Why The Military Never Learns

In a war with the import of wwii, we're in the wrong place with the wrong tools

The United States has fought a dozen major wars in its history. Vietnam used to be our worst military mistake. But of all the major wars the U.S. has fought, Iraq is now the biggest military miscalculation our country has ever made.

Why the greatest military miscalculation in our history? Because Iraq is the wrong battlefield. Invading Iraq was as wrongheaded as FDR ordering an attack on Brazil would have been on the night of December 7, 1941, just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Instead of moving into Afghanistan with sufficient force to take out the Taliban and track down Osama bin Laden, we've gone into Iraq and dulled our once-mighty military sword on the wrong target. We're engaged in one of the most important wars in our country's history: the war against global terrorism. The main objective should have been getting Afghanistan squared away and securing the U.S., which we're nowhere close to doing. Sure, the powers that be have given this most essential mission a lot of lip service, but security against global terrorist attacks hasn't improved much since September 11.

That's a fact, and a chilling one, even though losing this conflict would totally change our way of life and what America is all about. Make no mistake, our enemy's goal is to destroy American culture, the whole of Western society and Christianity and Judaism around the world--and dial the clock back to the seventh century. The stakes are as high as they were in World War II, and the duration will be far longer. If you're in your early 30s now, you will probably be retired and have grandchildren before it's over.

Right now it's déjà vu all over again for me. In June 1971 in Saigon, in uniform as a brand-new full colonel, I said in an interview what's now being said about Iraq. I said that the American people were being lied to, that there was no way we could win the war the way we were fighting it and that we should get out and we should get out now.

Another eerie parallel struck me recently. During Vietnam, General William Westmoreland--the architect of that war, first as the theater field commander and later as the U.S. Army chief of staff back in Washington--declared before Congress that we "would prevail in Vietnam." General John Abizaid, his counterpart in Iraq as commander of central command, recently announced to the Senate Armed Services Committee, "We will prevail there." I had to pick up my jaw off the floor when he used that phrase.

I shouldn't have been surprised. If there's one thing I've learned in all my years as a soldier and a writer about soldiers, it's that we make the same mistakes over and over and rarely learn from the past. The major lesson from Vietnam was never again to get into a fight if our national security wasn't threatened. And it wasn't before we went into Iraq. We had air supremacy over the entire country, and we controlled most of the north via the Kurds. By putting the same mechanism in place in the south with the Shiites, we could have contained the Sunnis without putting one boot on the ground and we would never have had to invade. In Vietnam we could run away; there were no earth-shattering consequences. Now, however, we're stuck in the middle of an ever-deepening sandpit that we can't easily climb out of because our national security is involved. The entire Arab world is watching us, and if we cut and run as we did in Somalia, Bin Laden will be quick to take credit and proclaim he has whipped us once again.

To compare Vietnam and Iraq is tough, because no two wars are ever the same. But there are troubling similarities. Both wars were major military and political misjudgments. And they became major disasters early on because in both cases the misguided expectation of a lot of ideologues in power was that these wars would be cakewalks. Of course, Iraq is totally different in scale from Vietnam. Iraq is a relatively small operation in number of troops and has had much lighter casualties. Vietnam was huge. We were involved there for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, spent hundreds of billions and paid an awful price in precious human treasure: 58,000 dead, 300,000 wounded. Still, in Iraq we've already lost around a thousands American soldiers, suffered thousands of horribly wounded battle casualties and evacuated more than 20,000 nonbattle casualties--and we've already thrown $123 billion at what promises to be a protracted, painful, trillion-dollar mess.

Before the war and during our first year in Iraq, Vice President Cheney consistently said that the war would be quick and that we would "be greeted as liberators." Apparently the administration never took into account that Saddam might have done some thinking after his first go with shock and awe during Desert Storm and may have taken notes during the new and improved Yankee-Doodle-dandy Shock-and-awe show that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld premiered in Afghanistan. So when Saddam ordered his people to stash ammo and weapons all over the country and laid the groundwork for guerrilla operations, our top brass were taken by surprise. It took an agonizingly long time for them to catch on to Saddam's endgame even though officers lower on the food chain, young majors and the like, kept urging their bosses to plan for the probability that the Iraqis would wage a hit-and-run guerrilla war just as the Taliban--and the North Vietnamese before them--had done.

So we jumped into Iraq prepared to refight Desert Storm--and totally unprepared for the possibility of guerrilla warfare. Instead of securing our rear and flanks, we sent our supply columns flying forward without the right security. War is dictated by logistics, and in Iraq we're dependent on extremely long supply lines, just as we were in Vietnam. Lines that long--in this case stretching from Kuwait to the Turkish border--are hard to guard and easily cut by guerrillas. No wonder we hear so frequently from the troops that the supply chain isn't working. I get reports from soldiers--they were particularly frequent last April and May, when the supply lines were chopped to pieces--saying they don't have enough ammo, spare parts or water and are so short on fresh food that they're reduced to eating MREs, the packaged food that troops call "meals refused by Ethiopians."

Guerrillas attack supply lines to cause opposing commanders to expend a considerable amount of force in securing those lines, which leaves fewer soldiers out hunting down guerrillas. In Vietnam we didn't bother to understand our enemy or the nature of the war we were fighting, and too often we reacted predictably. The same is true in Iraq. The result is that we keep playing dumb defense rather than smart offense--with Jessica Lynch and her service-support crew, along with countless others, being shot up as a consequence. Morale is so bad among some units that soldiers now salute their officers and shout, "PTGF, sir." PTGF means "Prepare to get fucked." As usual, the troops are telling it like it is.

Much of the trouble we're experiencing can be traced to how we fought in Afghanistan and the way that influenced the invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld, like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara of Vietnam shame, has a tendency to ignore the advice of his generals. When they told him there was no way we could go into Afghanistan quickly, Rumsfeld still insisted we go in fast and light. And that's what we did. With a few Marines and Green Berets and a lot of air power--as well as the forces of entrepreneurial rent-an-army Afghan warlords--we were able to pull it off. This reinforced Rumsfeld's belief that he knew better than the military brass.

During the planning stages of the invasion of Iraq, a squad of generals--including former NATO allied commander Wesley Clark, former commander of central command Anthony Zinni and former commander of Atlantic command John Sheehan--all said, "Don't go there. Bad place." Desert Storm commander Norman Schwarzkopf publicly expressed doubts about our plans. Secretary of State Colin Powell, also a former four-star general, said that if we broke the china, we'd end up owning the joint. When Congress asked General Eric Shinseki, then chief of staff for the Army (and former NATO commander of peacekeeping operations in Bosnia), what size occupation force we would need, he said a minimum of 200,000. He may have been dead on, but he was also dead in the water: He was harshly treated by Rumsfeld and crew for his honesty, his advice was summarily dismissed, and he soon found himself publicly ridiculed. Rumsfeld and his neocon cronies were convinced from their early, easy success in Afghanistan that they could approach Iraq the same way--that the model could be taken anywhere. And they still stubbornly refuse to admit it isn't working.

As the infamous leak of the Pentagon Papers proved, President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara and many top generals realized early in Vietnam that they wouldn't be able to win. And the longer we were mired there, the more they were convinced. They put on a different face for the public, of course, and the citizens of America took a long time to get turned off--even after U.S. troops were suffering a thousand casualties a week. By 1969 we had more than 30,000 U.S. dead, and still the polls supported the war. But early on, the Johnson administration had admitted to itself that we were in deep shit. What we see today is completely different. The arrogant conviction of the handful of chickenhawk officials who pushed us into Iraq is that it will still be "Wham, bam--good-bye, Saddam," and up goes the red, white and blue alongside the flag of a new, democratic Iraq. Blinded by their ideology, these fanatics don't seem able to accept the hard truths.

Last spring, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was asked how many American soldiers had died in Iraq, he missed the mark by a couple hundred. He didn't know the number of Americans who were dead as a result of his own overzealous strategy. It's probably been pretty easy for him to overlook all those casualties up to now because a disproportionate number of blue-collar kids have been doing the dying in Iraq. When you look at the casualty list, it's the same old story we saw in Vietnam: The rich, the privileged and the connected escape the war.

But the public already isn't buying the administration's rosy spin. It's easy to figure out why from the e-mails and other reports I get daily from kids in the trenches telling me what's really going on. In Vietnam, a letter would take weeks or months before making it home. The speed of modern communications means you can't bullshit the troops or their families back in the States for very long anymore. And yet the Bush administration maintains its infallibility.

The civilian command is not alone in its ineptitude. The conventional generals running the war in Iraq are mainly tank generals. In Vietnam we had mostly artillery generals who just wanted to build firebases--because that's what they'd done in previous wars and that's the way artillery people think. But just as that war was not to be won by artillery fire (we used more artillery in Vietnam than in all of World War II), this one can't be won by tanks alone. Guerrilla warfare is a totally different animal. It's won by stealth, surprise, good intelligence and small elements maneuvering independently in the dark. This is (continued on page 82)Military(continued from page 74) why the Iraqi theater should be turned over to Special Forces skippers, our specialists in these sorts of operations.

I've also discovered that, as in Vietnam, few officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel--not very high in the military scheme of things--have a clue about the nature of guerrilla warfare and the enemy. Officers at the top are still overly concerned with their careers. When commanders are focused on how they can maintain the status quo while moving onward and upward instead of zeroing in on their mission, their men and what needs to be done, the supply folks need to order more body bags.

Such problems are costing us dearly. Because of the commitment of our forces in 132 countries around the world and on two major hot battlefields, Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces are stretched beyond the breaking point. We're so desperate that we pulled an infantry brigade out of Korea recently, virtually from the front lines, to send to Iraq. We're frantically trying to resolve this shortage by activating National Guard units and calling up more Reserves to the point that we're about to break those two organizations filled with fine patriots. If this overcommitment continues, we'll likely end up with soldiers and Marines hanging up their rifles and walking out the front gate. A recent query on my website (hackworth.com) asked, "Are we going to see an exodus from the U.S. military?" I got a thousand e-mail responses within two days all saying essentially the same thing: "Fuckin'-A, you're going to see it. I'm going to be the first one gone."

Based on the staggering number of soldiers vowing to vote with their feet, we'll probably see a return of the draft at some point. In fact, the stop-loss provision the Pentagon is invoking--preventing soldiers from leaving when their obligations are over--already amounts to a bait-and-switch, backdoor draft. When the draft does come back, perhaps as soon as the end of next year, we'll end up with a bunch of disenchanted citizen-soldiers blowing the whistle and e-mailing and cell-phoning home like you will not believe, because there's no one more outspoken than a draftee who doesn't want to be there. And if the draft is fair, a mob of powerful, well-connected parents will be asking Congress, just as they did during Vietnam, "How are my sons defending America by fighting in Iraq?"

•

While the perceived threat from Iraq was the product of agenda-driven imaginations, there was a definite reality-based threat from the folks who brought us September 11, the same brand of extremist creeps who fired the first salvo in this war in 1983, when they bombed our Marine barracks in Beirut. That's when and where this current conflict started heating up, and that's what administration after administration--Republican and Democrat--have been in denial about ever since. High-level, head-in-the-sand denial.

We were so clueless in 1983, so into our preparations to fight the Soviet Union, that even as that superpower was gasping its final breaths we refused to open our eyes to the threat of terrorism. As late as 1991, when the Soviet Union was in its death throes, the first Bush administration, with Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was desperately casting about for a new enemy. Cuba, China, Libya, Iraq and half a dozen other punk states were put forward to justify perpetuating the massive economic support of our military machine for a superpower showdown. That administration never questioned the logic of maintaining National Guard and Reserves forces designed to fight the Cold War, never recognized the need to secure our borders and ensure that the interior of America was safe and never sought to develop an intelligence system able to track our new enemies, fanatical Muslim terrorists. The moment the first shot was fired in Lebanon, it should have been obvious to even a first-year West Point cadet that this would be the main threat of the future. But throughout the next decades it was as if the chaos in Somalia, the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole attack in 2000 and numerous other terrorist attacks on U.S. targets were all happening in some alternate universe.

That's because our leaders from both political parties are driven by the bottom line and interested in perpetuating business as usual. War is a racket. And there's a lot more room for profit in preparing for an intercontinental missile battle or a large-scale invasion than for a down-and-dirty knife fight. There's no money in boots. There's no dough in rifles. There's no pork in armored vests, uniforms or Kevlar helmets like there is in a fleet of F/A-22 fighters, V-22 Ospreys or armored vehicles. The new aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan cost about $4.7 billion. The next generation of the Star Wars missile defense system is another perfect example of the big-ticket toys the war merchants eagerly promote. We threw $70 billion at the first version of Star Wars, and it didn't work. Yet we've already commissioned an equally problem-ridden second generation.

One of the most striking and disheartening similarities between Vietnam and Iraq is that the fat cats at Halliburton--whose subsidiary, Brown & Root, cleaned up big-time in Vietnam--are back profiteering in Iraq. This time around they're able to overcharge even more egregiously because of the military's dependence on civilian contractors--equivalent to more than two divisions of soldiers. A private contractor who drives a truck in Iraq is pulling down about $100,000 a year; PFC Snuffy Smith gets $18,000 a year to fill the same job.

We have to get control of our reckless spending and start fighting the war against terrorism the way it should be fought--leanly and meanly. We need to vet our shopping lists, dump the irrelevant and the nonfunctional and fund the stuff our soldiers need for the ground phase of 21st century war fighting. The only losers in this scenario would be arms dealers and terrorists.

•

We have such enormous firepower and intelligence ability in terms of finding targets that right now nobody on planet Earth can go toe-to-toe with the U.S. military. No one could take us on in a conventional fight. But in Iraq, as in Vietnam, we're not fighting Soviet tank armies; we're fighting a hit-and-run opponent in a war of haves versus have-nots. And there's an important underlying similarity between jungle fighting and city fighting: Both are advantageous to the guerrilla. In Vietnam we had a huge fist and we clobbered everything in sight without considering our goals. And in Iraq, as in Vietnam, we don't seem to have a well-thought-out overall strategy or meaningful objective.

Of course, we still have the big stick, and we're great at swinging it. So far we're won every tactical battle in Iraq. There's no way we can suffer a large scale tactical defeat. But guess what? In Vietnam we won every large-scale (continued on page 164)Military(continued from page 82) battle and lost the war. We never figured out the nature of the war or of the enemy we were fighting. And the way we're going in Iraq, we may find ourselves faced with the same unhappy ending unless we realize we're in a knife fight. That's where we have to be proficient.

Apart from actual fighting tactics, the key to winning a guerrilla war is having the people on your side. That's the bottom line. Mao Tse-tung said the guerrilla is like a fish and the people are like water. To destroy the guerrilla, you must remove the water. Then the guerrilla will flop up on the bank, ready to be thrown onto the barbecue. But what we're doing with our ham-fisted approach is polluting the water and firing up the fish. In Vietnam we became Ho Chi Minh's best recruiter. A gunship would fly by a village and an enemy would shoot off a few rounds; the bird would swing a 180 and retaliate by hosing down the village and killing innocent civilians. We just helped the guerrillas move that village's allegiance from Saigon to Hanoi. That was their goal, and we fell for it time and time again.

I remember being in Somalia in 1992, watching a Marine Cobra helicopter come in to take out a pickup truck with a machine gun in the back--the type of target called a "technical." The gunship came in and hovered maybe 500 feet above the technical and then blew the shit out of it with rockets. Playing Vietnam in my mind, I thought, "You can get away with this once or twice. But these guys are going to catch on and realize that bird is an easy rocket-propelled-grenade target or one for a couple of automatic weapons. And they are going to take that sucker down." Guerrillas learn. When we lost two choppers in Somalia on October 3, 1993, that's exactly how we lost them. They hovered. They got blown out of the sky. We had given the guerrillas the opportunity to study our MO, and they had learned.

We rarely bother to learn, probably because we've won most of our wars in the past, except Vietnam, because of our massive power. We walk away this arrogant, muscle-bound dude, but we seldom critique the exercise. And once again that won't serve us well in this war against an agile, cunning guerrilla foe. Out of necessity, the guerrilla is fighting a war of economy of force while we're fighting a war with an unlimited checkbook. Again, as in Vietnam, we're using the big hammer instead of the scalpel, brawn rather than brains. For example, we used a billion-dollar bomber to drop million-dollar missiles on a diner where Saddam was supposed to be breaking bread. He was eating elsewhere. How many innocent Iraqis in how many kebab shops can we blow up without losing hearts and minds and going broke? It's time to ditch shock and awe. Boots on the ground and winning trust and confidence are what count.

•

Another lesson not learned from past experience: When you go in, know how and when you're going to get out. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, we went in without an exit plan. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger finally cobbled one together called "Vietnamization." They planned to replace U.S. forces with the South Vietnamese army, known as ARVN. The plan was designed to show the world that the South Vietnamese could defend themselves. In what the Nixon gang called "peace with honor," we would then leave under cover of the shield we would have helped build. And we conned ourselves into believing that shaky shield would hold. When I sounded off in Vietnam in 1971, I told the American people that Vietnamization was a big lie: ARVN was so addicted to U.S. firepower, there was no way it could stand on its own against the much superior North Vietnamese army.

I see the same thing happening with the Iraqi army. After one year and more than $1 billion in expenditures, Major General Paul Eaton, the first U.S. general in charge of training the new Iraqi army, said the Iraqis were good to go, that they were strong, powerful, well led and properly equipped. So when our Marines got into that tough fight in Fallujah last April, a battalion of the new Iraqi army was called in to reinforce them. The Iraqi troops completely fell apart. They ripped off their uniforms--many wore civilian clothes underneath--threw down their weapons and ran. This is the army that Eaton spent a year building, the army that's a major player in our exit plan.

Young Marines study Vietnam, even if the top brass seem not to: When the Iraqi troops ran, the Marine advisory team that had accompanied them said the forces "went ARVN on us."

•

While it looks as though the outcome in Iraq may be the same as in Vietnam, the consequences will be far more significant. After all, the North Vietnamese communists wanted only to eject the invader. Their political and military objective was to be free of foreign influence. Contrary to U.S. propaganda saying they would head for San Francisco next, the North Vietnamese had no intention of exporting their views beyond their immediate region. But if we lose in Iraq, it's not going to end in the Middle East. The Vietnam war was conjured up by LBJ, McNamara and crew, brought about by a sham attack--the Gulf of Tonkin--and, because it remained confined to Southeast Asia, in no way affected American security. This war in the Middle East is totally different. It's a global war not confined to Iraq. The objective is not just to boot us out of Iraq and Afghanistan but to impose a radical brand of Islam on the world and to destroy our way of life. By bumbling in Iraq, we have greatly eroded our ability to contain and destroy these fanatics--and they know it. Bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of a better scenario than our getting stuck in Iraq. That shell-shocked country is now his hottest recruiting ground, and our troops there have become A1 Qaeda's most convenient target.

It's not uncommon in our history to have adopted the wrong strategy and tactics at the onset of a war. We've frequently gone off in the wrong direction. But in the past we've always had the kind of bold and innovative leadership that said, "Whoa, we screwed up. We're doing this thing all wrong. I'm going to appoint Ulysses S. Grant to change things, and we're going to fight this war correctly and win." That's what we need to do now. If we don't wise up, our future and the security of our country and of the rest of the world are indeed in dire jeopardy.

Winston Churchill once said Americans always do the right thing--after they've tried everything else. While we never got it right in Vietnam, unless we're prepared to become one nation under Allah, failure is not an option in Iraq.

Elihys England contributed to this article.

General Alert

Many of the military's best thinkers issued grave warnings about an Iraq invasion

John Shalikashvili

former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

"We must continue to persuade the other members of the Security Council of the correctness of our position, and we must not be too quick to take no for an answer. We are a global nation with global interests, and undermining the credibility of the United Nations does very little to help provide stability, security and safety to the rest of the world, where we have to operate for economic and political reasons."

James Webb, former secretary of the Navy

"Take into account these issues: Resources from around the world, already stretched thin by the war against terrorism and traditional deterrence, will be diverted not only for a war but for a long-term occupation. We have done a good job of bottling up Saddam Hussein and degrading his military. We brought a far more threatening power, the USSR, to its knees by a similar process, not by invading. This proposed invasion has little to do with our true national purpose, which is hunting down terrorists."

Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief, U.S. Central Command, and Bush's former special envoy to the Middle East

"We are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started.... Attacking Iraq now will cause a lot of problems. It might be interesting to wonder why all the generals see it the same way and all those who never fired a shot in anger and are really hell-bent to go to war see it a different way. That's usually the way it is in history.... I worry about the commitment and cost of the aftermath.... You could inherit the country of Iraq if you're willing to do it--if our economy is so great that you're willing to put billions of dollars into reforming Iraq, if you want to put soldiers that are already stretched thin all around the world and add them into a security force there forever."

John Sheehan

former supreme allied commander, Atlantic

"At some point, you can't just jump out of an airplane and figure out what you're going to do when you get on the ground. It doesn't work that way. Warfare is a deliberate activity that requires deliberate planning."

I asked soldiers, "Are we going to see an exodus from the military?" I got a thousand e-mails saying "Fuckin'-A."

Our gunships came in and hovered. Then they got blown out of the sky. The guerrillas had learned, I thought.