Iraq Army’s Collapse May Hold Lessons for the Future
Iraq Army’s Collapse May Hold Lessons for the Future by Chris Carroll, Stars and Stripes
The Iraqi army’s failure to fight after the United States spent some $20 billion and the lives of many U.S. troops to train and advise them holds a number of lessons, including some that may apply in Afghanistan.
The stunning collapse in the face of a far smaller al-Qaida affiliated force may have been sparked by internal political and ethnic divides, but bad planning and failed diplomacy on the part of the United States played a major role, defense analysts said…
… analysts said President Obama’s stated intention to end the war in Iraq led to continual downward pressure on the planned number of advisers, until it fell to a small fraction of what military planners originally hoped for.
When the administration settled on just over 3,000 troops to remain, plus another 1,500 on a rotational basis, al-Maliki may have considered it a “drop in the bucket” not worth negotiating seriously for…
I am sure the next incorrect lesson that will be drawn is that it is no use training host nation forces or conducting foreign internal defense. But before we denigrate those missions we have to ask what is or was the strategy and did we have balance and coherency among ends, ways, and means? But anyone who advocates working with host nation forces will now be delegitimized by this fiasco (or should I say the continuing fiasco).
The lesson is to not expect to be able to build an Army to hold a country together that was never held together by an Army in the first place. Saddam kept power by mainly using a domestic intelligence apparatus. The US coming in and rebuilding an Army and having that Army perform a mission of internal security, when the previous Army was mainly concerned about external threats, was never going to happen.
Nor was it going to be a solution to keep power the way Saddam kept power. In my view, the United States had two end states it could have pursued. It could have entered the country and had a very limited mission of finding and destroying any WMD. The Iraq War could have been nothing but an armed raid to remove WMD(or the uncertainty about WMD, as there was in fact none) The second choice would be to divide the country into logical sub-divisions that would allow internal control.
In either case, it would be a shame if training other forces is thought of as a “failure”. Just because one answer doesn’t work in one situation doesn’t mean that the answer is always wrong.
“States that rise unexpectedly, then, like all other things in nature which are born and grow rapidly, cannot have their foundations and relations with other states fixed in such a way that the first storm will not overthrow them; unless, as is said, those who unexpectedly become princes are men of so much ability that they know they have to be prepared at once to hold that which fortune has thrown into their laps, and that those foundations, which others have laid before they became princes, they must lay afterwards.”
~Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch VII
The author isn’t saying we shouldn’t do SFA or FID in the future, he is stating that if we simply pull out and don’t sustain the forces we trained and provide them with technical support they don’t have such as ISR we can lose everything we invested up to that point. He captures this when he quotes Cordsman in the last two paragraphs talking about the sustainment plan, or lack of one, for Afghan security forces.
There may certainly be a necessity to build a large supported nation security force based on the threat, but that is an expensive beast that needs to be downsized as soon as conditions permit. Ideally demobilized soldiers will have a soft landing and not be tossed into the growing abyss of unemployed creating the potential for significant organized crime. How many developing nation security forces can we afford to sustain, along with our own robust military? Necessity will drive the requirements, but that doesn’t mean we don’t start with the end in mind which is ultimately an effective security force that is effective and sustainable by the supported nation. Otherwise it ends up looking our unsustainable military-industrial complex that just keeps growing until strong leaders finally put the brakes on it.
I know some think we don’t need SFA doctrine because we have FID doctrine, but clearly based on our historical poor performance we need SFA doctrine in a bad way. SFA is much broader than FID, and the real issue isn’t training and equipping, but equipping and training intelligently. Authorities that are more flexible are definitely part of the answer, but additional authority without a better process won’t result in much change.
We need to relook our assessment process from the strategic (ability of supported nation to sustain) to the tactical level (right equipment and training to get the job done), and then ensure assessments actually inform decisions so we don’t stay on autopilot executing a failed program.
I don’t think the Iraqi Army collapsed because of our poor training. It is more complex than that, with many social, political, and Machiavellian politics involved by a lot of actors. However, understanding that did we put too much faith in our dream of building partner capacity to work ourselves out of job? Do we put too much faith in this approach in other countries? If BPC/SFA/FID won’t work in certain situations, have we seriously considered alternative solutions? We love to harp the “through, by, and with” myth, but fail to see that other nations are achieving their objectives through, by and with our support and we don’t even realize we’re getting played.
The lesson from this “Fiasco” should be that No. 1 Nation Building (after destroying already in-place infrastructure) is not to be attempted by the USA, as we are very shortsighted & have an attention span of Ten-second Tom. No.2 We Do Not need to be getting involved with every country’s problems if it Does Not directly threaten our National Security. No. 3 We are way to dependent upon technology, especially when fighting/training forces who still have not evolved past tribal/religious warfare, but can still whip our butts in the long run. No. 4 Out Intel sucks!
The “lessons for the future” re: Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (all of whose armies collapsed/are likely to collapse), seems to relate more to the bad decisions made as to when, where, how and if to engage and not, as it were, on any other factor(s).