Planning Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq

For planners and bureaucrats, Afghanistan and Iraq appear to present a puzzle. In Afghanistan, on one hand, we had little time for planning; we did lots of innovative things on the cheap; our relatively small, international force has taken few casualties; we have had great local and international support; and we are, by most accounts, on the way to a good outcome. On the other hand, in Iraq, we had over a year to plan; our national policy has been expensive and often unimaginative; a relatively large, primarily American force has taken over 18,000 casualties, most of them in the so-called postconflict phase; we have had severe problems with local and international support; and the outcome, although looking up, is still in doubt. A wag might conclude from the above that Americans should avoid planning at all costs. While the wag's conclusion is flawed, problems in planning indeed contributed to serious shortcomings connected with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Successful innovation and favorable circumstances on the ground made the war in Afghanistan markedly easier than the one in Iraq, but the planning problems in both cases have had much in common with other complex contingencies in recent years (Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo). All of these cases have demonstrated the limitations of our stovepiped, single agency planning systems. Thus, in the future, we will have to adapt planning to a dynamic security environment and numerous challenges. Not only will we have to do better in mid-range interagency planning, but we will also have to develop and refine new capabilities to deal with the nonmilitary aspects of contingencies. In turn, this will require changes in the organizational cultures of the Armed Forces and the Department of State. The first step in understanding this challenge will be to appreciate the environment in which it will take place.
Published in Joint Force Quarterly, n41, p10-14, 2nd Quarter 2006.