Hope is Not a Plan

During the last trip to Korea in February, I had started reading of the book titled “Hope Is Not a Plan”, but was not able to complete the reading. Fortunately, I had a chance to finish the book during the recent trip to Korea taking advantage of a long and mundane flight across the pacific ocean. I found this book very interesting as all the talk of the failure of the Iraq war, so far, only summed up as the failure of the strategy, top down. However, the author of this book points out that the failure was caused by poor operational of the war which is contrary to what we were led to believe, the failure is the cause of the strategic and the tactical mistake.

Hope Is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone

In July 2004, the Major General in charge of the Strategic Political/Military section in Iraq asked the Superintendent of the Air Force Academy to send him some "Strategic Thinkers" to help with the war effort. Within two weeks, highly recommended military academics began arriving in Baghdad. They were embedded with headquarter units in the Green Zone and their assignment was to observe and assess the progress of the mission. "Hope is Not a Plan" is an anthology written by the participant observer academics. The book's scope is the summary of the observation and assessment of the mission during the critical months of late 2004 to early 2005.

Thomas Mowle and the other members of the team have done an excellent job of evaluating military operations from the perspective of existing US military doctrine. This area, doctrine and theater operations, is the cornerstone of effective military policy and operations.

What Thomas Mowle and his fellow authors found was a disorganized planning effort that was not up to the task of rejuvenating a failed nation state. The irony is that a military that dedicated itself to applying lessons learned from the past, at the critical moment, it forgot nearly everything that it had learned about counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia and Operation Desert Storm.

With thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the indisputable fact remains that the Iraq war is a major failure, and focus had been shined on this aspect. However, issues pertains to what led to such a negative outcome had not been discussed. "Hope is Not a Plan" provides highly informative first-hand accounts and experiences from their tours of duty in the Green Zone, where most policies were adopted and executed. From the facts and insights provided, it is clear that there was a lack of robust strategy, preparation, communication, coordination, and understanding of the local cultures, the nature of the resistance, and the local politics in Iraq by coalition forces. Neither the civilian nor the military agencies were prepared structurally and culturally to manage a multi-agency stability and development operation of tremendous complexity, under conditions of continuing violence that created difficulty assessing progress. Furthermore, each agency often pursued mutually exclusive and even contradictory objectives. Military actions undermined political goals, which led to the growing sense of popular frustration and despair among the Iraqi population.

What makes this book interesting is that it covers the operational aspects of the war. This is the critical intermediate step between the strategic and the tactical. The operational aspects of the war are not as inherently interesting as the behind scenes power struggles in Washington DC or as dramatic as the stories the men and women who are carrying out the mission. Yet, it is at the operational level that war is planned and ultimately either won or lost.

"Hope is Not a Plan" is an academic work and it will require members of the general public to have patience to get through it(contents are very dry to read with enthusiasm). The United States military more than likely be analyzing what went wrong in Iraq for a generation. The value of this book is that it is a first attempt to precisely describe what went wrong with the Operation Iraqi Freedom.