Rumsfeld's Unfinished Plans
He talked about 'transforming' the military, but it didn't turn out that way
A year ago, President Bush hosted a meeting with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. The president had some questions about how, exactly, they were faring with efforts to revolutionize the military's way of planning and fighting-known in military parlance as transformation.
This far-reaching change toward a smaller, more high-tech force was to be a cornerstone of Rumsfeld's legacy, and he had a vested interest in the answer. But it wasn't a good one. Before Rumsfeld had a chance to respond, Pace gave the president his score card: an 8 (out of 10) for shifting the military's culture and thinking, but only a 4 for actually making the changes happen. Startled, Rumsfeld asked Pace to write a memo explaining what he meant, according to defense officials-and he asked his own senior civilian team to do the same. But Pace's answer was hardly news to many within the Pentagon, who privately confessed that they considered Pace's score to be, if anything, overly charitable. Today, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates has yet to say much about transformation. It's been largely pushed to the background by the immediate needs to, if anything, expand the military-a move consistently resisted by Rumsfeld.
Those needs were brought into sharp relief last week when, amid the political byplay over the defense budget, the Pentagon announced that the 4th Infantry Division would return to Iraq just 7
Back in 1999, these were just the sort of problems that presidential candidate Bush promised to fix in an address at the Citadel that is widely considered to be the road map for his military-transformation plans. He lauded "men and women who love their country more than their comfort" but lamented a military in which "even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments ... shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness." He took a swipe at the military missions of the Clinton years. "We will not be permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties," he said. "This is not our strength or our calling."
As president, he turned to Rumsfeld to press transformation changes on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Though Rumsfeld had long served on commissions involving space and missile defense, "he came to the job being not much engaged in this transformation debate," says Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments President Andrew Krepinevich, who served in a key Pentagon planning office in the 1990s. The Pentagon struggled to define what, for instance, transforming the military meant-no small feat. Rumsfeld often asked, "Well, what does it mean to you?" recalls Krepinevich. "I got the impression he was groping on this issue."
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."
One of the big obstacles throughout Rumsfeld's tenure would remain the legendary Pentagon bureaucracy. Despite Rumsfeld's reputation as a hard-charging CEO bound to rein in spending on pricey (and politically popular) Cold War-era weapons and programs, "no big programs got canceled during his tenure," says Krepinevich. "He could be acerbic and brutal, but in terms of translating that into action, that didn't happen." Andrew Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy under Rumsfeld, says that "concepts, rather than things" were what he was most interested in. "So if you're looking for, did he kill one of the major aircraft programs, well, his notion of transformation wasn't about the big systems. He was very keen on changing thinking and culture."
To that end, Rumsfeld streamlined notoriously slow systems within Pentagon for getting new equipment out into the field. He sought, too, to move bases out of "old" Europe and revamp a command structure and imbue it with "more creative tension," adds Hoehn. Though many systems he championed, like national missile defense, were inherited, Rumsfeld made great strides expanding budgets for research and development, as well as pushing for more easily deployable systems like the Stryker brigades for the Army and agile combat ships for the Navy, says Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon. Special operations forces grew substantially under his tenure, as did the ability to destroy targets with the deployment of thousands of global positioning system-guided all-weather bombs.
But his legacy will be Iraq, a war that has derailed his transformation plans even as it continues to shatter many of the assumptions upon which its programs were built. "He had meant his legacy to be transformation of the military and preparation for future combat," says Kagan. "His assumption was that Iraq was going to be a brief excursion and not the defining struggle of our time. It's not at all what he wanted or intended to be judged by," he adds. "But it is what he will be judged by in the end."
This story appears in the April 16, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.