LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Lamb with Franco
made a point of excluding key elements of Rumsfeld’s staff from the planning
process. One consequence is that the chances for reconciling differences over
postwar planning were diminished.
Capabilities
The President’s September 20, 2001, speech promising a “lengthy campaign unlike
any other we have ever seen” implied that nontraditional capabilities would
be required to defeat a nontraditional enemy. The President even cited examples.
He mentioned law enforcement would need additional tools, and intelligence
capabilities to expose enemy plans would have to be improved. Over the
next decade, many new or augmented capabilities were used in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and elsewhere with great success. Some capabilities were resident in the
system but had to be pulled forward, proliferated, and employed better. This
was the case with SOF, which senior leaders extol as making a critical contribution
in the war on terror. 237 Other capability sets were altogether new. Some
were or still are exceedingly controversial, such as enhanced interrogation techniques.
Others, such as the armed drone program managed by DOD, were so
successful that some decisionmakers wanted to alter strategy to take advantage
of them. 238 And in some cases, such as Provincial Reconstruction Teams, performance
problems were ameliorated but too slowly.
Although increasing capabilities or developing new ones took resources,
in general this was not a major impediment. Congress generously made funds
available. As one Senator complained to the Secretary of Defense in 2005
about the slow development of a key capability:
Over the last two years, Congress has provided more than $200 billion in
supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . in
addition to the more than $400 billion we spend each year on defense.
. . . It is unbelievable, and quite frankly unacceptable, that American
personnel face shortages of anything at this point. 239
The United States faced some technical challenges with new capabilities
but in general these were not insurmountable obstacles either. The far more
significant problem was that decisionmakers were unable to agree on the capabilities
needed, or else the departments and agencies resisted providing them.
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