, that this happened exactly as we wanted it, and that there is nothing to learn from it, it would not be worth the paper in which It is impress. . "
US soldiers in Baghdad, part of the "surge" of troops in 2007.
Photo:
John Moore / Getty Images
When the study moved to the war college, plans for a foreword by the Army leadership were discarded in favor of one by the commander of the war university. In May 2018, war college officials believed they were close to the goal of publishing the first volume the following month.
After Army public affairs officials signaled the next launch of the study to the attention of Army leaders, the service put him on hold. Army officials began reviewing the text so that more than two dozen military leaders, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who held several military commands during the Iraq war, could be informed of what the study said about them.
The study of the war in Iraq: a sample of conclusions.
The army's examination of the conflict offers dozens of findings. The army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, says that although the study is not an official story and has gaps in areas such as special operations and enemy activities, the study team "did a very good job". Among its conclusions:
- The need for more troops: At no time during the Iraq war, the commanders had enough troops to simultaneously defeat the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite militias backed by Iran.
- The failure to dissuade Iran and Syria: Iran and Syria gave refuge and support to Shiite and Sunni militants, respectively, and the United States never developed an effective strategy to stop this.
- The coalition war was not successful: The deployment of allied troops had political value, but was "largely unsuccessful" because the allies did not send enough troops and limited the scope of their operations.
- The National Guard needs more training: While many units of the National Guard performed well, some brigades found it difficult to deal with the insurgents. The commanders of the United States stopped assigning their own "battle space" to control. The National Guard units need more funds and training. (The National Guard said that they had not seen the study and refused to comment).
- The failure in the development of self-sufficient Iraqi forces: The effort led by the United States to train and equip Iraqi forces was "without resources" for most of the war. A premature decision to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis made it more difficult to reduce the political pressure of Iraqi officials on Iraqi commanders.
- An ineffective detainee policy: The United States decided from the beginning not to treat the captured insurgents or militia fighters as prisoners of war and never developed an effective way to handle the detainees. Many Sunni insurgents were returned to the battlefield.
- Democracy does not necessarily bring stability: US commanders believed that the 2005 Iraqi elections would have a "calming effect", but those elections exacerbated ethnic and sectarian tensions.
Major General John Kem, who succeeded Major General Rapp as commander of the War College, sent an e-mail to Brig in mid-August. General Omar Jones, the main spokesman for the army. Hoping to speed up the publication, Major General Kem suggested that the war college publish the study in the summer, when much of the Congress would be outside of Washington.
"It seems to me that the time between this moment and the weekend of Labor Day is the perfect time to launch," he wrote. "We're going to continue as an academic launch."
The day of work came and went. Major General Kem also sent a marked copy of the final chapter of the story to the authors, stating that some of his conclusions were "too predictable" and reflected "too much visual prejudice."
He challenged the team's conclusion that commanders in Iraq never had enough troops. "Did any commander in the story have all the troops they wanted?" He wrote. He opposed the conclusion that the Army could have penalized officers whose innovations were in conflict with the vacillating strategies of superiors.
Major General Kem says he was not trying to censor the account, but he wanted the team to focus its conclusions more on military operations instead of policies. The team was not obliged to make the suggested changes, and the authors did not.
Ray Odierno in May 2018.
Photo:
News of Giulia Marchi / Bloomberg
In late September, Army Secretary Mark Esper and other senior officials reviewed the options. His decision, transmitted to the team in a note from a mid-level officer of the war university: the content and conclusions of the study would not change, but the prologue by General Kem that describes the study as an important task of the Army would be removed.
Senior Army officials also thought that the study should be seen as an independent "authors' job," as noted in the note, rather than being described as a project by the Chief of Staff of the Freedom Study Group. Iraqi Army Operation.
Brig. General Jones said earlier this month that removing the prologue was appropriate because no official decision had ever been made to include one and the prologues are usually included only in official Army publications. Mr. Esper declined to be interviewed.
Last week, General Milley intervened, reviving the original plan to include prologue by himself and by General Odierno, which will be executed along with one by Major General Kem.
General Milley says that the authors will be identified again as members of the Army Chief's study group. While the study is not an "all-encompassing" record, he says, he considers it "a solid job" and expects it to be published at Christmas.
Write to Michael R. Gordon in michael.gordon@wsj.com
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