IRT post number 74: You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Gunny again
And he is right. Amazing what can be accomplished when the collective will of the military and political is focused towards one objective. See the utter destruction of the Axis for a historical reference. Your insinuation that the .mil was somehow at fault for the political shackles is beneath contempt.
No military operation is ever flawless, Abu Ghraib was a PR disaster that was to be expected, put insufficiently trained people in a stress situation without clear orders and you invite disaster. They were not insufficiently trained. They had all the training you need to handle POW's and confinement. The SOP's across the service lines are very similar. The failure was in the leadership. That was addressed, dealt with, and disposed of. It is not our fault that the media is a "Man bites dog" oriented corruption.
In addition, sending troops to do actual counter insurgency who were insufficiently trained for it was bad too (propably toss up between politicians and military leadership). The Marines for sure, and the Army I would bet, were up to the task. It's not like we haven't done small unit MOUT ops before. The issue was the politically motivated ROES that came down after the initial takedown.
I am unsure who got the brilliant idea of not guarding museums and hospitals after the takeover (instead the Oil ministery was guarded) but that could potentially be attributed to politicians too.
But I agree that the biggest mistakes were political, in that order:
-Not having enough troops to begin with, according to both Nato and Soviet doctrine you need about 10 soldiers per partisan/insurgent, well maybe Rumsfeld assumed there would not be insurgents -.- .
-Disbanding the Iraki army, largely disbanding the police force. (Wehrmacht units were working for the British until early 1946, until Stalin got a complete fit because of it)
-Not seperating the different religious groups (although this would have been difficult to do)
-Having went in with a Casus Belli now commonly seen as faked.
Gunny you remind me of when the Vietnamese Genreral and the American General meet after the Vietnam War at a conference.
The American General said "you know we never lost a major engagement during the whole war"
And the Vietnam General retorted, "that's totally Irrelevant, because we won the war"!
And he is right. Amazing what can be accomplished when the collective will of the military and political is focused towards one objective. See the utter destruction of the Axis for a historical reference. Your insinuation that the .mil was somehow at fault for the political shackles is beneath contempt.