Today on Uncommon Knowledge, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discusses the problems, including intelligence failures, that plagued the Coalition after the taking of Baghdad in 2003.
How the insurgency would evolve I don’t think was knowable. And George Tenet talks about this in his book, and said that if they’d thought that it was a big problem they would have put it in the Executive Summary. And they didn’t. I’ve seen intelligence shortfalls like that throughout my career, over decades. Why? Because it’s tough work. You can’t expect that you’re going to have perfect information. Which is, I suppose, is why Eisenhower said “The plan is nothing, planning is everything.”