Key Planning Misjudgements
17. The Coalition's strategists believed that ordinary
Iraqis would welcome liberation from dictatorship, and they seemingly
overestimated the ease of the transition from war to post-conflict
rehabilitation. More specifically, they appear to have made five
key planning misjudgements. We identified three of these in our
report Lessons of Iraq; two more have since become apparent.
18. First, instead of the grateful, amenable population,
which the Coalition had apparently hoped to find, many Iraqis
sought actively to take advantage of the power vacuum that followed
the combat phase. Regime supporters, military personnel in civilian
clothing, and irregular forces such as the Fida'iyin Saddam ("Saddam's
Martyrs") conducted a harassing campaign in the third week
of March 2003 against Coalition forces.[14]
The looting which followed has been well-documented.[15]
Mr Jim Drummond, former Director, Iraq Directorate, Department
for International Development, told us: "… should we
across government—and indeed across the Coalition—have
anticipated better that there would be large-scale looting? Hindsight
is wonderful, but yes, I guess we should".[16]
19. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the Coalition
underestimated the insurgency—or, at least, its potential.
Even when signs appeared that the general disorder was being orchestrated
into more organized anti-occupation activities, the Coalition
seemed to deny or underestimate the threat, and to have believed
for a long time that killing or capturing Saddam Hussein and a
number of his allies and relatives, would solve the problem. Consequently,
the Coalition misjudged the impact of some of its decisions. In
his evidence to us, Major (Ret) Christopher Lincoln-Jones, a military
analyst, highlighted some of the mistakes that allowed the insurgency
to take root, including failure to establish order after the collapse
of central authority, and a failure to re-establish an infrastructure
that was able demonstrably to improve the lot of the Iraqi population.[17]
20. Third, the Coalition seemed to be unable to decide
what to do about the Iraqi military and security forces. On the
one hand, Coalition planners seemed to expect that a significant
portion of Iraq's police and army would emerge after the combat
phase able and willing to be transformed and democratised and
quickly deployed to assist the Coalition in its stabilisation
duties. Referring to the MoD's perceptions in March 2003, Mr Howard
said: "I was certainly aware of intelligence assessments
of the possible course of conflict if it should start. I do not
recall anything from those assessments which suggested the complete
disintegration and disappearance of the Iraqi security forces
that we actually experienced".[18]
On the other hand, there seems to have been considerable pressure
on the Coalition Provisional Authority, particularly in Washington,
to disband Iraq's military forces entirely and re-build the security
forces from scratch. In June 2003, Ambassador Paul Bremer, Head
of the Coalition Provisional Authority, disbanded the 400,000-strong
Iraq army.[19] As a result,
insufficient effort was put into developing the Iraqi Security
Forces to deal with, or even assist the Coalition in dealing with,
the insurgency. It appears that only gradually, as the insurgency
developed and the extent of the threat to Iraq's post-conflict
stabilisation became apparent, did the Coalition address in earnest
the development of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).
21. Even then, the process of building the ISF was
slow and ad hoc. General Houghton conceded as much: "the
nature in which the Iraq security forces were being equipped,
trained and developed did have an element of the ad hoc
about it. It was being driven bottomup in response to local
circumstances".[20]
This, and the original belief that more elements of Saddam Hussein's
forces would remain in existence than turned out to be the case,
led to more delays in building the ISF. It has also meant that
priorities for the development of the ISF focused on recruitment
targets and getting 'boots on the street' rather than a mission-oriented,
centrally-controlled institution-building process.
22. Fourth, the Coalition did not appear to plan
adequately for the scope of the reconstruction task that lay before
it nor did it seem to realise how quickly it would be expected
to act to ameliorate the situation. Even with knowledge of the
extent of Saddam Hussein's under-investment in the Kurdish north
and the Shia south from the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the extent
of the dilapidation of Iraqi infrastructure was not fully appreciated
and the Coalition was therefore not able to restore basic services
during the first few crucial months following the invasion when
many Iraqis' expectations of the Coalition were still being formed.
Mr Drummond told us that planning for the humanitarian phase of
the operation was successful and that many of the humanitarian
issues the Coalition thought it might face did not, in fact, transpire.
This meant, however, that the Coalition was confronted with the
need to undertake reconstruction activities much sooner than it
expected.[21]
23. Finally, the Coalition underestimated the number
of troops required to meet the challenges of Iraq's post-conflict
transition. Commenting on this, Professor Schlomo Avinieri, Herbert
Samuel Professor of Political Science at The Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, wrote in his submission to us: "The Coalition
planned for one kind of war—which it has won handily. It
was totally unprepared for the kind of war which it found itself
eventually confronted with".[22]
Other analysts we have heard from have made the same point, derived
from the same set of doctrinal assumptions: that technologically
advanced forces, capable of high-tempo operations do not necessarily
need large numbers when set against a technologically inferior
enemy, but will need large numbers to stabilize the post-conflict
phase.[23] Colonel (Ret)
Christopher Langton, Head of the Defence Analysis Department at
the Institute for International Strategic Studies elaborated on
this point:
Another well-documented shortfall in the Coalition's
military operation in Iraq has been in failure to deploy the right
number of personnel to carry out the myriad tasks that characterise
this phase of the conflict. Apart from counter insurgency, nation-building
and reconstruction are manpower-intensive military activities
as are most operations in which the civilian population is the
critical element. The US administration was convinced that military
technological solutions would overcome the Iraqi military, and
then the Iraqi nation would fall in behind the Coalition in re-building
the country, despite the well-known fact that the military leadership
requested many more troops. Therefore, although they were right
to a greater or lesser extent on the first point concerning numbers
for the military campaign, a miscalculation of the cultural dimension
in Iraq, and the nature of post-conflict operations allowed the
insurgency to grow whilst there were insufficient numbers to deal
with it.[24]
24. Numbers by themselves are not a 'silver bullet'
solution and any forecasts of troop numbers made before the post-war
situation develops would be, by their very nature, speculative.[25]
Furthermore, assuming that problems emerge only as a result of
policy errors or strategic misjudgements, such as inadequate troop
levels, is wrong. As Dr James Jay Carafano, of the Heritage Foundation,
has written:
The enemy gets a vote, and how indigenous opposition
forces or outside agitators choose to defy the occupation authorities
will, in part, determine the course of events.[26]
25. Nonetheless, the Government to an extent accepted
that the level of forces was not sufficient for the task that
they faced. In its response to our report, Lessons of Iraq,
the Government wrote:
The establishment of basic law and order was
initially hindered both by the other demands on Coalition manpower,
including continuing combat operations, and by the unexpectedly
large-scale disintegration of local Iraqi authorities including
the police…[27]
26. The post-conflict situation with which the
Coalition was faced did not match the pre-conflict expectations.
The strategic centre of the Coalition in Iraq was inevitably the
CPA in Baghdad. To some extent this complicated the task of British
forces in the south. Taken together these factors contributed
to delays in post-war stabilisation. It is not difficult to understand
how mistakes could have been made in planning and executing Iraq's
post-conflict reconstruction. No post-conflict mission in the
last 60 years has been as challenging as that which faced the
Coalition in June 2003. Mr Drummond acknowledged this, telling
us that "the challenges that we faced in Iraq were more difficult
than we have faced in other places".[28]
The considerable success that has been achieved in Iraq—especially
in the areas controlled by the UK—can, in large part, be
traced to the British forces' ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Suppleness and pragmatism are at the heart of the British forces'
professionalism.
27. In this report we focus on the Coalition's response
to the insurgency and Security Sector Reform.
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