The purpose of this monograph is to provide an in-depth study of how the U.S. miscalculation of Iraqi will to fight during the planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom contributed to post major conflict operational problems. The specific nature of these problems were foreseen and could have been avoided by adjusting the timing of the campaign and force structure in place prior to the beginning of the conflict. The monograph will raise issues specific to Operation Iraqi Freedom that have implications for future use in the American military. The term will as it relates to military capacity is in some respects an enigma. It is referred to often in terms of defeating the enemy's will to resist or maintaining our will to continue the attack. However, will is not defined in U.S. joint doctrine. The German military theorist, Karl von Clausewitz defines war as an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. Therefore, the concept of will is central to war. Despite the importance of the concept, there is no concise definition of will or its components in the United States military doctrine. This lack of attention to the concept of will has contributed to the situation faced by American and Coalition forces fighting an insurgency in Iraq today. The efforts of the United States military to understand will are hampered by its lack of definition. What one person means when they use the term will may or may not be the same as another. Only by defining will can this central concept and its many ramifications be properly understood and acted upon. Accordingly, the following definition was suggested as a starting point for fully understanding and exploiting will's place in war: the combination of multiple components that coalesce into a collective desire of a group, or groups, to initiate or continue actions to achieve a desired goal. Understanding the enemy's will to fight has been challenging throughout history. The historical analysis demonstrates that attempting to defeat an enemy's will by attacking it as a whole is challenging. The aggressors in each of the case studies failed to ask themselves what they would do if the enemy failed to respond as predicted. Each characterized their enemy's will as a whole and attacked it as such. At the operational level, each of the aggressors met their objectives. However, their operational success did not translate into strategic success. Current American military doctrine and thought has met with the same challenges in Iraq. The American focus on major combat operations played a large part in shaping the final plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Despite warnings from the Combined Forces Land Component Staff that their plan would actually facilitate conditions for an insurgency unless more troops were added to the force structure, the Americans executed the operation as planned. The prevailing view, supported by doctrine, was that the war would be decided during major combat operations. What most realize today, is that the short term successes of major combat operations would merely set the conditions for the long term challenges of military operations other than war. There is no one thing that was the root cause of the American problems in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When American decision-makers confined their view of the Iraqi will to fight to Hussein and his governmental apparatus, they jeopardized their own ability to achieve their strategic goals. The American military's understanding of how an enemy's will to resist changes the calculus of planning and executing military campaigns is incomplete. Understanding will involves trying to understand and predict complex human interactions that generate outcomes that are as likely to defy logic as bow to it. But that does not alleviate the necessity of reducing this gap in American military doctrine and thought. The Global War on Terrorism will not be won by the strongest; the side that undermines the collective desire of their enemy to resist will win it.

ADA436238 Approved for public release; Distribution is unlimited. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student-authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References to these studies should include the foregoing statement.)