 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Good afternoon and welcome to our final issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. I'd like to note that we're gathered here in person in the auditorium and we also have a substantial audience dialed in via Zoom. Over the 2022-23 academic year we were pleased to offer 15 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world from our resident faculty. 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We plan to initiate another series of lectures in the fall of 2023 so stand by for announcements early next academic year. During the presentation that follows our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we will welcome questions from our audience at the conclusion of the panel's remarks. Please use the microphones located at each seat so all of us including our virtual participants can hear the questions. Okay, on with our main event. One of the college's most effective and prestigious programs is the Maritime Advanced Warfighting School known as MAWS. This 13-month long program is completed in conjunction with the College of Naval Command and Staff curriculum. The intent is to develop strategic and operational leaders with the skills required to plan, execute and assess combined joint and naval operations. This afternoon a team of distinguished MAWS faculty members will provide a fascinating look back 20 years to the planning and execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We've got a lot of ground to cover so let me step back and turn the microphone over Dr. Don Thieme who will moderate the discussion. Don over to you sir. Thank you so much for your time and your attention. What I want to do today is take advantage of the wealth of experience that we've got sitting to my left and my right and try to provide a holistic understanding of how we got from September 11th to April 9th of 2003 in Baghdad and to do that I think the most important thing we ought to start with is a detailed understanding of the culture and the context within which senior decisions were made in Washington D.C. And so what I'd like to do is turn this over to Professor Gardner who served in an incredibly responsibility-laden position working for the command on the Marine Corps and let's take advantage of some of his insights first. So after being a project officer slash speechwriter for over two and a half years I took over as the senior aide to the command on the Marine Corps about a month or so before 9-11. So prior to 9-11 I thought I had a fairly good handle on how the building worked. When 9-11 happened everything I thought I knew changed or almost everything I knew. And so my role here today is to provide context to the Washington operating environment because it matters in terms of how the planning was done. And the first thing I would say is personalities matter. Secretary Rumsfeld had taken over in 20 or 2000 at 2000 and as a second tour first ever second tour sector. And with that uniqueness of coming to the job a second time there was expectations that went with that in the sense that he didn't need the time to learn the job. He already knew the job and but what came with that was a little bit of what I think of is uncertainty as to how he was going to do it. That uncertainty immediately ran into issues in the sense that he was the lone political appointee in the building for months. All the other political appointee positions remained open for a longer than usual period of time. And during that period where he was the lone appointee he consolidated procedures and power in the office and in himself in a way that hadn't been seen since McNamara or Forest Hall. And so there was a but I think it was a historic change to the way his office worked that was largely resulting from the fact that he was the only appointee in the building at the time. And with that he applied his will on the people and the processes in the building in a way that had both good and bad aspects to it I think is the way I would put it. One of the first things he started pushing for was transformation and it's somewhat undefined even today I think as to what transformation was but in an organization that is centered on programs and producing policies and buying things for the Department of Defense if you had a program that wasn't seen as transformational it was at risk. And so the inside the building there was a level of angst that came with that. That transformation also created operational expectations that came to fruition later I think when it came to the planning itself. The other thing in the slide here shows that 9-11 was a national traumatic event but what a lot of people don't remember is that there were others especially in the Washington DC area that went on at the same time. So we had a sniper or two snipers in running around DC shooting people at gas stations. We had anthrax in the mail going to multiple buildings across Washington and then at one point there was a classified information leak which in today's world where they happen almost daily it seems like back then it was very unusual and it caused a lot of angst. The implications for national leaders was that they had a obligation and a requirement to reassure the nation following 9-11. And to give you a sense of what that meant after 9-11 I did 13 trips with the Commandant between 9-11 and December 23. And multiple trips in New York City walked ground zero as they were excavating out the remainder of the people that they could find along with at least two trips overseas. And the wear and tear that goes with 13 trips in a fairly short period of time is fairly high. And one of those overseas trips included a trip to Afghanistan. So you've got this representational pressure on the senior leadership that isn't just external. They also had an obligation to the staff inside the Pentagon which meant they had to be more visible. We had psychiatric and psychological support to families and people in the Pentagon for months afterwards as they dealt with the trauma that went with the attack on the building. Continuity of operations planning had always been on the back burner that became a much bigger effort which also became an added distraction in terms of planning. And to give you a sense of the classified information leak issues that became a scheduling event because the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was essentially on a witch hunt throughout the building to figure out what happened. And so there was this constant repeat of these things. And then from an anthrax standpoint what a lot of people don't realize is all the mail going to the Pentagon ended up getting radiated to kill off the anthrax. Which doesn't sound too bad until you get a some picture that was probably of great importance to somebody but it's been burnt to a crisp because of the radiation. And so there's just this disruption that was running in the background. Next slide, please. To give you a sense of immediacy on the left side of the slide is the Council for the Commandant's Office with the Marine Corps flag in it. My son's godfather was in the room and they all made it out safely although there was a little bit of drama in the process. And then I was standing in front of that section of the building when it finally collapsed later that day. The reason I point that out, there was a physical impact of that kinetic attack that I don't think a lot of people realize that had planning implications. For instance, multiple services had their operations centers either destroyed or displaced because of the damage that was done. There was pressure to demonstrate resilience, national resilience by having us back in the building with the building fixed inside of a year. And so we were back in the building the next day. Essentially people were back in the building. But the pressure to renovate the building was fairly high. And then this sounds like small potatoes but when you look at the distractions that go with this kind of an event, everybody who was in that section of the thing, if they survived, they had to get new uniforms, they had to get new equipment, they had to get new computers. I mean, all the things that go with making that section of the building functional had to be redone. And so when you look roll forward, we go into Afghanistan almost immediately. We turn around and start planning for Iraq. And there's an expectation by the American people of revenge that goes with the war in Afghanistan. And so from a leadership standpoint, the idea of abandoning that effort in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden is still running around to go to Iraq is unpalatable. And so as a result, you have the building running one war while they're planning for a second war. And that level of distraction I don't think can be overemphasized. And then what that led to ultimately is a competition for resources, competition for personnel, time, units, equipment, and all the rest of that. And with that, I will turn it over to Don. So in that context, it becomes important I think to understand that there were in fact two planning efforts for the invasion of Iraq. There was a planning effort directed in D.C. Then of course, there was the planning effort down in Tampa. I can tell you a thousand one tales of the Arabian Nights, but I want to boil this down to really about six, seven points that I think are really important, especially for people who are students here at the Naval War College. The first one is the personal professional relationships that you build here will endure wherever you go by December of 2001. If you didn't have a set of relationships, if you didn't have a reputation as being preferably an advanced warfare school graduate, you literally did not get into the room. So the relationships that you build and that you maintain and that you curate and carry forward throughout the rest of your career are incredibly important. And in fact, they may be the most important thing that you do here. The second thing is you have to be proactive. As Ali North's defense attorney once said, I'm not here to be a potted plant. You have to be proactive. The leaders for whom you were working are incredibly battered is another best way to put it. With a lot of decision points, a lot of information, you have to help them make some sort of sense out of what is at best maybe a 50 or 60 percent knowledge solution of what's really happening. The third thing is the tip fit is not a plan. Planning includes the tip fit, but the tip fit itself is not a plan. Hundreds of thousands of people depending on the size of the operation will live with the results of how you plan and the tip fit that you build to support it, but the tip fit itself is not a plan. It is a planning tool and a planning process to help get the right ways and means in place to achieve the strategic ends that are being defined at a higher headquarters. I can tell you that I don't remember how many times I went to Scott Air Force Base, but I've been there when it's minus five and I've been there when it's 105, but I think our final planning tip fit conference was in January of 2003. And the reason that's important is a lot of the ships were already loaded and underway, and we were still trying to massage the tip fit. The next point I would make is as part of being proactive is to communicate quickly, concisely and effectively across the web of other planners and leaders and important staff jobs that you know. We would build every day a plan rep, okay, which was designed to inform all the other planners, you know, here's what's actually going on today. It was not designed for the flag mess, but it very quickly trickled up into the flag mess. So just remember once you hit the send button, you may have put all kinds of markings on it, but you no longer own it, and it might show up in some interesting places. So taking all that into context, what's the plan we actually came up with? After five different planning versions. Basically what we had was four vectors, if you will. The first were special operation forces efforts in the western desert to eliminate any threat of missiles being fired to the west into the south. The second was the introduction of forces primarily special operations forces and the 173rd Airborne Brigade into northern Iraq in order to deceive the Iraqis, divert their attention of force to them to disperse their points. The third vector was the main effort led by five core and one MEP and Colonel Watson is going to speak to that here in a minute. Striking into the heart of Mesopotamia in pursuit of our theater strategic objectives informed by operational factors and functions. And finally from the sea, as you'll hear Commander Sullivan and Captain Soneko talk about, the fourth vector was the assurance of both power projection and sustainment, as well as the delivery of fires from a variety of platforms and supportive on the ground efforts across all of Iraq. And lastly, while it may look nice and neat on this slide from the desert in Jordan to Kuwait City is about 1400 kilometers. And from Zako up on the northern Iraqi Turkish border to Kuwait City is another 1200 kilometers. And so what that means is, you know, these are not small distances and the forces have to get there and then operate in a dispersed manner, yet with integrated and synchronized effects against central targets across time, space, enemy strength and will. Now before I turn it over to Commander Sullivan, I should add that we at Simcon had to rebuild the master attack plan late in the summer of 2002, because the original air targeting plan called for the destruction of basically everything. And so the ground people had to go back and have a candid professional discussion with the air planners. You know, if you drop all the bridges, it's going to take us a little bit longer to get north. If you turn off all the power grids, we're going to own those towns and cities the next day when you need electricity to run the water pumps and run the hospital and things like that. So it's really important that you actually think about combined arms and combined effects and how you sequence those over time. Okay. And it's a, you know, a part of the application of operational art to maximize the effectiveness of thousands of dempies, their sourcing and their sequencing. And with that, Commander Sullivan. From the air planning perspective, it's pretty fair to point out that we had a very good idea of what the Iraqi air defenses and air forces would do because we had 11 years of shaping and planning the environment through Operation Southern Watch, which was the obviously the Southern no fly zone. That started at the 32nd parallel, which I believe is the yellow line on the slides. And then in 1996, after a Iraqi invasion, you know, incursion to the south, they push it up to the 33rd parallel, which is the red line south of Baghdad. And then in the North yet Operation Northern Watch, that came on from 1997 on. And that's from the 36th parallel south. Those are the only places ideally the Iraqis were permitted to fly in and operate their air defenses are. So we had a very good awareness of the Iraqi operating battle space. And the things we do typically those, those missions in the no fly zones, sort of with kind of this thing is you had vol or vulnerability periods, from two to four hours, a couple times a day, maybe three times a day, and several days a week randomized in time and spaces to keep the Iraqis off balance. And inside those no fly zone containers, you would have tack recce missions, defensive counter air and suppression of enemy air defense missions, patrol on the no fly zones. Typically, you flew around with a neighbor card with three to five response option strikes ready to execute if the Iraqis were started shooting out of us or flew an airplane south or anything like that. It would be a lot long and a fixed location. So one of the irons of it is sometimes the AAA or the rare occasion they fired a Sam. It may not even been the offending site. It was just a site that had offended prior. And then we'd go after one of those things, the voice of God would come on the radio, say execute response option three, and then we'd go and strike that target. At that time, the Air Force, the Navy, we'd be remiss to say it was a coalition effort. So you had all the joint force plus the UK primarily. And then every now and then you have other coalition partners sprinkled in, to execute the no fly zone. Occasionally, you would have a deliberate target on the ATO. So if it was something a little more robust or something further in the north, it may be the deliberate target on the ATO where a strike package would be put together with a time on target kind of the traditional ways we prefer to fly. Now, how the Iraqis would respond to this would vary quite a bit. So Iraq was, their air defense was the Kari system, which is Kilo Alpha Romeo, India, Iraq spelled backwards in French. And it was a quad in the four subcessors or sector operation centers reporting to a defense operation center in Baghdad. So very old school Soviet train, centralized command and control. A lot of mother may I can we do this and that kind of stuff. So what they would typically do when we fly in their country in their no flies is almost every time they'd shoot some kind of triple A at us. Every now and then in between the voles. So if there's a change over between the Navy and the Air Force or a or a break in the no flies or a no fly day, that's when they would fly some of their fast jets there. So make 23, make 25 stuff that can scoop pretty good. They would come south incur south of north of border and get everybody's tanner tanner up that way. Like I mentioned, a lot of it at the time was more de-confliction over integration, I would say. So like I said, yeah, some of the main Air Force assets would stay on station when the Navy was patrolling the box. So AWACS and rivet joint and things like that. We would work with those all the time. But a lot of time it was Navy you have this hour and a half Air Force you have this hour and a half, certainly not where we are today, nor where we need to go in a future fight. So as part of the shaping in summer 2002, especially in the Southern no flies on, we started operations Southern focus, which was a very much an increase in the intensity and unpredictability of our no fly zone operations. And we would strike more targets in the north of the no fly zones that were air defense related sites. We would fly more voles, more aircraft on station, especially as they forces started flowing in the theater in the lead up to the war. In fact, my air wing did a strike way out at H3 airfield from the Arabian Gulf. That's that Western airfield out in the Western Desert in Iraq there. At the time, we were a little unsure why we were striking a target way out there. Well, from Dr. Themi's lecture, he says there will soft was going to use that airfield in the opening hours of the war. So we didn't know the time we struck a random building out there was a fiber optics node of that air defense operation center out there in the Western desert. So a little bit, but the bottom line is because we had so much of the country case and all that it's going to allow us to have air superiority very, very quickly pretty much in the south and north from the beginning and allow us to support the land forces as they pushed up from the north. And you didn't need that long air campaign like you saw in Desert Storm looking at the Iraqi threat. So they had pretty much consolidated their surface air missile sites into suit to what we call them supermeses or missile engagement zones. And you can see their older systems, twos, threes and sixes, I say twos, threes and sixes, they had over a thousand triple A pieces. Some of that triple A could reach up into the mid to high twenties, which is where a lot of the coalition aircraft operate out. And then they had quite a few, I think almost 70 rolling low altitude air defense stuff that they had placed at their key airfields and things like that. So that's going to drive a lot of high altitude delivery, the need for GPS weapons and laser gated weapons and introduce the precision weapons. The Iraqi Air Force was still in the game. You've all seen the pictures of buried migs in the desert and that they didn't fly once the excursion started. But at the time, they still had 200 aircraft in their inventory. I wouldn't say 200 operational aircraft. But like I said, they were in summer 2002, they would still run a MiG-25 down south and try to go after us that way. And of course, just to get a response that they wouldn't want to kind of show that the country was theirs. Just for some stats from that no-fly zone enforcement, even though we were 11 years in the south, the last time we shot down an airplane, violating no-fly zone was 1993. And the last time we shot at an aircraft with an air-to-air missile was 1999. So when we were there, they tended to stay. If they flew it all, they stayed near Baghdad and out of the way where we can get them. But as you can see from the density of those defenses there, it's going to drive all those joint targets that the Master Air Attack Plant has is a lot of your aircraft are only going to penetrate maybe the edges of those supermeses. Or they're going to employ some standoff weapons like SLAMIR, JSAO, conventional air-launched cruise missiles and all that. And then a lot of Tomahawk land attack missiles, 500 of them in the first three days. But there's a great benefit to that stuff. So B-2, F-1-17, and T-lands are the only things striking a lot of those regime targets that are in the Baghdad area. The Navy responded with five carrier battle groups, that's what they call them back down, or carrier strike groups, what we call them now. We kept three in the Arabian Gulf. It was the Lincoln, the Kitty Hawk, and the Constellation. And they operated 24-7. So one would work days, one would work nights, and one would swing between day and nights to give 24-7 naval air power projection from a relatively uncontested Arabian Gulf. We also had two carriers in the Med, the TR and the Harry S. Truman. And the initial test shows they would fly missions over Turkey. Well, as you might remember, Turkey was a little skittish about participation of war. They closed their airspace for a day or two and demonstrated the flexibility of carrier air. The carriers moved down into the Red Sea, launched some missions into Saudi Arabia through Saudi Arabia. And then once Turkey was ironed out in a few days, they moved back into the Med and supported the Northern access of special forces and things we had going on the North. Like I talked about integration, it was good with the CFAC, I would say, not great. We had different ways of doing business, especially in the Sea Game. S-16 CJs are very much a destruction of enemy air defenses mission. They would fly on a four-ship practically inside the weapons engagement zone of a surface-to-air missile system, debated into coming on and shooting a high-speed anti-race missile. Whereas the Navy tend to do more of a pre-planned suppression of those air defenses there. We definitely transition to precision-guided bombings where you're going to see a big change in warfare. So 70% of all the munitions drop were precision-guided. And then the type of targets we went after. After I would say talking to sources that flew some of these missions, after about five or six days, the targets became less pre-planned and that those ATO targets that we talked about earlier and more of on-call cast and seed for efforts supporting the land forces working north and south and any kind of a strike into that super-mesh area. One part that was a challenge was because Turkey did not allow ground forces in. And the difficulty of that access, when those soft forces up in the northern fly zone areas were working, they didn't have a lot of air up there other than the Navy air from the carrier. When I say air, strike aircraft because Turkey would not allow strike aircraft from their territory. And so Navy air surged and flexed to support them when things would get hot there. And it's great for the flexibility naval air, but it comes as a tax as a carrier can surge for its number of stories and fly more stories for two or three days. And then it's probably going to have to take a break as it's got to rest its flight deck crew and due maintenance on the ship and the air crew. And with that, I'll turn it over to then Lieutenant now Captain Chris Soneko. Good afternoon. I'm Captain Chris Soneko. I was the Operations Officer on the USS Porter, DDG-78, so a Flight 2 Arleigh Burke class destroyer. At the time, we were in January, so this matches with what Dr. Thiemann was talking about. We were conducting our battle group certification exercise down the Puerto Rican operas. And we were actually surged over in 21 January is when we actually got the order to sail. So we went over spent about a month of operations kind of building pattern of life in the bed. Ultimately, we ended up conducting TLAM cruise missile strikes from the Red Sea. We were prepared to do them from the Eastern Med. We also were linked in, we took turns with USS Mitchell conducting a ballistic missile defense of Israel. So linked in with Patriot Arrow batteries, doing defense underneath an army command called Joint Task Force Cobra. So we got the bounce of between both of those operations throughout this, you know, basically through the end of March. Again, I was at the very, very tactical level of execution of the plan. But as the, you know, as we educate planners here in MAWS, I use these experiences to kind of inform the planners so that they can shape how they come up with these ideas to feed them down to those that are actually execute. There are three big things that were takeaway is just on the receiving end, you know, command and control, mission command, and an understanding of the tactics, techniques, procedures, and actual capabilities of platforms. Navy is very platform centric service. And there were times where, for example, we were conducting ballistic missile defense. Back then it was a sort of nascent capability in the Aegis weapon system. That's nothing like it is today. But because I had been a postgraduate school student, I knew of the ability for the ship to actually provide real-time national data link information. And that was never contemplated as far as the architecture going into execution. So I happened to mention to my captain, he was like, Hey, I'll see what you could do. And next thing you know, we were a producer in the East Med and a destroyer in the Pacific, I'm sorry, in the Arabian Gulf was designated the same thing. But it wasn't something that had been thought about in planning. And so just the planners need to understand at some level. And I like to make the analogy. If you have any experience with engineering, a planner needs to be like a systems engineer. They need to know enough about the various capabilities and components of the planning effort. And then you go to the SME for the detailed effort. And I think we try to get to that. I think some of the thoughts of big picture thinking and it's about just critical thinking. Well, if you don't know the box to operate, and you're going to have probably a horrible plan. So I use that as a kind of life lesson. The second one is because we were operating on that seam, especially doing the JTF Cobra, theoretically, or technically, we were actually operating under two different O plans at the same time. We had two different complete comm circuits up, we actually had a man up extra watches to maintain comms with the ballistic missile defense batteries in Israel, as well as with the six fleet carriers to the north of us up by Cyprus, which is a tax on the ship all by itself. And but we had needed to have an appreciation for the seams that was being created there by the fact that we were operating across COCOM. And it kind of it comes out now in the education and planning. It's that the command and control piece, the who works for who is sort of the thing that's done last. I think a lot of times nowadays, we try to take a command and control structure and shoehorned into what we're trying to do as opposed to doing that last. I think we'd have a lot different kind of concepts of operations if we think about the command and control last. And I saw that as a kind of a challenge for us in execution. And the last one, which I think is a kind of a critical one is the, you know, the Navy today. You know, understandably so, you know, a push is mission command is a thing. The idea that a commander can execute commanders intent, you know, in the loss of comms loss of, you know, sort of direct link with the boss. I would argue that we are still pretty poor about that because on the night that the war kicked off, if we had lost all comms and we lost data links, I would have no idea what the ship was supposed to do because we were constantly getting told to do, go here, do this, you know, day by day, hour by hour. And so this idea of mission command sounds great, but we need to make sure that the planners understand how to make that a thing in the plans that they create. The vignette here was we had a chief who had been a former shipmate who actually sent a copy electronically on the right class. It wasn't violating classification rules, sent it to all the ships of the copy of the O plan, the 1003 Victor, and he was almost sent out most best for doing it. And it was the only way we had a better idea of what was going on broadly in the theater was by getting our hands on that copy. It was not shared with us. You know, the example that Dr. Theme used about SOF operating in the West, by doing ballistic missile defense off of Israel and our radar, the way it was tuned, we could actually track things flying around over the Western desert. I had no idea what they were. We would sit there on watch at night and go, huh, something just left Jordan, something went back into Jordan several hours later. And we really were never clued in on what that was. I mean, now, you know, read the histories, I understand what I was tracking. But at the time, it was never shared with the ships that potentially could do something about, you know, assisting if there was ever a challenge or ever a problem. And so that idea of mission command is a good goal. I just think that the planning and the planners and the plans that are created have to enable it. And it's part of the education process. I think for us as we go, as we do the knowledge program, I think that's all I have. That's all I got. So again, it's really important to understand that integrating the desired effects of strikes maneuver and then how can you exploit that to operational effect is hard to think your way through. And so, you know, it can make for some great graphics. This is the first night of shock and on downtown Baghdad. But, you know, let me pose a question to you. Was Baghdad itself really the objective? Or to put it in a historical context in the American Civil War, was Grant's objective Richmond or was it Lee's Army? So how you think about this and then how that gets distilled and how that then flows down through the planning hierarchy of what came to be called, you know, 1003 Victor is really important. And I just wanted to tee this up for you in terms of how do you bring all this together? Then how do you make sure that people running off a flight deck or running a DDG, you know, or the operations officer for a battalion actually understand where they fit and how this all goes together? What I will tell you is our next speaker, Colonel Craig Watson can tell you his battalion ended up way north of Baghdad and Samar. Yet I can tell you that at the final confirmation brief, the senior army and Marine commanders parted with a C when Baghdad and the loser buys. Good afternoon. 20 years ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was serving as the operations officer for the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine Regiment, which was a mechanized reinforced infantry battalion of approximately 1200 Marines that would help spearhead what would eventually become the longest sequence of overland attacks in Marine Corps history, covering more than 800 kilometers in nearly 30 days of sustained combat operations. While serving in that capacity, I helped lead planning for the battalion alongside commanders, planners, and other fellow operations officers from both the 5th Marine Regiment as well as those from the 1st Marine Division. And then we had to execute those plans beginning with the assault into southern Iraq in late March through the seizure of Baghdad, a subsequent movement north to Samara, and eventually relocating to the city of Adiwani in southern Iraq to commence Phase 4 operations in late April. As with my colleagues here, I could probably spend an entire week sharing various lessons that I'd taken from that time now that I've had a chance to reflect back, but I've narrowed down what I'd like to share here today into three main points since we only have a few minutes. First is that interrelationship between planning at the strategic operational and tactical levels. We all know that there's similarities and differences between all three, and each presents various challenges and unique requirements. At the strategic and operational level, problems are generally more complex, but plans tend to be broader and more conceptual. Graphics, much like you've seen earlier in the slide deck, are often depicted with big blue arrows and large circles, identifying those major objectives. And although conditions are set for things like coalition and interagency support at the strategic and operational level, usually that takes without, usually done so without much detail for what exactly that's going to look like on the ground. So the tactical level is really where that conceptual planning tends to be turned into something more detailed that can be executed with a high probability of success. For us at an infantry battalion, it's very difficult to charge into oil fields and major population centers unless you've done a detailed study of the enemy, the environment, and the objectives that you've been assigned if you're hoping to be successful. Contrary to what some might think, basic battle drills and initiative-based tactics don't work well unless they're going to be aligned to a well-developed and rehearsed base plan. So in order to achieve that requisite level of detail, you need time to conduct good planning and preparations. As planners and leaders, we generally follow that one-third, two-third rule from conception until execution, one-third of the time being allotted for current planning for yourself, the remaining two-thirds, the majority of the time being given down to subordinate command so they can conduct that detailed planning. That generally wasn't what we experienced during the pre-invasion planning of Iraqi freedom. We know now, of course, that planning was being conducted at the strategic level as early as late 2001. And as Dr. Thimi has highlighted, some of the planning at the operational level in early 2002, certainly in earnest in the middle of 2002. But while we received indications and warnings of a possible major operation in Iraq going the following year as early as summer of 2002, we didn't see a plan order until December of 2002 and an X-word until a few weeks prior to crossing the line of departure. So how can you plan at the tactical level and the level of detail you need on that tide of a timeline? Well, the key in addition to, again, as Dr. Thimi has highlighted, being proactive, you have to become comfortable planning with very minimal guidance. You also need to leverage those personal relationships that you form over the years. We reached out regularly to personnel that were working not only at the Marine Expeditionary Force three levels above us, but also COCOMs at Headquarters Marine Corps, even at Officer of Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. And while those individuals could not provide us with great detail due to the OPSEC requirements, they were able to provide us with enough information where we had a good sense of those areas that we would likely be operating in, tasks that we could expect to receive, and the objectives that we were likely going to be assigned. What that did was then allow us to lean into detailed planning and preparation far in advance of receiving that planning order, which meant by January when we did receive that document, we were merely adding in more specifics to the plan rather than starting from scratch. And I highlight this because if you're a commander or a planner that is used to waiting for formal written guidance or specific direction from your higher headquarters before you lean into planning, chances are you're going to find yourself behind the power curve and not you're not setting the unit up for success. Secondly, although plans at the tactical level for an operation of this magnitude require considerable detail, they also need to be flexible and adaptable. As we know, things are going to change, whether that's due to something linked to political or diplomatic factors at the strategic level or a change in enemy composition and disposition on or near the objectives. We experienced three major changes to our initial assigned objectives over a two-week period prior to crossing the line of departure. One of these changes was driven by intelligence that the regime had planned to destroy the strategically important gas and oil separation plants located in the Romala oil fields, much like they had done in Kuwait during Operation Desert Shield in 1991. Our plans also had to adapt to meet changes in the approach that the enemy forces had taken, the opposition forces had taken. We had initially planned and geared our plans toward primarily engaging conventional forces from the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard, which we did, but soon found ourselves heavily engaged with irregular forces, both from the Saddam Fedayeen as well as foreign fighters that blended in with the population were very difficult to detect from the air and preferred to fight from hospital schools and religious sites. So that in addition to the fact that we executed a maneuver warfare approach, often operating on mission type orders with considerable latitude to seek and exploit gaps and seams that we detected in the enemy defenses instead of following very rigid axes towards our objectives, we regularly modified our plans to a constantly evolving situation. And I highlight this because finding that good mix between detailed, well designed and synchronized plans at the tactical level that still affords you sufficient flexibility and adaptability to adjust to changes is an art that takes a lot of practice. This flexibility and these flexible plans are heavily dependent on things like clear commander's guidance. Unfortunately, we were blessed with having a regimental commander who was then Colonel Joseph Dunford and a division commander who was then Major General James Mattis. So clear guidance and direction and commander's intent was never really an issue for us. The last thing I'd like to highlight, I think from one of the key takeaways that I'd share with you is the importance of planning for transition early on, or should I say the consequences of what happens when you don't plan for transition early on. I think the commanders and planners do a great job and we saw it in Iraqi freedom of focusing on what they feel is going to be the decisive action needed to defeat the enemy and accomplish the mission at hand. And that's understandable. And I think again, we did a great job of that. What we experienced, however, was a clear failure to sufficiently plan for transition to stability and support operations far enough in advance to ensure that we were going to have the right resources and expertise on hand supported by that credible and consistent messaging to the Iraqi people. And while much has been written that we weren't greeted with open arms and greeted as liberators, that was not my experience during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Even in areas that had been very supportive of the regime prior to us arriving there, largely the feedback from the people that we interacted with in the local populace was overwhelmingly positive. That trust and support that we had gained in March and April, however, quickly started to vanish when there was little or no essential services, food distribution, governance, or security for weeks or months on end. So I think this is something that helped fuel support for the subsequent insurgency that we saw in the coming years. And planning in detail has to happen not only for the decisive actions, but also for that transition and how you plan to keep the peace. I have obviously much more to share on what took place on the ground there, but in the essence of time, I'll turn it back over to Dr. Thieme. Well, thanks. I think it's important to build upon what Colonel Watson was talking about. The graphic here is to scale 114 killed in action if we define the period of combat from 20 March to the end of May in 2003, 3,376 killed in action in the ensuing period up to the 20th of March, 2023. I can tell you we spent 17 months of planning for 71 days of combat, and that's if you can consider 10 April to 31 May still combat. And during that 17 months, we spent little time planning for what would happen after combat. But as we briefed very senior leaders in the summer of 2002, we knew that phase four was going to start on day one. If you take a look at this, you know, the number appears here to relate to kinetic casualties. And as best as I can tell from my research, it does not include what must be assumed to be a higher toll of PTSD, burn pit exposure and other associated adverse health factors. The main point here is that the amount of time and energy spent on phases one through three resulted in one of the great campaign victories of modern combat. But the lack of planning, critical thinking, and your campaign design and attention to detail for phase four resulted in far, far more casualties. You get the future that you fail the plan for. And, you know, this was the takeaway of the slide that we sent up to the Secretary in the summer of 2002, which we told him that winning the piece is at least as important as winning the war. And as you can see, okay, there's a lot of open arms there. Yeah, the overall engagement in Iraq, which continues even today with roughly 2,500 military personnel operating there, produced far greater casualties. Okay, this was not due to a lack of concern, planners of many echelons, including at least one who had been a company commander in Iraq in 91, invested significant amount of time and intellectual energy trying to frame the problem and then to align the ways it means and ends to produce a safe and stable Iraq, securing its own borders and not a threat to regional stability. I can tell you that the Marine General who gave this brief to Secretary Rumsfeld is the only three star involved directly in the liberation of Iraq who was not promoted to a fourth star. And with that, I'll turn it over to Kampson and go to wrap it up. All right, I'm interested in time. We'll just wrap it up real quick, but hopefully from the context of the discussion and the faculty of the Moz program, you can see how we try to take these experiences not only on the planning side, but also the execution of what we've done in our careers to roll it into the curriculum so that as we educate Moz graduates that go out to fleet and command level planning jobs, they get some of these lessons to live vicariously through the mistakes of others, the experiences of others. And from that, I will see if we got any questions from either here or in the outstations. Over to you. Thank you. Very nice. Thank you very much. Are there any questions here in the audience? Dr. Tangredi. Thanks for some wonderful, wonderful briefs. I want to go back to the number of precision weapons that were dropped because you say about 70%. And that's, if I recall in Desert Storm, it was maybe about 30% or so where precision weapons. Now, my question is this, precision weapons are always expensive, the inventory is always low. Was there any time in the operation where it no longer made sense to use precision weapons because you had already taken out all the significant targets? Or was it necessary to expand the inventory, continue to expand that inventory? That's a great question. I think you're spot on with the numbers in relation to Desert Storm. Yeah, it's very interesting because as you go, you have those prefixed targets that you need to hit early on, then maybe a period of time where you're in close air support, so supporting your own forces. Then you can use just pre-fall bombs and things like that. But then as you get closer to that urban environment again, and especially as you get into the phase four stuff that we talked about, then you need to go back to precision because winning the piece becomes pretty important. But going back to the planning question, that was one of the things on the carriers that we were counting was particularly those precision weapons like laser guided bomb kits. It's not, you don't have if an amount of them on a ship, you can bring them out to the ship, but that's being stretched between five carriers in theater and all that. I hope that answers your question. I can add to that as well. I think from a ground combat perspective there, we didn't use as many precision weapons at our level that we would see when we came back in 2006. In fact, we use a lot of conventional munitions. There was a lot of dual purpose and improved conventional munitions that we used that were essentially scatterable mines, which did a great job of actually shattering a number of counterattacks that the enemy had conducted. But again, most of the fighting that we saw, conventional munitions and a lot of stuff, artillery, entire artillery regiment firing. So, although a lot of that may have happened in areas beyond what we were operating in, most of the stuff that we used was conventional. Yeah, I would just add to that. One of my tasks as the plan's chief in the run up to the invasion was to track the number of different PGMs that we were going to have to use and where they were coming from as well as then to go back to the headquarters Marine Corps and into DoD to say, I don't know who builds the widget, but we're going to need some more widgets. During actual execution, I actually had to answer a phone call every morning from the Pentagon as to exactly how many PGMs. I didn't use them. The force of 99,000 Marines, Poles, Australians and Brits used them. But for some reason, I got to answer that phone call every morning. And I had to have the numbers of exactly how many PGMs we used because there was a concern about being able to sustain that rate of expenditure even as the nature of combat changed. Yeah, the questions here in the auditorium. Commander, do we have any questions on Zoom? No, apparently not. Are there any closing remarks that you'd like to make before we wrap up? Okay, well, thank you very much. I think it's a tremendous story that you have to tell. We will archive this and hope that as many of our students as possible can take advantage of the experience that's been exposed here. So again, if you have an interest in a certificate of completion for the issues in National Security Lecture Series, be sure to send an email to myself or to the Public Affairs Officer. And if you get them in by the 1st of June, then we will produce the document. So once again, thank you very much.