The scorecard for the Sys Admin force in Iraq
“5,600 Ex-Soldiers Will Be Called Up: Ready Reserve Members to See Duty Overseas,” by Thom Shanker, NYT, 30 June, p. A1.
“As Threats to Oil Facilities Rise, U.S. Military Becomes Protector: Navy and Coast Guard Boost Presence in Persian Gulf, Brace for Long-Term Effort; Suicide Attacks on Terminals,” by Chip Cummins, Wall Street Journal, 30 June, p. A1.
The scorecard for our Sys Admin effort in Iraq has to be a “D.” The article cites the three big causes I’ve heard personally from numerous civil affairs officers who were there:
1. The procedures for contracting were bad: too slow, too tainted by waste, fraud and abuse, and too uncompetitive
2. The assumptions regarding the infrastructure were way too optimistic, plus the looting that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the war was a complete disaster
3. The ability to protect that which was rebuilt was simply not there in terms of the numbers of bodies required.
These are the big lessons learned from our first major attempt at Sys Admin-like rehab of a failed/destroyed society since World War II. Our jobs are cut out for us.
The desperate state of affairs on bodies has reached the point where we’re calling back ex-military into service, even though they’re not in the reserves, plus we’ve now got more Navy ships in the Gulf than we did during the tanker wars of the late 1980s and we’ve had to bring back the Coast Guard in force to help guard all the oil terminals there.
Again, our biggest failure in imaging how to win this peace was in underestimating our ability to wage war and overestimating our ability to wage peace.
The great rebalancing of the U.S. military has begun.
[P.S.—the WSJ story is the one about which I had a long talk with Chip Cummins a while back, an interaction I blogged.]