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Operation Iraqi Freedom Case Study

1698 Words7 Pages

The United States’ planning and execution of the 2002-2007 Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) campaign demonstrates how strategic civilian-military relationships can hinder the complexity of war. OIF demonstrates how a failure to understand the strategic environment sets in motion a series of events with potentially irreversible consequences. This paper assesses the strategic U.S. military planning approach to OIF by examining four key areas. First, the paper examines how military commanders and planners understood, or misunderstood, the operational environment (OE) and framed their problem. Next, the paper describes a few key strengths and weaknesses of the initial approach to OIF. Third, the paper explains how over time leaders assessed their operational approach, allowing them to reframe the problem and change their approach. Lastly, this paper highlights a few notable ways that lessons learned from OIF influenced and improved current joint doctrine.

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. military planners and commanders failed to fully understand the strategic OE and subsequently failed to properly define the problem. Following the 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against the …show more content…

An operational approach is the commander’s broad description of actions that forces will pursue to meet national objectives and a desired military end state. A commander must visualize the current conditions and most importantly take the time to visualize the desired conditions to obtain the strategic national objectives. This approach is hinged on a firm understanding of the OE and assists the commander in identifying the problems facing a commander. This failed understanding of the Iraq OE attributed to civilian and military leader’s inability to visualize current and desired condition, or maybe personal bias skewed the desired

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