When that lovable Joe would rub those two brain cells together and think out loud about the nature and consequences of Iraq I would tell him 'we're here until they get ballsy enough and smart enough to tell us to get out, and a year from that point we'll see if we "won" or "lost." '

After seeing first hand the terrible apathy units had at the beginning of the 4th quarter (right before OIF 9-11 transitioned to OND) I can tell you it's going to be an eye sore looking for what the coming year brings to Iraq. You know the Army had it's head up it's ass when there was more ferver over Cucolo's plan to give women UCMJ if they end up pregnant in a war zone rather than the fact that USD-N's #1 HVT was within 10 miles of COB Speicher (Thank god for SOTF-N and their 5 minute trip to kill the 3rd Omar Baghdadi).

Anyone with a day in the military knows better than to plan shit more than one FY out. Hell even that's too long sometimes.

I seriously doubt the military knew what it's plan was going to be even if it was allowed to stay.

Anyways, you can't war game In'sha'allah.

You just wing it.

There's a tough psychological road to considering that barrier, e.g., to think that at some point you're going to get asked to leave, then you have to consider that's a point at which you're considered an occupier rather than a supporter.

I suspect many Americans would shudder (today) at the thought of being considered imperialistic or occupiers, even when and where at least one of those terms may be appropriate.

But not also that such a stay-until-leave event probably shouldn't be black-and-white, in that there should be some transition planning.

David Kilcullen is a smart man, but his insight in this matter looks radical only to those many people who see people not US citizens as something rather less than, well, real people. Iraqis want the American military out? Must be Obama's fault. Sadly, it's not all that big a step from this to Startling amount of snow falling? Must be Obama's fault. This latter idea has already been expressed by Republican candidate Bachmann in her suggestion some weeks back that God was sending bad weather to tell the American people He wants somebody else in the White House. God has yet to confirm or deny this.

One of the most valuable things the Army taught me was that hope was not a plan. Seems like that thought becomes more heretical as you go up the chain. Why is that? Do they read Clausewitz and apply it in reverse? Are the pessimists (realists?) selected out? The same thing happens with procurements, and it is puzzling.

You're kidding right Tom? This was the very definition of success. At least for the moment. We get to leave there with heads held high saying - well we would have stayed if those darn Iraqis didn't press that immunity piece so hard.

Everyone has been looking for an exit strategy - there it is. We can declare victory, or something like it. Iraq still has their structural and political problems but this should be looked at as a clear sign that WE WON. They created enough of a quorum to kick us out. That's good news.

(I'm only being a little cynical here, I think honestly that this is the best way we could leave. Iraq asserts themselves as the sovereign they are and we agree to part company as sorta friends who might text one another frequently. If not for big, bad, worrisome Iran I think we would all think this is just peachy.)

I don't really think the picture is very appropriate.

My goal in life is to become a general, and spout the "failure is not an option" line.

Then, during my annual checkride, the check pilot will give me a single engine failure in flight, and expect me to act accordingly. I will then roll the throttle back on, and claim "engine failure is not an option".

There have been a lot of articles in Scientific American and other psychological journals lately on the negative consequences of an overly positive outlook. I think this article in Armed Forces Journal articulated them quite well in the context of strategic planning. It may have been referenced on this blog previously, but it resonated with several other posts we've seen from disgruntled TOC inhabitants.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2011/08/7065554

is one of those useless slogans that people like to say to "man up" but whether it is true or not depends entirely on the particular situation. In anything nuclear (in the physical sense) it is pretty much 100% true. Me going down to find a sundae because I'm tired of doing equations? Failure is very much an option even if I prefer success in that endeavor. The world is too complicated for general slogans like that.

Also:
"The problem with this is that, as David Kilcullen has pointed out repeatedly over the years, the host government you establish in places like Afghanistan and Iraq must at some point stand on its own two feet and demonstrate its independence. Inevitably, it will have to distance itself from the U.S. government."

It took Germany and Japan, what, 50 years?, to get to the point where they felt very comfortable saying "no" to the United States. It took Iraq and Afghanistan's new governments 1, maybe 2 years, before they did. You could say that is cultural but why is Japanese culture closer to American culture than Arab culture is?

The embedded myth: That our goal is to descend on a country, stay for decades at a time, and spend billions to keep the host nation happy to continue to tolerate us.

If goals are realistic, and matched or re-matched to available resources and conditions, failure is not an option. It is theoretical in a context where success is nebuluous and subject to constant re-definition. (German: Nebel: Cloud, Fog).

I am quite happy with our outcome in Iraq, notwithstanding anyone's view of the 2003 decision (the decision to go in being a whole different subject beyond the scope or responsibility of most on this board, including myself).

The goal of my little gang was to rapidly transfer authority to Iraqis (by the end of 2008), so that we could leave. Point, set, match.

Actually, I was a little surprised about the lengthy dawdling phased into the SOFA. Once troops were forced out of civilian areas, and confined to bases, their purpose and effectiveness was in question much sooner than their actual withdrawal.

Grousing about alternatives that were neither credible or supported seems like a waste of time.

I will be very happy to see the last troops leave Iraq before Xmas. That, in answer, to the famous Petreaus Question, is how it ends (troops on the plane out). Failure is not an option if the President controls the planes out, and Congress controls the purse strings.

What happens next (or in Kuwait) is a different problem. One at a time please.

If you never define "success" everything will be a failure.

Success, or rather US aims in Iraq, should have been, should be, to set the conditions where Iraqis can govern themselves. They've had two national elections. If we would've explicitly and decisively stated that as our aim after the 2004-06 civil war, we'd be able to leave without any lingering thoughts of their economic or security or governance failures. Those problems are theirs. They need to own them.

As a boxing coach I've learned, you can tell your boxer how to fight, but ultimately, the boxer has to climb through the ropes and fight the fight, not the coach. If your boxer doesn't listen, or uses his own tactics, and loses. So be it. The coach can't win the fight. The boxer must.

We can't and shouldn't hold the US responsible for Iraqi success. We can and should only be responsible for giving them a reasonable opportunity to achieve governance, security, and development. If they piss away that opportunity. So be it.

Very few of the commanders or staff officers that I have ever been associated with have ever had the ultimate nerve to brief "mission failure" or "I cannot complete this task because (fill in the blank). Even when there are some very good reasons for why a task cannot be completed, or for all intensive purposes an operation was a failure, the truth is anathema to those in positions of authority who do not wish to have a black mark on their record. Those hearty souls that speak such heresy are ostracized and ridiculed; and a few have been invited to a spate of private counselling sessions with however many supervisors the individual has.

So, we are trapped in a culture of not failing; worse than that we are trapped in a culture of not facing the truth. Tasks are carried out haphazardly and inefficiently because the doers are afraid to request the things they really need to make their job a true success. Technically they might complete their assignment, but far more eggs are broken in the process that are necessary. Subordinates report "mission accomplished" just to avoid the reckoning that would be brought on should they report the opposite. One AK-47, three cell phones, and a bottle of homemade explosive becomes a massive weapons cache with the owner being a terrorist mastermind. A unit's rotation and actions during deployment are described as being the best ever in the history of warfare, when in actuality it may have been average, mundane, and relatively boring.

Failure should not be an option, so long as leaders do not compromise honesty and integrity. When it becomes an option, I would posit that someone, maybe even multiple people, dropped the ball somewhere.

Given the state of the world it's probable that the U.S will, sooner or later, find itself in some armed conflict with another conventional military and that eventually it will find itself defeated in war*. Considering our past seventy years of military history** I can only wonder what will happen then.

*And political defeat in South Vietnam (really more political defeat in the U.S than South Vietnam really) is not the same as military defeat.
**And our tendency to try to make our wars sound better than they were, including the dubious War of 1812.

The Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps told the House Armed Services Sucommittee on Readiness last week:

“A hundred and fifty thousand (troop total in the USMC) would put us below the level that’s necessary to support a single contingency”...“We will not be there to deter our potential adversaries”... “We won’t be there to assure our potential friends or to assure our allies. And we certainly won’t be there to contain small crises before they become major conflagrations.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/27/general-cuts-risk-marines-war-fighting-missions/

I'm confused; is this an option to fail or not an option to comply? All the military chiefs seem to be parading out in this very strange time of "success" with Libya," failure" in Iraq because we have finally honored that country with obeyance of an agreement to remove troops, and the threat of massive DOD cuts either if self-inflicted or very massive if noncompliant. The parade signs Show: "we can't, we will suffer, we will fail with a 'hallow force'".

Is this failure as an option or threat of failure because we fail the reality to see that cutting costs and doing the missions can both be done if we try harder?

Its been done before. The love of massive budgets and procurements seems to have caused an inability to plan to do more with less.

I can't believe a Marine would say that shit in public. Shame.

we can simply have our officers write out Options Are Not Failure a hundred times a day for each step up the rank ladder they climb.

One condition of victory should be that we sit down and deliberately learn the lessons from the war we just fought. The lessons should be explored, examined, and incorporated into current doctrine. People who never left the Green Zone are should not be part of the discussion. Things that could make the list:

1. Create a small, permanent command that plans to advise non-combat indigs. Special Forces can only train light infantry and guerrillas; nobody knows how to advise a logistics brigade or a minister of the interior. Nobody wants to get stuck with this job (it doesn't look promotion-worthy). Tough. It's the job that needs to be done, and it keeps happening (Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). We need a small but scalable command whose job is to constantly update these lesson plans, then teach them to advisory teams ("transition teams"). Make nation-building somebody's full-time job so it doesn't have to be everybody's part-time job (without training).

2. Language and culture training is still broken. This is the first war in which we have (finally) realized that combat troops need language, but we can't even do that right. McCrystal's Af-Pak Hands plan started out only training Dari, and units had to pay for Pashto out of their training budgets (fixed later). Anyone who left Bagram knew that the entire war was in the Pashtun areas.

3. Somebody at DA needs to look up the word "camouflage." It should say something about blending in with the environment YOU'RE IN, not the environment in a lab. We had a desert camo uniform, and they replaced it with a pattern that worked only in cities and woodlands. This is reminiscent of WWII, when another generation of camouflage "experts" could only come up with the same pattern as the Germans (brilliant idea).

4. Stop throwing out lesson from the previous wars. Make permanent equipment changes, and make violating them punitive. The armored cupolas currently used on 113s, MRAPS and HMMWVs are virtually identical to the ones on the "AVAC Kit" used during Vietnam. We phased them out why exactly? The current M1117 armored vehicle is just a derivative if the Cadillac-Gage V-101/M706 vehicle used for force protection in Vietnam. After that war, we apparently assumed that we would never again fight the world's oldest type of conflict, and phased them out. Now we've phased them back in... what a surprise.

5. Most importantly, identify those senior NCOs and officers who focused on all the wrong things, and select them for non-promotion. If you had a CSM who wouldn't let his soldiers use their issued hydration systems, retire him. If you had an officer who cared more about badge-around-the-neck versus badge-on-the-arm than he did about fighting the war, pass him over. Let soldiers determine what is taught and tested at NCO Education Schools, not civilian education experts or old, tradition-obsessed retirees.

One of the tasks of an After Action Review is to identify mistakes, and to train to avoid them in the future. Every private knows that. When are the colonels, generals, and CSMs going to realize that it's also a condition of victory?

The failure to plan is all too apparent from my end--I'm currently participating in the Iraq pullout--and I can say that the level of disorganization and shoot-from-the-hip logistical movement and decision-making is astonishing. I can attest to the reality that military leadership at all levels, even in theatre, turned something of a blind eye to the possibility that all U.S. Forces would be withdrawn from the country by the end of December.

I don't, however, think that all of this can be attributed to a planning failure on the military's part. Before it had been decided that troops would be leaving the country entirely, vast movements of personnel and equipment were being made in anticipation that it could happen. Soldiers were left in various parts of the country with only the barest necessities for self-sustainment as a result along with an looming question mark as to whether or not they would remain in the country and, if so, what their mission and role within it would be.

The hurried nature of the withdrawal and its ensuing chaos are (or seem to be) the result of politicians who pushed relentlessly for a continued U.S. presence, and then, when negotiations fell through in the eleventh hour, called for an immediate withdrawal without anticipating or realizing the enormity of the headache such action would create. (Consider--are the scanty amount of American bases in Kuwait truly able to sustain a sudden influx of 40,000 plus soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines? How will these bases handle the equipment turn-in requirement, since virtually all unit equipment is theatre-owned?)

Did Army planners have an overly-optimistic view of how the situation in Iraq would develop? Possibly, but we have seen time and again the Army's can-do culture and shouldn't be so surprised by it. The mess (and responsibility for it) belongs to politicians unable to decide upon an acceptable end state, and then provide a reasonable timeline for its execution and realization.

* David Kilcullen has pointed out repeatedly over the years, the host government you establish in places like Afghanistan and Iraq must at some point stand on its own two feet "

Saint David has said many things and shall, no doubt, say many more things. However, the current government in Iraq was not established by the US. That would have been Iyad Allawi, had the US military managed to rig the last elections, on instructions from On High. The same CIA Iyad who proved a reasonably reliable selected (as opposed to elected) leader before the advent of Shia Power (to simplify).

The apparent failure to extend the occupation force is hardly a surprise, given that Allawi did not manage to form a government. It is completely in line with the non-existent second front in Turkey thanks, in part to Gen Franks who decided that his public pronouncements would be The Proper Line for Turkish decision-makers, be they political or military.

The presumed original intention was to be a permanent post-1945 Germany and Japan (vloiced numerous times, too many to count) by various people. Of course, Iraq had a twentieth century history of occupation and resistance and was a colonised territory. Unlike Japan. As for Germany, the occupation of the Ruhr post Great War hardly counts and the detachment of Alsace scarcely more so.

As I understand it, the mantra "failure is not an option" came from NASA during the 1960s.

And then, of course, the Challenger showed that it was.

Best,
Tom

were in the OPLANs...so was Operation New Life.

had it that when a troop hadn't done shit that month, he "backed up to the table" on payday. This was back when troops were paid in cash each month.

Today's senior officers have been backing up to the pay table for quite some time now. Most likely because they are a bunch of liars. When the political authority puts them under the gun, they magnify their ability to perform the mission. Going back to the old Army, this was the Asian, "Can do eegie. No sweat, GI." Honest discussions of risks v gains and force limitations are beyond our generals until they're out of money.

When our generals are awash in money, they ensure that they spend it as rapidly as possible on high-tech wonder weapons and then lie about the test results, painting failure as success, reasoning that that the money machine will turn off if those in charge of funding learn the truth.

When our generals are facing a cut in funding, they turn the lying around to the point where, as we've seen, the USMC will be so weakened that it won't be able to deal with the Queen's Own Regiment, the pride of Ruritania.

"Failure is not an option." Every time I heard that when I was on active duty, I thought, "What a dumb ass thing to say," and my respect for the officer uttering the phrase went down another notch.

I was in Iraq last year and left a few months after OIF became OND. Planning to get out was always half hearted at best. Even getting down to 50,000 was a last minute affair.

I saw that ground commanders don't want to make the tough decisions that allow good realistic planning to occur because they don't want to commit to a date on when they give up combat power.

I can't imagine the level of pain going on there now. Last year at this time they seemed to be banking on getting a new security agreement.

Somebody to suggest that we should leave tons of equipment behind for the Iraqi Army. That negates the need for logistical plans to get them out of Iraq, gives contracting opportunities for trainers and maintainers, and allows the generals to say that they need new gear to replace the old.

This is akin to the Air Force not refurbishing the F-15 so that there would be a dire need for a replacement. If we can keep B-52s flying and up-to-date, we can keep F-15s flying. We even replaced the main lift spars on C-141s and extended some to keep them from falling out of the sky and carry a useful load. It is very hard to believe that someone did not prepare a plan, a contingency plan for the withdrawal of all troops and equipment. It just has to be sitting om the shelf of the J-4 shop at CENTCOM. If it isn't , then fire someone.

If the leadership of the USMC is concerned anout cuts, then they should select what they want to cut. Let's start with the Osprey. Then they can forget that they have a unique requirement for an armored troop carrier. LSTs are cheaper than new vehicle programs. The last amphibious landing was Somali, I believe. That unopposed landing could have been done a harbor or in LST and smaller vessels. Whether it's their standard rifle, LMG, or sniper rifle - settle on one with the Army and buy jointly. Is it useful for our different services to wear different camouflage? As suggested above; examine how the Marines have been used in the recent past and plan and buy for that type of warfare in the future.

We have failure. Failure of national leadership, failure of military leadership at home, and a failure of general officer leadership abroad. The creation of massive bureaucracies like ISAF, SOCOM, and CENTCOM are not signs of success; they are signs of insanity.