When you reach to the edges of living memory to today, there was no military challenge more complicated, important, or transformative than WWII.
The geopolitical, technological, warfighting, and demographic changes in the six short years from 1939 to 1945 are hard to fully understand as we approach the end of 2018.
Perhaps six years isn’t quite the metric we should be looking at when it comes to change at that time. Look at the 15-yr timespan going back from victory in WWII: 1930 to 1945.
In 1930, Hoover was President, the Army 137,645 strong, and its Field Artillery Manual still had articles on how to properly pack a mule.
By 1945, Truman was President, the army at its peak of 8,291,336 and just got through via the USAAF nuking two Japanese cities.
A lot can happen in 15-yrs, and lessons get stale fast.
Now, let’s do the same here. 15 years from today would be October 2003. At that point, the invasion of Iraq was seven months old. We were seven weeks from finding Saddam Hussein in a cellar south of Tikrit.
What have we learned since the start of that war? We don’t know – and that is a problem.
Let’s go back to a bit before WWII even ended. On November 3rd, 1944, in response to a directive by President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson formed the team that would produce the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The Survey was to investigate the impact and lessons learned from the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
They had no computers. They had no internet. No email. No VTC. They were covering only part of a World War – but part of a war that saw RAF Bomber Command suffer 55,573, and the USAAF 52,173 KIA. The ongoing Iraq conflict has seen 4,555 combat and non-combat deaths. Iraq a longer conflict? Sure, but only a small fraction of the bombing effort of WWII – especially when measured in blood.
Now, back to The Survey. It was completed on September 30th, 1945. 10.5 months after being tasked. Recorded copy in June 1947. From start to record copy; 2 yrs, 7.5 months.
What about our recent war in Iraq? Where is that official history? Michael R. Gordon has a must read article in the WSJ that says a lot about the priorities and bureaucratization of our military.
Army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno issued the marching orders in the fall of 2013. Some of the Army’s brightest officers would draft an unvarnished history of its performance in the Iraq War.
Why is this important to an officer of his generation?
A towering officer who served 55 months in Iraq, Gen. Odierno told the team the Army hadn’t produced a proper study of its role in the Vietnam War and had to spend the first years in Iraq relearning lessons. This time, he said, the team would research before memories faded and publish a history while the lessons were most relevant.
He knew that was needed sooner more than later and be something that should be widely read.
It would be unclassified, he said, to stimulate discussion about the intervention—one that deepened the U.S.’s Mideast role and cost more than 4,400 American lives. He arranged for 30,000 pages of documents to be declassified. For nearly three years, the team studied those papers and conducted more than 100 interviews.
Inside of 3-yrs he had the report ready – not out of line with the WWII Survey’s work.
By June 2016, it had drafted a two-volume history of more than 1,300 pages. H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser to President Trump, reviewed the tomes while a three-star general. He said in an interview last month it was “by far the best and most comprehensive operational study of the U.S. experience in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.”
The study’s title: “The United States Army in the Iraq War.”
However, the Army of the Potomac had yet to mobilize its blocking force. Slow to mobilize, but an impressive defensive force when it takes the field;
Gen. Odierno retired before the team could finish the history, which then became stuck in internal reviews and procedural byways. Under new Pentagon leadership, Army priorities changed from counterinsurgency to countering powers such as Russia and China. Senior brass fretted over the impact the study’s criticisms might have on prominent officers’ reputations and on congressional support for the service.
The study’s very existence is little known outside the Army.
Well, it is known now, but its release has been slow rolled and its substance spun for years by people who do not fully grasp that our nation’s future success on the battlefield is more important than personal egos. Odierno knows this. You can feel his frustration seeping out of the printed page.
“We owe it to ourselves as an army to turn the lessons learned as quickly and as accurately as we can,” he says, “understanding that they are not going to be perfect.” He says he hopes to publish the study by year’s end.
Hopefully most have yet to use up their monthly free articles or can get the full story from behind the WSJ paywall. This is an impressive investigation in to an issue whose importance is hard to understate. We are driving in to the future without putting the lessons of the previous conflict in the hands of those we expect to fight and win the next. It is not a stretch to call professional malpractice at the highest levels for holding on for so long … and for what looks like all the wrong reasons.
Look at the pedigree of the report’s authors. It is an crime against our human capital investments to hold it back.
The study team was led by Col. Joel Rayburn, who worked for Gen. Petraeus in Iraq and wrote a book on Iraqi politics before joining President Trump’s National Security Council. Now a State Department envoy on Syria and retired from the military, he declined to comment.
Col. Sobchak, who joined the project after a Special Forces career, took over the team’s leadership from Col. Rayburn. The remaining authors, who all served in Iraq, hold doctorates in history, international affairs or public administration, including Col. Matthew Zais, now the NSC’s director for Iraq.
Just look at this institutional mindset. Just look at it. Pick it up. Smell it. Taste it.
With both volumes written by the summer of 2016, publication decisions fell to Gen. Odierno’s successor, Gen. Milley, who led a brigade in Iraq and held a more senior command in Afghanistan. “Gen. Milley was very concerned given sensitivities in the wonderful city of Washington, D.C.,” says Gen. Dan Allyn, Army vice chief of staff at the time and now retired.
“Clearly, there were senior leaders who were in position when these things happened, and there were concerns on how they were portrayed.”
Gen. Allyn says Army leaders had to balance these sensitivities with the need to share the war’s lessons and that he favored publication.
Egos over lives and future victories?
In DC, the answer appears to be, “Yes.”
They did the interviews only to face another obstacle. Gen. Odierno had sidestepped the Army’s Center of Military History—the body is charged with publishing the Army’s official accounts of conflicts—because it had a reputation for taking years to prepare histories. In 2012, Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Army’s vice chief of staff, had asked Richard Stewart, then the center’s director, if he could put together an Iraq-war history in two years only to be told it would take five to 10, says Mr. Stewart.
As we reviewed earlier, the “go” was given in the fall of 2013. What we see in the above, the actual idea started in 2012.
It is almost 2019.
Back in 2015 on my homeblog, I came up with a measurement of time that is helpful in things military. I call it a “Worldwar.” It represents the time it took the USA to fight and win WWII; 3-years, 8-months, 26 days. Including the end date, that is 1,366 days.
We are already at 1.3-worldwars trying to get this report out using the NOV13 date, more if we knew exactly when in 2012 the idea became flesh.
Where was the report this time two years ago?
In November 2016, one of its historians, Shane Story, wrote a memo questioning whether the Iraq study was intended to “validate the surge” and thus burnish Gen. Odierno’s and Gen. Petraeus’s legacy. Mr. Story wrote that it didn’t follow the center’s time-honored practice of relying primarily on official documents, suggested it needed major revisions and proposed that Gen. Milley make the center a major partner.
Some parts of the Army were trying to move the ball forward by taking ownership;
In a bid to expedite publication, Maj. Gen. William Rapp, then commandant of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., says he argued his institution should publish the study instead of the history center. As the service’s premier institution for teaching officers about strategy, the war college had a long tradition of publishing contrasting views under the banner of academic freedom. Issuing the study under the auspices of the war college, he reasoned, would distance Gen. Milley from some of its controversial conclusions.
…
That didn’t help much. In an email to senior Army officials, Maj. Gen. Rapp said Gen. Milley had expressed concern during a May 2017 visit to the war college that the study might be “un-balanced” and stated that Gen. Milley would be “the release authority” to determine if it should be published.
How about last Spring in to this Spring – a full dust collecting year as we expanded combat operations in to yet another Middle Eastern nation, Syria?
Maj. Gen. Rapp says he thought the history was suitable for publication before he left the post in July 2017. “When I read it in the Spring of 2017, I was satisfied,” says Maj. Gen. Rapp, who is retired from the military and lectures at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “It was not going to make everybody happy. But if a history of the Iraq war was written that said the U.S. Army was perfect, that this thing went down exactly as we wanted it to, and there is nothing to learn from it, it would not be worth the paper it is printed on.”
When the study was shifted to the war college, plans for a foreword by the Army leadership were dropped in favor of one by the war-college commandant. In May 2018, war-college officials believed they were near the goal of publishing the first volume the next month.
You would think we’d be good to go then? Well, who in the bureaucracy had yet to get their stink on it?
Of course;
After Army public-affairs officials brought the coming release of the study to the attention of Army leaders, the service put it on hold. Army officials began to comb through the text so that more than two dozen military leaders, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who held several military commands during the Iraq war, could be informed about what the study said about them.
You know what this soup needed this summer? More cooks.
Maj. Gen. John Kem, who succeeded Maj. Gen. Rapp as the war-college commandant, in mid-August emailed Brig. Gen. Omar Jones, the chief Army spokesman. Hoping to speed up publication, Maj. Gen. Kem suggested the study be published by the war college in the summer when much of Congress would be out of Washington.
“Seems to me that the time between now and Labor Day weekend is the perfect time to release,” he wrote. “We will keep as an academic release.”
Labor Day came and went. Maj. Gen. Kem also sent a marked-up copy of the history’s final chapter to the authors, asserting some of their conclusions were “too preachy” and reflected “too much hind-sight bias.”
Now, back to The United States Strategic Bombing Survey. It was completed on September 30th, 1945. 7.5 months after being tasked. Recorded copy in June 1947. From start to record copy; 2 yrs, 10.5 months.
How are we doing here?
Gen. Milley says the authors will be again identified as members of the Army chief’s study group. While the study isn’t an “all encompassing” history, he says, he considers it “a solid work” and hopes it is issued by Christmas.
That will be over 5-yrs, maybe over 6 if you want to take the 2012 date.
Do we need a lessons-identified (always like NATO terminology over the USA’s lessons-learned) report on the report?
I hear the Army likes reports, perhaps a report on the report could be done in less time? Maybe.
Well, we may have a stocking stuffer at least.
I would like another small request: I’d like to see the June 2016 draft with changes made since noted, who made them, and when they were made.
That too would be a good lesson of the Iraq war and its aftermath.
