Phil Carter says that the Iraq Study Group talked to generals when it should have talked to corporals and ends with these words on bureaucracy:
To be fair, many of the panel’s 79 recommendations do sound practical — they’re the kinds of strategic and tactical course corrections that should have been made long ago. The reason they have not been previously adopted or implemented is also telling. Strategist and historian Eliot Cohen gets it precisely right in today’s Wall Street Journal when he writes that our looming defeat stems from “an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act.” Diplomat Robert Komer wrote much the same thing a generation ago in his classic study of Vietnam titled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. Forget about its technological sophistication or vaunted all-volunteer force — today’s American military is the largest and most lethargic bureaucracy in world history. Its job in Iraq has been made tougher by the grafting of numerous civilian headquarters onto its existing Hydra-headed command — first the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, then the Coalition Provisional Authority, then a U.S. Embassy, and now a U.S. diplomatic mission and a nascent Iraqi government. The Iraq Study Group, the Pentagon, and the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad have all displayed an almost pathological inability to listen to and learn from their own people. Our enemies suffer from no such bureaucratic encumbrances; they learn, they adapt, and they evolve much faster than we do. It’s a shame we needed the Iraq Study Group to show us that.