Welcome to H-War, a member of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences Online. H-WAR encourages scholarly discussion of world military history and makes available diverse bibliographical, research and teaching aids.
Absolutely true about overestimating. I think this was an "inside the Beltway" problem, as too few IC analysts had operational military experience or much familiarity with the Iran-Iraq War.
Submitted by John T Kuehn on Thursday, April 24, 2014
Dear Mr. Richey,
Back in 1997 my School of Advaned Military Studies (SAMS) seminar (there were 12 of us including our seminar leader) had a wonderful 3hour discussion with General Fred Franks. This issue came up and he was very open and honest. He closed the discussion with the following (a paraphrase but I have it written down in my SAMS notebook which is down in my basement back in Missouri-I am currently TDY):
"Nothing in our experience had prepared us for what we were seeing. We were in a deliberate attack when we should have been in a pursuit, but none of us had ever been in a pursuit, we had only read about them."
Submitted by John McGrath on Wednesday, April 23, 2014
I highly recommend Stephen Bourque's book. It is, perhaps, the best modern operational history written. I use it as a how-to guide for writing such works.
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