US army think-tank condemns 'war on the cheap'
By Peter Spiegel in London
Published: April 15 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: April 15 2004 5:00
news.ft.com
The US army's top think-tank yesterday severely criticised the Bush administration's preparations for attacking Iraq, saying "the logic of war was flawed" by a belief that the US could "win the war quickly and on the cheap".
The report by the Army War College says the administration should have known reconstruction would be long and arduous - but senior officials were so enamoured with military technology such as high-precision bombs that they believed combat could be completed quickly.
"While this emerging way of war looked to employ new concepts, such as shock and awe and effects-based operations, designed to win battles quickly, it had no new concept for accomplishing the time-intensive and labour intensive tasks of regime change more quickly and with less labour," wrote Lt Col Antulio Echevarria, director of national security affairs at the college's Strategic Studies Institute.
Although the paper includes a standard disclaimer that Lt Col Echevarria's work represents his views and not the army's, it is not the first time a senior analyst at the college has taken the administration to task for its conduct in Iraq.
In December, Jeffrey Record, a visiting research professor, wrote a scathing report accusing the White House of diverting assets needed to fight al-Qaeda to an "unnecessary" war in Iraq, and of waging a "dangerously indiscriminate" war against terrorism.
Critics of the war seized on that report as evidence of dissent within the military. But whereas Mr Record was a visiting scholar and a former Democratic Capital Hill staffer, Lt Col Echevarria is a career army officer whose views are likely to reflect those of other senior army officers.
Lt Col Echevarria stresses that senior officers disagreed with civilians in the office of the secretary of defence (OSD) about the force size needed for stabilisation. This is an obvious reference to Gen Eric Shinseki, the former army chief of staff who was publicly reprimanded for estimating before the war that it would take "several hundred thousand soldiers" to pacify Iraq.
"For their part, senior military officials argued that, while a small coalition force moving rapidly and supported by adequate firepower might well defeat the Iraqi army, a larger force would still be necessary for the ensuing stability operations," he wrote. "OSD and other administration officials dismissed such arguments as 'old-think'."
Lt Col Echevarria is particularly critical of attempts to convince the public that the war could be easily and cheaply won.
"The administration. .. downplayed the possibility that the overall financial cost of the war would be high, even going so far as to fire White House chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay, who stated publicly that the conflict could cost between $100bn and $200bn," he wrote.
"It low-balled the total number of US troops and other personnel that might have to be put in harm's way to get the job done, and how long they might have to remain deployed." |
