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Reviews
12/01/2006
THE UNITED STATES IN IRAQ--A 15-YEAR HISTORY LESSON
Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Military. Michael Knights. Naval Institute Press. 466 pages; maps; index; $39.95.
Reviewed by Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson, U.S. Army retired
Cradle of Conflict is an outstanding piece of work. The title, however, is deceiving, as the work focuses more on Iraq’s effect on American strategy and tactics than on the country’s inherent nature as a center of belligerency. In truth, Cradle of Conflict reads as if it were two books: the first a recitation of the history of American political and military involvement in the country, including the interwar period from 1991 to 2003; the second dealing with the escalation of U.S. policy objectives, including regime change in Baghdad and suppression of uncooperative segments of the populace. It concludes with an analysis of Iraqi resistance and a discussion of U.S. military weaknesses. Knights is no doubter about the wisdom of our campaigns in Iraq. He simply concludes that our operations must be improved.
Fortunately, the book has a preface to orient the reader for the jarring literary trip upon which he is about to embark. From there it is a fast moving, fact-packed review of what has transpired in the country from 1990 to 2005, with some educated guesses on where we may go from here. The author concludes that we will need more than our prized advanced technologies to transform us into the dominant military power of the 21st century and that we will have “to match other areas of U.S. military dominance; to gather multilateral support; and to underpin the use of force with clear and attainable military objectives.”
Readers who do not know what TLAMS, IADS, CALCMS or SuperMEZ are would do well to photocopy the ample index and keep the sheet handy as they work their way through the book. Most such terms are translated once, but soon get lost in the pace of events. Knights exhibits little patience with forgetful readers.
If the reader can keep pace, he will learn lots of little facts about the Iraqis and their forces that do not seem to have impressed other writers. For example, how many of us realized that the Iraqis’ combination of energetic runway repair and superhardened aircraft shelters were such that it would have been virtually impossible to launch a single knockout blow against them such as the Israelis had done against their Arab neighbors in the past? Perhaps we had an inkling. That might have explained why we had so many airplanes on hand. Four days into the campaign, with a surfeit of aircraft, we were seriously worried that we would be unable to deal with the threat. Fortunately, the Iraqis had come to a different conclusion and solved much of our problem by dispatching more than 100 of their best aircraft to Iran.
Knights begins with an assertion that in 1990 we had little in the way of in-country field intelligence collection capability and had to rely on a faulty chain, which often could not get the necessary information from one end to the other. And, unfortunately, no American military attaché had bothered to walk the terrain south of the Euphrates to the Saudi border when he should have made the time; nor had he apparently noticed that the Baathist regime had taken measures to reduce the politicization of the Iraqi officer corps and to improve its professionalization during the war with Iran. Better strategic intelligence collection might also have noted that the Iraqis had learned that chemical agents did not stand up well in the desert heat with shifting winds, nor were the Iraqis able to achieve good fuel-air explosives.
Indeed, American war planners focusing on the region got off to a peculiar start, apparently as a result of some faulty intelligence. In August 1990 the U.S. air campaign, code-named “Instant Thunder,” envisioned coercing Iraq to quit Kuwait within six to nine days without the deployment of U.S. ground units. Furthermore, air operations were not to entail attacks on Iraqi units unless they moved against Saudi Arabia. Fortunately, Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected the scheme, directing greater emphasis on the proper role of ground forces.
Still another strange occurrence was the over-deployment of aircraft to the theater.
As U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson remarked, “The Gulf coalition forces at my disposal were unrealistically large. I had almost twice as many airplanes as I needed.”
Knights describes the initial stages of the air-land battle as a mirror of the hunt for Scud missiles: not a thunderclap, but an “air-ground siege.” The operation consumed some 30,000 strike sorties, or 72 percent of all strike missions flown, targeted largely at logistical bunkers that were mostly “buried, bermed or sandbagged,” each requiring a direct hit to be destroyed. Knights suggests that the measure of success of the largely air delivered preparation of the battlefield was set at 50 percent destruction of key enemy equipment, largely because the intelligence community had little capability for making a more nuanced judgment.
And the fog of war continued to harass senior American officers. Fifteen days into the tactical air operation, Lt. Gen. John Yeosock estimated that it would take until D+100 for all enemy targeted units to be reduced by 50 percent. Nevertheless, when the order was given for the Allied ground forces to advance on February 13, 1991, much before the 100 days elapsed, the line surged forward. An Iraqi tank commander would comment, “After six weeks of bombardment, I had 32 [of his original 39] tanks. After 20 minutes in action against M1s, I had none.” In tune with this, Knights reports that the rest of the war “showed a ruthless side of the American character that had not been seen for many decades and belied the vacillating softheaded image that Americans had developed across the world.”
At this point, Knights turns to the interwar period to which he devotes a lot of talk about air strikes without a clear statement of purpose or apparent capability for U.S. forces to fulfill the objective, whatever it was. He comments that Iraq surface-to-air missile sites were too elusive to be struck, but that key industrial equipment had been destroyed. This apparently assured that air strikes would remain as an element for sending signals. According to the Central Command Air Force, the strikes amounted to “message passing and trying to do something militarily useful at the same time.”
The interwar period, with its no-fly zones, gets almost as much attention as the ground actions in the rest of the book. A lucid chapter entitled “Cheat and Retreat” covers the period, focusing on Iraq’s resistance to U.N. inspections. While the Allied focus was clearly on the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Iraq’s capabilities for attacking neighboring states continued to receive considerable attention. Knights comments that the Clinton administration would have been pleased to have had an Iraqi regime change, but it was not inclined to seek it. Gen. Zinni, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), on the other hand, argued, with some prescience, that while there might be benefits to such a development, the risks outweighed the potential gains that a change might bring. We may note that he has persevered with this point of view to the present day.
Knights asserts that the new Bush administration grew increasingly impatient over the Baathist rule in Baghdad and began to speak seriously about the fall of the regime. “For the first time since World War II,” Knights asserts, “the United States and its allies entertained the idea of invading a large and well-armed country with the express intention of toppling its government, and disarming and reconstructing it.”
But the Secretary of Defense was not satisfied with the military plans to accomplish the deed. He called upon the new commander in chief of Central Command to reduce the scale of planned forces. As one CENTCOM intelligence officer described it, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his advisers had been arguing since the mid-1990s that “Saddam’s house would collapse with the first good kick.” Based on this, the planned troop figure of 400,000 would be reduced by 35 percent.
With no charter for regime change, Knights points out, the Anglo-American coalition cobbled together for the enterprise had to look for justification for its initiative through U.N. resolutions concerning WMDs. That course, as we now know, would come to naught. No smoking gun would be found in Iraq.
The campaign was to be launched with headline-grabbing attacks featuring “shock and awe,” hopefully lethal to the Iraqi leadership itself. But the results were disappointing. Concerns for civilian casualties brought the effort down from its anticipated heroic levels to something more akin to a series of loud bangs. Ultimately, no more than 39 percent of the planned anti-regime targets were struck throughout the campaign. As many of the strikes were made at night, the offices were largely unoccupied, and, as Knights says, most of the Iraqis went about their business as usual.
But the ground forces pushed ahead with alacrity—120 kilometers a day—outdistancing similar offensives in World War II. The big surprise was the behavior of the enemy’s nonregular forces. Instead of surrendering or fleeing to safety, as many U.S. leaders had expected, they shed their uniforms or played dead, only to come to life again after the Coalition forces had passed. They would then become guerrilla teams behind the lines. U.S. forces were frequently forced to strike back with ruthless destruction. Knights quotes another reporter who says, “The first surprise of this war has been the resiliency of the regime … when the Coalition kicked in the front door, the rotten edifice did not collapse.” While U.S. casualties were light in the beginning, they soon began to pick up. On March 23, 29 Americans were killed, and anti-aircraft fire became more dangerous. During one operation, Knights reports, every American helicopter taking part was struck by ground fire. On average, each aircraft sustained some 15 bullet holes. In one squadron only a single helicopter was considered mission capable. Knights resorts to a phrase coined by a colleague, Rick Atkinson, to summarize the point: “The political imperative of waging a short decisive campaign increasingly conflicted with the military necessity of girding for a longer, more violent and costly war of attrition.”
“Indeed,” Knights adds, “this statement accurately sums up U.S. military involvement in Iraq ever since 1990, and foreshadows years of U.S. military occupation to come.”
As the sweeping ground operations began to come to a close, and the dirty street fighting commenced, other problems began to emerge. The lack of a northern entry port was one. (Oddly, Knights makes no mention of the 4th Infantry Division cooling its boots, waiting for permission to transit Turkey to get to the battle. That would have been interesting.) Perhaps more important was the widespread looting of public buildings and offices. Civil functions—providing potable water, electric power and medical care—ground slowly to a halt. From that perspective, Knights duly recounts the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the emergence of the broader insurgency, noting the weakness of the U.S.-led command without the historic ratio of occupational troops to population (1:50) which would have entailed a force of more than a million troops. He quotes U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Conway commenting after his force deployment to Anbar Province: “Our vision to win hearts and minds was met squarely with a 300 percent increase in the number of attacks in our sector.”
And so it seemed to be virtually a country-wide problem. A number of radical clerics chose to follow “the violent edge of Iraqi politics.” By April 2004 the country had deteriorated so badly that high level Coalition officials had to undertake a holistic reevaluation of their expectations.
Nevertheless, with enormous effort, the Coalition was able to achieve a credible sense of Iraqi public hopes and aspirations through elections. The insurgency came to fear that the interim government’s development of local security forces and the concept of democracy loomed as a “suffocating” threat to its interests. When the history of the final phases of the war is written, it would seem, things could go in almost any direction. Much remains up for grabs.
But, Knights cautions, the United States has much to do to improve its military effectiveness in this type of warfare, especially in the intelligence field. In some cases it has been a matter of “incomprehensibility,” as V Corps commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace described the enemy order of battle. In others it has been their skilled use of mobility, concealment and deception. Knights cites particularly their use of “cheap and simple wooden decoys and scrap metal hulks” to soak up hundreds of expensive precision guided munitions. “Moreover,” he writes, “the United States could only find, fix, target and track the targets of least value to the Baathist hierarchy—numerous or easily repaired weapons systems and empty buildings.”
He concludes with the point that “the technologically driven revolution in military affairs is necessary but not sufficient to transform America into the dominant military power of the 21st century. It is not enough to shift from being configured to fight the mechanized foe that Iraq was in 1990 to being ready to fight the terrorist foe that Iraqi adversaries became in 2005.”
MAJ. GEN. EDWARD B. ATKESON, USA Ret., Ph.D., is a senior fellow at AUSA’s Institute of Land Warfare. He has written four books and more than 150 articles on military affairs.
FAME AND INFAMY: A QUESTION OF CHARACTER
George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots. Dave R. Palmer. Regnery Publishing, Inc. 424 pages; photographs; maps; index; $29.95.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired
George Washington and Benedict Arnold—both generals—served the fledgling United States with quiet dignity in the initial years of the American Revolution. In the war’s opening stages, each held the fate of the infant nation in his hands, yet they took diverse paths as the war neared its dramatic conclusion. In the first dual biography of the American Revolution’s most famous generals, Lt. Gen. Dave R. Palmer, U.S. Army retired, has produced a superb analysis that examines the lives of these two historic and sometimes controversial patriots.
Palmer needs no introduction to the readers of ARMY Magazine. A career officer who served as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, Palmer is an accomplished soldier-scholar, whose credits include The Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective; The Way of the Fox: American Strategy in the War for America, 1775-1783; and The River and The Rock: The History of Fortress West Point, 1775-1783.
At the center of Palmer’s study are Washington and Arnold, two politically prone radicals whose paths first crossed when both joined the 1st Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774. Though neither Washington nor Arnold made much impact on the proceedings, both prepared themselves for the inevitable military struggle with Great Britain. Even as Washington received his commission as commander in chief of the new Continental Army, Arnold was already in the field.
In 1775, it was Arnold, not Washington, whose star shone most brightly. While Washington remained frustrated outside Boston, Arnold had already earned the praise of the New York and Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress by his audacious military campaigning. Following his capture of Fort Ticonderoga in conjunction with Ethan Allen, Arnold launched an unsuccessful, yet highly publicized, expedition to seize Quebec.
Arnold’s glory reached its zenith during the campaigns in New York in 1776 and 1777. As Washington suffered repeated defeats at the hands of British Gen. William Howe, Arnold constructed a small fleet that denied British control of Lake Champlain in upstate New York in October 1776. By year’s end, Washington was on the rebound as a result of his twin victories at Trenton and Princeton. But fame had its price as the celebrated generals soon encountered jealousy of lesser men.
Early efforts by disingenuous congressmen and ambitious generals to remove Washington as commander in chief soon fizzled, but Arnold felt compelled to request a court of inquiry to address the “catalogue of crimes” of which he was accused. While Washington quietly endured “his season of trauma” at the hands of the Continental Congress, Arnold assumed his responsibilities as commander of the Philadelphia region. The appointment, states Palmer, was Washington’s most uninspired decision of the war.
Philadelphia was rife with political intrigue and Arnold soon found himself the object of scorn. Much of the criticism was the result of Arnold’s own efforts to restore his personal fortune. Palmer carefully categorizes Arnold’s “avaricious and nefarious activities.” In early 1779, Arnold was required to defend himself against charges of malfeasance in command. Though Arnold was exonerated by a committee of Congress, a full Congress submitted the charges to Washington for a court-martial. For Arnold, already embittered that less qualified officers had received preferential promotions over him, this was the last straw. By mid-1779, Arnold already was considering defecting to the British.
Palmer is at his best in describing the transformation of America’s Hannibal from hero to traitor. Carefully documenting Arnold’s private correspondence and his increasing dissatisfaction with Washington’s treatment, Palmer claims that Arnold made the irretrievable decision to defect to the enemy in the aftermath of his court-martial in February 1780, and upon hearing that the Continental Congress refused to reimburse him for his expenditures earlier in the war.
The events of the “black year” of 1780 need little elaboration here. Palmer recounts the full scope of Arnold’s villainous perfidy in the early summer, and Arnold’s correspondence clearly outlines the price he demanded for his defection. At his own request Arnold received command of the garrison at West Point on August 3, 1780. He then repeatedly delivered the defensive plans of West Point and knowledge of American military operations to the enemy. Arnold’s scheme to deliver West Point and Gen. Washington to the British collapsed when his co-conspirator, British Maj. John André, was captured while returning to New York City following a covert meeting with Arnold.
Arnold later exacerbated his treachery by leading British raids into the heart of Virginia and into Connecticut. It was the last time he led troops in combat. On his part, Washington and French allies forced Gen. Charles Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown in the last “great vigorous effort” of the war. In the two decades following the war, Washington “rose to new heights of renown while Benedict Arnold dwelt in the depths of infamy.” Washington died in December 1799; Arnold outlived him by only 18 months.
Why then did Washington become the father of his country, while Arnold became the most notorious officer who ever donned the American uniform? Palmer, whose West Point’s superintendency fostered increased emphasis on the cadet honor code, provides the answer. In reviewing both officers, Palmer states, “Washington had strength of character while Arnold did not.”
Indeed, in his final chapter Palmer departs from the historical narrative to delve into the concept of character-based leadership. Unequivocally stating that character is an essential element in the makeup of military leaders, Palmer argues forcibly that leaders of character know the difference between right and wrong and have the moral courage to act accordingly—that, as the cadet prayer at West Point states, they have the moral fiber to take the harder right instead of the easier wrong. The lives of Washington and Arnold bear mute testimony that character forms the bedrock of officership.
COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.
ALL VOLUNTEER--OUR ARMY OF CHOICE
I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force. Bernard Rostker. RAND Corporation. 800 pages; photographs; index; DVD; $68.50.
Reviewed by Lt. Gen. Richard G. Trefry, U.S. Army retired
In the long history of the U.S. Army the total force has been volunteer except for a brief time in World War I, and from the start of World War II (with a year of no draft in 1947-48) until 1973. Concomitantly with the drawdown of the Army following Vietnam, there had been an effort to go to an all-volunteer force. As a systems analyst, Bernard Rostker had been closely associated with this thrust from its beginning. He has compiled a monumental study of the modern volunteer Army that should be of interest to any professional soldier.
This is a story that should not be confined solely to the “personnelist,” but should be of interest to anyone wearing an Army uniform in a position of functional responsibility concerning raising, maintaining and reducing the Army. Likewise, it should be of interest to the civilians in the Army and Defense Secretariats. Perhaps even more important, the subject should be of vital interest to members of Congress and their staffs.
The current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated more and more discussion, particularly with the Washington pundits, pertaining to reinstituting a draft. For any of those so inclined, all the pros and cons of the proposition can be found in the book.
The layout of the book is an interesting study in itself. The author’s preface, an entry and explanation, is followed by the table of contents, which extends from page seven to page 20; followed by an index of two pages of tables and a page-and-a-half forward by Melvin R. Laird, who served as the Secretary of Defense during the formative years; followed by six-and-a-half pages of accomplishments. We finally get to Chapter One, “What Have We Done—A Summary of Then and Now (1960-2006).” It takes 31 pages to get to Chapter 1. This is not intended to be critical, but to provide the reader the necessary background to enter the study.
Potential readers should be warned to be in good physical condition to read this book. It is a heavy lift. It is not designed for bedtime reading.
Perhaps the prime value of this book is the accompanying DVD that lists more than 1,700 primary source documents. Beyond this DVD, there are an estimated 6,000 links listed in the book that cross-reference personnel actions and papers.
The tribute on pages 386 to 392 that the author pays to Gen. Max Thurman regarding his conceptions and actions in personnel matters is well deserved.
This is the seminal study of the Cold War personnel processes of the Army. One often hears how the personnel system is “messed up.” The fact is that there is no personnel system per se. There is a collection of personnel policies and processes that makes up the so-called personnel system. The book lists most of them, which is a step in the right direction; but until we tie the requirements (the should haves) to the authorizations (the actual haves), we will never have a functioning personnel system.
That observation notwithstanding, this is a book that any professional should purchase, study and refer to for a thorough understanding of the witches’ brew that is endearingly referred to as the personnel system.
LT. GEN. RICHARD G. TREFRY, USA Ret., served as Army Inspector General from 1978 to 1983. He is a senior fellow of AUSA’s Institute of Land Warfare.
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