Rumsfeld Sí!, and Rumsfeld No!
As my long-term readers may remember, I am no fan of Donald Rumsfeld. I do not condemn him with broad strokes as his devoted enemies do, but I do think he made some very serious errors - nay, blunders - after 9/11. Credit the conduct of the Afghanistan campaign as a major, positive accomplishment that stll endures. But, perhaps a-glitter from Afghanistan's stunning success, the Defense Dept. pretty much botched Iraq from the beginning. Since Rummy heads DOD, the buck stops on his desk.

Three days ago, NRO published a piece by Mackubin Thomas Owens defending Rumsfeld. It's not a pure defense; Owens is critical as well as complimentary. But on the whole he says that if Rumsfeld didn't foresee the occupation problems in Iraq, neither did anyone else.

In criticizing the Iraq war plan and its execution, the naysayers were demanding something that is rarely achieved in wartime: a linear progression from the initial concept of the war to the seamless execution of the strategy resulting in a clear victory. I challenge the critics to provide examples from history in which such an outcome prevailed. War is a hopelessly messy thing, and rarely goes as planed [sic].

But it is untrue that no one foresaw the forces required. As I explained in June 2003, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, and the service's secretary, Thomas White, both said in advance that the invasion and the postwar accupation would require more troops than Rumsfeld wanted to use.

The Army, led by then-SecArmy Thomas White and Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, demurred. In fact, when asked by a Congressional committee about the size of the forces required, Shinseki answered that the war and the occupation following would require hundreds of thousands of troops. ...

The minor point of Shinseki's testimony was that a larger invasion force would be better than the one envisioned. The major point was that post-war occupation would require enormous personnel and material resources for a long time. Events since the end of offensive action show that Shinseki was more right than Rummy, though Rummy was correct that the invasion force could be substantially smaller than the Army seemed to want.

So I think Owens is guilty of some selective history of events. The Army staff certainly understood that the occupation of Iraq would require a vastly larger force than Rumsfeld insisted on.

Next comes Frederick W. Kagan's Weekly Standard essay, "Fighting the Wrong War." Kagan takes Rumsfeld to task for several things, but chiefly for failing to foresee since 9/11 that the Army needed to be expanded in size signficantly. Moreover, Rumsfeld dodged every suggestion to do so.

Take the most serious criticism leveled at Rumsfeld--that he has refused to expand the American military in order to enable it to deal with the strain the current missions are imposing upon our men and women in uniform. The chief of the Army Reserve, in a December 20 memo leaked last week, warned that the Reserve "is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force." Rumsfeld's defenders assure us he is not responsible. Only Congress can approve an increase in military end-strength; Rumsfeld has never opposed increasing the armed forces; more troops in Iraq wouldn't help anyway. These are the arguments deployed in behalf of the secretary of defense.

But as James Carville was so fond of saying, "That dog don't hunt." Says Kagan, "He has, in fact, consistently and vociferously opposed congressional attempts to offer" opportunities to expand the regular Army.

In February 2003, he declared, "we will come back and ask for an end-strength increase at any moment that we believe it is in the interests of the armed forces. At the present time we do not have evidence that suggests that's the case." In October 2003, he discouraged Congress from "going into the taxpayers' pockets for a 10,000-person increase, when there's no analytical work that supports it."

Kagan lists a long series of adverse conditions in Iraq that almost certainly could have been avoided if the Army had begun expansion after 9/11. But the main criticism Kagan offers is that faced with the critical choices of sticking with a long-range, non-specific-threat program of military transformation or winning the present war, Rumsfeld chose to emphasize the former.

It is not that Rumsfeld's decisions were without a rationale. The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America's military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.

[Victor Davis] Hanson reminds us that American forces in World War II, and in many other conflicts, had to fight with imperfect weapons and under imperfect conditions. All quite true. But in no previous American war has the chief of the military administration refused to focus on the war at hand, preferring programs that could not help soldiers then in the fight to survive and win. Even Robert McNamara, engaged in a "sideshow" war in an otherwise irrelevant theater, did not imagine that he could focus his efforts on preparing to meet the Red Army in the Fulda Gap at the expense of supporting our troops in Indochina.

When you've been negatively compared to Robert McNamara, it's a major diss. Both pieces cited above are worth the reading.

by Donald Sensing, 1/8/2005 05:40:12 PM. Permalink |