McMaster, Korb, and Iraq: Here is what Tom Ricks missed about my NYT letter

By Lawrence Korb

Best Defense guest
respondent

Like
Tom, I have written many things about Iraq, including outlining the strategic
redeployment (with my colleague Brian Katulis) which became the basis for President
Obama's plan to end our involvement in that mindless, needless, senseless
war. But for reasons of space (letters are limited to 200 words), I could
not include all these points in my letter to the New York Times.

I
do agree with Tom that the military also made huge mistakes in Iraq and needs
to address the two major problems that Tom correctly claims it had in
Iraq. But these problems also were not completely of their own
making. As I have written over and over, the all-volunteer force was
never intended to fight protracted, large-scale wars, and its reserve component
was never intended to be an operational (as opposed to a strategic)
reserve. When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq while the
nation was still engaged in Afghanistan, it should have activated the selective
service system. Had selective service been activated, the military would
not have had to lower its recruiting standards so drastically (between 2003 and
2007, the ground forces gave 100,000 moral waivers to meet its recruiting goals),
invoke stop loss, soften the criteria for promotion, shorten the time troops
were given between deployments (the standard my office employed when I was in
government was two years at home for every year in a war zone), and hire so
many private contractors with dubious backgrounds who were so difficult to
control.

Also,
I would argue that Tom misses two other big failings of the military.

First,
by publicly supporting the Bush administration's failing strategy, the military
ignored the evidence and extended the conflict. See, for example, then-Lieutenant
General David Petraeus's op-ed in the Washington
Post shortly before the
2004 presidential election,
which painted a bright picture of the situation on the ground in Iraq.



Second,
the military remained silent as manpower and resources were diverted to Iraq
from Afghanistan before the job was finished. Had we not done that, we
would not still be bogged down in that graveyard of empires, and our military leaders were remiss
not to object to such poor strategic decision-making.

Lawrence J.
Korb is a senior fellow at the
Center for American
Progress . He is also a senior advisor to the
Center for Defense Information and an adjunct professor at Georgetown
University. Prior to joining American Progress, he was a senior fellow and
director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.