That Army description of the planning defects doesn't conflict with the New York Times story discussing the ambitious post-war plan:
Many elements of the plans are highly classified, and some are still being debated as Mr. Bush's team tries to allay concerns that the United States would seek to be a colonial power in Iraq. But the broad outlines show the enormous complexity of the task in months ahead, and point to some of the difficulties that would follow even a swift and successful removal of Mr. Hussein from power[.]
So there was lots of planning and studying, but no central authority for the entirety in planning or execution.
So yeah, we could have done better. Although recall that we assumed Iraqi police, security forces and civil servants could continue to function without Baathist leadership. That didn't work out. Indeed, the oft-repeated charge that Bush ignored General Shinseki's testimony that we needed 300,000 troops for the post-war wasn't objectionable to me because of the number but because of the assumption that those troops had to be American. That was a constant subject of my posts during the war about whether we had enough troops to win. Indeed, we never did get anywhere close to 300,000 American troops at any time during the war. Yet we--America, the Coalition, and our Iraqi allies--defeated our enemies there.
We also didn't know how badly Iraq's infrastructure had deteriorated, thinking that if we avoided destroying things in the invasion, that infrastructure would exist in the post-war.
Further, in an era when anti-war activists charged that Iraq was just the first target for our military in the Neocon Regime Change Middle East Tour, with Syria and Iran next on the list, I didn't think Iran and their Syrian vassal state would have the balls to essentially invade Iraq to make the post-war a different--and evolving--war instead, after we essentially defeated the Baathist insurgency by February 2004.
Recall too that it took the Democrats until 2006 to come up with their vaunted "plan."
Further, given that many opponents of the war assumed we'd face a Stalingrad-style defeat in Iraq's cities or that we'd face defeat in a "new Vietnam," part of the issue is that we can afford to be critical of the post-war planning because we won the war. Which to this day is easily overlooked. In the broadest sense, we practiced COIN 101.
Had we actually faced defeat--or even just the proliferation of loose WMD following the defeat of Saddam as some war opponents predicted--we wouldn't have the luxury of such a lessons learned approach. Perhaps if the conventional phase had lasted longer we would have had the opportunity we had for Germany and Europe after World War II--which actually didn't work out all that will, as it turned out.
So sure, our post-war planning may have been insufficient, but given that Iran and Syria (using internationally recruited jihadis as part of the intervention) invaded Iraq after we liberated it, we weren't actually in a post-war situation. We were in a different-war environment.
The post-war era in Iraq didn't begin until 2009 (and in 2010 and 2011 Biden and Obama boasted of the victory) but we blew it by not developing a plan to defend the win and instead pulled out of Iraq entirely in 2011 and then ignored the developing problems. Which gave us Iraq War 2.0 in 2014.
I'm just hoping Trump sticks around in Iraq for the long run to win our second post-war period in Iraq.
