Army history highlights failures in Iraq War
Interesting article.While fighting in Iraq, the Army failed to grasp the significance of the country’s sectarian divisions and “tended to penalize” its own innovative leaders, according the service’s long-awaited history of the war that claimed over 4,000 servicemembers’ lives. The study, titled “The U.S. Army in the Iraq War” and published by the U.S. Army War College, was commissioned in 2013 by retired Gen. Raymond Odierno when he was the service’s chief.
The study highlights numerous failures during the 8-year conflict, including a lack of awareness among military leaders of the sectarian, social and political dynamics in the country that would fuel much of the violence. The critique, which is more than 1,000 pages long and contains hundreds of declassified documents, also says efforts to train Iraq’s military were insufficient and led to a force that was over-reliant on the U.S.
The decisions by commanders, often made in consensus, “seemed reasonable at the time they were made, but nonetheless added up over time to a failure to achieve our strategic objectives,” the study said. “Examining the reasoning behind these decisions and the systemic failures that produced them should be the first task in analyzing the Iraq War’s lessons.”
Authored by a group of Army officers, the study also criticizes the Army for failing to recognize effective leaders on the battlefield and an institutional tendency to punish the best innovators.