The Wall Street Journal gets into the Rumsfeld rumble in the bumble.
WSJ.com - Rumsfeld's Control Of Military Policy Appears to Weaken
Five years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld took over at the Pentagon, he quickly moved to assert greater civilian control over senior military officers. But now, well into the Bush administration's second term, there are signs that his firm grip on the Defense Department is slipping as some uniformed officers increasingly chart their own course.Well before the recent calls by a half-dozen retired Army and Marine Corps generals for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, there was an increasing challenge to his ideas about warfare from within the senior officer ranks. It seems likely to persist even assuming Mr. Rumsfeld survives the retired generals' criticism -- which it appears he will, given a recent strongly worded statement of support from President Bush.
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While there is no sign the military leadership inside the Pentagon is ignoring or defying Mr. Rumsfeld's orders, senior military officials in a number of cases seem more willing to go their own way, even if that means publicly questioning or quietly trying to undo some of Mr. Rumsfeld's initiatives. “Many of his war-fighting concepts are turning out to be impractical. People are walking away from them,” said Robert Killebrew, a retired colonel who spent much of his career as a strategist within top commands inside the Army. He described Mr. Rumsfeld as “increasingly a spent force.”Much of the disenchantment grows out of the initial war plan for taking out Saddam Hussein. Officers who are critical now say the strategies Mr. Rumsfeld championed, particularly his focus on faster, streamlined forces to make warfare more efficient, sowed the seeds for some of the problems encountered later.
The areas where senior military officers seem to be exerting more influence run the gamut from basic manpower and military procurement to how the U.S. military interacts with allies and potential adversaries in the Middle East and Asia.
...The scattered calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation began in late March when retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who led the initial effort to train Iraqi security forces, chastised Mr. Rumsfeld in an opinion piece in the New York Times for “unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower.” Other critics quickly followed, among them retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Mideast and Central Asia.Last week, retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who served as former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's senior military aide and was a senior commander on the ground in Iraq, attacked Mr. Rumsfeld over the planning and execution of the Iraq war. “The current administration repeatedly ignored sound military advice. I think the principles of war are fundamental and we violate those at our own peril,” he said on PBS's “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
Though the criticism revolves around the difficult situation in Iraq, the unease reflects fundamental disagreement about how wars should be fought. Mr. Rumsfeld came into office with a mandate to shift the military from a force designed for the Cold War to one suited to today's unpredictable threats. He railed against inefficiencies in the military. “I have no desire to attack the Pentagon. I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself,” he said in a speech one day before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The swift toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Mr. Rumsfeld's no-nonsense briefing style turned him into something of an administration rock star. The Afghan success seemed to ratify his theories of warfare. He became a strong advocate of the idea that the military, particularly ground forces, needed to be lighter and faster. Whereas initial war plans in Iraq called for as many as 500,000 troops, the secretary -- working closely with Gen. Tommy Franks, who has recently defended Mr. Rumsfeld's management -- whittled that to fewer than 150,000.
Much of the planning grew out of the “effects-based operation” strategy that caught Mr. Rumsfeld's attention. The concept argues that through the careful application of military force and diplomacy, wars can be fought more efficiently, with fewer resources and fewer casualties. Instead of trying to annihilate the foe, the goal was to use all aspects of U.S. power to bend the adversary to U.S. will. In Iraq the strategy put a premium on speed to disorient the enemy and precision strikes to knock out its ability to communicate and control forces.
Initially, the strategy seemed to bear fruit in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld argued that the speed of the assault by the relatively small U.S. force caught Mr. Hussein by surprise, preventing him from bursting dams or torching oilfields. But as that swift success gave way to looting and an increasingly violent insurgency, officers in the Army and Marines began to question whether technology could in fact transform how wars were fought.
At first, senior officers were reluctant to contradict Mr. Rumsfeld's conclusions. An Army War College study in October 2003 suggested that Iraqi incompetence had more to do with the enemy's collapse than U.S. tech superiority or speed, but the Army, wary of drawing Mr. Rumsfeld's wrath, never released the study.
More recently, active-duty Army and Marine officers have become more outspoken, reflecting the critiques of some retired officers. Senior three-star officers in the Army and Marine Corps formally petitioned the Joint Forces Command -- a key instrument Mr. Rumsfeld has employed in his push to change the military -- not to publish a handbook on effects-based operations that had long been in the works.
“They saw the handbook as an effort to rewrite the way the services make war in the future,” said Col. Killebrew, a retired Army strategist who reviewed their objections for the Army. The handbook was recently published, but the Army and Marines were able to insert a section cautioning that the book wasn't formal U.S. military doctrine, giving the services sway to ignore it in their war planning.
Regional commanders also have been given wider latitude to chart their own course. In the Middle East, their focus is more on stability than the democratization that the administration often cites. “All the military can do is help provide a protective shield” that will give governments in the region the breathing room to reform slowly from within, said one senior officer in U.S. Central Command of the strategy outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the near term, this officer conceded, that might involve bolstering the position of nondemocratic regimes.
In Asia, the head of the Pacific Command, Adm. William Fallon, has struck a decidedly more understanding tone toward China than has Mr. Rumsfeld. In a speech in Singapore last year, Mr. Rumsfeld questioned China's military buildup, which he said put the “delicate military balance in the region at risk.” Several Pentagon strategy papers, including February's massive review of spending, went further, calling China a potential military competitor whose rise necessitates a variety of U.S. counterstrategies, among them procurement of new long-range bombers and other technologies.
Adm. Fallon expressed a far different view to the Senate this month, playing down China's defense acquisitions and saying “the numbers are not yet anywhere near the kinds of numbers that I believe truly threaten this country.” In an interview, he said he had no difference of opinion with Mr. Rumsfeld but simply saw China from a more up-close perspective. “At the national level, you have to look at the world and say what out there has the potential to be a problem,” he said. Asked if the signs pointed toward any sort of problem, the admiral said, “I think the answer is very clearly, No.”
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Tags: incompetence, /Iraq
