The Plan We Didn't Follow

A tiresome line of attack over the post-war has been that we failed to plan for it. Our assumptions didn't work out, but nobody accurately called this. Seriously, how many of the anti-war crowd were yammering in May 2003 that our forces in Iraq were too heavy for occupation duty and that we had to get infantry out of their body armor and helmets, patrolling in soft caps? We are adapting and that is good enough given the uncertainties of war.

But I am glad we didn't follow one study's recommendation that was reported in a September 23, 2002 Washington Post article by Vernon Loeb entitled "Study: New Demands Could Tax Military, Historical Precedent Suggests 100,000 Troops Would Be Needed to Rebuild Iraq." (sorry, no link--I found this while cleaning up some papers piling up)

The lead paragraph stated:

A new study by the Army's Center of Military History has found that the U. S. military would have to commit 300,000 peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and 100,000 in Iraq if it were to occupy and reconstruct those nations on the scale that occurred in Japan and Germany after World War II.

It was based on mathematical models using historical experience.

Fascinating. Glad we didn't put 300,000 troops into Afghanistan. How would we have done anything else? Instead we have done the job with 18,000 troops (and another 7 thousand or so allied forces in Kabul). And if we'd planned for 100,000 in Iraq? Well, we'd be tens of thousand short of our current strength.

Look, I expected a corps of 75,000 (7 brigades) two years after the fall of Baghdad. After the Baathists collapsed so quickly, I did not think they'd be able to resist much and I expected that the Iraqi army would have defected. Properly de-Baathified, I figured we'd be able to use Iraqis to police a fairly quiet Iraq. So I'm not pretending to have great predictive powers. I'm not mocking the center's study. The point is any plan requires assumptions. This study's assumptions were wrong. The Pentagon's assumptions were wrong. Mine were wrong.

But we are adapting and moving forward to victory. Too many people have been too panicky over any deviation from perfection. And complaints about the failure to plan are just annoying.