As the Defense Department continues to analyze the successes and failures from
the war in Iraq, there is always a danger that those “lessons learned”
could be politicized during an election year, said the top U.S. military commander
of forces in Iraq.
“It becomes harder during a political year, because everything takes
on a political ramification that might not necessarily have been the case otherwise,”
said Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command.
The organization in charge of gathering and reporting those lessons, the U.S.
Joint Forces Command, deployed teams and embedded them with units in the field,
to get a first-hand look at the operations. This approach “was a good
idea,” Abizaid told reporters at a Washington D.C. roundtable. “I
am a big fan of embedding all sorts of groups that are looking at what is going
on and are trying to help us get better,” he said. “They are always
smart people. They help us fix things on the run.”
One example was the inadequate flow of intelligence, which became a contentious
issue during the initial weeks after the invasion of Iraq and during subsequent
counterinsurgency operations. JFCOM experts, said Abizaid, helped improve the
intelligence systems.
These teams can be valuable in helping commanders deal with unexpected situations,
he added. “In war, things change all the time. Having the experts there
on the battlefield is a good thing.”
Abizaid gets to review lessons-learned reports published by JFCOM, but he says
he rarely censors any information. “I see what they are going to publish
and almost never do I say ‘you can’t write that’ ... We have
a good system of self-critique to help us get better.”
The Defense Department, however, has not always been successful in applying
lessons learned from previous conflicts. Going into Iraq, for example, U.S.
military planners were applying lessons from Bosnia and Kosovo “that were
more stability operations from the beginning and less counterinsurgency,”
said Abizaid. “We tried to apply them against Iraq and Afghanistan in
ways that are not necessarily valid.”
The U.S. military strategy now is being revised to better address regional
commanders’ needs for forces skilled and trained in specific areas. The
plan is to have a mix of “base forces” for long-term operations,
such as the occupation of Iraq, and “surge forces” to deal with
specific military problems. The surge forces would be moved around, as needed,
said Abizaid. “We should all feel comfortable with the fact that forces
will move from Afghanistan to Iraq, from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan, as
situations emerge.”