In February 2003, the planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom felt like a math problem that could be solved with a discrete solution. Maps. Timelines. Phase lines. Routes. Bridges. Objectives. The maps were clean, the intent was sharp, and the plan – at least in our minds – had an end state you could point to with a pencil. While not stated explicitly, many of us felt it was implied: secure Saddam International Airport, codenamed Objective Lions, and we could declare victory.
We were in Kuwait with the 3rd Infantry Division, rehearsing an invasion that many believed would move fast, strike hard, and collapse a regime that had already been weakened for a decade. The precision of the preparation was seductive. It made the unknown feel manageable. It made the waiting feel purposeful.
My unit spent several weeks of preparation in Camp Pennsylvania, a modest encampment surrounded by a sand berm and filled with tents of various sizes. While there, we uploaded live combat ammunition, test fired our weapons systems, conducted rehearsals and mentally prepared for what was to come.
I wrote letters then – quiet notes meant for my son, Brandon, who would grow up in the long shadow of that war even if he never saw its opening days. I didn’t know what a father can’t fully know in the moment: that the words you write before war are never really about what you’re about to do. They’re about what you hope you’ll still be when it’s over. In Camp Pennsylvania, we also had access to the internet for corresponding home in real time. That intimate access did not last as our leaders prepared to issue sensitive operations plans.
As an infantry platoon leader in Charlie Company, 2-7 Infantry – task organized under Task Force 3-69 Armor, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division – my world in the days leading up to March 20th consisted of mundane routine in the desert with my men, waiting for the operations orders which were issued after we departed Camp Pennsylvania for a position in the open desert. We no longer had the luxury of internet and phones.
After we received and disseminated the operations plans, we kept up with the outside world through embedded reporters who joined us in the desert. One reporter brought a radio and updated us on the news of the day. While news reported what was happening at the international level, we started to see signs more directly. There was the order to move to an assault position at the Kuwaiti border. And then the order to cross the border came – sooner than I think anyone anticipated.
The crossing from Kuwait into Iraq wasn’t cinematic. It was a start line in darkness and dust – an abrupt transition from anticipation to action. The war began not with a dramatic moment, but with a sustained acceleration: convoys pushing north, vehicles spaced out across the desert, radios alive with instructions and updates. We were entering a country we’d studied in briefings and satellite imagery, but now it was physical – heat, grit, distance, and the weight of decisions that couldn’t be rehearsed.
In those first weeks, our planning held. The opening campaign rewarded tempo. It rewarded combined arms. It rewarded leaders who could act quickly without waiting for perfect information. There was no pause for philosophical debates. The job was to close with the enemy, break his cohesion, and keep the momentum.
That momentum carried us to objectives that – at the tactical level – looked like the war’s natural conclusion.
Objective Peach. Objective Saints. Objective Lions. And there were many other smaller objectives that would gain more meaning and notoriety through battles fought on the road to Baghdad.
Peach was a Euphrates River crossing south of Baghdad – an operation that demanded coordination, speed, and nerve. Saints was a large intersection south of Baghdad, seized by 2nd Brigade after Peach was secured. Lions was Saddam International Airport, seized by 1st Brigade in early April 2003. And the “Thunder Runs” were a set of offensives that sought to clear the terrain from Saints to Lions, eventually exploiting toward the east into the center of Baghdad in what would later be referred to as the “Green Zone”.
The airport wasn’t just terrain; it was symbolic ground. In many minds, including ours, securing it felt like securing the narrative. The road to Baghdad had opened once we reached the tarmac. The decisive phase was playing out.
In the opening campaign, it was possible – almost easy – to believe the arc was bending toward a clean finish.
That belief wasn’t naïve. It was human. It was reinforced by the logic of conventional war, where capturing key terrain and shattering fielded forces often produces an end. It was reinforced by the professionalism of the operation itself: well-led, well-executed, and ruthlessly effective.
But here is the lesson that matters, the one that still echoes two decades later:
Our planning ended at the airport – but the war was just beginning.
This isn’t a partisan claim. It’s an operational observation with strategic consequences. We planned brilliantly for the invasion and less clearly for what came after. The tactical excellence of the opening phase created a false sense of closure. We were conditioned by success to assume success would convert into stability. Yet the collapse of the regime did not automatically produce the foundations of governance, security, and legitimacy. This was evidently clear in the years that followed, but this lesson could be easily forgotten.
You could feel that gap even in small moments: in the uncertainty about what came next, in the shifting missions, in the way the battlefield’s rules blurred once the conventional fight faded into occupation realities. The force that had been designed to defeat an army now had to help hold a country together. Those are different problems. They require different tools. They demand different assumptions.
When my unit redeployed home in August 2003, the calendar said the opening chapter was complete. But history was already writing the sequel. The war’s public meaning was beginning to change – from swift conventional victory to something more complicated, more costly, and more enduring than any of us had fully anticipated in the desert outside Kuwait.
That’s the lesson I want my son’s generation to understand—not because they need to relitigate Iraq, but because they will inherit the consequences of every battle and war they fight, including the ones they choose not to fight. Their era will be defined by contested assumptions: about speed, technology, decisiveness, and what “winning” even means in conflicts where governance, legitimacy, and information matter as much as firepower.
They will also inherit something else: the obligation to think beyond the planned objective.
We will always need soldiers who can seize an airport. We will always need leaders who can take the bridge, keep tempo, and collapse an enemy’s coherence through initiative. But future wars will also demand a clearer theory of what follows tactical success – what political order you are trying to establish, what institutions must stand, what second-order effects will erupt when the old system collapses.
If the Iraq War taught anything that remains durable, it is that tactical excellence is not a substitute for strategic clarity.
I wrote letters to Brandon before we crossed the border because I wanted him to know who his father was, even if he was too young to remember. Now I think of those letters as something else: a reminder that every generation writes a story it doesn’t fully control. The best we can do is tell the truth about what we saw, what we assumed, and what we learned the hard way.
We planned to the airport. We executed the opening campaign with historic speed and discipline. And then the real test began – one that would shape a generation of Americans, Iraqis, and soldiers who carried the war home long after the headlines moved on.
That is Iraq’s legacy. And it is why we owe the next generation not only gratitude for service – but honesty about what service costs, and what strategy requires.
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