I took Praktike's recommendation from a week or so ago and watched Frontline's piece on Rumsfeld's War. It really was a fascinating program to watch, and a complex one too since a lot of different threads seem to be at work: the title is somewhat deceptive because there are actually quite a few conflicts surrounding the Secretary of Defense presented within the program, any single one of which could probably merit a whole program of its own. Praktike has already highlighted the dispute between the traditional Army establishment and more radical "transformation" advocates like Douglas MacGregor (yes, yes, I'll get to reading his book one of these days, I swear) who wanted to go into Iraq with a fast, light force of (at first estimate) 50,000 troops. I did think the program did offer an interesting suggestion of why Rumsfeld might be more inclined to support such a "transformation" — political demands in the wake of 9/11 demanded a fast reprisal against the Taliban in Afghanistan and a slow and hesitant Army response meant the risk of losing out on the most crucial new role in the post 9/11 security environment to the CIA's paramilitaries. We just recently talked in my American military history course about how the US Marine Corps following the introduction of steel battleships searched around for a mission to ensure its continued usefulness as a distinct service branch and settled on the role of advance base assault forces in the Pacific, which perhaps makes me more aware of the bureaucratic struggle for relevance sorts of explanations than I might have first been.
The exchange in the program I found most jarring, and this was a segment that I believe also appeared in a Frontline episode entitled The Invasion of Iraq that I rented from the library earlier this fall (unfortunately streaming video of the whole program isn't currently available online), was Paul Wolfowitz testifying to Congress in response to US Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's comment (later reiterated by Army Secretary Thomas White) that an occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ, Deputy Secretary of Defense: [March 27, 2003] But some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. First, it's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
(Emphasis added.) Now, to get the full impact, Wolfowitz's words have to be juxtaposed with the series of military professionals interviewed on the program testifying to the need for a large pacification force, but even without that the simply ... well, simply bizarre nature of that statement strikes me. For one thing, it was certainly not hard to imagine, because several of the military professionals had been doing just that. Does Wolfowitz not understand the military requirements of occupying a country the size and character of Iraq? Did he not understand the political situation that regime decapitation without any strong reassertion of authority in the aftermath would produce? Did he understand both but was so desperate to make the war politically palatable that he cherry-picked analysts like MacGregor who could tell him and Rumsfeld that what they wanted was doable? I have no idea.
Now, the President got a bit of snarky flack recently (from yours truly and others) for his reiteration during the debates that this stuff is "hard work". But in truth, it is, and being President of the United States requires, I believe, a dedicated commitment to being a generalist — you may not know everything about everything that goes on in your government, but you should have at least have a base and the willingness to build off it in all the major policy areas of your administration, be they tax, health care, or military policy. (Whether this is a naive and superhuman requirement that no President can live up to I'll leave others to decide, but suffice it to say I find our current President's disheartingly uninterested in even really attempting to achieve that bar.) This is in large part because when it comes to military matters I'm ultimately a Clausewitzian: the civilian representative government is responsible for setting policy and to the extent that it feels the uniformed services are failing to address those demands, it can pressure and reassign and so on until satisfied. And so in this respect I must grudgingly express appreciation for Donald Rumsfeld's willingness to reassert real control over the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the associated services. (As an interesting aside, in the American Military Experience today the professor made the point that it is Rumsfeld, not the President, who meets most frequently with the JCS, as opposed to a figure like FDR who during WW II met directly with them to craft war policy to the effective marginalization of his Secretary; it speaks to the decentralized nature of decision-making in the Bush administration and Rumsfeld's dominating skills as a bureaucrat, I guess. Similarly, the point made explicitly in the program about how Rumsfeld takes front and center at the podium in all his press conferences.) As Phil Carter suggests, doctrinally, the Army itself has yet to fully appreciate in some respects the changing requirements of modern wars, in which there are frequently no such things as "rear areas" any more:
During the late 1990s, I served as a military police lieutenant and captain, and watched the Army struggle to find a new warfighting paradigm that would enable it to fight and win the next war. Its theoreticians developed a "contemporary operational environment" which was supposed to look more like tomorrow's battlefields than the old fight against the Soviet hordes in the Fulda Gap. But this "COE", as it was known", never really amounted to much more than incremental change. Massive "Warfighter" computer exercises, which simulated division and corps-level maneuvers, were still fought in much the same way. And as several high-ranking officers have noted, the Army typically called "EndEx" when U.S. forces secured their objective, without paying any thought to the complex warfighting that must be done next to secure the peace. Some doctrinal changes were made in the late 1990s, but not many.
But one area where change barely happened at all was in the area of equipment. In the Army's first digitized division, used as a test-bed for all sorts of organizational and technological innovations, little thought was given to the way that an asymmetric, noncontiguous, nonlinear battlefield would interact with poorly-armored, poorly-protected, and under-equipped support forces. Despite planner predictions that tomorrow's forces would move farther and faster than any in history (see, e.g., the 3rd ID march on Baghdad), their support units received no additional armor or armament with which to deal with the inevitable bypassed forces, insurgents, or myriad threats they would face as they rushed to keep up with the tanks and infantry.
The program also made this point in describing the reluctance of the military to go in without the traditionally defined "overwhelming force" of the Powell Doctrine: there clearly are a lot of officers in the US Army who do not want to do counter-insurgency warfare and who may in their heart of hearts conceive of their job description as fighting large scale armor battles with the ghost of the Soviet Union. It wouldn't be the first time the military has clung to an outdated mission doctrine and for an officer corps that saw a military broken by the disaster in Vietnam and dedicated their careers to repairing that breach, I can see why. All appearances right now do seem to indicate that regime change followed by nation-building and counter-insurgency may well represent a key foreign policy component of the Bush Doctrine, and the US military will have to adjust (as it is) to that duty.
Having said that, however, there is a difference between pressuring for change and a failure to recognize military realities, and Donald Rumsfeld and his assistants (and by extension, the President they serve) appear to me to have overstepped that line in Iraq. Though partially obscured, these realities were not unforseen, and by failing to produce policies that reflected the accurate warnings of Army expert planners, brought about a situation like we have in Iraq today. To return to Clausewitz, just war remains an extension of politics so too the converse, and our civilian leadership failed to fully appreciate the politico-military ramifications of the aftermath of their military assault on Baghdad, leading them to make the wrong demands of their uniformed commanders. That's a judgement that, apparently, 51% of the country these days either doesn't share or doesn't consider significant enough to merit dismissal, but since I said this wasn't going to be a post-election post I'll guess I'd best leave it there.
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