"One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army would welcome liberation, that the Iraqi army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation," said Pace, who will leave the chairman's job on Oct. 1. "If I knew that the Iraqi army was not going to be available, then I probably would have made a different recommendation about the total size force going in." ...
Believing that the Iraqi army could be rebuilt, retrained and equipped by the end of 2006, Pace said that he did not — and never would think to — recommend in early 2006 that the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps be expanded.
But after the bombing of the revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in Feb. 2006, which unleashed widespread sectarian slaughter, it became clear that the U.S. would not be able to reduce force levels then and instead would have to beef up its own military to maintain troop rotations.
As Pace notes, these were reasonable assumptions.
On invasion numbers, our initial force along with the British were too small to police Iraq, but if we assumed a certain number of Iraqis could be immediately put into the streets, we'd be fine. And to help those units defect we avoided destroying the Iraqi military as we headed straight for Baghdad and focused on the Republican Guards.
But we did put Iraqis in the field after Baghdad fell and even in the initial period of the counter-insurgency campaign through the end of 2003, we did manage to knock down the Baathists until we captured Saddam in December 2003 and suffered only 20 KIA in February 2004. Even with too few troops, we made progress in the counter-insurgency. Unfortunately, the jihadis and Sadrists picked up the slack that spring.
And given the enemy resistance we faced, would the former Iraqi regular army forces of the Saddam regime have held up against the Baathist spooks and Republican Guards who were the core of the insurgency in the latter part of 2003? Or against the jihadis and Sadrists in spring 2004? Remember, assuming that the former Baathist-led army could maintain security assumed no Baathist-led resistance of any consequence. And not even the Left assumed this. Recall they charged the war was a ploy to grease Bush's 2004 reelection campaign with an easy win against a feeble foe.
Regarding our troop strength, remember that we worried that we'd expand the Army only to win the campaign and then find that Congress wouldn't support the new (and now unneeded) troops.
Further, even in the period we declined to add to our end strength, we added nine Army combat brigades and a couple Marine battalions by reallocating troops, reorganizing our brigades, and freeing up military slots by using more civilians for noncombat jobs. [Clarification: we planned to add 9 brigades using these methods. Thus far we've actually added 5] After we decided to add to the end strength, we will be adding just six more combat brigades to the Army and a full Marine regiment. So we did more under the old cap than we will under the higher end strengths,
So the mistakes Jones concedes were real. But we tried to work around those mistakes. And they were reasonable assumptions at the time. And we could have faced other different problems had we invaded with more troops or expanded our end strength early.
Everyone makes mistakes in war. Quitting because we've made mistakes is idiotic. The enemy makes mistakes, too. We've also reacted well and will win the war if we don't panic.
