When to Adjust Plans in Iraq
"Stay the course"?
GWEN IFILL: What is the Achilles heel here? Is the Achilles heel that we didn't study up enough on what to expect from these [Iraqi] paramilitary or as the Pentagon likes to call them, "thugs"? [i.e., the term two years ago for "the insurgency" which, as Donald Rumsfeld has assured us, is "in it's final throes".]
COLONEL SAMUEL GARDINER: I really — let me say it another way. It's about the plan. We're not losing [in Iraq]. We're still on top in this. But the notion is when there begins to be problems with plans, with the plan that you start with, the worst of military mistakes occur when you don't adjust, that when you take the plan you started with and keep going with it and don't adjust to it.
[From "War Plans", a segment on The Newshour, with Jim Lehrer, 26 March 2003.]