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Gold9472
03-30-2006, 09:58 AM
Repairing Rumsfeld's Damage

http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,92653,00.html

(Gold9472: It's not rocket science. You can't have a war that "won't end in our lifetimes" without having a draft.)

Joe Galloway | March 30, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Anyone else might be embarrassed when not one but two detailed studies of the way he's doing business conclude that his plans and assumptions are totally wrong, but not Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

A recent Rand Corp. study commissioned by the Pentagon of the U.S. Army in this time of war concluded that without an increase in manpower the Army "simply cannot sustain the force levels needed to break the back of the insurgent movement" in Iraq.

Yet another study, conducted by the Defense Department's own Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded that the Army's Transformation program, intended to add combat brigades without boosting manpower, cuts the number of maneuver battalions in those brigades while adding more headquarters troops.

"The essence of land power is resident in the maneuver battalions that occupy terrain, control populations and fight battles, not in headquarters and enablers," the IDA study said. "Yet the Army plan reduces the number of maneuver battalions by 20 percent below the number available in 2003, while increasing headquarters by 11.5 percent."

The IDA study noted that under the Army plan, now well under way, the number of infantry battalions in infantry brigades and the number of armor battalions in armor brigades had been cut from three to two.

Army spokesmen counter that each reorganized brigade also has been given a combat-capable reconnaissance squadron.

They also argue that improved information technology and the use of "joint capabilities," i.e. Air Force bombing, will make up for any reduction in manpower. This is a siren song that's heard nearly as often as "off we go into the wild blue yonder" but seldom proved satisfactory to those mired in the mud and blood on a battlefield.

In defense of the added manpower in brigade headquarters, the additions are actually quite useful ones: each transformed brigade now owns its own artillery, military police, engineers and logistics troops.

However, the need to increase Army manpower -- evident in the fact that many soldiers are serving their third yearlong deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan while junior officers are bailing out or finding themselves in divorce court -- is something that Rumsfeld has steadfastly rejected for cost reasons. Army leaders also reject it because they want to spend the money on a costly Future Combat System for which the technology has yet to be developed.

In a Pentagon where Rumsfeld thought he could storm Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein with fewer than 50,000 troops -- with no thought of what would happen after Baghdad fell -- perhaps all of this makes sense of a sort. Yes. Nonsense.

Rumsfeld's response: "I just can't imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they're close to breaking. The people writing these things don't have any more insight than the other people around here do."

If that's so, then why did he hire them to study the situations? "It's a useful thing to invite people to make comments and critiques and to opine on this and opine on that," he told questioners at one news briefing.

From the beginning of his current tour as defense secretary, Rumsfeld has shown an amazing ability to hear only advice that agrees with him. Contrary advice, especially from a uniformed expert in the subject of combat power, is met with swift retribution. Telling the truth in Rumsfeld's Pentagon will get you in trouble quicker than a tour of duty in Iraq's Triangle of Death.

It's of interest that when budget time came around this year Rumsfeld told the service chiefs that they could have manpower increases or money for weapons systems. One or the other, but not both. The service chiefs, to a man, opted for money to throw at defense contractors for weapons systems that were designed 20 or 30 years ago for the Cold War, or that haven't been designed at all.

Then the chiefs were informed that they'd also have to swallow decreases in manpower over the next five years.

Rumsfeld's arrogance and incompetence have done unprecedented damage to the military in a time of peril that won't end when he leaves town. Those who've lived long enough may recall that it took a long, difficult decade and more to repair the damage that was done to our military during another unpopular war in Vietnam.

Fixing everything that Donald Rumsfeld has broken may take even longer.