FEEDING THE BEAST:

THE RASHOMON WAR (RALPH PETERS, April 5, 2003, NY Post)

In addressing his critics last week, Secretary Rumsfeld demonstrated the low regard in which he holds military personnel, active duty or retired. He mocked his critics as "military retirees" and "armchair generals." In fact, the secretary's leading critic has been retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the nation's most decorated senior officer and a hero of both Desert Storm and Vietnam - where he was painfully and graphically wounded.

Gen. McCaffrey, who has nothing to gain and much to lose by speaking out, undertook to express the anger felt by serving officers toward Secretary Rumsfeld for his refusal to honor repeated requests for more ground troops.

As for the existence of a plague of "armchair generals," the secretary is correct. They occupy the highest-level civilian positions in the Pentagon, where these amateur theorists of warfare have treated career officers as if they were servants - or worse than anyone should treat a servant. Dismissed as unimaginative and insulted in front of their subordinates, the generals and colonels could not respond in kind. They could only stand there and take the abuse - or face a court-martial by replying.

As it became evident that more ground troops would have been a great help to the campaign, the secretary of defense denied any responsibility for capping troop levels. This is breathtaking: the first-ever doctrine of secretarial infallibility. It is a display of moral cowardice by an arrogant man who was dangerously wrong.

Our troops will continue to save the secretary's strategic bacon. Secretary Rumsfeld will be heaped with laurels earned by our combat soldiers. But, even now, those troops continue to face higher than necessary risks because they were deprived of the additional ground forces for which commanders and planners asked.

We shall, of course, hear continued denials that anything ever was amiss from Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from Gen. Franks, the theater commander. They are loyal subordinates and, at least for the duration of the war, cannot and should not break ranks with the Secretary of Defense. They must present a unified front to our enemies.

But honest criticism from those outside the chain of command is another form of loyalty. It is the role of the retired officers whom Secretary Rumsfeld publicly despises to speak for those in uniform when they cannot speak for themselves. And to insist that our troops be given all the support they need.

One of the things that makes Don Rumsfeld so extraordinary is that he is one of the few cabinet secrataries in modern memory not to be captured by the bureaucacy he manages. Just like junior department heads at the Department of Agriculture, the military guys always want bigger budgets, more men, more equipment, more programs of every kind. Usually, no matter how strong-willed and talented the Department head, he gets a kind of Stockholm Syndrome and makes their causes his, rather than serving the president who appointed him. In fighting against wasteful and unnecessary weapons systems and trying to reorganize a 1980s (1970s?) structure, Mr. Rumsfeld was repeatedly confronted by officers who were seeking to serve themselves and their services rather than the overall goals of Defense. This is what bureaucrats do, and for all that we honor the men who
serve, the military is fundamentally a bureaucracy. No one could ever have given them all the troops and artillery and other goodies they'd have wanted before they began the Iraq campaign--and the active service folk who leaked stories saying they should have had more were being disloyal--someone had to say no; start the war. We are very lucky that one of the great bureaucratic infighters of the last four decades, and a man who's old enough to have no further political ambitions, was in the Secretary's seat.

MORE:
Rumsfeld and the Generals: In this week's mini-mutiny of the generals against Donald Rumsfeld, it was awfully tempting to side with the generals. (BILL KELLER, 4/05/03, NY Times)

[W]hen aggrieved officers and former officers suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld was mismanaging the war, it was a delicious story. But was it true?

Any serious verdict on the war must await its outcome, and even then the fog of postwar self-aggrandizing will take a long time to clear. But so far I think Mr. Rumsfeld has the high ground. Any shortcomings of the war plan seem to me much exaggerated, and the blame for them largely misplaced.

The indictment gleefully compiled in the press alleged that Mr. Rumsfeld had overruled his generals and sent them into battle a division or two short of a prudent force. Various motives are deduced for this: his oblivious haste to get the war started, his stubborn optimism about how easy victory would be, his enthusiasm to prove some egghead theories of modern warfare, his determination to show we could win "on the cheap."

The officers making these claims are all, understandably, either anonymous or retired. (The only commander named as one of the complainers, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, was the victim of a media stampede. General Wallace, who commands Army forces in Iraq, told The Times's Jim Dwyer that enemy tactics had been "a bit" different from what was war-gamed against beforehand. Most accounts lost the "a bit," making an obvious and innocuous remark sound like a defeatist whine.)

With a few levelheaded exceptions, analysts piled on, relishing the chance to bring the haughty defense secretary down a peg. The war plan was unfavorably compared with the overkill of Desert Storm, and blamed for troops' being susceptible to ambush and short of supplies.

By the end of the week, the gripes were overtaken by the impending siege of Baghdad, but they deserve further comment. What we were witnessing was, in fact, blowback from a bitter animosity that dates to the very beginning of this Bush administration. And it is about bigger things than the number of soldiers in Iraq. It is about who runs the military, and how to propel it into the modern age.

Mr. Rumsfeld arrived in Washington with a mission to speed-march the military into the information age. The new gospel was "transformation," and it meant a leaner fighting force that would be quicker to deploy, more agile in battle, capable of killing with greater accuracy from greater distances and more "networked."

The reform designs fell most heavily on the Army, which has a somewhat exaggerated reputation for being provincial and ponderous. One early draft
floated the possibility of cutting two of the army's 10 divisions to help pay for modernization. Mr. Rumsfeld compounded the hurt by bypassing the generals, trampling some careers and dispensing scorn.

"Rumsfeld is a takedown artist," says one general who knows him well. "First meeting, he insults you. You do that to an Army general, and he doesn't know what to do. He can't smart-off to the boss. So he swallows it, and hates it."

One striking irony of the current infighting is that many of the people cluck-clucking at Mr. Rumsfeld this week would--were we not engaged in a war they oppose--applaud him for standing up to the brass, and wish he had done so more successfully.

For in practice the generals and their allies in Congress have pretty much fought Mr. Rumsfeld to a standstill on his plans to reshape the military.

If he stays true to form, Mr. Keller's next column will be a scurilous attack on conservatives, the price he pays Howell Raines in order to write sensible ones like this. Nice how he admits that his, and the rest of the press's, instinctive reaction is to go after Rumsfeld, the easy partisan Democrat position.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 8:43 AM