INTL442_Final

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Political Science

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Jan 9, 2024

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Final Paper Intelligence Challenges of Operation Iraqi Freedom INTL442: Tactical Intelligence Professor Eloy Cuevas November 26, 2023
Intelligence Challenges of Operation Iraqi Freedom 1 “The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.” - Margaret Thatcher. Introduction The planning efforts that contributed to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) highlights the critical role of intelligence in military success, which holds tremendous consequences for misinterpreting information and underestimating threats. Although the U.S. never found any suspected weapons of mass destruction, that served as justification for the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue signified the end of his regime and a mission accomplishment for the United States. The success of OIF however was still tainted by significant intelligence planning failures that deeply influenced strategic decision-making and operational outcomes of the war. OIF's lessons stress the continued importance of accurate intelligence procedures and critical thinking strategies as they pertain to influencing military operations. By examining these issues, this paper will seek to gain insights to intelligence shortcomings and oversights involved with the planning of OIF in an effort to better understand the lengths by which fallible intelligence support could impact national security decision making. After the September 11 attacks, senior military officials and decision makers began to shift planning war planning in scenarios where Iraq was expected to be acting from an offensive position to exclusively consider a coalition offensive initiated by the U.S. to defeat Iraq and its leading regime, despite Iraq’s position. The new offensive scenario changed operational planning but required changes in intelligence inputs that caused the intelligence community (IC)
Intelligence Challenges of Operation Iraqi Freedom 2 to reconsider Iraq's options as a defender rather than an aggressor. The military intelligence estimates, different from National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), focused on specific concerns that may affect military operations. The goal to quickly develop offensive plan required a detailed analysis of Iraq's potential enemy courses of action (ECOAs) from an almost exclusive military perspective which incited shortcuts, perpetuated biases, and failed to consider several other factors that could impact the success of the operation. Intelligence Assumptions One very early mistake was a deviation of analytical procedure to assume Saddam was hiding his weapons capabilities rather than taking a more standard approach of accounting for enemy weapon systems to gain an accurate estimate. Prados (2008) further explains this negligent approach was taken as a result of the IC’s previous underestimation of Iraqi weapon capability in the 1980s which prompted analysts to overestimate Iraqi capabilities by assuming assets that couldn’t be accounted for, must be hidden. A basic responsibility of intelligence gathering is to gain an understanding of enemy capabilities, Hooker (2005) further elaborates this point by claiming “This is probably the easiest intelligence problem on which to collect data and to analyze. By observing the large-scale activities of a given nation's military units, intelligence analysts can draw fairly certain conclusions as to its gross military capabilities.” In accordance with this understanding, it can be observed that intelligence community was breaking a fairly standard method of achieving one its most basic responsibilities. Overlooking Insurgency During the planning of Phase IV (post-conflict stage) of the operation, planners focused heavily on traditional military tasks and largely failed to accurately estimate the level of
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