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Originally Posted by M21Sniper
While some of the criticisms in there are valid, there is also a lot of sour grapes going on too.
The blame to be placed for holding back 1Cav belongs on Dumsfeld's head, not franks. I have no problem a general getting in his subordinates asses to push an offensive ahead. He was obviously correct in his assessment that the attack could and should continue. Overall the actual warplan was pretty daggone good IMO, it was what came after......
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Snipe,
1. Most of the targets that we went after had ties to the Fedayeen. Whether they were the same Fedayeen that were bypassed on the march (no pun intended) to Baghdad, I don't know, but I suspect that some if not many were as I'm sure this scenario played itself out across much of Iraq after the fall of Baghdad.
2. The decision to stop the pipeline was an Army decision. Since the COCOMs are the decision makers, that puts Franks smack dab in the middle of responsibility.
3. While the
campaign plan for the march to seize Baghdad was good, the
strategic war plan has proven to be flawed, as has the intra-agency coordination conducted by the administration (i.e. the DoD-State disconnect). What I am afraid of is that "Vietnamization" may occur, where the Army will be absolved of its sins by revisionists and the blame will fall too much on the administration, thereby preventing the Army as an institution from taking a hard look at how things really went and as a result, allowing lessons that should be learned to be discarded, awaiting discovery when we make the mistake again at some point in the future.