At their best, wargames
provide a nonthreatening
environment in which the
collective play of
partici-pants can reveal unpleasant
truths about a particular
strategy or set of goals. So it
was with Desert Crossing.
1. What are the key U.S. decision points and conditions for intervention?
2. How do the United States and its allies manage Iraq’s neighbors and other influential states?
3. How does the United States build and maintain the coalition?
4. What are the major refugee assistance challenges external to Iraq?
5. What is the appropriate role for co-opted elements of Iraqi military power?
6. How can the coalition contain Shia and Kurdish threats to the stability of Iraq and prevent fragmentation?
7. What is the U.S. role in establishing a transitional government in Iraq?
8. How can the coalition synchronize humanitarian assistance and civilian and military activities during combat and/or peace enforcement operations?
9. How do the allies reestablish civil order in the wake of combat operations?
10. What is the U.S. exit strategy and long-term presence in Iraq?
At their best, wargames provide a nonthreatening environ-ment in which the collective play of participants can reveal unpleas-ant truths about a particular strategy or set of goals. So it was with Desert Crossing. Participants were playing the U.S. government at that point in time, mid-1999, and their examination of Zinni’s 10 questions revealed some of the dangers, shortcomings, and missed opportunities that later would bedevil the United States in the real world during the occupation phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Desert Crossing posited several possible scenarios for Saddam
G U L F W A R S ( T H E R E S T O F T H E S T O R Y )
47Hussein’s removal, including assassination, a palace coup, and a military rebellion. Each touched off events—a humanitarian crisis, sectarian fighting—that required a U.S.-led coalition to intervene, quell the violence, restore stability, and begin to move Iraq to a semblance of normalcy.
In a game of four moves representing nine months in the imagined world of Desert Crossing, the participants identified sev-eral important learnings in their “After Action Report” that ad-dressed directly and indirectly most of Zinni’s questions:
Planning
The United States cannot afford to wait until after the intervention begins to orchestrate interagency
coordination and planning.
Indeed, a flexible political/economic/humanitarian plan must be developed well in advance of military action. Agencies across the U.S. government should be mobilized for the effort, and non-governmental organizations should be used as well. “Sustaining peace often requires more complex planning and sophisticated in-tervention techniques than do combat operations,” the report said.
“If there are severe disruptions of the infrastructure that impede normal government services, if food and drinking water cannot be distributed, if reconstruction progress does not provide incentives to refrain from renewing hostilities, or if minorities perceive the social system will not protect them, then peace may be lost.”
Military Action
It should be “swift, large-scale, and decisive,” not only to overwhelm any remnants of Saddam’s military but to
demonstrate a show of force to minimize violence and ensure security.
Zinni originally envisioned an invasion force of 400,000 because he felt it was important to flood the zone—to get troops into as
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many cities, towns, and villages as possible. The United States went into Iraq in 2003 with considerably less than half that number.
In the wargame, the general was playing the role of a cabinet secretary; as much as possible, we wanted participants to play at a level above their normal responsibilities to challenge them to think bigger. Zinni told the group that the military takedown of Saddam’s regime was only the first three innings of the ballgame. “That’s not how the game ends,” he said. “It’s only how the game begins.” Even in the best circumstances, participants in the wargame agreed, coalition forces could expect civil unrest and insurgent activity, especially in Baghdad, Basra, and other large cities. Dealing with insurgents would require a huge military presence as well as coor-dination with other government agencies charged with rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and services.
Political Stability
Regime change may not enhance it; in fact, Iraq’s neighbors may try to take advantage, particularly
if there is internal fragmentation.
“What about double containment?” There it was, put on the table by one of the players on the principals (cabinet secretaries) team.
For years, certainly since the end of the 1991 war against Iraq, U.S.
policy in the Persian Gulf had been built on a foundation of double containment: Washington would keep a tight leash on Saddam Hussein while it also worked to contain revolutionary Iran’s re-gional ambitions. The fact that those two regimes despised each other did not make double containment easy, but it certainly did not make the job more difficult.
What would happen, though, when the United States finally toppled Saddam’s Sunni-dominated world? Iran, those playing the wargame quickly realized, was critical. If the United States and its allies were not proactive, one player said, it would be like fighting a war with Iraq that produced a hidden winner: Iran. It reminded
G U L F W A R S ( T H E R E S T O F T H E S T O R Y )
49Mark Herman of a question he asked students at the Naval War College when he taught there: Who won the Peloponnesian War?
The choices usually were Athens and Sparta, but the real winner, Herman argued, was Persia. The two powers, Athens and Sparta, that had kept the Persians out of the Aegean Sea knocked the day-lights out of each other; when it was over, the Persians were the only ones left standing.
In the wargame, everyone soon agreed, Iran was a key player, perhaps the key player, and managing the Iran problem would be critical to the mission’s success.
Ideally, the game participants said, Iran should be engaged be-fore intervention occurs, in part to convince its leaders that the United States is not threatening its sovereignty. Indeed, lifting sanctions against Iran may be an important part of a full Iraq pol-icy. Otherwise, Shiite Iran might feel free to meddle in Iraq, given the country’s long-suppressed Shiite majority, and expand its terrorist-funding activities elsewhere in the region.
The reasoning hit many players like a blow to the solar plexus:
Iran, represented in the Red team, easily could make it more diffi-cult for an occupying force to succeed. In other words, this particu-lar enemy had a vote. (This is another example of how principles in military wargames have applications in the commercial sector.
Even the most powerful corporations must acknowledge that “the enemy”—a competing company, a government regulator—often has a vote.)
Leadership in Iraq
It’s crucial to identify potential Iraqi leaders well in advance of regime change, if possible.
The Desert Crossing players concluded that United States lacked reliable information on the role of Iraqi opposition forces within the country because its humint—its human intelligence—was weak. Meanwhile, “Iraqi exile opposition weaknesses are signifi-cant,” the report said.
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G U L F W A R S ( T H E R E S T O F T H E S T O R Y )
51In fact, the report’s language on this point was polite. The scene inside the deputies team when its members were chewing on the question of the Iraqi opposition was less diplomatic. The discus-sion had turned to the identity of Iraqi opposition figures such as Ahmed Chalabi, who had left his homeland in the mid-1950s and had lived largely in exile ever since. “Well, what do we know about these people?” someone asked. Dead silence. “Well, what’s their position? Who are they?” Dead silence again.
Remember, these were U.S. government people playing the game—people in a position to know the answers to such questions.
But even those in the intelligence community could not respond with anything but dead silence.
Exit Strategy
The preferred “end state” for Iraq was a unified country with self-reliant political and economic systems, a stable security environment free from internal and external threats, respect for
human rights and decent treatment of its own people, and recognition of its international borders and obligations.
Realizing these objectives would signal a withdrawal of the U.S.
and coalition presence. However, even in the best circumstances, even if the coalition did everything right, the report concluded, it might take years to achieve that end state.
“The [Desert Crossing] scenarios looked closely at humanitar-ian, security, political, economic, and other reconstruction issues,”
Zinni wrote in one of his books. “We looked at food, clean water, electricity, refugees, Shia versus Sunnis, Kurds versus the other Iraqis, Turks versus Kurds, and the power vacuum that surely would follow the collapse of the regime [since Saddam had pretty successfully eliminated any local opposition].” In short, Zinni said, the wargame examined many of the enormous problems the United States faced after Operation Iraqi Freedom brought down Hussein in April 2003.
But in those days Zinni was unable to spark much interest in a post-Hussein Iraq. “You can’t really blame [anyone] for this,” he wrote. “Nobody saw Iraq as a really pressing threat. . . . Besides, we had other, more pressing crises to manage,” such as Kosovo, Bosnia, the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, and more. Still, he said, somebody had to start planning for a post-Hussein Iraq. He got his people at CENTCOM on the case, but the plan “was nowhere near materializing” by the time he left in mid-2000.
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