The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
The end of
combat operations led to a change in the US command structure and
military
headquarters
within Iraq. According to Hard
Lessons:
“By May
1, 2003, CENTCOM had dismantled its forward
command-and-control
center in
Qatar. Two weeks later, the Defense Department announced
that
Lt Gen McKiernan’s
command would soon leave Iraq and that his large
headquarters
would be
replaced by a much smaller Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7),
led by
Lt Gen
Sanchez arrived in Baghdad on 8 May and formally assumed command of
CJTF-7
on 15
June.151
As well as
having a significantly smaller headquarters, he was also
newly
promoted to
this level of command, in contrast to his more experienced – and
senior –
predecessor
(Lt Gen McKiernan) and successor (General George Casey). The
reporter
Mr Bob
Woodward commented that Lt Gen Sanchez was the most “junior
three-star
general in
the [US] Army. He had been given America’s most important ground
command
and had a
small and inexperienced staff.”152
In his
memoir, Lt Gen Sanchez described the removal of the Coalition
Forces Land
Component
Command headquarters staff as:
“… another
monumental blunder that created significant strategic risk for
America
… the
foreseeable consequences were daunting. In country, we would no
longer
have the
staff-level capacities for strategic- or operational-level campaign
planning,
policy, and
intelligence. All such situational awareness and institutional
memory
would
be gone with the departure of the best available Army officers
who had been
assigned
to CFLCC for the ground war. The entire array of established
linkages
was
dismantled and redeployed. Furthermore, V Corps had no coalition
operations
and
ORHA/CPA-related staff capacity, which were departing the theater
with
CFLCC just at
a time when the coalition and civilian administrator support
missions
were
dramatically expanding.”153
Lt Gen
Sanchez observed that his headquarters had remained staffed at less
than
60 percent
of its required staffing levels (1,000) for the majority of his
time in Iraq and
commented
that:
“With both
CENTCOM and CFLCC leaving Iraq, V Corps was going to have
to
operate at
the theater strategic level, for which it possessed no expertise,
as well
as the
operational and tactical level across the country. Unfortunately,
neither
CENTCOM nor
CFLCC was planning to provide any help to accomplish that
task.”
150
Bowen SW
Jr. Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. U.S.
Government Printing
Office, 2009.
151
Sanchez RS
& Phillips DT. Wiser in
Battle: A Soldier’s Story. HarperCollins,
2008.
152
Woodward
B. State of
Denial. Simon &
Schuster UK Ltd, 2006.
153
Sanchez RS
& Phillips DT. Wiser in
Battle: A Soldier’s Story. HarperCollins,
2008.
176