The man who is breaking the United States Army is being given more time in office to finish the job. Rumsfeld has to go before he completely destroys the United States Army.
That said; this isn't a republican or democratic problem. Both parties gleefully dismantled the US military in order to spend the so called peace dividend on domestic programs. Starting in 1990, the first Bush administration began planning to decrease the size of our military. All of the think tanks, both liberal and conservative were convinced that there would never be another large war after the fall of the Soviet Union. Wars were going to be short and swift. Right after the initial drawdown plans were published, Saddam invaded Kuwait. The cold war vintage Reagan military that Bush inherited performed superbly. But instead of learning the lessons of Gulf War 1 our strategic planners considered it an anomoly and moved right on down the road that was mapped out before Gulf war 1. The Clinton administration simply followed the Bush defense department's blueprint for the drawdown. Of course they added insult to injury by cutting funding for training and equipment. We spent defense money on programs like breast cancer research in those days. While the armored vehicles we still had, sat in their motor pools and soldiers did busy work around the barracks because there was little money to train with. Bases were closed and the real property sold or given away to local government entities. The main focus of a lot of those bases was to provide a place for mobilized troops to train before deployment. Suffice it to say that we sold off the troops and equipment we need to fight a war and along with it, the ability to rapidly expand our military to meet the needs of a national emergency.
That is the situation our defense establishment found itself in on 11 Sep 2001. Instead of believing it's own public statements about the world being fundamentally changed, the administration charged blindly down the road to transformation, the mythical state at which technology replaces soldiers and takes and holds ground. Emboldened by the spectacular success of this new doctrine against the Taliban, a military scarecly worth being considered a military, we plunged headlong into planning the next step, the liberation of Iraq. Rumsfeld ignored the advice of the CSA about the number of troops needed to liberate Iraq because that would not have validated the concept of transformation. The Iraqi military fell in a few weeks. The secretary of defense was overjoyed, because a concept that the think tanks said would defeat a determined force in a high intensity conflict managed to beat a fifth rate army that barely fought and an air force that refused to fly. The secretary told the president we were finished in Iraq, it was time to declare victory and move on to other things. There was just one problem with this, the enemy hadn't yet had his say.
Islamic radicals flooded into Iraq for the chance to kill Americans. The leaders of their movement knew that if we were allowed to succeed in Iraq, it would spell the end of their movement. Personal and economic freedom tend to cause tyrants to fall and radical movements to die.
The American forces left in Iraq were hard pressed to contol the borders to keep them out. Stockpiles of weapons and munitions were left unguarded because there were insufficient American forces or enough coalition or Iraqi forces to secure them.
Soldiers are can do type people. If an order comes down the chain of command they do it. So Rumsfeld can honestly tell the president that the commanders on the ground aren't asking for any more forces. Our system breeds leaders like this. Professionals don't usually speak out about what the civilian leadership in the Pentagon wants until after retirement. When Gen. Shinseki spoke out in a newspaper interview about the number of soldiers he thought the Iraqi war might require, he was immediately corrected by Rumsfeld. The secretary then took the unusual step of publically humiliating the General by announcing his replacement months before his term as Chief of Staff of the Army was over. Do you really think another flag officer will publically disagree with the secretary, even if he or she knows he's right?
So here we sit at the end of 2004. Things are going as well as can be expected in Iraq. End strength was a big issue during the presidential campaign. But the truth of the matter is, we have no way of rapidly expanding our forces to give us the troops we need to do the job right. A draft would not only be politically unacceptable, but would not give us the increased troop strength we need in time to make a difference. We no longer have the facilities to accept the new soldier, nor do we have the NCOs to train them or the officers and NCOs to cadre the new units. Our industrial base is not capable of producing the rifles, radios, trucks and hundreds of other items we would need to equip our forces.
This brings us to the problem with the Guard being unable to meet it's recruiting goals. The administration has followed the Clinton defense department model of mobilizing units for a period of time and then standing them down. This was already starting to take it's toll in some units before 9-11. What they should have done, was a general mobilization after 9-11, expanded the Army to a reasonable size for the demands they were about to place on it and prosecuted the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Instead they chose to do things piecemeal. During the buildup for the Iraq war units were alerted and then stood down, and then alerted again. This cycle went on continually. Naturally this has quite an effect on the citizen soldiers in the Guard and Reserve. Imagine getting alerted, going through all the processes to change your life from civilan centric to military, then told to stand down, then alerted again. Imagine this happening 3 times in a year. This kind of BS not only affects the soldier and his/her family, but the employer as well. Large corporations can often absorb this turmoil with their employees and even score PR points by making a big show of their support for the soldiers. The problem is, that most guardsmen don't work for large corporations, they work in small businesses, or in public service. It's harder for a businessman who employs 10 people to deal with this turmoil. He still has to keep the business running. He has to hire and then train a replacement for the soldier, then lay off the replacement when the soldier returns from deployment, then start the process again wwhen the soldier is called up again. Think about the police chief who still has to cover shifts 24-7.
We aren't doing our reservists any favors by calling them up for a period, sending them home for a few months, then doing it again. It would be better to expand the Army to the size it needs to be, by calling up the reserves and guard and using them to cadre new units, like we did in 1940.
The Army is too small. There isn't an easy way to expand it any more. We've broken the Guard and Reserve and if we aren't careful we will break the Army....All so we can prove transformation works and the Rand Corporation is right.....
Jeff
. I've found that method works best