The crucible: how the Iraq disaster is making the U.S. Army stronger.

• Author: Carter, Phillip

In late 1862, as he watched thousands of Union soldiers die during the bloody battle of Fredericksburg, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee said grimly: "It is well that war is so terrible--we should grow too fond of it." The war American forces are embroiled in today is perhaps less terrible, but in some ways it has cost us just as dearly.

Since September 11, the U.S. military has expended an enormous amount of spirit, blood, and treasure on battlefields halfway around the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, 979 of our soldiers have been killed; and another 5,600 wounded. More than a quarter of a million young men and women have been exposed to the horrors of combat. The abuses at Abu Ghraib have damaged America's moral credibility, and that of our armed forces, around the world, hampering" our ability to win hearts and minds in the war on terrorism. The Bush administration's foreign policy decisions have been expensive both in dollars--$149 billion in taxpayer money to date, with bib lions more yet to be spent--and in material, having all but depleted the Pentagon's stocks of pre-positioned vehicles, equipment, and ordinance. Our enormous commitment of resources to Iraq has emboldened our enemies, including North Korea, and has forced us to neglect other crisis spots such as Haiti and the Sudan. And it has pushed American soldiers to the breaking point. Even when our commitment in Iraq ends, it will be several years before our forces have recovered enough to take on a military venture of similar size.

But the stresses of war--and in particular the aftermath of defeat or failure have historically spurred the most profound and lasting revolutions in military affairs. During World War II, Gen. George Patton used the Army's trouncing at the Kasserine Pass as an excuse to whip our poorly-disciplined, poorly-trained, and poorly-led forces into shape. Out of the ashes of defeat in Vietnam, a cadre of officers, including Colin Powell and Anthony Zinni, turned a dispirited draft force into a volunteer body that became the most powerful military the world had ever seen. And only after the debacle of Desert One--the failed 1980 Delta Force raid to rescue American hostages from Iran--did the military get serious about special operations and joint warfare.

Today, the pattern appears set to repeat itself. Though we don't yet blow whether historians will judge the second Gulf War to have been a victory or a defeat--America decisively won the battle of tanks and artillery; but has yet to win the peace--the searing experience of Iraq is already inspiring the US. military to reshape itself for the better.

War and peace

The spring 2003 march of American forces on Baghdad was arguably the fastest and farthest military assault of its kind in history, and was a resounding success. But the brilliance of the Iraq war's combat phase was matched by the ineptitude of Pentagon planning for the post-war period. When Saddam's statues began to fall, U.S. forces lacked the manpower, training, and resources to combat the chaos that followed or launch the peacekeeping operations that would be necessary to establish security and order. These early failures permitted former regime loyalists and a flood of new insurgents to establish a foothold in Iraq, one they have yet to surrender. Even today, there are too few men and women on the ground trying to perform the many operations which they have been assigned, from protecting our bases and forces to guarding power plants to conducting nighttime raids on suspected insurgents.

In large part, this is the consequence of a deliberate--and ill-considered--choice by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies, who were determined to send in an invasion force with many fewer ground troops than uniformed officers had asked for. Programmatically, Rumsfield, an opponent of nation building and an advocate of joint warfare, special ops, and air power, wished to prove that the military could get by with a smaller ground force than it had during the 1990s. Ideologically, he and his neo-conservative advisors believed that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq, obviating the need for a large occupation force.

But the problem wasn't simply that the neoconservatives weren't interested in planning for a postwar Iraq; the Army, too, retained an historical reluctance to embrace counterinsurgency and peacekeeping as major roles. For obvious reasons, the Army has always seen its mission as fighting wars, not keeping the peace (let alone providing homeland security). From the late 1940s until the end of the Cold War, the Army had arrayed itself to fight one massive land battle in Europe; pos-conflict reconstruction was little more than an afterthought, something best left to State Department planners. This attitude began to change during the 1990s, when Army forces were dispatched to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo to deliver relief supplies, enforce peace accords, and stop ethnic cleansing, among other non-combat missions. Some high-ranking officers, most notably Gen. Eric Shinseki, the last Army chief of staff under Bill Clinton, tried to change the service's culture to reflect his experience running peacekeeping operations in Bosnia.

Despite a mostly successful record on these deployments, however, the Army never embraced non -combat operations as a crucial part of its mission. Two of the Army's three major training centers--the Combined Maneuver Training Center in Germany and the National Training Center in California-focused primarily on major combat operations, with peacekeeping exercises occasionally added on as a sideshow limited to military police and civil affairs units. The third, known as the Joint Readiness Training Center and located in Louisina, began incorporating large-scale "operations other than war" scenarios, but limited participation to the Army's light infantry formations, which make tip less than half the services combat strength. When presidential candidate George W. Bush--whose national security guru, Condi Rice, famously opined that the United States didn't "need the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten"--won the election, many tradition-minded officers breathed a sigh of relief. And in 2002, citing budgetary pressures, senior Army leaders decided to shut down the Peacekeeping Institute located at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

But Iraq seems to have taught Army leaders that planning for the peace is as vital as planning for war--and, indeed, that falling to do so may ultimately lead to strategic defeat. The success of American efforts in Iraq will be judged not only by how quickly our tanks fought their way from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad, but by the success or failure of Iraq's transition from tyranny to democracy. And while the new government in Baghdad faces many challenges, very little progress will be possible unless American forces can maintain the security necessary to let Iraqis rebuild their country's infrastructure One sign that Army officials may embrace peacekeeping more than they have in the past: In July 2003, the Army reversed its earlier decision to close the Peacekeeping Institute, in part due to our current need, given our extensive presence in Iraq, to maintain a center...