Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Bush administration's unrealistic war planning has increased the dangers facing the men and women on the ground in Iraq.
Apr 29, 2004 | The U.S. Army faces a gathering threat that is more dangerous to its long-run capability than Saddam Hussein ever was. That danger, according to military strategists, lies in a foreign and military policy that is stretching the force to the breaking point, leaving it unable to execute its mission. The latest assaults on U.S. forces in Fallujah and Najaf starkly illustrate the problems facing U.S. troops, who are still trying to maintain control over Iraq almost a year after President Bush declared major combat operations over. Military commanders on the ground in Iraq describe the situation they face as all bad choices.
Throughout his presidential campaign, candidate George W. Bush beat the drum against the Clinton administration for misusing and abusing the armed forces. "This administration wants things both ways: to command great forces, without supporting them, [and] to launch today's new causes with little thought of tomorrow's consequences," he declared in his first major national security speech, at the Citadel military academy in September 1999.
Bush was taking a swipe (without being specific) at Clinton administration forays into nation building and peacekeeping in Bosnia and Kosovo. In both cases, the United States organized large international coalitions of its allies, went in with overwhelming power, lost not a single U.S. serviceman or -woman and maintained big forces on the ground to prevent conflict and begin reconstruction. But, in retrospect, Bush's complaint seems to have more to do with scale than mission: The Clintonites were pikers compared with the Bushies when it comes to stretching the military.
Under the rubric of the war on terrorism, the U.S. armed forces are now conducting operations in more countries around the world than at any time since World War II, though in sheer numbers the current force of 10 active divisions is dwarfed by the 90 divisions of the earlier force. The Bush administration's policies have created unsustainable and dangerous conditions in the U.S. Army, according to military experts, retired officers and a growing number of elected officials from both parties. The administration's insistence on doing more with less has left the military unable to secure Iraq, triggering a ripple effect that threatens the morale of active and reserve members of the Army, retention, training schedules and, not incidentally, American lives. While some of the underlying issues predate this administration, they have been exacerbated by the decision to wage a war of choice in Iraq and critically bad judgments on how that war's aftermath would play out.
"What we're seeing is a repeat of the McNamara era," warned Paul Van Riper, a retired three-star Marine general who was in the corps long enough to remember that time. "We're seeing a leadership that is arrogant, is unwilling to listen to military advice. They thought they had the answer, [but] they fundamentally didn't understand war. It was war as they wanted it to be, not as it exists in the hard realm of reality."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was determined that Iraq would not be your father's (that is, Bush's father's) Gulf War. The U.S. and British march to Baghdad seemed the model of the kind of "transformation" that Rumsfeld had been advocating as the force of the future, with air dominance, ground speed and information superiority producing battlefield supremacy. And for a few weeks during the invasion last year, the Iraq war was as the Bush team wished it to be.
But if the plan of battle was long on style, the follow-on was short on substance. "The difficulties we face in Iraq now began more than a year ago, and they began because we have an arrogant, unprofessional, unschooled senior leadership in the Pentagon," Van Riper says. "They believed that modern technology and some of their very weak operating concepts and unrealistic expectations of what the Iraqi people would do [would] let them go in on the cheap with ground forces." He adds: "If you think I'm emotional about it, and I am, it's because soldiers and Marines are dying today because of their incompetence."
These problems were predictable and were in fact predicted. Three weeks before U.S. soldiers poured across the Iraq-Kuwait border, then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, a Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient in Vietnam, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that because of Iraq's size and ethnic makeup, any occupying force would require "on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers." Shinseki was speaking from experience, having commanded NATO forces in Bosnia from 1997 to 1999.
The Pentagon's civilian leadership responded with speed and force -- against Shinseki. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark." Having rejected Shinseki's estimate -- not his alone but the work of the Army's top planners -- Wolfowitz laid out a different scenario. Iraqis would greet allied forces as "liberators ... That will help us to keep requirements down." Rumsfeld gave a similar formulation to reporters: "The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark," he said.
