When the initial combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom ended in the spring of 2003, it was immediately apparent to anyone who had followed it closely that something remarkable had happened. The most sophisticated conventional military force in the world had engaged a large, reasonably well-equipped adversary and destroyed it in a matter of weeks, with a speed and precision that exceeded even the Gulf War of 1991. The performance of American military forces was, I wrote then and I believe now without qualification, absolutely brilliant.
My book, Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and Why, was written with the benefit of direct access to senior Air Force personnel during the campaign itself — people at the command level who were seeing real-time intelligence and making real-time decisions. This was not a book written from press releases or official briefings. It was written from the inside, while the guns were still warm.
What Went Right: Air Power Decided the War
The central argument of the book — and one I stand behind absolutely — is that the war was decided by airpower. This is not a controversial claim if you look at the operational sequence honestly. The air campaign that preceded the ground advance disrupted Iraqi command and control, destroyed Republican Guard formations in the field, suppressed Iraqi air defenses, and created the conditions of paralysis and confusion in which the ground forces operated with relatively minimal opposition. American Army and Marine forces advanced at speeds that would have been suicidal against an opponent capable of coordinated response. That the opponent was incapable of coordinated response was directly attributable to what the aircraft had done before and during the ground advance.
The joint integration that made this possible was genuinely impressive. American forces — Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and the joint special operations community — worked together with a seamlessness that would have seemed optimistic in any pre-war planning scenario. The coordination of close air support with rapid ground maneuver, the management of airspace over a dynamic battlefield, the integration of precision munitions with ground unit requests for fire — all of it functioned at a level that the men who planned it had hoped for but could not guarantee. It worked because the services had trained to work together, because the equipment was genuinely capable, and because the non-commissioned officer corps — the sergeants and staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants who actually execute the plans — were, as I described them then, extremely bright and extremely competent.
What Went Wrong: The Day After
The question of what went wrong is more complex and more uncomfortable. The operational phase of the war — the destruction of the Iraqi conventional military — went right. What followed was something that the planners, for reasons that remain partially obscure to me, had not planned for with anything approaching the sophistication they had applied to the combat phase.
Iraqi leadership was flawed in ways that distorted the pre-war analysis. The Republican Guard fought; their resistance was real and in some cases fierce. The regular Iraqi Army, by and large, did not — its disappearance into the civilian population created a security vacuum that would prove enormously consequential. The assumption that the collapse of the regime would be followed by a grateful population and a smooth transition to stability was, to be generous, optimistic. It proved catastrophically wrong.
The book also addresses a point that deserves far more attention than it has received: Congress was learning nothing about the lessons of the war. The institutional tendency to declare victory, celebrate the troops, and return to normal appropriations patterns without seriously examining what the war had revealed about the future of military operations was, and remains, a failure of the oversight function that should alarm anyone who thinks seriously about American national security.
The C-SPAN Moment and the Chinese Interest
The book received an unusual range of attention. C-SPAN aired my discussion of it on March 18, 2012, the ninth anniversary of the war's beginning — a date that provided a useful opportunity to assess what the intervening years had confirmed or refuted in the original analysis. The answer, in most respects, was that the operational analysis had held up well; the political and strategic analysis had, if anything, understated the difficulties.
Perhaps the most striking indicator of the book's reach was a detail I still find remarkable: the Chinese military purchased 2,000 copies for their officer corps. This was not, one assumes, an act of affection for American military capability. It was the act of a professional military establishment that wanted to understand what had happened, why it had happened the way it did, and what the implications were for their own doctrine and force development. The Chinese, whatever their geopolitical intentions, took the lessons of Iraqi Freedom seriously. The question is whether we did the same.
About the Book
Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and Why by Col. Walter J. Boyne USAF (Ret) is published by Forge Books. Written in the immediate aftermath of the combat phase with access to senior commanders and real-time intelligence summaries, it remains one of the most contemporaneous serious assessments of the campaign's operational conduct and its broader implications for the future of American military power.