US details war plan's success and failings

WASHINGTON -- The American blitz into Baghdad was a stunning military success, but the war plan failed to adequately address the need to secure "sensitive sites" such as suspected weapons facilities, government archives, and possible terrorist hide-outs, according to a draft of the Pentagon's self-assessment of the military's performance in Iraq.

The draft report said that not enough properly trained units were available in the early weeks of the operation to take over sites where weapons of mass destruction were suspected, even though much of the war plan was predicated on the idea that Iraq might retaliate with unconventional weapons.

Overall, the unclassified version of the "lessons learned" report concluded that the successful US-led invasion proved the effectiveness of smaller, high-tech units deployed quickly over large expanses -- the prime thrust of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's efforts to "transform" the military.

No longer are large formations critical to victory when small, flexible units linked with precision weaponry and high-tech communications can overwhelm a conventional military enemy by attacking its political, military, economic, and social centers, according to the draft report, which was obtained by the Globe.

"The traditional view of military forces wearing similar uniforms, arrayed on a linear battlefield, fighting mass formations, began to give way [in Iraq] to a different style of war-fighting," the report said. "Smaller formations with fluid and flexible command-and-control relationships, using lethal and nonlethal capabilities, fought to directly influence political, military, social, economic, information, and infrastructure objectives."

The report, dated March 1, is the first comprehensive Pentagon assessment of the invasion. Its existence was first reported by Inside the Pentagon, a newsletter covering the US military and the defense industry. A final version is expected to be released to the public in the coming weeks. The draft warned that the campaign that toppled Saddam Hussein in three weeks should not be used as a model for all future wars: Iraq, which had been a heavy focus of US military and intelligence officers at least since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, provided unique advantages for the United States from the outset that are unlikely to recur.

The 128-page report, which covers the period from March 21 to May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to "major combat operations," was commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the war and compiled by 34 military officers and 23 civilians at the US Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., who were dispatched to Iraq at the start of the war to track how the military branches coordinated operations.

The draft provides a highly technical assessment of the gamut of military activities, from prewar planning to intelligence and logistics. It highlights a series of deficiencies, including the inability of US and allied forces to identify each other on the battlefield and prevent friendly fire; difficulties in providing supplies to forces that were rapidly on the move; the limited ability to track Iraqi military forces as they dispersed; and inadequate preparations before the war to equip National Guard and other reserve forces to take on a significant role. The draft said the preparations for seizing weapons of mass destruction facilities and other sites in Iraq -- missions conducted by Sensitive Site Exploration Teams, or SSEs -- were inadequate.

"Multiple SSE organizations were created with overlapping missions," it said. "This caused unnecessary competition for limited resources and reduced the effectiveness of all the groups."

Commanders chose an artillery unit, the 75th Artillery Brigade, to take control of sites with suspected weapons of mass destruction, even though it had virtually no experience or training for the mission. The brigade's mission soon expanded to include searches for Iraqi archives, war crimes evidence, terrorist hide-outs, regime leaders, and prisons.

The brigade was improperly trained for these missions, which were "far from the one for which it was designed," said the report.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, even though the military created a special survey group to lead the search after the combat phase.

Other key findings in the report include:

The intense, hand-to-hand combat expected in urban areas never materialized, so "our ability to conduct this sort of fight is not yet proven."

Some Iraqi troops evaded intelligence gathering, exploited adverse weather such as sandstorms to disperse, and have not been caught yet.

The military did little since the Gulf War to improve coordination to prevent deaths from friendly fire. For instance, ground forces had seven different "combat identification systems" and no way to identify one another. A Patriot missile shot down a British fighter plane, killing its crew.

The report praised the policy of "embedding" media with American combat units: "Public access to the battlefield through media proved to be a significant and overall positive component."

Overall, the assessment depicts a highly successful effort that employed many of the advances in military science of the past decade. The United States used about half of troops it employed in the Gulf War to envelop all of Iraq, not merely evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait as US forces did in the Gulf War. It used 15 percent of the munitions it used in 1991, although both wars lasted about the same amount of time.

"The terms historically used for measuring success in conflict are now less meaningful," the report said. "Forces are moved, operated, and sustained in a way that focuses more on generating effects than quantifying space occupied."

Indeed, special forces, on the order of 10,000, were twice the number that served in the 1991 war and more than three times larger as a proportion of the whole force engaged in combat. The small, elite units were able to take control of half of Iraq and almost single-handedly bottled up 11 Iraqi divisions.

Still, the report cautioned that Operation Iraqi Freedom could be a poor model for future fights. Iraq had 30 percent of the ground forces and 25 percent of the aircraft that it had in 1991, along with 60 percent of the air defenses. US Central Command had more than a decade of "corporate memory" of Iraqi miltary capability to prepare for the onslaught.

"Before the beginning of major combat . . . the United States continued to enforce the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq," the report said. "Additionally, these operations had been used to shape the battle space for the upcoming conflict. This extensive shaping affected how much effort was needed during the combat phase."

In the future, it concluded, the military is "not likely to have the same levels of experience or the time during a crisis to build the types of cohesive teams that marked CENTCOM's success."