The uniformed officers who inhabit the Pentagon’s five concentric rings of corridors generally do not appreciate civilians interfering with their plans. Military logistics may look boring, one said, but when the shooting starts, it saves lives.
The last time there was this level of civilian micromanagement was 40 years ago when Robert McNamara and his Kennedy-era whizz kids were not content to lay down general policy. They decided they knew better than the generals what forces would be needed to take on the Vietcong. More than any other single politician, McNamara took the blame for the Vietnam disaster.
United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has become the Iraq conflict’s McNamara. His second-guessing of the deployment orders in the months before the fighting started is being blamed by retired and serving officers alike for the thinly protected 300-mile supply lines on which US troops are now depending.
Their message is clear. Whatever happens now, this has become ”Rumsfeld’s war”. If Saddam Hussein’s regime suddenly collapses, his superstar status from the Afghan war will only be enhanced. If it slides into a gruelling slog as coalition casualties climb into the hundreds, there is no doubt he will take the blame.
Fiercely worded criticisms of the 70-year-old have been seeping to the surface with increasing frequency through the press in the past week as the uniforms vent their frustration.
The latest broadside comes in The New Yorker, in which unnamed former and acting officers are quoted complaining about Rumsfeld’s interfering ways. They accuse him of fiddling with the ”tip-fiddle”, the time-phased forces deployment list, a thick computer printout that determines which military unit goes where, how
it gets there, and when. It is the ”software” that ensures the military
machine rolls along smoothly.
In normal circumstances the tip-fiddle is put together by military planners in the Pentagon and in General Tommy Franks’s central command, who have spent their whole lives working on logistics. But this time Rumsfeld went through Operation Plan 1003, the blueprint for invading Iraq, page by page. The result, according to the critics, was equivalent to having enthusiastic amateurs tinker with your car.
As there are not enough troops to guard the lines of supply properly, the front-line units are being slowed down and even halted by Iraqi guerrilla attacks. They are also facing exhaustion and the next available reinforcements will not arrive until late April.
The Pentagon let it be known last week that more than 100 000 troops were on the way. But these troops had been given their deployment orders weeks earlier. The point was not that they were coming, the military critics say, but that they were coming so late.
Rumsfeld has denied the accusations of meddling and micromanagement. ”The planners are in the central command,” he insisted. ”They come up with their proposals and I think you’ll find that if you ask anyone who’s been involved in the process from the central command that every single thing they’ve requested has in fact happened.”
But The Guardian has learned that the defence secretary was instrumental in holding up deployment orders for about 36 000 troops in the Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division and the German-based 1st Armoured Division, insistent that such heavy units were unnecessary for the more agile warfare of the 21st century.
The delay in the arrival of another division, the 4th Infantry, was caused principally by Turkey’s refusal to allow them to drive across its territory on the way into battle.
But Rumsfeld and the White House are being blamed for wasting valuable weeks while the division’s tanks floated in ships in the eastern Mediterranean, in the belief Ankara would change its mind. Then when Franks wanted to halt the offensive until the 4th Infantry could be diverted to Kuwait, Rumsfeld reportedly overruled him.
Furthermore, there are signs that the Pentagon’s political leadership is still trying to orchestrate the tempo of operations, putting pressure on field commanders to keep up the pace of the advance on Iraq rather than wait for the 4th Infantry to arrive. The generals are fighting back.
Back in January, when such attention to detail still looked like a virtue, Time magazine published a largely admiring cover story entitled ”Rumsfeld’s Blueprint for War”, which begins with him reviewing one of the troop deployment orders, No 177.
”Pentagon officials say orders such as No 177 are normally reviewed thoroughly in advance and fly across a defence chief’s desk. But with every step America takes toward war with Iraq, which could be as little as a month off, Rumsfeld is doing things his own meticulous way,” Time reported.
The defence secretary may come to regret providing that insight into his working day, particularly now that he is insisting the war plans do not bear his fingerprints.
Yet the allegations against him go much further than holding up troop deployments. He is also charged with putting too much faith in the potency of air power, and its much-vaunted ”shock and awe”.
”While I think it might have worked very well against Belgium, they forgot to take into account the enemy, which is something no military plan should do,” argued Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired army intelligence officer and prominent Rumsfeld critic.
”Saddam Hussein, his sons and their key paladins, the people who make that regime run, are never going to surrender, because they know if they surrender they’re not going to exile in the south of France.”
The wily and thoughtful defence secretary is also charged with ignoring one of Machiavelli’s warnings — ”how dangerous it is to believe exiles”.
While US intelligence was apprehensive about the strength of Saddam’s army and
his willingness to resort to unconventional methods, Rumsfeld and his aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, put more weight on the assessments of the opposition Iraqi National Congress and its exiled leader, Ahmed Chalabi, who insisted that even the Republican Guard divisions were rotten to the core and were ripe for defection. So far, those predictions have not been borne out.
Rumsfeld is the only US defence secretary to have served in the office twice — the first time as the youngest in Pentagon history, the second time as the oldest. This is more than a historical curiosity. It is also a key to his attitude and his management style.
When he was Gerald Ford’s defence secretary, at the age of 43, he felt his authority and his plans to reform the department were ignored by generals and admirals. He was swept out of the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter won power in 1976.
It is clear he is determined that this time things will be different, but his first attempts at reform did not go well. He brought a veteran radical reformer, Andrew Marshall, out of obscurity and gave him full authority to ”transform” the armed services.
The armed services would be transformed from their ponderous cold war formations into lighter, faster integrated units that would use overwhelming technological superiority to bring victory without a big ”footprint”.
The admirals would have to give up their belief in the primacy of aircraft carriers, the air force would have to rethink its vast fleet of heavy bombers, and the army would have to give up its faith in the power of the heavy mechanised divisions.
Franks’s first version of Plan 1003, delivered to the Pentagon more than a year ago, called for four of these divisions to play a central role — the 3rd and 4th Infantry, the 1st Cavalry and the 1st Armoured. Rumsfeld sent the plan back to the central command HQ in Florida, ordering the ground forces to be cut.
The defence secretary and his advisers originally argued that only 70 000 to 80 000 soldiers would be needed, including just a couple of army brigades. Franks protested and the final plan was a compromise, using two heavy divisions, the 3rd and 4th Infantry. The Turkish refusal to play host halved that force again.
”No secretary of defence, at least since Robert McNamara, has made himself so hated by the people in uniform, because he treats them absolutely arrogantly, and General Franks begged for more troops,” Peters said.
Rumsfeld’s defenders point out that the ability to go to war even when a major element of the strategy, the northern front, collapsed, showed that a new flexibility in military thinking was beginning to take hold. Transformation was being forced on the forces by circumstance.
Rubbish, said a Pentagon official. ”I don’t see anything transformational about it. This is mid-intensity, high-tempo combat,” he said.
In other words, the army and marines are fighting the way they did in World War II and Vietnam, and taking losses. If the army has its way, when this war is over, Rumsfeld’s career will join the casualty list. — Â