[A-List] US military: knives out for Rumsfeld

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Knives come out for Rumsfeld as the generals fight back

Interfering style blamed for army setbacks

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian

The uniformed officers who inhabit the Pentagon's five concentric rings of
corridors generally do not appreciate civilians interfering with their
plans. Military logistics may look boring, one said, but when the shooting
starts, it saves lives.

The last time there was this level of civilian micromanagement was 40 years
ago when Robert McNamara and his Kennedy-era whizz kids were not content to
lay down general policy. They decided they knew better than the generals
what forces would be needed to take on the Vietcong. More than any other
single politician, arguably including Lyndon Johnson, McNamara took the
blame for the Vietnam disaster.

Donald Rumsfeld has become the Iraq conflict's McNamara. His second-guessing
of the deployment orders in the months before the fighting started is being
blamed by retired and serving officers alike for the thinly protected
300-mile supply lines on which US troops are now depending.

Their message is clear. Whatever happens now, this has become "Rumsfeld's
war". If Saddam Hussein's regime suddenly collapses, his superstar status
from the Afghan war, when he proved the doubters wrong, will only be
enhanced. If it slides into a gruelling slog, as coalition casualties climb
into the hundreds, there is no doubt he will take the blame.

Fiercely worded criticisms of the 70-year-old defence secretary have been
seeping to the surface with increasing frequency through the press in the
past week as the uniforms vent their frustration.

The latest broadside comes in today's New Yorker, in which unnamed former
and acting officers are quoted complaining about Mr Rumsfeld's interfering
ways.

They accuse him of fiddling with the "tip-fiddle", the time-phased forces
deployment list (TPFDL), a thick directory-sized computer printout which
determines which military unit goes where, how it gets there, and when. It
is the "software" that ensures the military machine rolls along smoothly.

In normal circumstances, the tip-fiddle is put together by military planners
in the Pentagon and in General Tommy Franks' central command, who have spent
their whole lives working on logistics. But this time Mr Rumsfeld went
through Operation Plan 1003, the blueprint for invading Iraq, page by page.
The result, according to the critics, was equivalent to having enthusiastic
amateurs tinker with your car - it did not fix the problem but made it
worse.

"He thought he knew better," one senior planner told the New Yorker. "He was
the decision-maker at every turn."

Because there are not enough troops to guard the lines of supply properly,
the frontline units are being slowed down and even halted by Iraqi guerrilla
attacks on their routes back to Kuwait. They are also facing exhaustion and
the next available reinforcements will not arrive until late April.

The Pentagon let it be known late last week that more than 100,000 troops
were on the way. But these troops had been given their deployment orders
weeks earlier. The point was not that they were coming, the military critics
say, but that they were coming so late.

Yesteray, under the most intense media pressure since the war began, Mr
Rumsfeld denied the accusations of meddling and micromanagement.

"The planners are in the central command," he insisted. "They come up with
their proposals and I think you'll find that if you ask anyone who's been
involved in the process from the central command that every single thing
they've requested has in fact happened."

But the Guardian has learned that the defence secretary was instrumental in
holding up deployment orders for about 36,000 troops in the Texas-based 1st
Cavalry Division and the German-based 1st Armoured Division, insistent that
such heavy units were unnecessary for the more agile warfare of the 21st
century.

Blamed
"There's nobody there who wouldn't rather have an armoured cavalry regiment
with them," a senior Pentagon official conceded on Friday.

The delay in the arrival of another division, the 4th Infantry, was caused
principally by Turkey's refusal to allow them to drive across its territory
on the way into battle. But Mr Rumsfeld and the White House are being blamed
for wasting valuable weeks when the division's tanks floated in ships in the
eastern Mediterranean, in the belief Ankara would change its mind. Then when
Gen Franks wanted to halt the offensive until the 4th Infantry could be
diverted to Kuwait, Mr Rumsfeld reportedly overruled him.

Furthermore, there are signs that the Pentagon's political leadership is
still trying to orchestrate the tempo of operations, putting pressure on
field commanders to keep up the pace of the advance on Iraq, rather than
wait for the 4th Infantry to arrive. The generals are fighting back.

"Why be in a hurry to make a mistake," a senior defence official told the
Guardian.

Back in January, when such attention to detail still looked like a virtue,
Time magazine published a largely admiring cover story entitled "Rumsfeld's
Blueprint for War" which begins with a description of him standing at his
lectern-like desk, reviewing one of the troop deployment orders, No 177.

"Pentagon officials say orders such as No 177 are normally reviewed
thoroughly in advance and fly across a defence chief's desk. But with every
step America takes toward war with Iraq, which could be as little as a month
off, Rumsfeld is doing things his own meticulous way," Time reported.

"Over the past few weeks, he has been holding up deployment papers at the
last minute, demanding answers and explanations about which units are going
where, why."

The defence secretary may come to regret providing that particular insight
into his working day, particularly now that he is insisting the war plans do
not bear his fingerprints.

Yet the allegations against him go much further than holding up troop
deployments. He is also charged with putting too much faith in the potency
of air power, and its much-vaunted "shock and awe".

"While I think it might have worked very well against Belgium, they forgot
to take into account the enemy, which is something no military plan should
do," argued Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired army intelligence officer who is
now a prominent Rumsfeld critic.

"Saddam Hussein, his sons and their key paladins, the people who make that
regime run, are never going to surrender - I mean, the hardcore people -
because they know if they surrender they're not going to exile in the south
of France."

The wily and thoughtful defence secretary is also charged with ignoring one
of Machiavelli's warnings - "How dangerous it is to believe exiles". While
US intelligence was apprehensive about the strength of President Saddam's
army and his willingness to resort to unconventional methods, Mr Rumsfeld
and his aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, put more weight on the
assessments of the opposition Iraqi National Congress and its exiled leader,
Ahmed Chalabi, who insisted that even the Republican Guard divisions were
rotten to the core and were ripe for defection. So far, those predictions
have not been borne out.

The top Pentagon leadership also seemed to have ignored the worrying signs
produced by its own wargames. In the exercise known as Millennium Challenge
last year, a retired marine general, Paul Van Riper, acting the part of a
rogue Middle Eastern military leader, inflicted huge losses on a US force by
using guerrilla and suicide tactics very much like those being witnessed now
in Iraq. He was so successful the wargame had to be stopped, and the old
general was instructed to play "by the rules". He pulled out of the exercise
in protest.

The actual plan for the invasion of Iraq assumed that President Saddam would
have learned from the last Gulf war, but it assumed he would have drawn
different conclusions. It was thought he would draw all his best men back to
Baghdad, not send them out on suicide missions to the provinces, using
tactics last seen in Somalia in 1993, the site of the US military's last
major disaster.

A Pentagon official close to Mr Rumsfeld's inner circle bristled at the
comparison. "In Somalia, we changed the mission halfway through. Here, we
went in with a mission, to get WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and take
down the regime," he said.

Mr Rumsfeld is the only US defence secretary to have served in the office
twice - the first time as the youngest in Pentagon history, the second time
as the oldest. This is more than a historical curiosity. It is also a key to
his attitude and his management style.

When he was Gerald Ford's defence secretary, at the age of 43, he felt his
authority and his plans to reform the department were ignored by generals
and admirals, who knew they would be in their jobs long after he was gone.
They were right, he was swept out of the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter won
power in 1976.

It is clear he is determined that this time, things will be different, but
his first attempts at reform did not go well. He brought a veteran radical
reformer, Andrew Marshall, out of obscurity and gave him full authority to
remake the armed services, pursuing what was once called the "revolution in
military affairs" and is now more concisely known as "transformation".

The armed services would be transformed from their ponderous cold war
formations into lighter, faster integrated units that would use overwhelming
technological superiority to bring victory without a big "footprint", the
sheer numbers of troops and armour on the ground.

The admirals would have to give up their belief in the primacy of aircraft
carriers, the air force would have to rethink its vast fleet of heavy
bombers, and the army would have to give up its faith in the power of the
heavy mechanised divisions.

Gen Franks' first version of Plan 1003, delivered to the Pentagon more than
a year ago, called for four of these divisions to play a central role - the
3rd and 4th Infantry, the 1st Cavalry and the 1st Armoured. Mr Rumsfeld sent
the plan back to the central command HQ in Florida, ordering the ground
forces to be cut.

The defence secretary and his advisers originally argued that only
70,000-80,000 soldiers would be needed, including just a couple of army
brigades. Gen Franks protested and the final plan was a compromise, using
two heavy divisions, the 3rd and 4th Infantry. The Turkish refusal to play
host halved that force again.

"No secretary of defence at least since Robert McNamara has made himself so
hated by the people in uniform, because he treats them absolutely
arrogantly, and General Franks begged for more troops," Col Peters said.

Mr Rumsfeld's defenders point out that the ability to go to war even when a
major element of the strategy, the northern front, collapsed, showed that a
new flexibility in military thinking was beginning to take hold.
Transformation was being forced on the forces by circumstance.

Rubbish, said a senior Pentagon official who talked to the Guardian.

"I don't see anything transformational about it. This is mid-intensity,
high-tempo combat," he said. In other words, the army and marines are
fighting the way they did in the second world war and Vietnam, and taking
losses. If the army has its way, when this war is over, Mr Rumsfeld's career
will join the casualty list.