LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Lamb with Franco
important, was flawed due to unrealistic assumptions, tunnel vision, or cognitive
dissonance. The collective explanatory weight of the three limitations we
identify is commensurate with the magnitude of the performance puzzle posed
by the history of the wars. The United States expended prodigious amounts of
blood and treasure, swept enemy forces from the field, and targeted terrorists
and insurgent leaders on an industrial scale, but exercised little influence over
outcomes. This reality is comprehensible when one realizes we had no guiding
strategy, worked at cross-purposes, and did not furnish the capabilities necessary
for irregular warfare. Many leaders were frustrated by such impediments
and, on occasion, they were able to mitigate or temporarily overcome them.
But in the main, these problems persisted through 15 years of war.
The first handicap—lack of an adequate strategy—may elicit yawns. The
cognoscenti often decry the lack of strategy but are ignored by senior leaders
who promulgate lists of goals and work toward them purposefully, believing
that should suffice. Yet as we have shown—and as a significant number of senior
leaders now relate in their memoirs—the United States needs a strategy,
beginning with a precise definition of the problem posed by 9/11. Preventing
terrorists from obtaining and using weapons of mass destruction is a workable
ersatz definition, but it has lost support over time and never was sufficient for
guiding operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. 326 The United States backed into
counterinsurgency to prevent tactical reversals to its counterterrorism agenda.
Senior leaders never agreed on whether or why stabilizing those countries
was a vital interest. The failure to identify the problem we were trying to solve
condemned the United States to incremental decisions and half-hearted commitment,
and retarded unified effort and fielding capabilities needed to win
the wars.
Sociopolitical constraints help explain the absence of strategy. Senior
leaders do not put real strategy in official strategy documents because doing so
alienates important constituencies and opens them to criticism that they have
misdiagnosed the problem or chosen too narrow a means for solving it. The
political risks of real strategy are so onerous that it is now common to confuse
strategy with goal-setting and “assume strategy is a big-picture overall direction
divorced from any specific action.” 327 Leaking information about senior
leader deliberations, civil-military tensions, and poisonous partisan politics all
reinforce this trend, driving clear thinking further underground. Leaders want
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