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(More customer reviews)In July 2004, the Major General in charge of the Strategic Political/Military section in Iraq asked the Superintendent of the Air Force Academy to send him some "Strategic Thinkers" to help with the war effort. Within two weeks, military academics with advanced degrees began arriving in Baghdad. They were embedded with headquarter units in the Green Zone and their assignment was to look at the planning process. "Hope is Not a Plan" is an anthology written by the participant observor academics. The book's scope is the critical months of late 2004 to early 2005.
What makes this book interesting is that it covers the operational aspects of the war. This is the critical intermediate step between the strategic and the tactical. The operational aspects of the war are not as inherently interesting as the behind scenes power struggles in Washington DC or as dramatic as the stories the men and women who are doing the fighting. Yet it is at the operational level that war is planned and ultimately either won or lost.
What Thomas Mowle and his fellow authors found was a disorganized planning effort that was not up to the task of rejuvinating a failed nation state. The irony is that a military that dedicated itself to learning the lessons of Vietnam discovered that at the critical moment it forgot nearly everything that it had learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam. It is a depressing performance and one can only hope that American military is beginning to turn itself around in 2007.
"Hope is Not a Plan" is an academic work and it will require members of the general public to have patience to get through it. The United States military will be analyzing what went wrong in Iraq for a generation. The value of this book is that it is a first attempt to describe what went wrong at the operational level. "Hope is Not a Plan" will be a starting point for future historians. Recommended.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Hope Is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone (Praeger Security International)
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