What the U.S. Military Still Hasn’t Learned From Iraq

By the summer of 2003, it had become clear to even its most ardent proponents that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had, at the very least, not gone as planned. After Washington disbanded the Iraqi military at the end of May, hundreds of thousands of armed men began protesting across the country. Fighters began regularly attacking U.S. and allied soldiers, prompting the American military to spend June carrying out a series of operations to find and kill armed groups. As the weeks went by, these groups began carrying out even bigger and bolder attacks. In August, they bombed the Canal Hotel, killing the UN special envoy to Iraq.

That, of course, was just the beginning. Twenty years later, it is clear that in the post–Cold War era no conflict has been more consequential to the U.S. military than the war in Iraq. The U.S. military spent nearly $2 trillion deposing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and fighting the insurgencies that arose in his wake. The United States lost 4,000 soldiers in combat, and it has spent more than $200 billion caring for those who were permanently injured. The United States still has troops in Iraq, and so these costs continue to mount. Approximately four million Americans fought in the war, people who spent the formative years of their lives battling for control of a country more than 6,000 miles from where they grew up.

It is now obvious that the war was a strategic disaster. Despite its investment in Baghdad, the United States ultimately created a fragile state with deep ties to Iran—one of Washington’s main antagonists. All over the world, the invasion engendered tremendous ill will toward the United States. It gave birth to new terrorist groups, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). And it ended Washington’s moment of unquestioned dominance, illustrating that even the world’s most powerful country could not get away with whatever it wanted.

These sweeping failures have been endlessly dissected by journalists, academics, and politicians. But 20 years later, as it continues to reflect on the invasion, the United States must think about more than just how its overarching plans failed, or where its intelligence was wrong. It must also consider how the military—despite its many resources and great sophistication—could not create lasting peace in Iraq.

In some ways, it is hard to blame the armed forces for this failure. Turning Iraq into a tranquil democracy was always going to be extraordinarily difficult, and unlike the White House and Congress, the U.S. military did not decide to embark on it. The military also did not set the conflict’s objectives. The armed forces did what they were asked. Unlike the Russian military in Ukraine, the U.S. military did not leak key secrets, run low on weapons, or overstretch its supply lines (although it came close to doing so, in the early days of the initial “march upcountry”). Within a month of invading, the armed forces had captured the Iraqi capital and driven the country’s government from power.

But the U.S. military, like Washington as a whole, did not seriously plan for what would happen after it defeated Saddam’s regime. It had no good strategy for securing a victory where the country would be democratic and stable, rather than riven with internal divisions. The military did realize that it needed more troops than Washington wanted to commit. When asked by Congress before the invasion what it would take to defeat and occupy Iraq, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki said that the armed forces would need several hundred thousand soldiers, more than the 130,000 they were given. But the military still failed to adequately communicate with U.S. civilian leaders.

Instead of walking into Iraq and trying to tackle challenges as they came, the U.S. military should have clearly defined and planned for the long-term problems of not just meeting the mission of destroying the enemy forces it expected to face but also of restoring effective Iraqi civil governance. It should have better studied and worked to understand the endemic problems facing Iraq—such as its historical, economic, and social struggles—rather than focusing all its attention on how to oust Saddam’s government. If it had considered all these factors, the U.S. military could have told civilian leaders that their goals for the country were beyond the armed forces’ capacities, and then made clear to these officials what the military could realistically accomplish. Instead, the U.S. military conflated and confused what it would take to win in battle with what it takes to fully win a war, meaning that its best military advice to civilian leaders came up short. And as early as March 19, 2003, it was already becoming clear that the enemy the United States faced was not, as U.S. General William Wallace put it, “the one we war-gamed against.”

To avoid repeating these mistakes, the U.S. armed forces must better communicate with Washington going forward. In doing so, the military should do what it can to steer the United States away from wars of choice. When it must enter new conflicts—and in today’s turbulent world, it may have to—the military needs to expand and enlarge the advice it gives civilians on how to campaign. It needs to better assist civilian decision-makers in crafting long-term strategies that can secure lasting victories, instead of just short-term plans to defeat enemy forces. It must learn how to convert local wins into broader victories. The military cannot, in other words, behave as it did in 2003—and assume that force alone will transform a divided and poor country into a Western-style democracy. The U.S. military’s best military advice must get better, and it must be inclusive of what it takes to win the peace in addition to what it takes to win a fight.

DOOMED FROM THE START

When the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, I was an army major, attending the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies. I first voiced my concerns as a student, arguing that the United States was not ready for the war it had planned. I also expressed worries in the pre-invasion phase while responding to an army chief of staff’s request for alternative military options to an all-out invasion.

My concerns only got worse when the war started. After graduating early from the School of Advanced Military Studies, I deployed to Iraq to co-lead Shinseki’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group, which was deputized to chronicle and study in detail how the invasion was going. From what I saw, it was apparent early on that the military would struggle to succeed. We invaded the country without an operations-ready “Phase IV” plan for consolidating our victory after combat ended; there was, in other words, no formal strategy for occupying and stabilizing the country. Because Washington was not preparing for this monumental task, it never committed enough troops to the invasion. It also coordinated relatively little with civilian and other governmental agencies, figuring that the war would be quick and that it would therefore transfer responsibilities to some civilian agency by summer 2003. As a result, the military concluded that substantial outside support would be unnecessary.

Part of the reason for this failure lies with civilian officials, who would not meet the military’s early troop requests, and who also had minimal interest in becoming involved with Iraqi state building. But part of the failure very much lies with the military. The American armed forces remained institutionally committed to the traditional way of doing war, which emphasizes defeating an opposing state’s own armed services. U.S. commanders therefore focused on calculating the type and amount of forces required to win against Saddam’s military—not what kind of forces they would also need once the regime had crumbled. As a result, once Saddam was driven from office, the United States and its allies had to haphazardly pivot from dynamic, rapid major combat operations to slower-moving and lower-level protracted ones. Suddenly, there was a whole new set of numbers and equations that the United States needed to consider, as the mission, enemy, and culture altered and expanded dramatically and the military’s task expanded beyond winning in military battles (which is, itself, complicated enough). For example, the West’s lack of knowledge of and appreciation for entities and armed organizations other than states—including tribes and clans—made it impossible to properly plan. The U.S. military, intensely focused on physical geography, failed to realize that religion, culture, and ethnicity are also a type of terrain.

The U.S. military paid too little heed to Iraq’s many sectarian divisions.

Angry Iraqis quickly capitalized on this uncertainty. In 2004, as the United States and its coalition tried to redefine their aims and policies, the opposition organized into an insurgency. U.S. troops fought back, and they continued to win battles against armed militias in various locales. But without a greater and clearer strategic purpose, these local efforts did not add up to a bigger success. Planners failed to create a way to turn individual operations, actions, activities, and investments into an effective and comprehensive campaign. By the 2004 U.S. presidential election, American commentators began asking a quippish, but fair, question: How could we have a plan for the war but not for the peace?

By late 2006, Washington finally accepted that the United States needed to send more troops to Iraq in order to stabilize the country. And in early 2007, the United States began its famous “surge,” sending 30,000 additional soldiers onto the battlefield. Seemingly, it was a success. As the military’s presence expanded, violence declined. By December 2011, the United States felt secure enough that it finally withdrew from Iraq.

Yet in reality, the surge provided little more than what the journalist and former CIA analyst Frank Snepp, referring to Vietnam, called “a decent interval” to escape obvious censure for failure. The campaign pacified the insurgents, but the U.S. military paid too little heed to Iraq’s many sectarian divisions as it tried to suppress violence. It made no durable attempt to work or reshape the country’s system of tribes and kin-based relationships beyond making transactions with them. As a result, it was easy for violence to flare back up once the United States withdrew.

And flare up it did. Within three years of Washington’s departure, the self-proclaimed Islamic State—which was partially led by prisoners of war held by the United States—erased the international boundary between Iraq and Syria. It invaded and took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014. The U.S. military was then forced to return to the country in order to push ISIS out. Even after ten years, many U.S. troops have not left.

THE FOREST AND THE TREES

On a tactical level, the U.S. military has learned much from two decades of fighting in Iraq. It has developed new operational concepts, and it has discovered how to take advantage of technologies that could improve combat capabilities. The armed forces, for example, have made strides in information-based warfare. Based on what happened in Iraq, the military created the Joint Military WebOps Information Center, which helps the Joint Chiefs of Staff better understand digital information and operations. Since invading the country, the U.S. Army alone transformed entire warfighting divisions into digitally linked formations, based on the idea that such links would increase the tempo of ground operations and thereby make army forces both more lethal and more likely to survive. New technologies have also allowed the military to decentralize mission command by giving officials a literal picture of unit locations and movements, making it easier for officers to make quick decisions.

But despite significant operational achievements, there are many lessons that the U.S. military has not learned from Iraq. In fact, some of the armed forces’ advances could exacerbate the faults. Take, for instance, the U.S. armed forces’ critical failure to chart a plan for how to permanently stabilize the country. The United States’ improved prowess at quickly projecting military force simultaneously, across multiple theaters of conflict, has allowed Washington to continue neglecting questions about how to establish peace once its principal adversary is gone. The irony is stark: the United States’ desire to stop its endless wars may be a forlorn quest, because of the country’s peerless capacity for endless warfighting.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of Iraq, then, is the simplest: don’t launch such conflicts to begin with. This lesson is most important for civilian leaders in Washington, given that they ultimately decide when the United States goes to war and when it doesn’t. But U.S. military leaders should do a better job of making clear to their civilian superiors what the full costs of such conflicts will be. That means that commanders must understand a potential war’s political goals and objectives well before combat begins. If those goals and objectives will be extremely difficult for the armed forces to achieve, they must forthrightly tell civilian leaders. The U.S. military is a powerful but blunt instrument, with a dismal track record of defeating protracted insurgencies. It should steer itself away from issues it cannot fix.

But as far as advice goes, “Don’t do it” is insufficient. Iraq was a war of choice, but in the future, Washington could face wars it is obligated to wage. Indeed, the risk of such a conflict is growing. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has endangered the whole planet, but especially the West. Today, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the United States must rush to defend one of its NATO allies. China could also launch its own war of aggression in the years ahead, including to take Taiwan. And terrorism remains a persistent threat.

The United States’ desire to stop its endless wars may be forlorn, because of its peerless capacity for endless warfighting.

The United States must therefore reform its fighting forces, but in calculated ways. It will need to adopt new technologies, yet it must also avoid overcommitting to the latest technological trends at the expense of past military challenges. The military, for example, should adopt major new systems that will remake war—including artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, and three-dimensional printing—but in ways that help serve the military’s practical purposes. It should also not oversell or fetishize new war concepts. It should avoid asserting that any reduction will irreparably degrade national security. In the end, Washington needs to focus on the military’s organizational design and people, making sure that the U.S. soldiers are as well prepared and well commanded as they can possibly be.

To make these changes work, however, the United States must learn to do something it failed to do in Iraq: win not just the war but also the peace. Those of us who have served on the ground have seen how the U.S. military can defeat enemy forces, rebuild local governments, strengthen local economies, and generally help build a healthy civic life. It is unbelievably frustrating for us to then witness these individual successes unwind as the United States fails to convert local wins into countrywide victories.

In Iraq, the U.S. military failed because it did not realize that all politics is local. Washington and its coalition of the willing proved unwilling to work with and through local tribes and kin-based political networks, as well as with regional and international tribal confederations, for far too long. In future civil-military interventions, the United States must instead begin and end its efforts at the basic roots of human society. To succeed in engaging populations as they are, rather than just as state actors, the armed forces should do a better job of engaging civilian governmental or international actors, as well. And whenever possible, the military should seek to deter without actually using lethal force. The U.S. armed forces are extremely powerful, and they can use their might to help intimidate and deter adversaries without fighting.

GHOSTS OF THE PAST

My father was a lifelong soldier. He spent 30 years in uniformed service, before then spending 12 more as a Department of Defense civil servant until his death in 1985. During his career, he experienced an unconditional win in World War II, a stalemate in South Korea, and finally an abject loss in Vietnam. His untimely passing was the result of his cumulative experiences with war, mounting in Vietnam. Ultimately, he was left—like so many of our Vietnam War veterans—scarred by fighting in this unwinnable war of questionable cause. He and others fought well and honorably, but their efforts were never good enough to make the war good and righteous.

The United States continues to lose the war in Vietnam as it keeps losing veterans to the conflict’s physical and psychological scars, even though it has been nearly 50 years since it officially ended. Washington must begin now to exorcise similar haunts from Afghan and Iraq war veterans, or else these endless wars will become forever wars for these veterans and their families, as is Vietnam. Indeed, the United States is, unfortunately, already losing Iraq and Afghan veterans to drug addiction and mental illness.

Like my father before me, I spent 33 years in a uniform, followed by seven years (and counting) as a government civil servant and military and global affairs scholar. As with my father, my experience of American wars has left me disappointed with, and often confused by, U.S. defense policies. They have left me persuaded that there are just some conflicts—like Iraq and Vietnam—where the United States cannot win. They have taught me that Washington should not be in the business of carrying out wars of choice, no matter how appealing they may seem.

But my experiences have also shown that when the U.S. military must fight, it needs to campaign with more than just its forthcoming battles in mind. It needs to have the Phase IV plan it never had in Iraq. It needs to learn how to translate small wins into big ones.

And it needs to start crafting such plans now, before the tumultuous global order springs conflict on Washington. Otherwise, the United States, and its military, risks repeating one of its greatest-ever failures.