WASHINGTON POST: ARMY'S POST-SADDAM PLAN IS WRECKING ARMY NATIONAL GUARD AND ARMY RESERVES

Army's History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon

By Josh WhiteWashington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008; A03
http://tinyurl.com/4ja8tm

A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.

The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.

"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."

The results of those errors, they add, were that U.S. forces and their allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.

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