I agree with person who held the responsibilities of chief civilian authority of the City of New York during the lower Manhattan Island bombing campaign and the subsequent emergency. The units that secured the al Qa'qa Governmental Enterprise facilities should have held that position until relieved, or forced to abandon the position by either hostile forces or logistical failure, and should have prepared for relief or abandonment outcomes using due diligence for units in possession of tactical and strategic war making assets.
To have done so however presents some problems. A group of Brigade-level staff officers[1],[2] would have had to make a situational judgement that voluntary abandonment of the al Qa'qa Governmental Enterprise facilities was not the course of action they were going to take. To make that judgement, the same group of staff officers would have had to have sufficient knowledge to evaluate the risks and rewards of each alternative course of action. They would have had to know that there were risks and rewards outside of the immediate tactical problem, they would have had to consider issues other than the elimination of defensive or counter-offensive capacities of opposing forces along the axis of advance on Baghdad. They would have had to appreciate that the mission requirements had temporal boundaries that extended into the future, and that leaving direct or convertable assets "in the rear area" had consequences for the logistical integrity of the overall mission.
In a nutshell, they would have had to choose an alternative to the rapid advance focused narrative that Dick Cheney sold Tommy Franks, the rapid war of decapitation and victory by light manuverable forces narrative. They would have had to see the necessity of their force "failing to advance", at a time when equivalent grade officers were being relieved of command for exercising equivalent situational judgements.
Colonel Joe Dowdy who commanded the 1st Expeditionary Marine Squadron was relieved of his command on April 4th for "failing to advance" against defensive forces in An-Nasiriy, having chosen to use artillery and air power to preserve the capacity of the 1st EMS.
They would have had to see the consequences of others confronting similar situations, Iraq is full of weapons dumps and strategic assets, and might make equivalent choices, each reducing the forces dedicated to the Cheney/Franks rapid advance on Baghdad plan by a Battalion, and quite possibly compromise that vision, and delay the day when recon units could enter central Baghdad.
To "adapt and overcome" the staff officers would have had to disregard their orders and acted autonomously for a prudent goal -- defensible occupation of terrain taken, the long-term sustainable logistical requirements included, rather than the imprudent goal -- penetration in depth, with long-term sustainable logistical requirements excluded.
They'd be up on charges of course, and ultimately the political government has command authority over the armed services, but the Oath taken is not to Party or to President, and some poor slobs from non-elite units are going to have to throw their flack jackets against moments of high brisance defined by supersonic expanding spheres of shards, after the parade to Baghdad passes by.
Rudi is right, and the officers in the field should have stopped the advance on Baghdad, because CENTCOM and the Pentagon couldn't, and the White House wouldn't. The choice to allow follow-on forces to operationalize the al Qa'qa Governmental Enterprise assets, in particular the RDX, HMX and PETN inventories, was a political choice made by Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. Every officer down the line to the OIC of the unit in place supported a political choice.
Nothing adverse could happend in the Chalabi-rose-petals-welcome scenario. It was a no-brainer.
Afterthoughts. Because I'd other things to do today not everything made it into this piece, but I was thinking about the operational concept and doctrinal implications of the Orange Plan from the 30's. That plan set the Navy and Marine Corps goal for a future war with Imperial Japan as a trans-Pacific, island-hopping campaign. The War in the Pacific was understood to be a war of logistics, since the joint Army-Navy ORANGE plan of 1938. Iraq, or rather the CENTCOM AOR is not a series of archipelagoes, major and minor islands, fortifications, airbases, and ports all held together by connecting tissues of surface, air, and submarine transports, and trivially dis-integrated by modest maritime and air policing forces once naval and air superiority has been established.
One of the "lessons learned" from the Pacific campaign was that logistics in the absence of "friendly territory" was manditory to solve, and solutions were found. Iraq is a bit dryer than the Western Central Pacific, but it appears to be just about as easy for US forces to walk around the dry bits of Iraq as it is for them to walk around the wet bits of the Western Central Pacific, so there is a problem to be solved (and convoys of slightly armored bang-and-burns are not the only answer).
[1] 3rd ID, Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commanding.
[2] 2D Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Col. Joseph Anderson commanding.
". . . so there is a problem to be solved (and convoys of slightly armored bang-and-burns are not the only answer)."
Problem is, as long as the civilians in the Pentagon want to micromanage the war with blinders on, there will never be any of that old WW2 thinking. These folks ain't the 'outside-the-box' types.