Contingency Planning

There have been a thousand articles and blog posts analyzing what the United States should or should not have known about potential Iraqi resistance, about Rumsfeld's overruling of military commanders, and other various claims of shortsightedness and miscalculation.

Here's my question: even if America had good reason to be confident of a small and expedient war, where was the contingency planning? It's one thing to have a plan that includes Shiite uprisings in the south. It's another to ignore the possibility that they won't.

The claim has been made that the Iraqis are not acting as American wargaming suggested they would. Well how many wargames did we run? The point of these simulations is not just to determine the most likely enemy action, but to test our ability to react to unlikely actions. It is to avoid surprises and ensure we have a plan in place in the worst case scenario, not just the best.