CIAO DATE: 08/04

Iraq War: Drop the Myths; Learn the Lessons

Winslow T. Wheeler

Center for Defense Information

April 2003

As the war ends, the gloating and the huckstering starts. Pundits are already praising themselves that this war against Iraq was a “cake walk” after all, and advocates of high cost weapons, “information warfare,” the “revolution in military affairs,” air power, and boots on the ground all are declaring themselves prophetic. Each is urging the reorganization of US Armed Forces around their particular ideas, to the exclusion of any others’. It’s not that these self–declared clairvoyants are conceited or just wrong; it’s that right now, they don’t have a clue. They all lack one thing: data.

Shortly after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf said the Republican Guard was destroyed and over 2,000 Iraqi tanks killed from the air. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force announced the F–117 “stealth” bomber to have an “80% hit rate.” The Secretary of the Navy said the Tomahawk cruise missile was 60% effective, which many thought was low. And, senior Pentagon bureaucrats declared “one target, one bomb” precision. It all added up, most agreed, to the supremacy of “silver bullet” weapon systems and a revolution in warfare.

It was all baloney. When the data was finally collected and assessed months, in some cases years, later, those willing to listen learned what actually happened. The Republican Guard was able to crush the Shiite revolt in Baghdad because only 13% to 30% of its tanks were immobilized from the air. An on the ground inspection of some killed Iraqi tanks found just 17% to have been hit from the air. Of the 2,271 strikes tasked to F–117s, just 1,142 (50.3%) could be verified as resulting in a hit target. While the Navy kept secret the actual hit rate of Tomahawks, it did permit a public statement that about half “failed to arrive at their intended targets.” Instead of “one target, one bomb,” successful attacks against bridges, for example, required, on average, 10 bombs, all of them “precision” guided ones. Further examples of the over–hyping of Desert Storm abound; these examples of what the data finally showed are just a taste.

But, Desert Storm was a brilliant victory, as is the second war against Iraq. Many weapons and concepts were certainly effective in both wars. However, the ballyhooing of pre–selected systems and theories was so rampant after Desert Storm that many in the Department of Defense, to say nothing of the pundit crowd, had a totally false impression of the war. Delusions that any war can be a “cake walk” are made of such things, and they are already proliferating for Operation Iraqi Freedom: Air power won the war; heavy, traditional land power was the key to success; “shock and awe” made it all possible. This success has more fathers than the laws of biology and physics can permit.

So data–free are some prognostications that one writer has declared air power so effective, even “revolutionary,” against Iraqi armor on the basis that it was “spectacularly successful” in Desert Storm in 1991. In the absence of anything to base his claim from the current war, he mutilates the data from the past war.

The company commanders who fought this war on the ground and the squadron leaders who fought it from the air have barely begun to write their after action reports. The data bases keeping track of how much was used, where, and when are still taking inputs. Logisticians have not reported what supply nightmares they foresaw and which were surprises. Interviews of our own troops and of Iraqi prisoners to discern what worked, and what didn’t, are just starting. It will be months before all the data are collected, and it may be years before the information is analyzed and written up by objective researchers.

The issues will not be resolved by the Defense Department’s own report when it comes out some months from now. Internal service politics, apprehension that Congress will exploit any admission of a flaw, and the sensitivities of senior commanders and civilian officials make an objective, comprehensive, and accurate self–assessment by the Pentagon literally impossible.

There are too many undetected, but important, lessons lurking in the weeds of the data. Indeed, verified facts and figures have a nasty habit of disrespecting cherished notions and can offer unexpected insights. Even a short, dramatically successful conflict is far too complex an event to pretend its lessons are knowable before all the data are collected and assessed. We should hope our future enemies will rush to judgment on the lessons of this war; to do better than that, our leaders, let alone the pundits, should talk less and probe more.

Winslow T. Wheeler is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Defense Information. From 1991 to 1996, he directed the General Accounting Office’s comprehensive study, “Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign.”

[Note to editor: From 1971 to 2002, Wheeler also worked for four US Senators from both political parties on national security issues. He resigned his position with the Senate Budget Committee after his essay, “Mr. Smith Is Dead,” written under the pseudonym “Spartacus,” attacked Congress for its response to September 11 and his identity became known to those he criticized.]