Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born Read Case Study 5.1. Answer Questions 1, 2, and 3 at the end of Case Study 5.1.
Each question should be answered in an essay format of approximately 250-500 words. Ensure your paper answers the questions and uses concepts studied in the module and from the reading.
Support your answers with personal experiences, current events, and references to the reading Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
CASE 5.1
A STRATEGY IS
BORN
From the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
March 2003, a small group of American officers
thought the plan for prosecuting the war
was counterproductive and that, with a better
plan, the war still might be won. These officers
believed that the U.S. military had forgotten the
experiences of Vietnam and had been training for
something resembling World War II—not counterinsurgency warfare or low-intensity warfare.
The generals never expected to fight a guerrilla
insurgency in Iraq; and once it began, they concentrated almost entirely on killing and capturing
as many insurgents as possible. So, villages were
surrounded, doors kicked down, and scores of
suspects apprehended. These practices alienated
Iraqi civilians and produced new recruits for the
insurgency.
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
By the summer of 2006, Iraq was in a state of
anarchy. In Baghdad, 50 people were being kidnapped every day, often by the police. Increasingly, the kidnappers’ targets were children, fewer and fewer of whom were being allowed by their
parents to venture outside. Once snatched, the
victims were typically offered for sale to one of
the many kidnapping gangs.
The violence in Iraq was not random but had
specific purposes and specific causes. Al Qaeda
sought to start a full-scale sectarian war between
the Sunnis and Shiites, believing such a war was
their only hope of victory. To this end, that terrorist
group unleashed suicidal attacks on Shiite civilians,
hoping to provoke a backlash and a wider
conflict. Indeed, Al Qaeda was increasingly taking
over all of Sunni society.
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
In the first two years of the war, the country’s
Shiite leadership had held its fire in the face of
the Sunni onslaught. Then came the elections in
December 2005 that brought to power a Shiite-dominated government. Now, Iraq’s new leaders were determined to crush the Sunni insurrection at any cost. Police and paramilitary units were turned loose in the Sunni neighborhoods, where
they began massacring military-age men.
In the face of all this, the Americans decided
to back away. From the summer of 2004 onward,
the objective of the American strategy was less the
defeat of the Sunni insurrection than the training
and equipping of Iraqis to fight it for them. “As
they stand up, we will stand down,” President
Bush was fond of saying. Iraq security forces had
grown in quantity if not in quality and were taking
over larger and larger pieces of the war. It was
difficult in the summer of 2006 to drive around
Baghdad and see any American soldiers. The
trouble was that the strategy of Iraqification was
manifestly failing, but the Bush administration kept
pushing it anyway.
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
For all of the dramatic developments in Iraq,
perhaps the greatest drama was taking place
in Washington were very senior officers advocated
a different strategy involving increasing
U.S. presence and using U.S. forces to secure
the population from insurgents rather than keeping
they penned in and behind the blast-proof
walls. Thomas D. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, chronicles
the difficult birth of this “surge” strategy in Iraq
and describes the personalities and events that
reversed the U.S. strategy. There were three key
players in the military establishment who brought
about the difficult midcourse correction of U.S.
strategy:
• General David Petraeus was the most prominent
player. After returning from Iraq, where
he had commanded the 101st Airborne
Division during the invasion, he was sent to
Leavenworth, Kansas, to command the U.S.
Army’s educational establishment and craft a
new counterinsurgency manual. Drafted by a
team familiar with the history of such conflicts,
the manual prescribed a radical shift for the disaster, what do you think will happen?
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
U.S. military, away from the traditional focus
on capturing and killing the enemy to one of
recognizing that the people are the prize.
• General Jack Keane, a retired former Army
vice chief of staff was the motivating force.
He launched what Ricks calls a “guerrilla
the campaign” in the defense establishment to
get these new ideas accepted at the highest
level.
• General Raymond Odierno, assistant to the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, worked
with Keane—largely behind the scenes and
often outside the chain of command—trying to
sell their model of a workable strategy, even as
the war was at its bleakest stage and calls for
a pullout was mounting.
Translating ideas into plans is difficult. Surge
advocates, for example, faced entrenched interests
and inflated egos. Fortunately, Petraeus,
Keane, and Odierno would get help from four
key actors outside the military. In June 2006
President Bush met with sympathetic war critics
at Camp David. Elliott Cohen, Michael Vickers,
Fred Kagan, and Robert Kaplan—the first three
men, respected national security experts; the last,
an influential journalist—were generally supportive
of the war but critical of the current strategy. They
were invited to tell Bush how it might be better
run. The meeting didn’t sway Bush, but it set in
motion a behind-the-scenes effort to change the
course of the war. That effort began to take hold
after the midterm elections in November, when
strong gains by the Democrats led Bush to dismiss
Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary and
replace him with Robert Gates
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
In early December, Cohen, together with
Keane and several others again met with Bush,
and this time the professor was determined to be
clearer and more emphatic than he had been the
previous June, stressing the need for a new strategy,
a change in commanders, and more troops.
Meanwhile, General Odierno was doing the
same from Baghdad. Taking over as the number
two commanders in Iraq, he became dissatisfied
with the strategy being pursued by the then
commanding officer. The chain of command is
normally sacrosanct in the military, but Odierno,
“making one of the most audacious moves of the
entire war” bypassed two levels of command
above him to talk to officials at the White House
and aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In doing
so, Ricks writes, he “was laying his career on
the line.”
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
The efforts of Cohen, Keane, and Odierno
paid off in January 2007: Petraeus became the
new commander in Iraq with a promise of 30,000
extra troops to support the 126,000 already there.
After Petraeus took over, his counterinsurgency field
manual became the cornerstone of a strategy.
To help carry out the plan, Petraeus assembled
a team dominated by military officers who possessed
doctorates from top-flight universities as
well as combat experience. Also present were
many dissidents, skeptics, and outsiders, some
of them foreigners. For example, they included
David Kilcullen, a freewheeling former Australian
The army officer who enjoyed semi-mythical status as Petraeus’ counterinsurgency adviser and Emma
Sky, a pacifist British expert in Middle East affairs.
To her own surprise, Sky became an admirer of
the U.S. military. “I love them,” she said, adding,
“they’re better than the country they serve. That’s
the way I feel about it—America doesn’t deserve
its military.”
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
Petraeus took as his model for what he was
trying to achieve the cowboy painting The Stampede
by Frederic Remington. Iraq was never
going to be a case study in democracy; everything
would have to be pretty rough and ready.
“Sustainable stability” was the minimalist objective.
In Petraeus’ words: “We’re just trying to get
the cattle to Cheyenne.”
The surge worked for a number of reasons,
one of the biggest being luck. The insurgency
had always been a many-headed beast, with
no overarching leadership. As the war dragged
on, it was the murderous members of Al Qaeda
who gained the upper hand. Al Qaeda’s gunmen
killed everyone—the traditional Sunni tribal
leaders, for instance—who did not share their
extreme goals.
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
But then, in late 2006 came the Sunni backlash.
In Arabic, it was called the Awakening.
Squeezed by Al Qaeda on the one side and the
Shiite death squads on the other, the sheiks turned
to the Americans to save them. Soon American
officers were making deals with sheiks across the
Sunni heartland and into western Baghdad. This
was possible in large part because Sunni Iraq is
All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization still a tribal society. Make a deal with the sheik—promise security, hand him a bag of money—and he can plausibly deliver the rest of his tribe.
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born
Could the surge have worked without the
Awakening? Ricks thinks that this question is
somewhat irrelevant because as things played
out the two reinforced each other. The surge
brought the security that allowed the sheiks to
come forward, and the Awakening rapidly took
thousands of potential enemies out of the war.
Case Questions
1. Which planning model do you think best represents
the events described in this case—the
rational planning model (pages 213–15) or
logical incrementalism (214–15)?
2. Governmental planning takes many
diverse forms. A very partial list of large-scale
governmental planning activities would have
to include at least the following: planning for
the conservation and use of natural resources,
city planning, planning for full employment,
planning for personal and family security,
planning for agriculture, and planning for
the improvement of government organization.
What lessons do you see in this case
that might be relevant to these other planning
activities? 3. Ricks concludes that the surge, although
successful on the tactical level, faltered on
the strategic one. What do you think he
means? Does Petraeus’ group bear any
responsibility?
Case Study Questions on A Strategy Is Born Case References
Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David
Petraeus and the American Military Adventure
in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press,
2009); Kimberly Kagan, The Surge: A Military
History (New York: Encounter, 2009).
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