Ruminations With Rummy

In the May/June 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld published a very interesting essay called "Transforming the Military" (subscription required). His central thesis was that ground wars involving the United States had largely become a thing of the past and that America could rely on technology to win its wars, primarily from the air.

In the years after annoyances like Bosnia and Kosovo, it was hard to disagree. Between the end of the Vietnam War in 1973 and the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, there were probably more American ground troops killed by "friendly fire" than there were by hostile action. That was particularly true in Grenada and Panama, which were actions so comical that they should hardly be described as wars.

Moreover, the United States hadn't fought a significant ground war in over thirty years at that point. Even the 1991 Gulf War, which involved 500,000 troops, was mostly an air war that involved five weeks of extensive bombing. The ground operations, which lasted a mere 100 hours, was mostly an exercise in mopping up and disarming retreating Iraqi personnel.

What Secretary Rumsfeld proposed was what became known as a "light footprint". Under this theory of war, the United States would go in, defeat a defined enemy and withdrawal. It explicitly rejected occupation and nation building, leaving such things to the organizations such as the United Nations.

It was under Rumsfeld's "light footprint" theory that the Weinberger - Powell Doctrine was abandoned by the United States. That doctrine simply stated that war is undesirable and should only be pursed as a last resort and with such overwhelming force that operations are ended quickly and successfully. You'll notice that the Reagan and first Bush administrations very rarely resorted to military force, which couldn't be said of Presidents Clinton and Bush 43.

If "Transforming the Military" had been published in the spring of 2001, as opposed to a year later, it would have been a perfectly acceptable premise. It would have massively reduced the expense, redundancy and waste of the American way of war. Prior to 9/11, the United States usually confronted small state actors, with a military and infrastructure that could be liquidated easily with high-tech air power.

That stopped being true in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead the United States began warring with large insurgencies as it engaged in nation building exercises. As we have seen, that requires a significant footprint, much larger than the one America placed in either country.

Air power is almost counterproductive in battling an insurgency, as the U.S should have learned in Vietnam. Bombing insurgencies almost always has the effect of killing civilians, which tends to grow the insurgency. People, it has been said, react badly to having their friends and families killed by foreigners.

But Rumsfeld refused to abandon the light footprint doctrine, even as evidence abounded in Iraq that it was a deadly failure. It was only after his resignation in December 2006 that the much ballyhooed "surge" (which I have other problems with) was implemented. That failure is something that Donald Rumsfeld should wear to his grave.

Of course, he won't do that willingly or easily. He has now resorted to the oldest tool in politics, the self-justifying memoir. In the soon-to be published Known and Unknown, Secretary Rumsfeld refuses to accept responsibility for anything.

His biggest mistake, Mr. Rumsfeld writes, was in not forcing Mr. Bush to accept his offers to resign after the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American military jailers came to light in early 2004. Mr. Rumsfeld insists that the abuses were the actions of rogue soldiers and that they did not reflect any approved policies, but nevertheless he offered to step down.

“Abu Ghraib and its follow-on effects, including the continued drum-beat of ‘torture’ maintained by partisan critics of the war and the president, became a damaging distraction,” Mr. Rumsfeld writes. “More than anything else I have failed to do, and even amid my pride in the many important things we did accomplish, I regret that I did not leave at that point.”

Poor Rummy! Abu Ghraib wasn't his fault, you see, even though he's ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces, particularly overseas, but he offered to fall on his sword anyway.

By the way, the outrage over Abu Ghraib went far beyond the "partisan critics of the war and the president." It was almost universal in the international community. Even the senior uniform military now admit that it set back America's reputation in the Muslim world back by years. Moreover, it further fuelled the insurgency and gained for it important public support.

But now we get to the granddaddy of all half-truths.

Mr. Rumsfeld denies that he ever rejected requests from his commanders for more troops to invade Iraq. In hindsight, he concedes that additional forces might have prevented the post-invasion looting in Baghdad, which preceded the far more dangerous and deadly insurgency.

While some military officers complained privately of not having sufficient forces, and some of those anonymous comments ended up in news reports, Mr. Rumsfeld writes that he never received a formal request from commanders for an increase in forces for the 2003 invasion, although he did sign orders for an increase of 20,000 troops for the January 2005 elections.

To understand exactly what happened, you need to understand Rumsfeld's reputation going back to his days in the Ford Administration.

As Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld was known as one of the greatest bureaucratic infighters in Washington's storied history. Henry Kissinger, himself not noted for his modesty, once said that Rumsfeld was "the only person I ever lost a turf battle to."

When it became clear that Nelson Rockefeller couldn't survive as Ford's vice-president, Don had managed to convince himself that he should be nominated in 1976, which would position him perfectly for the presidential nomination in 1980. Rumsfeld saw as his chief competitor one George Herbert Walker Bush, who was then Gerald Ford's envoy to China. Rummy convinced Ford to name Bush Director of Central Intelligence, which politically neutralized him, and to have himself made Secretary of Defense for the first time. Almost no one is better at palace politics than Don Rumsfeld as Bob Hartmann's incredible and aptly-named book Palace Politics made clear.

Rumsfeld brought those skills with him when he returned to the Pentagon in 2001. When he says that he never "rejected requests from his commanders for more troops", he's technically not lying. This is because the secretary had created a climate among the senior uniform military where they knew not to ask in the first place. As Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq lays out, Rumsfeld cut division and brigade sizes for the invasion as they were being proposed, further making clear that the issue was not up for debate. Rummy couldn't then refuse troops requests because he made sure that they would never be made in the first place.

That no flag officer resigned in protest over what they had to know was a debacle in the making speaks ill of them as a class, but the responsibility ultimately belongs with Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush.

While describing Mr. Bush as “a far more formidable president than his popular image,” Mr. Rumsfeld, who spent time as a corporate chief executive, reveals his frustration with the president’s management style. Meetings of the National Security Council, even with Mr. Bush presiding, he said, too often ended without precise objectives for the way ahead or decisions on how to proceed to reach those goals.

He faults in part Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state, and his top subordinates are criticized for interagency feuding.

This is score-settling at it's finest. It's also misleading to the point of being fantasy. It has been reported that Rumsfeld refused to attend NSC meetings chaired by Rice and wouldn't share documents with her, saying that he served the president directly in the chain of command. Bob Woodward also revealed in The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 that, as Powell's successor at the State Department, Rice was instrumental in Rumsfeld's eventual firing after the '06 elections.

As for Colin Powell, he knew more about the military and its requirements than did Rumsfeld and he was far more conservative about how military power should be applied, as his tenure in the Reagan,Bush 41 and early Clinton administrations show.

Historically, there was very little in the way of "interagency feuding" in the Bush White House. this is because Rumsfeld's pupil from the Nixon and Ford years, Dick Cheney, was the most influential vice president in American history. If there was a conflict with Rice or Powell, Rumsfeld went to Cheney, who persuaded Bush to give DOD whatever it wanted. That happened repeatedly and it was only reversed after Cheney was marginalized somewhat during Bush's second term. Unfortunately, Iraq was an unmitigated disaster by then, Afghanistan was headed in the same direction and Bush was politically ruined to the point of near irrelevance.

Don't get me wrong, Known and Uknown is probably going to be a fascinating book and I have every intention of reading it. But understanding some recent history is important if you intend to actually learn anything from it.