My reading lately

So I'm waiting for Cobra II and Fiasco (two books about the Iraq War) to come in from the library, and while I wait I'm reading The General's War (about the first Gulf War) by the same guys who wrote Cobra II. I'm not terribly far in yet, but I'm already struck by two things. The first is that whatever else their failings were, the commanders during the Gulf took the Iraqi forces seriously - indeed, more seriously than they deserved, as it turned out. There were numerous examples of the US applying massively overwhelming force during the war, and TGW explains this as deriving from the commander's real concern that Iraq had one of the largest, battle-hardened armies in the world.

The second thing that strikes me comes from the chapter on the drawing up of the air war against Iraq. The original architect of the air war believed that the objectives of the war (Iraq out of Kuwait) could be achieved by airpower alone. So he drew up a plan where the air force effectively ignored Iraqi ground forces and instead went after command and control facilities in Baghdad. However, the plan did not survive unadulterated. First Gen. Horner (commander of air forces in the Gulf) then Schwarzkopf and then finally Colin Powell himself all forced major changes on the plan by asking a simple question: what if it doesn't work? That is, what if we drop all your bombs on all your targets, hit them all perfectly, and Hussein still doesn't leave Iraq? It was an important question, and the architect of the plan didn't have a good answer, so the plan was changed.

Those two elements - a real concern over your enemies' strengths, and doubt over your own abilities - served the US forces enormously well in the Gulf War. There is no evidence that the civilians at the Pentagon, or even the uniformed commanders in Iraq, gave any serious thought to the strength of Iraqi resistance, or had any doubts about their own abilities. And look where it got them.