Rand Corporation to Rummy, "you got it all wrong"

The Rand Corporation, a think tank with ties to the Pentagon, tells Donald Rumsfeld that every assumption he made about Iraq was wrong.
Rand offers War 101 textbook

WASHINGTON - It isn't all that often that a think tank dependent on government contracts dares tell the emperor that he is naked, and that makes a recent Rand Corp. report to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on lessons learned in Iraq all the more remarkable.


The Rand report puts the finger on what went wrong there and makes "a case for change, and even urgency" in fixing those problems in a brief and frank distillation of what its researchers found in more than 20 studies focused on the Iraq invasion and what has followed.


Rand, although independent now, was originally formed by the U.S. government and is often hired by the Pentagon to conduct major research on military operations.

Shock and awe didn't

The Rand researchers found that the "shock and awe" air attacks against the enemy leadership did not achieve the advertised objectives of "decapitating, isolating or breaking the will" of that leadership. They added that future operations should not be predicated on expectations of fast regime collapse through air attacks because of a host of limitations, some self-imposed to avoid civilian casualties.

Plan for winning the peace

Again putting a finger on a major problem, the Rand study sharply criticized the Pentagon for failure to plan in detail for postwar stabilization and reconstruction "largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult."


In fact, the study said, it is highly likely that in future operations the United States and its allies will quickly defeat outmatched opponents but then spend "months or years winning the peace." The Rand researchers recommend that the planning process for future interventions be stood on its head and the military and civilian resources needed to secure the peace and launch reconstruction be given primary focus and priority in resources.

There is much more so go check out the entire report. Their conclusion is everything that the Rumsfeld Pentagon did was wrong, a string of poor assumptions and choices.