Hoffman to McMaster: not so fast, Bub
More troops doing the wrong thing wouldn’t have helped in Iraq in 2003-2004, Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman says in response to my post yesterday about Col. H.R. McMaster’s new article. McMaster, a consigliere to Gen. Petraeus, argued that because commanders lacked sufficient troops, they were forced to blim-blam around Iraq conducting raids that alienated ...
More troops doing the wrong thing wouldn't have helped in Iraq in 2003-2004, Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman says in response to my post yesterday about Col. H.R. McMaster's new article. McMaster, a consigliere to Gen. Petraeus, argued that because commanders lacked sufficient troops, they were forced to blim-blam around Iraq conducting raids that alienated Iraqi civilians.
More troops doing the wrong thing wouldn’t have helped in Iraq in 2003-2004, Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman says in response to my post yesterday about Col. H.R. McMaster’s new article. McMaster, a consigliere to Gen. Petraeus, argued that because commanders lacked sufficient troops, they were forced to blim-blam around Iraq conducting raids that alienated Iraqi civilians.
Not so, says Hoffman, no intellectual slouch himself. "Great troop strength would not have significantly changed things," he says in an e-mail. "We were not forced to ‘COIN Raid’ by low troop strength." Indeed, he says, there were other approaches that could have been taken, such as "ink blotting" — that is, securing only small areas, and then slowly expanding influence through local actors. Also, he says, "The force didn’t have to be allocated over the area it was given….More troops doing the wrong thing in my view would have been more counterproductive." In fact, he says, having a bigger force early on in Iraq might have dug a deep hole even faster, because it "would have undercut the rotation base faster and deeper."
How to resolve this issue? Fairly simply: Had the U.S. military’s civilian and uniformed leadership been more agile, more attentive to battlefield success, and less in denial about the situation in Iraq back then, then they would have looked to commanders such as Petraeus who were succeeding during that first year in Iraq and would have promoted them and ensured that their effective approaches were imitated. Ultimately that did happen — but only several years later, after the United States had been fighting in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. In the meantime, we had encouraged a generation of Iraqi allies to surface and then been unable to protect them from the enemy.
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