Rumsfeld is not incompetant. He has a plan, and that plan is to transfer as much of the personal budget of DOD into the hands of General Dynamics, Boeing and United Defense Technologies. A little thing like the Global War on Terrorism isn't going to get in his way.
In the 1980s we started putting the force that was gutted by Vietnam and the neglect of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administraions back together. We built the most effective fighting force the world had ever seen. The generals who built that force were all young officers in Vietnam. They hung in there throug the bad years of the 1970s when the all volunteer military was going through it's growing pains.
Then in 1989 the Cold War ended. Bush I began making the plans to dissassemble the force and spend the so called Peace Dividend. The first Gulf War intervened and the drawdown was temorarily postponed. But starting in the last years of the Bush I administration we began the hard process of taking apart the finest force ever. The Clinton adminstration continued with Bush I's plans and generally neglected things like the Carter administration did.
Bush II campaigned on the promise to rebuild the military. "Help is on the way!" he proclaimed at campaign stops on military installations. Yet that help wasn't forthcoming once he got into office. Budget proposals continued to show cuts in the force. Help was coming all right, to the stockholders and CEOs of the American defense industry. But that's ok, tell a soldier you care about him and it goes a long way. He doesn't expect or demand much more then that.
September 11 2001 came, and the nation was plunged into a war of unknown duration against an ill defined enemy. So did the Bush II administration conduct a total mobilization and expand the forces to the size they needed to be to meet the global commitments of this war? No, that would have been going against the master plan. The plan that came from the think tanks, from the students of military history like William Lind and people in the Rand Corporation. Lind and many of these experts who were deciding the future of warfare had never worn a uniform. Not one day did they spend with the straps of a 90 pound rucksack digging into their shoulders while they trudged through the muck to an assault position at 0230 after they'd averaged 3 hours sleep a day for the past 10. These posers who were too good to wear their countries uniform and live a soldier's life decided in all their wisdom and verified with their computer simulations that were were entering the age of network centric warfare. Electrons on a CRT were to replace steel on target and men pulling reserves of strength and stamina from their guts as what would win battles.
Many of our finest warriors died in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan to prove that netcentric warfare worked. All those electrons and cathode ray tubes let the commanders watch from their tactical operations centers as our nation's finest fought and died on places like Robert's Ridge. Those electrons were unable to put steel on target in support of our warriors. And when it all shook out, nobody had the nerve to stand up and admit it was their decision to leave the artillery at Ft Campbell. Les Aspin at least had the decency to resign after Mogadishu.
Iraq was to be the perfect testing ground for that theory. A fifth rate army from a region that hadn't produced an effective army of it's own since Saladin during the Crusades. The soldiers who knew better were dismissed out of hand. The Chief of Staff of the Army was given the indignity of having his successor named a year before his scheduled retirement because he dared to offer an opposing view on how many troops would be necessary to win the war.
Fourth Generation warfare worked just as the computer models predicted. Of course the Iraqi army didn't put up much of a fight, so perhaps that wasn't a good test of the theory. But nature abhors a vacuum. You can't go in, take over a country (that if left to it's own devices would really be three countries) and then expect everything to be ok once you remove all it's government.
Now in March of 2006 we've got a ground force (Army and Marines) that is seriously overworked. We've broken the reserve components of the Army by mobilizing them for year tours, standing them down and turning around and repeating the process.
The proposed defense budget contains more personnel cuts. We have significantly reduced capability then we had in January of 2001 when Bush II took over. We have more dangerous times ahead. Our enemies grow bolder, it's no coincidence that Iran is ramping up it's nuclear program just now.
Jeff
