Reaction, Action - If there's

Reaction, Action - If there's one thing the US military has learned since World War II and Vietnam, it's that planning has to be flexible. The enemy - whoever he is - is constantly acting to derail your plans. And intelligence, being an uncertain, fuzzy field, frequently causes plans to be based on faulty assumptions.

Change is not only good, it's unavoidable - if you're smart.

This WaPo article shows some of the process the Pentagon's gone through.

Until early June, when the Army launched the first of three major offensives in the an area known as the Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad, U.S. officials didn't fully grasp the extent of Baathist resistance in the area, one Army official said today.

The first offensive, dubbed Peninsula Strike, wasn't aimed so much at Baathists as at hostile remnants of the Iraqi military that remained active in the Sunni town of Thuluya, on the Tigris River between Baghdad and Tikrit. Yet when captives from that operation, from June 8 to 15, were interrogated, they began shedding unexpected light on the role that Baath Party operatives were playing in the region in supplying weapons, recruiting fighters and financing attacks on U.S. troops and bases, officials said.

Later in June, the next offensive, Desert Scorpion, began with scores of simultaneous raids aimed at, among other things, shutting down escape routes available to the former Iraqi leaders. It also went after the secret hoards of cash and jewelry that were financing their operations, and it sought to gather more information about the size and structure of Baathist resistance in the Sunni triangle.

That series of raids yielded information on what analysts said was a surprisingly large network of Hussein loyalists. "We call it the gang of 9,000," said a senior Army official, adding that that figure was just an estimate of the number of Baath Party operatives, former intelligence functionaries and their allies active in the Sunni region and in Baghdad.

It occured to me during the Dash to Baghdad that the traditional culture clash between the left and the military played a small but signficant part of the problem. Both the military and the left are all about plans; the left's plans are usually inflexible documents that focus on visions; the military's plans tend to be more living, evolving things. When a plan of the left goes awry, it's because things are truly off the rails. When a military plan goes wrong - at least, under current doctrine - it is designed to be adapted while in progress.

Of course, not all is lost for the left. The post notes that opportunity waits around every corner:

Despite their recent success, U.S. military officials here caution that the fighting is far from over, and they predict that the nature of the attacks could worsen. They worry that the more they succeed, the more desperate Baathist remnants will become. So, they fear, the next phase of attacks might rely more on car bombs and other terrorist methods than on direct attacks on U.S. forces. Two officials here this week, for example, expressed concern about the possibility of an Oklahoma City-like bomb attack on U.S. officials and Iraqis working with them in the capital.

Well, Howard Dean has to hope so, doesn't he?

(Via Powerline)

Posted by Mitch at July 23, 2003 06:10 AM