• Australian Army trainer Corporal Jeff Cummings demonstrates the correct operation of a MK 19 grenade launcher to Iraqi Army soldiers at the Taji Military Complex, Iraq. Credit: Defence
    Australian Army trainer Corporal Jeff Cummings demonstrates the correct operation of a MK 19 grenade launcher to Iraqi Army soldiers at the Taji Military Complex, Iraq. Credit: Defence
  • In 2004, Jim was deployed to Iraq as Chief of Operations to lead a multi-national force of 300,000 troops. In a rapidly changing situation, facing a new style of insurgency, the Molan plan achieved results which included the first democratic elections held in Iraq and rebuilding and protecting Iraq's infrastructure, including vital oil production. Credit: ICMI
    In 2004, Jim was deployed to Iraq as Chief of Operations to lead a multi-national force of 300,000 troops. In a rapidly changing situation, facing a new style of insurgency, the Molan plan achieved results which included the first democratic elections held in Iraq and rebuilding and protecting Iraq's infrastructure, including vital oil production. Credit: ICMI
Close×

Former ADF general and onetime coalition operations chief in Iraq during 2004-05, Jim Molan presents the second of his four part series entitled "The Answer is Strategy".

 

Jim Molan | Canberra

First, we learn much faster at the tactical level than at the strategic level, probably because the consequences are immediate, those that are responsible bear the consequences, and the process is not as impacted by the illogicality of politics. At the strategic level, lessons are rarely learnt by those who experienced the consequences first hand, and with regular new leadership, we are continually at the start of a learning process.

This has been particularly so with President Obama who learnt the wrong lessons from the Second Iraq War, ignored advice, has taken years to learn the right ones and has only just started to apply them in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Second, we usually start our conflicts very slowly and are inevitably clumsy. There is a popular view that because we invaded Iraq, failure was preordained and the current fight against Islamic extremism lacks moral authority because “we started it”.

In 2004, Jim was deployed to Iraq as Chief of Operations to lead a multi-national force of 300,000 troops. In a rapidly changing situation, facing a new style of insurgency, the Molan plan achieved results which included the first democratic elections held in Iraq and rebuilding and protecting Iraq's infrastructure, including vital oil production. Credit: ICMIThere is however an important alternative view. Regardless of your view of the invasion of Iraq, nothing was preordained. Even if the intervention was strategically unwise, once it occurred we were obliged to remain. In Iraq it took eight years, but by 2011 the Second Iraq War was successful. It may have taken, in my estimation, six years too long and up to 100,000 deaths more than necessary, but for all our faults and errors, we won the Second Iraq War.

If there is alignment, an operational strategy can sometimes deliver victory where victory is defined as the achievement of the wars aims. And the current conflict, the Third Iraqi War, is a different and new war. Almost the only thing common to the Second Iraq War is the country in which part of it is being conducted.

Third, despite being slow learners and clumsy, the world has been successful in the past against Islamic extremism. Analysis shows that since 1979, there have been at least 12 occasions where such extremism has been defeated. Not destroyed, because it is unlikely ever to be destroyed, but it can be defeated. And this is an important concept in Strategy. Whatever you choose as the objective of your strategy it must be achievable. Destruction of Islamic extremism would be nice but it is likely to be beyond feasibility. But we have defeated it in the past and we will defeat it again in the future. And maybe that is the best we can ever do, keep defeating it.

If our war aims are the unachievable finality of destruction, we may apply the wrong strategy at the wrong time with the wrong tools for the wrong reason. Islamic extremism is not an existential threat to most of us, so we can win by defeating this episode of Islamic extremism both domestically and internationally, and that is our success, our victory. We just need to accept that there is unlikely to be an ultimate onetime victory.

Our victory in confronting Islamic extremism across the world has much to do overall with suppression and containment, but may also involve the total defeat of physical elements of the threat such as Daesh in certain locations such as Iraq. 

comments powered by Disqus