Examination Witnesses (Questions 103-119)
DR BARRY
POSEN, PROFESSOR
CHRIS BELLAMY
AND MR
PAUL BEAVER
4 JUNE 2003
Q103 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you
very much. Before we start, just a brief word. There is a vacant
seat over there. Our Committee tends not to take a serious interest
in journalists generally and it is only by inviting former journalists
that we can get one into our proceedings, it appears. However,
there was one who was a great exception and that was Francis Ponsonby
who wrote for The Officer—not one of the mainstream
journals. Francis died earlier this week and I would like on behalf
of the Committee to pass on our condolences to his widow and his
children. He was a really good guy and he will be sorely missed.
He is proof that you do not have to be a trained journalist to
write very good prose that can be easily read—in fact, that
might be a lesson to others to follow suit. Thank you, Dr Posen,
for making the great journey over the Channel, and Paul Beaver
and Chris Bellamy. As you know, we have begun our inquiry into
Lessons of Iraq; the Secretary of State came a couple of weeks
ago and now we have a distinguished panel of experts who we look
forward to listening to. When we ask the questions, please do
not think it is obligatory for all three of you to answer. If
you do not have any particular interest or expertise in that question
then do not join in, because we can use your expertise more obviously.
If I might start by asking you all this: apart from the obvious
eventual strategic success of the campaign, how good do you believe
the war plan was?
Dr Posen: To the extent that we
know what the war plan was, on the whole I think it was a pretty
decent plan. It did not overestimate Iraqi military capabilities:
it aimed to leverage certain strong suits in which the west, in
particular the United States, had invested for many, many years,
particularly air power: it took advantage of the fact that much
of the Iraqi military could be counted upon to be fairly unreliable
so you could risk these kinds of deep penetration operations that
essentially were done: so on the whole I think by the time they
got to the actual plan that they used they were in pretty good
shape, with the caveat about whether the plan was entirely adequately
resourced once the Turkish option was lost. I think once the Turkish
option was lost, the plan was not adequately resourced. It seems
entirely reasonable to me that there should have been another
division in the theatre before they started. If not, there should
at least have been pre-positioned material to make it easy to
bring another division into the theatre. That is where you have
key issues—not only about the campaign itself but how you
would transition from the campaign to essentially pacification.
Q104 Chairman: I will ask later what
the British contribution was—there is no need to answer
that at this section.
Mr Beaver: I think I agree with
Dr Posen on that. On the resourcing of it, until 14 January it
was anticipated that there would be an attack from the north and
although there were plans to be able to sustain a military operation
in the north of the country by using heliborne troops I believe
that that perhaps could have been better resourced. Certainly
it seems to me that the campaign probably started about two to
three weeks ahead of a schedule that may have been there, and
the reason is that, if you look at the disposition and the way
in which troops were being deployed, they perhaps went across
the startline slightly earlier than the military would have particularly
wanted. The one area there was a failure was in the appreciation
of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Iraqi forces.
I think that the capability of the Republican Guard was overestimated
and it seems to me that the one failure was in tactical intelligence—the
fact that there would be Fadayeen groups, suicide bombers, even
though in smaller numbers, and a case of ordinary people fighting
which gave the Americans in particular a problem with their rules
of engagement.
Q105 Chairman: I will come back to
you on this if I may.
Professor Bellamy: I also agree
with my two fellow witnesses that the plan for the war was a pretty
good plan. There is a famous saying that no plan survives contact
with the enemy and of course the plan, 1003 Victor, was continually
changed. Probably the most radical change occurred around Christmas
because, as you probably know, the British were originally part
of the northern front with the Turks. However, even before Turkey
became publicly opposed to allied troops using its territory as
a base, General Franks had switched to an all-south option. Paul
said 14 January: my understanding was the 6th, but obviously there
are other witnesses who can confirm. It was around then. 3 Commando
Brigade were always going to be in the south of Iraq but 7 Brigade
and another brigade, and at one stage I understand it might have
been 4 Brigade, another armoured brigade, were for the north.
The Turkish resistance to the deployment of British and American
troops on their territory was a gift for General Franks in terms
of deception because he maintained the effort to open up a northern
front and convinced, I believe, the Iraqis that a northern front
was essential to the point that the Iraqis deployed two corps
and some of their best troops in the north, so although 4th Division
actually existed, unlike the fictitious 1st US Army Group at D
Day, nevertheless it fulfilled the same role in diverting the
Iraqis. As we know, the Operation Phase 3, the war fighting bit,
went extremely quickly. It was a high-risk operation, and I agree
with Dr Posen that if the Iraqis had put up more of a fight we
might have had considerable problems—but we are not into
counter factual history; we are into history.
Q106 Chairman: There is an interesting
article in today's Telegraph by John Keegan saying how
inept the Iraqis were in not using their Republican Guard up forward,
keeping them back, and then they melted away. Did you look at
the article? Do you think he got it right.
Mr Beaver: I have not seen it.
Professor Bellamy: I have not
seen it. There were very basic things that the Iraqis could have
done—for example, blowing bridges over the Euphrates. When
the Germans failed to blow the bridge at Remagen, and you have
probably all seen the film, the Major was shot. He had tried to
blow it but the explosives did not work, so very basic military
things the Iraqis did not do, and I therefore believe there was
a reluctance among senior members of the Iraqi military leadership
to fight and I am sure that the allied planners had intelligence
to that effect which gave them the confidence to put in what,
by any normal military criteria, was a high-risk plan.
Q107 Chairman: Perhaps, Dr Posen,
you would be well placed to answer this question. Cheney got into
a lot of trouble earlier in the campaign for having chosen rather
too light forces and all of the academics were telling him how
he had made a mistake. Can you just give us some sort of background
to that debate in the Department of Defence between allegedly
Cheney on the one hand and General Franks on the other; the Army
wanting to go in heavier, in greater numbers and Cheney wanting
to go in rather light? Was he vindicated?
Dr Posen: I think people have
different perceptions—
Q108 Chairman: I mean Rumsfeld, I
am sorry. Delete Cheney; insert Rumsfeld!
Dr Posen: They may talk to each
other so you may have it right after all! It looks to me like
perhaps the concepts of operations went through a number of iterations.
I think in the beginning a group around Rumsfeld believed the
regime would be quite easy to topple, so you had a lot of talk
early on of very small forces based a lot on special operations
forces, air power, the idea being that this regime would succumb
to a sharp rap and it would collapse. This was an argument that
the US military was not destined to be comfortable with and they
were not, and Franks as a good Army soldier pushed back, and in
the pushing back the force grew. Now, there is this second part
of the tale about how Franks came up with a rather large force
and then there was a kind of a guerilla fight by the people around
him to keep control over some of these forces, so you still had
an argument between Franks and Rumsfeld about the size of what
was becoming the larger force, and I think circumstances in a
way intervened to make the force lighter than what Franks wanted.
I cannot believe he did not want another division in the theatre.
Everybody I knew looking at the build-up beforehand was sure that
another division was coming. Everybody I talked to was sure they
were going to wait. This was the conventional wisdom and I personally
think it was right. I think in retrospect it would have been intelligent
to have another division in the theatre, and we already talked
about the Turkish problem. As for vindication, I think it is central
to admit or to observe that the key battles, to the extent there
were battles—the key encounters—with Iraqi heavy ground
forces were done by western heavy ground forces. In other words,
the key fighting units were the heaviest units that were sent
to the field. There were three heavy brigades in the 3rd, two
heavily reinforced marine brigades that essentially turned them
into mechanised brigades, and the heavy unit, the British 7. These
were the units that carried all the weight in terms of pressurising
the bad guys. The 101, which was an air cavalry helicopter unit,
which was in some ways the pacer for when the war started—they
did not want to start until they had the 101 in theatre—by
the admission of the division commander was never used as a division.
The 101 ended up essentially being a provider of forces and assets
to other units—extra attack helicopters after the 3rd lost
many of its attack helicopters in that initial misplanned raid,
suppliers of infantry units to secure the line of communication
once it ran into trouble—and ultimately, had there been
a brawl for Baghdad, that unit would have had to supply the extra
infantry necessary for the street fight. So when you look at the
ground fights that were fought there were, at least in the American
part of it, five very heavily armoured units centred around traditional
stuff that would have been familiar to any central front NATO
pack commander that wildly outclassed anything the Iraqis could
put in the theatre, and therefore these units could afford to
take terrific risks—and did—partly because of their
confidence in their own equipment and tactical superiority and
partly because of their confidence in the incredible massive responsiveness
of air power, and it is the massive responsiveness of American
air power today which makes a plan that twenty years ago would
have looked insanely risky look bold but still well considered
and, on the whole, still prudent.
Mr Beaver: I would like to add
to what Dr Posen has said—
Q109 Chairman: Please feel free to
disagree as well!
Dr Posen: He will get round to
that.
Mr Beaver: I will when we talk
about aviation but what I would like to add is that the Americans,
in a Blitzkrieg type operation which would not have been out of
place to a German mind in 1940, in the way they went straight
to Baghdad around the centre of population, did it because they
had not only the confidence in their vehicles but also in their
logistic support, which is a very important lesson that has come
out of this. You cannot go hell for leather to Baghdad unless
you know you can be supported, and the US Army and the US Marines
have a very good logistic tail that works. They have a very good
series of equipments and they plan around it. The one area that
was very bold of the Americans was that they did not add armour
to their main battle tanks. They went all the way with their vehicles
without appliqué armour on, which meant when they did lose
vehicles—they lost three main battle tanks—they were
lost to relatively simple anti armour weapons which indicates
that had the Iraqis put up anything like a fight the Americans
would have had a serious problem because they did not have that
appliqué armour in theatre.
Dr Posen: You mean reactive armour?
Mr Beaver: Not necessarily reactive.
The British do not use reactive, for example.
Professor Bellamy: We just bolted
extra plates on the outside. On this question of the number of
forces, I would just like to say that a risk was taken by going
in, as has been suggested, a division light but more troops really
were needed, of course, in Phase 3B, the grey area between war
and peace, and in Phase 4 which is now, which is the peace support
operation phase. That, of course, is where you need more bodies
and that is where an extra division perhaps more specifically
configured for a peace support role would have been particularly
useful.
Q110 Jim Knight: Picking up on the
comments about getting into Baghdad quickly and the logistic support
and following on from what Chris Bellamy has just said, it was
fine to get in quick and do the job they did in Baghdad but they
then did not have the logistic support to do the reconstruction
and humanitarian work that they had to do, and seemingly failed
to do. Is that right?
Mr Beaver: I agree. The impression
I get is that the thinking through to capturing Baghdad and removing
Saddam Hussein from power was a well thought out and well executed
plan—full stop. The next phase, Phase 4, in Baghdad and
the American area in particular, was not thought through. There
was a real feeling that somebody else would come in and do that,
or some other force would be there. One of the areas that the
Americans overestimated was the number of Iraqi soldiers who would
come over and surrender without a fight. I think they hoped that
there would be formed units of the Iraqi Armed Forces that they
could use, perhaps putting British or American officers and senior
NCOs there—creating a force where the engineer battalions,
for example, in the Iraqi Armed Forces could have been used. But
we did not have that; we had the Iraqi Armed Forces melting away
in effect, so nobody quite knows who was who. So that was a failure,
I agree. Going to Baghdad, full stop—a success. After that,
history will probably show it was not quite as well thought out.
Professor Bellamy: I agree that
there was a hope that formed units of the Iraqi Army would come
over en masse, and in fact very few did—instead they just
went home. Also there was a feeling among the British troops in
Basra that the peace support operation would be done by some sort
of follow-on force. Well, it did not work that way; the troops
are now doing a magnificent job but not a job that they were expecting
to do. That is my understanding.
Q111 Chairman: Perhaps when they
start a retrospective war game they should calculate what might
have happened had the Iraqi military operated rather more effectively.
You think then it would have been not a damned near run thing
but much more difficult. Secondly, I was getting very nervous
with the speed of the advance fearing that some kind of guerilla
operations would more effectively operate, leaving the Americans
way out in front of their fuel and much more vulnerable. You say,
Dr Posen, that the Americans did very well on the logistic supply,
but were they effective therefore in protecting the hundreds of
miles of road that, had guerilla operations been more effective,
might have caused considerable problems?
Dr Posen: I think what you are
calling guerilla operations did cause some trouble and the great
speed of the advance caused a trouble. I think militaries are
experiential learners, and however you do the arithmetic I am
not sure you are really ready for the wear and tear on vehicles
in such a long, fast dash in such difficult circumstances. Most
of the vehicles were pretty beaten up by the end of it and fuel
and whatnot was hard to keep up. One of the lessons that the Americans
should be learning or relearning from this experience is an old
lesson from mobile armoured warfare and that is that, if you are
going to make these bold deep thrusts, you have to fix your line
of communication in a way that it is prepared to fight. Towards
the end of the Cold War there was some reapplication of attention
to the problem of getting logistics units to relearn the fact
that they might have to defend themselves and have to fight. There
was some little bit of attention paid to improving the armaments.
Similarly, towards the end of the Vietnam war, when American combat
units began to become more sparse, you had to start getting the
line of communication troops to think about defence and start
armouring up those forces a bit, and we had to improvise that
on the fly in this particular operation. My own guess is, if they
want to do this again—and I do not say they want to do Iraq
again but it is entirely possible they are thinking about another
war—one of the lessons they are going to learn, I hope,
is that some attention to hardening this long line of communication
is going to have to go into not just the planning and the operation
but the training of the line of communication troops. They have
to be more attuned to the fact that they are likely to end up
in brawls.
Mr Beaver: What I noticed was
there was no front line in real terms in this conflict. The first
casualties of the Americans were a mechanical engineering team
who took a wrong turning. They were not properly trained; they
could not read the maps; they did not know how to use their GPS
properly; they had no weapons to hand to defend themselves—and
I think that is a lesson for us. We have to remember we cannot
have a two-tier Army, and we cannot have the service support operations
like the REME[1]being
given, for example, SA 80 A2 with iron sights. They have to have
them with the proper sights; they have to have the proper equipment;
and that is something we have had to learn out of that. The other
thing the Americans have an advantage with that we do not is that
all of the logistical support could move at the same speed as
their forward units, so as their armour went forward all of their
back-up came with them. We do not have that luxury in the British
Army; we are using vehicles that are 33 years old in terms of
the engineer support vehicles; we have vehicles that break down
more often than they run; and that is another good reason why
perhaps it was not a joint military operation—
Q112 Chairman: That is why we were
given Basra, then, you think?
Mr Beaver: It could well be. We
were given what was within our capability. In fact, I think the
United Kingdom requested what was in its capability. Its capability
was southern Iraq going into just south of Nasariyah and that
was what we could do, and so the United Kingdom did what it could
handle. A lesson for us there is if you are going to move in a
Blitzkrieg type operation, as the Germans proved to us and as
lots of things have proved to us before, not only have you got
to have the right kit but you also have to make sure the people
are trained in the same way, and you cannot have a second tier
in your Army. It all has to be first tier.
Q113 Patrick Mercer: I am fascinated
by all of your comments but particularly, concentrating on the
logistics side, my personal experience was you could not fault
the Americans on their logistics—they have always been superb—and
yet we had this unprecedented account on about day 5 of, "We
are only getting one meal. Our logistics have broken down so badly,
we are only getting one meal a day and running out of ammunition".
That is the first point. In line with that, when the concept of
manoeuvre warfare was ladelled upon the British Army after the
first Gulf War, the idea of deep, close and rear operations I
thought was extremely welcome because at last there was this business
of a line of communications having to be able to fight and defend
themselves and being vulnerable not just on the central front
to the idea of Spetznatz but also Fadayeen as it came up very
clearly this time, but I was shocked to hear American troops saying,
"We took the wrong turn; we could not read a map; we had
no weapons to hand; the weapons we had were jammed with sand"—and
then the remarkable comment, "We could not even mount a bayonet
charge". Well, it does not sound to me as though they were
trained to mount a bayonet charge.
Dr Posen: I think you are saying
in a stronger way what I was trying to intimate, which is that
in modern high technology armies the division of labour is very
intense and a terrific amount of action in the rear has to happen
for what appears to the naked eye to be a relatively small amount
of combat power up at the front. Obviously on the receiving end
it does not seem like a small amount of combat power but relative
to—
Q114 Chairman: Could you slow down,
please? We have some very fast speakers here today.
Dr Posen: It is an old problem
of mine. It does look as if, over the last eight or 10 years,
this is an area that the US Army in particular let slide a bit.
I am guessing they will not let it slide again—they are
pretty good, pretty quick learners—but I do not think it
is a crashing indictment. It is striking, as Paul said, that you
can uncoil this line of communication behind you over such a long
distance in so little time and move as much as needs to be moved.
When an American armoured division is on its best day, several
thousand tons is needed to feed this beast with ammo and fuel
and everything else and that is a lot to drag over, and it is
impressive that they did it. Yes, there were some mistakes and
they paid the price, but I think it is impressive that they did
it and the next time they do it they will be better.
Mr Beaver: I think it is interesting
they had one meal a day; the Iraqis did not have any meals a day
so I think that is an advantage.
Dr Posen: Well, if you know the
meal a day they were eating, the meal ready-to-eat, nobody could
eat more than one of those a day anyway!
Mr Beaver: As you say, this is
a tactical thing about going to central messing as opposed to
going to combat rations and that sort of thing.
Q115 Patrick Mercer: No. As I say,
this was about day 5 when suddenly we started seeing pictures
desperately reminiscent of Vietnam of mud-laden soldiers and there
was a perception, rightly or wrongly, that they would be in Baghdad
already by this time, particularly amongst the civilian community,
and yet suddenly here was the operational pause. Is it an operational
pause or have they been stopped in their tracks? "We only
have one meal to eat", and the American Marines are saying,
"I have no ammunition".
Professor Bellamy: I am also a
former journalist, as the Chairman knows, and I think here we
have to be wary of taking a report and saying "We are only
getting one meal a day". Let's look at the big picture. As
the crow flies it is about 300 miles from the Kuwaiti borders
to Baghdad; by road it is about 500 miles. 5th Corps did that
in 10 days—that is 50 miles a day. Rommel, Guederian and
Patten did not achieve that rate of advance with an entire corps
ever, I believe. Okay, you may say the Iraqis did not put up a
fight and if they had put up more of a fight then maybe that would
not have been achieved, but that is a rate of advance on a scale
which I believe is unprecedented in recent military history, and
if we are getting people whingeing about on "We only had
one meal yesterday" then, frankly, you should not have joined
the Army.
Q116 Mr Cran: I want to be clear
on this because I am not sure I am. Following on from what Patrick
Mercer has said, it is easier with hindsight to say what you have
said and we would be in the same position, but I do recall—and
I cannot give you the dates—that there was intense political
pressure exerted particularly by the media, and therefore Professor
Bellamy you might tell us why, at the daily press conferences
about the fact that everything had stalled. What I want to be
clear in my mind why that occurred. Was it because of what you
have all said about the logistics tail and they had to wait for
a few days for everything to catch up then relaunch the attack
again, or was it something else?
Dr Posen: I think it is reasonable
for you not to be clear because I do not think we understand history
all that well yet. It seems to me it is probably a concatenation
of three things: it is the line of communication probably not
fully keeping up with the guys at the business end, and those
guys did need a kind of pause. Secondly, the weather closed in—there
was that rather nasty sandstorm and people looked muddy because
then it rains through the sandstorm and there is this nightmarish
occurrence—and thirdly, there is the tactical surprise.
The Fadayeen or whatever you want to call them—these party
militias—from Basra all the way north were making not as
much trouble as they could but as much as they knew how to make,
and in some cases it was a fair amount of trouble, and I think
the commanders on the ground quite rightly became somewhat cautious
for several days until they could convince themselves that that
line of communication was going to be secure, so it is those three
things working together with some degree of force for each one
of them. I cannot put a number on it but I think they were the
key.
Mr Beaver: And then the fourth
includes exhaustion of the troops. You can only fight for a limited
number of days. To have moved forward and spent that time doing
50 miles a day, engaging the enemy most of the time at night as
well—and remember this is a 24 hour battle with the Americans
using their advantage of having night vision equipment so they
could operate at night—after about five days of 24 hour
battle it does not matter how much Dexedrine you have taken or
how much kip you have had in the back of a vehicle for half an
hour, you are going to be exhausted.
Q117 Mr Cran: Is it too unfair to
say that these elements could have been foreseen, one or other?
Mr Beaver: I think they probably
were. I would imagine that there was a pause sort of in the mind
of General Franks at some stage. He is an experienced military
officer and I would imagine he did not think he could go all the
way. He is not going to be compelled by the Hollywood mentality
of flags flying and driving hell for leather for Baghdad. I would
imagine he would have expected there to be problems. He certainly
would have expected to have had to put bridges across in places
where he did not so. He would have had that in his mind anyway,
which would have given him an operational pause to allow his soldiers
to get a bit of rest and to do simple maintenance to vehicles.
There are things you do on the move where sometimes the tank will
keep going but it would be so much better if you stopped for two
hours, get out, get the tool box out and do some maintenance.
Dr Posen: This business about
sleep is really quite critical. This is not just a kind of a comfort
issue: this is a safety and rationality issue. Commanders who
do not get enough sleep do not think clearly—we know this—and
troops that do not get enough sleep will fall asleep driving the
vehicles. You have these stories from this war and the last of
a group of tanks trying to do something and the unit commander
will notice one wandering off, and it is because the driver is
asleep, the commander is asleep—everyone in the tank is
asleep, not because they are negligent but because the human body
ran out. So the idea that people need a rest is central. I think
it is tempting for commanders to stress to people as much as they
can when they see opportunities to fight all day and all night
and run as hard as they can, but sooner or later you are going
to run up against these human limits.
Chairman: Now, we have new hours
in the House of Commons that is not going to happen here. It used
to, but not any more. Also, we cannot be accused of a rush to
Baghdad—I have worked out we have asked three questions
and there are 52 to go so we are going to have to step up the
pace otherwise we will be here until midnight, and I am sure you
have a train to get back to Belgium before that!
Q118 Mr Howarth: You have referred
in your last answers to some of the surprises that were encountered,
and I wonder if you can tell us whether there were others? I have
detected a difference of view between you, Dr Posen, and Paul
Beaver. You, Dr Posen, suggested that the United States had deliberately
calculated that the Iraqis were going to be a less difficult obstacle
than some people were suggesting they might be and you, Mr Beaver,
suggested that the capability of the Republican Guard had been
overestimated. Frankly, I share your view. It seems to me astonishing
that the Republican Guard were so inactive, but were there any
other surprises?
Dr Posen: Just to be clear, my
view at the time, and I think the military's view, was that it
was the Iraqi regular Army that they thought they could discount
relatively. Paul is right, they probably overrated the Republican
Guard, but I think almost everybody did—in other words,
if you read the ISS Military Balance they did. On the whole, I
think you are better off slightly overrating your adversaries
than slightly underrating them. That is the difference. If you
want to know about other surprises that I think the Americans
faced which I do think could have been or should have been foreseen,
some proved quite destructive and others did not. This one attack
helicopter operation that the 3rd ran against the entrenched Republican
Guard units essentially ran into a lot of rather old-fashioned
anti aircraft automatic weapons which basically put a lot of metal
in almost every helicopter that flew, and most of the helicopters
that came back were not flyable for some days.
Q119 Mr Howarth: We were lucky to
have ours grounded, were we?
Dr Posen: I think you were, actually.
1 Note from Witness: Royal Electrical and Mechanical
Engineers Back
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