Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 4, August–September 2009, pp. 31–48
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On 8 December 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took part in a town-hall style meeting with US troops preparing to deploy from Kuwait to Iraq. One of the soldiers in attendance, Specialist Thomas Wilson, ‘complained that he and his comrades were rooting through Kuwaiti junkyards to find improvised armor for their military vehicles to protect against bomb blasts and small-arms attacks’:
A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon … Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up … picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper … vehicles to carry with us north.
Rumsfeld replied: ‘As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.’
Rumsfeld was correct in his assessment of the basics of building, training and fielding a combat force for war, but the exchange captures the fundamental dilemma of any military in an interwar period: are you preparing to fight the next war or the last war? It also raises the question of how, and how well, the US military adapted over the course of the war to become ‘the Army [we] wish to have’.
After 11 September 2001, the United States went to war with exactly the military it wanted, and it planned to fight the war based on that military’s strengths. The US forces that crossed the Kuwait–Iraq border in March 2003 were the product of three decades of evolution, validated and accelerated by the unprecedented success of Operation Desert Storm. It was a military that enjoyed all the strengths of high-tech, advanced-manoeuvre warfare that the US military establishment had mastered to an unprecedented degree. Equipment was state-of-the-art, training led the world, doctrine was more mature and integrated than ever, and US soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors were the most capable in US history. Less than two years after the rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, US forces marching to Baghdad conquered more ground faster than any other military in the history of military operations.
US and Coalition forces quickly found themselves, however, in an unconventional war almost entirely unlike that for which they had been so well prepared. The world’s most advanced battle tank was not designed, nor were its crews trained, to repel ‘boarders’ – Fedayeen irregular fighters who swarmed the armoured columns. The world’s most advanced intelligence and surveillance systems could find a single enemy tank from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but could not determine if the ambulance racing up the street was filled with injured Iraqis or hundreds of pounds of explosives. Humvees that could cover hundreds of miles of open desert could not withstand even the most crudely designed roadside bombs. And almost without exception, the world’s most capable infantrymen had almost no training or experience in administering…
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Philipp Rotmann is a McCloy Scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and a fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and Geneva. He is a co-author of the forthcoming Learning to Build Peace? UN Peace Operations and Organizational Learning. Colonel David Tohn, a veteran of operations in Iraq, Haiti and Somalia, is an active-duty Military Intelligence Officer in the United States Army and a National Security Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a co-author of On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Captain Jaron Wharton currently serves as a Public Service Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is an active-duty infantry officer in the US Army and served in Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003–06). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or positions of Harvard University, the US Government, the Department of Defense or the United States Army.
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