![]() The early signs of the insurgency, the report says, were ignored. ![]() troops nor civilian agencies were prepared to undertake. The task of creating a new police and military force was a "severe burden" that neither U.S. It says that the early dismantling of Iraq's security forces and firing of mid-level government officials - decisions, made by Ambassador Paul Bremer with broad support in the Bush administration - crippled Iraq's ability to govern itself and fueled the insurgency, creating social chaos that lasted for years. ![]() While it does not name those responsible, the assessment points fingers in unmistakable directions. What the report makes clear is that senior officers have fully accepted the judgment by so many others that their prosecution of the wars - at a direct cost to the federal budget of more than a trillion dollars - was in some ways inept. military's early failings in Iraq, bluntly titled "Fiasco." An internal Army War College assessment in 2005 cited in Ricks' book reaches similar conclusions.īut this new retrospective may be more significant because it was prepared by the Pentagon directorate responsible for developing military educational curricula, war-fighting doctrine, and training regimes for all the services. ![]() Its criticisms are largely familiar to anyone who closely followed the two wars' fitful progress or who read author Thomas Ricks' seminal, bestselling 2006 account of the U.S. Cindy Fields, a Joint Staff spokeswoman.įields said the 36-page May 2012 report remains an internal document and is not available to the public, but a copy was posted last Thursday on the website of a trade publication, Inside the Pentagon (accessible only to regular or trial subscribers). military forces for the future, according to Navy Lt. When completed, "it will be used by senior leaders" to develop U.S. These self-critical conclusions appear in the first volume of a draft report titled "Decade of War" - part of a multi-volume survey of "enduring lessons" from the past ten years of conflict. military training, policies, doctrine and equipment were ill-suited to the tasks that troops actually faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first half of the decade, "strategic leadership repeatedly failed," and as a result, U.S. forces were poorly prepared for peacekeeping and had not adequately planned for the unexpected. The efforts were marked by a "failure to adequately plan and resource strategic and operational" shifts from one phase of the conflicts to the next.įrom the outset, U.S. There was a "failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define" the environment in which the conflicts occurred, leading to a "mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals," says the assessment from the Pentagon's Joint Staff. combat operations in Iraq, he complimented the soldiers who had served there for completing "every mission they were given." But some of military's most senior officers, in a little-noticed report this spring, rendered a harsher account of their work that highlights repeated missteps and failures over the past decade, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When President Obama announced in August 2010 the end of U.S. Army soldier of 5-20 Infantry Regiment attached to the 82nd Airborne Division.
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