Iraq war review highlights costly failures

An Iraq war review says the US military achieved a historic level of co-ordination of air, land and sea power but fell short in other respects, at the cost of American lives.

Too little was done to minimise incidents of “friendly fire,” or inadvertent attacks by US forces on US or coalition troops, according to Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, chief of Joint Forces Command, which compiled the war review, known as a “lessons learned” report.

Giambastiani testified before the House Armed Services Committee in Washington today.

In his testimony, Giambastiani said he applied “ruthless objectivity” to studying the lessons of war in Iraq and that the military will make comprehensive changes to its warfighting doctrine and establish new training methods to ”ensure an ever-transforming dominant joint force.”

Portions of his report are classified for security reasons.

In addition to friendly fire, the Giambastiani report found fault in a number of other areas, including:

:: Assessing damage inflicted on Iraqi forces by US air and ground fire. Timely assessments, a key to an efficient offensive, were hampered by the speed at which US ground forces advanced through the Iraqi desert.

“We couldn’t keep up with operations,” he said. “Ground forces were moving so quickly, it was difficult to assess how well we were doing.”

:: The sharing of battlefield information with coalition partners. The problem was not a reluctance to share but the application of US government policy restrictions that prevented coalition partners from getting the information in a timely manner.

:: National Guard and Reserves. The troops performed well, but the Pentagon bureaucracy needs to improve the way it alerts, mobilises and trains reservists, Giambastiani said.

In many cases reservists were given too little advance notice – only a few days in some cases – and in some instances troops who were mobilised had to sit around for weeks before they were used.

In his testimony, Giambastiani added another point: the military’s ability to collect human intelligence in Iraq – as opposed to intelligence gathered from intercepts of communication or from aerial or satellite photographs – was ”seriously deficient” and must be improved.

Fratricide is a problem in every war, but after the 1991 Gulf War the Pentagon vowed to invest heavily in new technologies that would reduce inadvertent killings to an absolute minimum.

Giambastiani said the Pentagon fell painfully short of achieving that goal.

“We’ve just got to do better,” he said. “We’ve spent a lot of time and money on it since (1991), but frankly we just weren’t there. We didn’t have it deployed with all our forces, we were doing it at the last minute. It wasn’t a good story.”

Ground force commanders used an imaging system called Blue Force Tracker that gave them a view of the battlefield that showed locations of US and coalition forces.

However that did not enable an American pilot, for example, to communicate in the heat of battle with a tank, or other obscured object on the ground to determine for certain whether it was friend or foe.