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Not that there was any real structure or organization to back up the military planning within the US government. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), part of the Department of State, makes contracts with outside organizations—it is not a planning and executing organization. Any semblance of the structure that had pursued nation-building in Vietnam was long gone. The Army had established the Peacekeeping Institute at its War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, but the small group of dedicated instructors there had been cut back repeatedly and was fighting a budgetary decision that would, in effect, close down the institute. Congress had established the US Institute for Peace in a burst of 1970s antiwar idealism, and it served as an important center for discussion and scholarship— but it was not a real analogue to the Air Force's RAND, or the Navy's Center for Naval Analyses, or the Army's RAND Arroyo Center, each federally funded to think through the tough issues associated with the armed forces' missions.
Nor was there a bureaucratic structure dedicated to investing billions every year to improve our capacities to carry out postcombat operations. And there were no analogues to the defense industries, with their armies of consultants and lobbyists concerned to get adequate appropriations.<...>
This brings us to the third major criticism of the government's plan: in attempting to retain full control, the administration raised the costs and risks of the mission by preventing our use of the very allies and resources that should have been available to the US. The Bush administration, thus far, has been unwilling to make use of the international legitimacy and support it could have from international institutions like the United Nations and NATO. Rather than gain leverage by means of international legitimacy, the United States, even through the long summer of 2003, refused to cede political authority to the UN or grant meaningful authority to any other international institution. Yet such legitimacy was critical if governments in Europe were to provide forces and resources to assist postwar efforts in Iraq. With greater international legitimacy, especially in Europe, more leverage could have been brought to bear on governments elsewhere. In the court of international opinion, the UN's authority carries substantial weight. All of this was potentially available to the United States—if only our government had seen that it was necessary and pursued it.
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Yet to be fair, much of the reluctance can be traced to the military-industrial complex and the politics of survival as an organization. Trapped for years within a powerful vision of military transformation that relegated postconflict and peacekeeping activities to a lower priority, the Army, like the other services, has made its existence dependent on high-tech innovation and the creation of impressive, far-sighted procurement programs designed for high-intensity combat in the Middle East or in Korea. In view of overall US defense priorities, these programs were seen as more likely to compete successfully for funding. And, once funded, they would get important backing from contractors and subcontractors in many congressional districts.<...>
Unfortunately, that is exactly how the mission was approached. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the successes and failures of both the war plan and military transformation were soon evident on the ground. In its "decisive operations" the military had performed superbly, but in the larger planning effort, and in the thinking about the true nature of modern war, the civilians had misunderstood what was needed.
Perhaps it was all too easy to concentrate on the fighting, killing the enemy and destroying his forces. But every serious student of war recognizes that war is about attaining political objectives—that military force is just one among several means, including diplomacy, and that all must be mutually reinforcing.<...>
The contrast with the controversial NATO campaign in Kosovo, in which I served as military commander, could not be more stark. There, international authority was invoked in a diplomatic effort to resolve the prospect of additional ethnic cleansing. For months the negotiations and planning continued apace. The UN was engaged early and continuously. NATO, rather than the US, took hold of the problem. First, there was discussion about issuing a threat; then the actual threats were used to exercise diplomatic leverage. There was no preconceived timeline for action; indeed, NATO went to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to act. Several countries' leaders tried individually to broker a solution, and all this diplomacy complicated the military planning.
Force was used as a last resort, and then only after planning and commitments for the period following combat had been made. The application of force was measured at the outset. And after seventy-eight days of bombing, and the threat of a ground invasion, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic gave in to all of NATO's conditions. Some 1.5 million of the brutally expelled Kosovar Albanians were allowed to return to their homes. Serb forces withdrew, and a NATO-led force entered (with the United States providing only about one fifth of that force). Today, Milosevic is standing trial for war crimes at The Hague, and Yugoslavia is an emerging democracy. No American soldiers, airmen, or Marines were killed in action during the campaign.
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16650DTH
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