| Summary/Abstract |
Following Moltke’s dictum that ‘no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy’, military learning and adaptation has long been a staple of military studies. Over the past fifteen years, much of the literature has been focused on Western armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Little attention has been paid thus far to adaptation by the Iraqi armed forces in their fight against ISIS. Whereas the Iraqi army was routed by the group in 2014, three years later it managed to take back almost all the territory lost to ISIS. How was that possible? This article discusses military adaptation by the Iraqi armed forces and their role in the military defeat of ISIS in Iraq. Combining an academic theoretical framework on military adaptation with a primary source-based investigation of the Iraqi fight against ISIS, we reconstruct how the Iraqi armed forces learned from their mistakes in 2014 and which role this process played in the military defeat of ISIS in Iraq.
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