333: The Center for Lessons Learned

Ira Glass

OK America, there's a phone number that you can call in Kansas, and when they pick up the phone, they say--.

Ira Glass

The Center for Army Lessons Learned. The first time you hear that name, it's hard to believe that it's real, and not one of those places like the Hogwarts School, that it would be so amazing to believe that it existed. But of course, it never could exist.

Ira Glass

Colonel Steve Mains runs the center.

Ira Glass

It is a 200 person operation to do all this. And this is a pretty new thing for the Army. The center has only been around since the mid 1980s, and didn't really get cooking until the first Gulf War. One way they get their information, they embed researchers with units all over the world, including combat units in Iraq, for six months or a year at a time, to report from the field about the latest innovations-- what works, what doesn't work. And then, to get those lessons out, the center puts out reports and handbooks. There's this massive website for soldiers to download all this stuff. And if that weren't enough, there's a reference desk.

Ira Glass

Craig Hayes runs the desk that answers these requests for information, which are almost all over email. He's officially a civilian, a retired lieutenant colonel, and a veteran of the current war in Iraq. He is the very first person who's ever had a full time job answering these inquiries.

Ira Glass

What kind of insurgency tactics, training Iraqi police, getting Sunni and Shiite in your area to get along better. When it comes to a lot of these things, Colonel Mains says, the questions that the center gets pretty much amount to--.

Ira Glass

That's Lane Rolf, who works the reference desk answering questions. He says that back when he was in Baghdad as military police, he was a company commander, he could have used some of the information that he now gives out every day in his job, like how to recognize improvised explosive devices, IEDs, something his unit had to learn on the fly. Though other questions he gets, he never would have needed help with.

Ira Glass

He remembers one email that he got from a military policeman, a young sergeant who was heading over to Iraq for the first time. He was worried because he had never had to lead a squad before. He wanted to know how to train them better so everybody would come back alive.

Ira Glass

Talking to guys at the Center for Army Lessons Learned, it's hard not to feel kind of hopeful. It's the US Army at its best: smart, practical, can-do. And today on our show, during this war in Iraq that drags out for month after month, longer than our involvement in World War II, longer than the Civil War, we wanted to feel a little hopeful for a change, and talk about what's been learned, and try to understand why there's certain lessons that we're taking so long to learn. From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio international. I'm Ira Glass.

Our show today for this Memorial Day weekend, The Center For Lessons Learned. Our show in three acts, including Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City on lessons for civilians in this war. And Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, the author of Fiasco, in Baghdad, who says there's a whole different sensibility in the air in the Green Zone these days, where Americans seem to have learned some lessons. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, Cassandra. Everybody knows that we occupied Germany after World War II, but you might not know that we occupied part of Germany after World War I. And two interesting things happened. One, it did not go so well. And two, the soldiers involved took very good notes. In fact, there's a four volume report on that occupation, hand typed, complete with typos, in which one Colonel Erwin L. Hunt summed up what happened this way: quote, "The American army of occupation lacked both the training and organization to guide the destinies of the nearly 1 million civilians, whom the fortunes of war had placed under its temporary sovereignty."

So when World War II happened, military planners did not want to botch another occupation in the same exact country, and they returned to this report to understand what went wrong. And the occupation after World War II went very differently, not only the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe, but there was an entire infrastructure of schools, and classes, and training devoted to getting Americans, American military, prepared to occupy and rebuild another country. Which is to say, we learned from our mistake. We figured out how to occupy and rebuild a country after a war. Well, Nancy Updike has this story about one man's quest to make America remember that particular lesson.

Nancy Updike

I want to read to you from page 42 of this booklet that came out in January of 2003. That's two months before we invaded Iraq. Here's what it says. "The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious. Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution. Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation, the United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow, of new problems of America's own making."

That paragraph is only one of this report's many predictions, observations, and warnings that have made a guy named Conrad Crane famous in certain circles as a man who should have been listened to. The report is called "Reconstructing Iraq." It was commissioned by the Army in the run-up to the Iraq War. They wanted a guide for what to do after the fighting ended, how to occupy, stabilize, and reconstruct a country, based on previous wars, and on Iraq's specific challenges. And the booklet ends with a detailed nine page chart listing what would need to get done, who should do it, everything from securing the borders, the banking system, the museums, to dealing with sewage and medical waste.

Crane co-wrote the booklet. He's a historian, a 26 year Army veteran, and director of the Army's archives at the US Army War College, the Military History Institute. And seven years ago, in 2000, before he became known for having written this booklet, Crane was just one more historian with pale hair, glasses, and a head full of ideas, and a problem that is not uncommon among idea people.

Nancy Updike

The unwanted commodity that Crane was pushing was an idea he'd been trying to get the military to take seriously for years. It started like this. Crane had been studying the aftermath of US military involvements big and small, going back more than 100 years. Nation building in Germany and Japan, the toppling of Noriega in Panama, our long occupation of the Philippines, humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts in Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, even reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War. And what Crane found was that after major combat ends, there are always a whole bunch of unglamorous, bigger than expected, absolutely crucial tasks that the military is often the only one around to do; tasks that can mean the difference between stability and chaos. And Crane's idea was this: that the military needed to become much better prepared to take on everything that happens after major combat ends in a given war or conflict, the so-called--.

Nancy Updike

To say that now, wars are won or lost in the way that peace is established, is to state the obvious. We wouldn't still be in Iraq or Afghanistan if it weren't true. But before Iraq and Afghanistan, before 9/11, Crane's notion that the military should devote a lot more thought, money, and manpower to post-war planning was an idea that could not get traction. It was one small, unpopular corner of the never-ending debate about military strategy and doctrine.

After we invaded two countries and toppled two governments, suddenly rebuilding and stabilizing a postwar country became arguably the most urgent job, not just for our national security, but also for the security of large chunks of the rest of the world. But back in the fall of 2002, a half year before the invasion of Iraq, Crane and a Middle East expert named Andrew Terrill started cranking out that booklet I read from earlier, "Reconstructing Iraq." They did it in three months, working like crazy, and getting input from other civilian and military experts from the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Joint Forces Command, the Army.

Nancy Updike

Reading this booklet four years into the war, it feels like Crane and Terrill came from the future and traveled back in time to January, 2003 to try and warn us. Page 24, "Even under free elections, differences within Iraqi society may be further exacerbated." Page 34, "Unlike a variety of other dictatorships, many Iraqi citizens have access to firearms. These weapons can become a problem following the war." Page 32, "To tear apart the Iraqi army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society. Breaking up large elements of the army also raises the possibility that demobilized soldiers could affiliate with ethnic or tribal militias."

Page 40, "If the United States assumes control of Iraq, it will assume control of a badly battered economy." Page 38, "After the first year, the possibility of a serious uprising may increase, should severe disillusionment set in, and Iraqis begin to draw parallels between US actions and historical examples of Western imperialism." Page 35, "Having entered into Iraq, the United States will find itself unable to leave rapidly, despite the many pressures to do so."

So if we had this booklet, why weren't we better prepared for what to do after President Bush declared--.

Nancy Updike

Well, one thing that Crane found about previous wars is that the Pentagon, that is the military and its civilian leadership, has a sort of amnesia about these post-conflict stability operations. The military doesn't like to do them, so they often don't prepare to do them, or they underprepare. The Gulf War is a perfect example. We were so focused on winning the war, that we got surprised at the end of the war by how much there was to do in Kuwait. And believe it or not, there was a lot to do. According to the Army, tiny Kuwait ended up being the largest civil military reconstruction effort the US had undertaken since World War II.

But in the run-up to the war, Crane found, all those post-conflict tasks were treated, as one US commander put it, like quote, "a dripping bag of manure."

Nancy Updike

Getting it done for Lieutenant General Yeosock did not just mean coordinating battles. No, after this short, seemingly easy war was officially over, Kuwait was in shambles. The Kuwaiti government and a lot of its workforce had fled. Iraq had been occupying the country for months. There were landmines to clear, a port to dredge, oil wells on fire, and a lot of just plain destruction of buildings and infrastructure, plus tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees and prisoners of war. Not to mention all the things we're now familiar with, because they didn't get done in the Iraq War: getting electricity and water back to normal, policing the streets, a thousand issues.

Nancy Updike

Of course, civilian agencies do a lot of this postwar work too. But sometimes it's not safe for large numbers of civilians to come in, even after major combat is over. Remember the UN compound getting bombed in Iraq? The military is used to operating in the midst of chaos, so they end up handling a lot of nonmilitary tasks when major combat ends, whether they prepare for them or not. After the first Gulf War, which we won in 100 hours on the ground, the Department of Defense spent a year rebuilding Kuwait.

Nancy Updike

Here's Crane again, talking about the first Gulf War.

Nancy Updike

There's a military saying that defeat is an army's best teacher. An unspoken corollary is that success is often not the best teacher. And because the aftermath of the first Gulf War wasn't studied and absorbed, the lesson that many in the military and civilian leadership took away from that war is that if we wanted to, we could do a better kind of war, quick and decisive. That's what the current war in Iraq was supposed to be, as was Afghanistan. It was part of the revolution former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was pushing in the Pentagon: fewer soldiers, more high tech gear, no nation building.

It seems crazy to think about this now, but after Baghdad fell, the plan was to get most of our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2003. Crane is one of dozens of people inside and outside the military who tried to push for more troops for Iraq, not because we'd need them to win the war, but because we wouldn't be able to stabilize the country without them.

So whatever happened to Crane and Terrill's booklet, the one that foresaw a lot of the problems we've had in Iraq, and offered a plan for how to prevent them?

Nancy Updike

On January 20, 2003, two months before the invasion, the White House decided to switch gears. The Army would not take charge of the occupation after the war. Instead, that would be done by a newly formed civilian body, what would later become the Coalition Provisional Authority. And with that announcement, Crane and Terrill's booklet, months of work, was dropped from the planning process for the war. And they weren't the only ones. In the months leading up to the invasion, other detailed plans and warnings about the coming occupation were also being ignored or shut out, including efforts by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development, the Marine Corps, the National Defense University, the Rand Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations.

One of the tragedies of Iraq is that so many people did try to plan for the post-major combat phase. But the civilian leadership at the Pentagon resisted suggestions that the occupation might be long and complicated and require nation building. So almost none of that planning, not Crane and Terrill's, not any of the others, was put into action when it might have mattered.

Nancy Updike

Instead of seeing people in important places make use of his research, Crane had the opposite experience. He had to watch while one thing after another that he and Terrill had hoped to prevent came to pass. I kept asking him, didn't that drive you crazy? But he wouldn't take the bait. He's a former soldier and historian, not much given to public acts of gloating or hand wringing. The one time he did show real frustration, in the form of a sharp sigh, was when I asked him about the moment in 2003 when he'd heard the Iraqi army had been disbanded, something he and Terrill had strongly warned against in the booklet, saying that sending home men with guns was a bad idea, that they might turn the guns on us. So here comes that sigh.

Nancy Updike

Colonel H.R. McMaster was one of the people Crane gave the booklet to on his own initiative, through back channels. He got it to him in April, 2003, one month into the war. McMaster went on to pull off one of the astounding feats of the war. He figured out a strategy in a place called Tal Afar to do what we've been finding mostly impossible elsewhere in Iraq: defeating a fierce insurgency. I called him in Baghdad.

Nancy Updike

These days, McMaster splits his time between a London think tank and Iraq, where he's part of the team assembled by the top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to redesign US strategy in the country. But when McMaster first arrived in Baghdad, Crane and Terrill's booklet helped him grasp the scope of what he was facing. And then, like Crane had done, he went on a history binge.

Nancy Updike

The pages had a breakdown of the tribes in the area where he and his soldiers were fighting. He also brought in an officer with a degree in Middle East history to serve with his regiment for two months. He reached out to other scholars, talked to Iraqis, all of which seems smart and straightforward. Why not look back and learn? The way McMaster and Crane saw it, we were facing tasks in Iraq we had faced before: counterinsurgency, stabilization and reconstruction. We knew how to do these things. But until well into the Iraq war, looking back was out of fashion among the people running the Pentagon. All through the 1990s and right up through 2003, the Defense Department was so focused on propelling itself into the future, that in the process, lessons from the past got ignored, and some tried and true, old school, boots on the ground soldiering just got eliminated.

Nancy Updike

Here's Crane again.

Ira Glass

That story from Nancy Updike, one of the producers of our show. Coming up, the sober discussion ends and the yelling begins. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program for this Memorial Day weekend, The Center For Lessons Learned. We have stories from Iraq, what we've learned, what we did not learn in time. We began our show today talking to people at the Army's Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And the men at the reference desk there say that their most popular item these days is this 79 page booklet called "A Soldiers' Handbook: The First 100 Days." Colonel Steven Maines, who runs the center, says the whole reason for this booklet comes out of something that they found in the research.

Ira Glass

So to figure this out, they surveyed soldiers who were in Iraq. How did they survive? What were the factors that led to their comrades getting killed? And then they put together this handbook. I have one here. One of the biggest things that got people killed in the first 100 days, soldiers told the center, was just complacency; not properly preparing for patrols, losing focus. Going on patrols at the same time every day, or along the same route, or with the same stops, so the enemy would be able to pick up a routine.

This book reviews all kinds of practical things like what to do if you're ambushed, how to deal with a sniper. There are procedures that were invented in Iraq on what to do if a bomb stops you in the road. They have names like the five to five drill. Here's the five Cs. In fact, fully half of this booklet is about IEDs, improvised explosive devices, with page after page here of different kinds of IEDs. And then they have these photos of detonators, the detonators which include the most mundane, household stuff, like for example, the little push button thing on your key chain that unlocks your car door. Milt Hileman is a senior military analyst. He was the lead analyst for the information in this booklet.

Ira Glass

Milt Hileman. So if all of that is what the military is thinking about when it comes to this war, what do we civilians mostly think about? Well, we have one answer anyway now, in act two of our show, on the civilian perspective. Act two, Am Not. Are Too. Am Not. Are Too. The journalist George Packer, who reports from Iraq and who wrote the book Assassin's Gate said in an interview recently, when he was back in the United States, that while Iraqis tend to get stuck arguing and refighting old historical battles, there is an American version of that too, where we seem condemned to keep reliving the debates from before the Iraq War over whether to go to war, because they never really happened the right way the first time, out in the open, in the sunlight, which I think is true.

In Salt Lake City, they recently reargued that argument over the war. It was a good place for it, actually, because Salt Lake City is like the Austin, Texas of Utah, the one liberal city in the state. But because the conservatives are more conservative in Utah, it seems like the liberals are more fiercely liberal. And each of those sides brought a champion, so it was kind of like a superfight of the two sides.

On the left, you had the liberal mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, who's traveled around the country calling for President Bush's impeachment. And on the right, one of the icons of conservative talk radio-- and TV for that matter-- Mr. Sean Hannity. One of our regular contributors, Scott Carrier, lives in Salt Lake. And he was there too, sitting way in the back on the lower level.

Scott Carrier

It was in the air, walking into the theater. Truth be told, we don't like each other very much, us and them. We can be surprisingly civil in the grocery store, or even on the road. But inside the theater, our contempt for each other was naked and exposed. Both sides had come for blood.

Scott Carrier

The place was sold out and the seating was mixed, so Hannity supporters were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Rocky supporters, and everyone was checking out their surroundings, trying to read hairstyles and body posture. Who is us, and who is them?

Scott Carrier

Suddenly, it was like, at last, it's on. There was a half minute of cheering, followed by a half minute of booing, and nothing had happened yet. [CHANTING - "ROCKY, ROCKY"]

Scott Carrier

I looked around at all the Hannity people and started to count. So on my right, there were two married couples, mid-30's, maybe friends who had left their kids with the same babysitter, clapping and cheering for Hannity. And behind, to my left, were five lesbians, like a rugby team, shouting, Rocky, Rocky. It seemed the two sides were about even, and that everyone had gone equally crazy. Rocky went first. He had 30 minutes to lay out his argument.

Scott Carrier

Rocky's a civil litigator by training and profession, so his strategy was, present the evidence. And he had a lot of it. He showed quotes from intelligence reports, and played video of speeches all up on the big screen with a PowerPoint presentation, like President Bush from 2002, speaking about Iraq.

Scott Carrier

Here's Rocky.

Scott Carrier

Let me explain something. Utah is about 2/3 Mormon, except for right here in the city of their most holy temple, where they're actually in the minority. Rocky was born into a prominent Mormon family, but as a teenager, he crossed over and began to fight what he called the culture of obedience-- people blindly following authority. And this is why we elected him as our mayor. It's also the reason we, or at least a lot of us, are so proud of him now. And it's why the rest of the state pretty much hates him.

After Rocky, Hannity had his 30 minutes.

Scott Carrier

Hannity didn't talk about the things Rocky had said, whether we were lied to or misled by the President, or whether the invasion of Iraq was a criminal act. Instead, he attacked.

Scott Carrier

Hannity's main point, and he said it over and over, was that there was nothing wrong with President Bush wanting to go to war with Iraq. Lots of Democrats wanted it too. He had video to prove it, of John Kerry, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton.

Scott Carrier

After the 30-minute opening statements, the next round was a question and answer period. Rocky got to ask the first question.

Scott Carrier

But instead of asking a question, Rocky made a three minute background statement. And this upset even some of his supporters. Finally, Hannity stepped in.

Scott Carrier

Then the moderator jumped in, Ken Verdoya from the local public television station.

Scott Carrier

Rocky wasted a lot of time and energy throwing punches in the air, while Hannity walked the stage, gesturing to the crowd.

Scott Carrier

Too much. It got ugly. Verdoya, the moderator, tried to keep things in line, but there wasn't much he could do.

Scott Carrier

When it was over, I walked home feeling tired, asking myself, what just happened? There was no knockout, no clear decision. Everybody came out thinking their guy had won. Nobody had changed their minds. And then I remembered there were two moments in the debate when everybody felt the same way, like what happens sometimes in a concert or a play. The audience becomes one emotion. It happened the first time when Rocky showed photos of dead Iraqi civilians, including bloody bodies of Iraqi children.

Initially, the audience cried foul. You're hitting below the belt. But as the images continued, the room became quiet. Photos of dead children, time stopped, thinking stopped. All that was left was the feeling, this can't go on. We have to stop doing this. It was like mass nausea.

Then the screen showed a government document, and everyone snapped out of it. It went by so quickly, but then it happened again, when Hannity showed documentary footage of dead Kurds, victims of Saddam's nerve gas bombings. Whole families lying dead in the street, little kids, dead children. The room became like a quiet lake. And I thought, this is it. The solution lies here. Forget all the political arguments, and just sit by this lake and try to figure out its name. The moon was nearly full. The city was going to sleep. Train horns spread out across the valley floor, and rolled up the sides of the foothills. We don't like each other very much, us and them. But we have this lake between us.

Ira Glass

Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. He's the author of Running After Antelope, and a producer with hearingvoices.com.

[MUSIC - "NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME" BY RICKIE LEE JONES]

Ira Glass

Act three, The Lessons of Tomorrow, Today. Earlier in our radio show, we were talking about how lately, Congress has been debating withdrawing from Iraq, and timelines for withdrawal, and benchmarks for withdrawal. And we all just felt like, what happened? It's like suddenly people have staked out positions for and against withdrawing from Iraq, and they're all shouting at each other, and there is this momentum toward withdrawal. And the only question seems to be how soon. Is it going to be super soon or is it only going to be somewhat soon? And it's like the US skipped the part where everybody looks seriously at whether withdrawal is a good idea in the first place, or what would happen in Iraq if we would withdraw.

You know what it's like? It's like we got into the war in Iraq without much of a national debate about realistically what's this war going to mean? What's it going to mean to be in Iraq? And now people are talking about withdrawing, without much serious discussion at all about realistically what it will mean to leave, or why we're leaving. So to get some perspective on all these questions about Iraq that are not being talked about so much, we called Thomas Ricks, a Washington Post reporter, author of the book Fiasco, about the invasion and the early years of the war. I reached him in Baghdad.

Ira Glass

Thomas Ricks in Baghdad. A new paperback edition of his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq comes out in July, with a new afterword discussing some of these questions about what now.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Nancy Updaike and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollack, and Alisa Shipp. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper, web help from Sho Jou Yung. Special thanks today to Steve Cashket, Dan Ephron, Andrew Metz, Haider Hamza, Kiki Munchy, and Brian Sargent. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support also comes from audible.com, where you can download audio books, magazines, newspapers, and radio shows, including archives from the last 10 years of this show, audible.com/thisamericanlife.

WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Torey Malatia, who says we are not using his real talents.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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