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Notebook

Why I’m glad Rumsfield is gone

November 9th, 2006 by Double Tap

I promised the other day that I would discuss my real reaction to the Rumsfield resignation and what I thought about it. Up until now, I have avoided saying anything critical of the former Secretary of Defense, because military protocol prevented me, as an active member of the armed services, from criticizing my superiors - military or civilian. Now that he is no longer SECDEF, I am no longer bound by that requirement.

I’ve had my doubts and concerns about Donald Rumsfield, starting not long after he took office. It really began for me with the cancellation of the Crusader howitzer program in 2002. The Crusader was designed to replace the old and obsolete M109A6 and M109A5 that were still in the Army’s inventory. The M109 system has been around, in various forms, since the Vietnam War. Many other cannon artillery systems in the world are far superior in their fire control, range, and automated loading. The Crusader would have trumped all of those systems.

The reason for the cancellation was that the Crusader was too heavy (48 tons, but two can still be carried by a C-17) and did not meet Rumsfield’s vision of a lighter, more mobile force. While I can appreciate leveraging technology to make Army weaponry easier to move around the world to fight global conflicts, I question pushing for “light” in place of “effective”. Light is great when you are fighting insurgents with limited arms - but it definitely falls into the “bad” category when you are fighting countries with large conventional armies - like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the like.

Another “light” system that Rumsfield pushed, on the way to his ultimate Future Combat System, is the Stryker. Stryker is a 6-wheeled armored personnel carrier which is destined to have a variety of weapons packages including mortar carrier, tank cannon, anti-tank missile carrier, and simple personnel carrier. The thinking here is that the Stryker is an “interim” system until the FCS can come on-line sometime around 2009.

Now, the Stryker is a pretty good personnel carrier. It’s far superior to the HMMWV for carrying weapons and personnel and it is very fast and relatively quiet. You can mount all sorts of weapons systems on it, as evidenced by the mounting a tank gun turret. But (and this is a very big “but”), it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. First, it was supposed to be light enough to be carried by a C-130 (as are all the FCS systems). While it is true that it can be, that’s only in a stripped-down state. Once you start adding in all the additional systems that make it actually useful, it becomes too heavy and bulky to fit into that aircraft. So yes, you can fly it to a hot-spot in a C-130 - but then you have to put it all together to make it actually useful.

Plus, it has very limited armor. Check out the photo below. You’ll see a Stryker with a “bird cage” mounted all around it. That’s to stop RPG rockets from exploding against the vehicles’ thin armor. The Stryker can not stand up to anti-tank missiles or tank rounds. Yet, we are going to put these systems up against a conventional army? Insurgents, maybe; the North Korea horde - suicide.

I was involved in two different Army exercises that were designed to test the new Stryker brigade concepts. In both cases - a Fort Irwin National Training Center rotation and a I Corps Warfighter exercise, the Stryker brigade got its ass handed to it by a conventional OPFOR army - which were using obsolete weapons systems. Bottom line - Strykers can’t stand up to modern tanks and mechanized infantry, which is something the Chinese and North Koreans have in great abundance.

Then, there was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the time, I thought we were doing it on the cheap, with not nearly the sufficient number of forces for the job. I think history has proven that out. Yes, with our superior technology, we were able to dissect Saddam’s poorly trained, led, and equipped army. But we didn’t have nearly the forces on-hand to actually occupy the country, and we still don’t.

Two senior Army officials fought Rumsfield’s decisions regarding the Crusader and the number of forces needed to deal with Iraq, and lost their jobs in the process. The first was GEN Shinseki. From a New York Times article, dated 28 FEB 2003:

“The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers — are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.” He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.

A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. “He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment,” Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

Shinseki had supported the Crusader system, while Rumsfield opposed it. Now, he was contradicting the SECDEF on the number of troops that would be needed to deal with Iraq. He also opposed Rumsfield’s vision to reduce the size of the Army. Shinseki’s retirement was coming up, but Rumsfield apparently couldn’t wait to announce his successor - an unusual move that basically told all of us in the Army that he didn’t care for the Chief of Staff very much. Of course, history has proven that Shinseki was right about the number of soldiers required to prosecute the war. Time will only tell if he was also right about the Crusader program.

Another victim of Rumsfield was Secretary of the Army Thomas White. White was criticized early for his associations with Enron, but I believe the issues that really got him in hot water with Rumsfield was his support, along with Shinseki, for the Crusader program and his backing of the Chief of State of the Army in his projections for the numbers of troops required to prosecute the Iraq War. White was put to pasture on 25 APR 03.

Despite what many of said about the armor on vehicles at the start of the war, I don’t blame Rumsfield for that. The army hasn’t armored its troop carrying trucks for FOREVER. The whole IED phenomenon didn’t start until this war - and was the impetus for getting vehicles armored. I do blame Rumsfield for being slow on the uptake and being forced into improving the armoring of vehicles and personnel by the howls of troops, families or troops, Congress and the media. It takes awhile to get all of those systems into the inventory, and the army as an institution has greatly changed its way of thinking regarding armor for vehicles. Now, judging from some new MTOEs I’ve seen, armored trucks, which were once a rarity, have now been added to all sorts of units.

Is it time for Rumsfield to go? Yes. I, and many soldiers like me, think he should have been gone long ago. I fear the army I am in now is no longer capable of waging conventional warfare against an enemy of any real strength. Over the last four years, we’ve become pretty good at dealing with insurgency. However, we’ve been turning nearly all of our soldiers - no matter what their original job description - into infantrymen and military policemen trained only to deal with an insurgency. Relevant warfighting skills - like knowing how to fire and maintain your howitzer or tank - are being lost as soldiers trained to fight a conventional war are being trained to do everything but that.

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