U.S. Army Delayed Progress of its Own Iraq War Study

After being commissioned by Army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno in 2013, a study on the Iraq War sought to preserve officers’ memories and lessons learned.

The two volume, comprehensive look of more than 1,300 pages about the U.S.’s involvement in the Middle East between 2003 and 2011 was completed in 2016 — but has yet to be published.

Gen. Odierno retired before its completion and since then, the study has become “stuck in internal reviews and procedural byways,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

On top of the Army’s own red tape, some high-ranking officers are allegedly worried about their reputations and what aspects of the war the study might criticize them for, according to WSJ.

Conclusions made in the report include a finding that “senior U.S. officials continually assumed the military campaign in Iraq would be over within 18 to 24 months and didn’t deploy enough troops,” and that the American government did not anticipate intervention by neighboring countries and had no plan in place to handle the opposition from Iran and Syria.

Yet Gen. Odierno’s successor, Gen. Mark Milley, said he would like to see the report made public by year’s end.

“We owe it to ourselves as an army to turn the lessons learned as quickly and as accurately as we can,” Milley said, “understanding that they are not going to be perfect.”