Required Reading

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today that he had not yet seen a recently completed Joint Staff report on lessons from the last decade of war. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, appearing with Panetta at the Pentagon, told reporters that officials are just beginning to review the lengthy report, which draws lessons from many other reviews conducted in recent years.

In the last 10 years, the Pentagon failed to understand the operational environment, learned the hard way that conventional military methods were ineffective and initially ignored the need to influence perceptions in order to achieve objective, according to a draft of the study first reported by Inside the Pentagon.

The assessment says the Pentagon must craft a strategy for intelligence gathering and pursue major improvements in interagency coordination to avoid repeating mistakes made since 9/11.