Rumsfeld's Unfinished Plans
He talked about 'transforming' the military, but it didn't turn out that way
Rumsfeld's conception of the answer was becoming clear by January 2002, when he gave a speech at National Defense University on the topic of transformation. He was clearly taken with the image of the light and agile Special Forces sent into Afghanistan. "They sported beards and traditional scarves," he said. They rode "horses that had been trained to run into machine-gun fire, atop saddles that had been fashioned from wood." And they used pack mules to carry high-tech equipment and small global positioning devices to help direct precision-guided bombs.
But while Rumsfeld saw the war in Afghanistan as vindication of transformation's viability, there is a growing body of evidence that those lessons turned out to be not only wrong for Iraq but oversold for Afghanistan as well, says Frederick Kagan, a leading neoconservative advocate for the "surge" in Iraq and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy. "You can destroy the enemy's ability to fight and not set the preconditions for political success-and that has been a key failure of transformation policy."
If, for example, eliminating al Qaeda was the aim in Afghanistan, there should have been more U.S. troops there initially, says Kagan. "If we could have one do-over, I would have liked to see a couple of brigades or Marine regiments on the ground," he adds. "Osama bin Laden did us the favor of actually deploying his terrorists as conventional ground force units. I believe we would have killed a lot more al Qaeda and been in a better position to control how the government was formed."
Indeed, there is some consensus that one of the chief shortcomings of transformation has been the failure to think through the on-the-ground implications of military action. Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, former commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, tasked with honing the corps's fighting abilities, believes that some of the current problems in Iraq were foreshadowed in 2002, during a large-scale war games exercise. He had been invited to head up the enemy, or red team, forces to help test key transformation concepts with futuristic names like net-centric warfare and effects-based operations. The problem was that the veteran war gamer quickly overwhelmed America's high-tech blue team forces, using, for example, motorcycles and mosques to send messages so transmissions couldn't be intercepted by the other side's communications systems.
War games. As blue team forces continued to take a beating, Van Riper was told that he had to play by rules-and that those rules did not include insurgency tactics. He promptly resigned from the game. "There were lessons that we could have used," he tells U.S. News. "In every case when the blue team seemed to be winning, we went to an insurgency. That's the default move when you see that you're going to lose in a high-tech fight." That lesson "was just passed over," he says. "Except for this claim that effects-based operations were the wave of the future, very little came out of that game-just unsupported assertions." And that has long been a glaring gap in transformation, adds Kagan. "The whole problem is when you start to see war as a technical exercise and you stop seeing it as a fundamentally political activity, you lose sight of the obstacles that you're going to face."
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