Why can’t we take troops out of Bosnia and Germany? Just as tax cuts force the government to choose more carefully among spending programs, so Rumsfeld’s hard line should encourage hard choices about force allocation. But that might interfere with total global hegemony, I suppose.

Donald Rumsfeld is the second coming of Robert McNamara. McNamara was part of “the best and the brightest” crew of elitists who came in with JFK. They knew everything, and the military men knew nothing.

McNamara’s hangup, in particular, was that he had worked at Ford Motor Company and therefore knew all about the efficiencies of mass production. He came in with the prejudice that the only reason that the Navy and the Air Force did not jointly design and procure warplanes must be inter-service rivalry. In fact, the demands of landing planes on aircraft carrier decks force Navy fighters to much more rugged, hence heavier and less maneuverable. The Air Force never wanted to sacrifice speed and maneuverability in return for the ability to land on carriers, which is unsurprising, as they are not going to land on carriers.

Based on his prejudices, McNamara dictated cancellation of various Air Force design projects and forced the design of the F-111, which was going to be used in umpteen different ways by every service that flew planes. It was a design and procurement fiasco from day one, all because of our civilian “expert” from Ford Motor Company.

Don Rumsfeld came in with the prejudice that the only reason we have big armored divisions, etc., in the Army is that we were prepared to fight the Warsaw pact nations in a colossal European land war. With that threat gone, we must be continuing with such a force structure merely due to inertia. In fact, the recent war, as well as recent Balkans interventions and (hopefully not!) potential war in Korea all can make use of more heavy divisions than we have.

But don’t waste your breath telling the civilian know-it-alls like Rumsfeld.

By the way, David Hackworth has passed along reports directly from Iraq that the initial plan was for the 101st Airborne to hit the airport outside Baghdad and seal off the city (perhaps with Saddam cooped up in it) at the beginning of the actual conquest of Baghdad, then rush into the city from a different direction than the 3rd division, which was entering from the south. The capture of Baghdad was thus to be quicker, and the 101st was to quickly guard hospitals, power stations, etc., that were crucial to rebuilding Iraq quickly and maintaining good will towards us by the Iraqi people. Instead, we were one heavy division short in the south, our flanks and convoys were being attacked, and the 101st was diverted to the south as a result. To this day, the neocon cabal in the Defense Department will claim that all went well and we did not underestimate our troop needs, etc.

How much more swift would the conquest of Iraq need to have been to have satisfied Mr. Coleman? Ten days instead of eleven? It is the neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard who are complaining about the lack of troops and attacking Donald Rumsfeld.

“Recent Balkan interventions” should have made use of fewer, rather than more, heavy divisions—more specifically, zero heavy divisions, since we should not have intervened there in the first place. American soldiers should be used sparingly for police work in Iraq. We should, as quickly as possible, let Iraqis police themselves and rule themselves. The troops the neoconservatives want are necessary for the unappealing goal of converting the Iraqis to secular democrats at gunpoint.

DR misunderstands entirely the point of my posting. Iraq was a very weak military enemy. Whether the conquest takes ten or eleven days is not the point. The point is that Donald Rumsfeld, by many reports from those close to him, is the kind of know-it-all who does not need to listen to those around him who have a different opinion. Such hubris can be very costly in a President or Secretary of Defense, but only against an opponent (and on a terrain) very different from Iraq. There is a huge difference between fighting Iraq, or Grenada, or Panama, on the one hand, and fighting Vietnam or North Korea on the other hand. With the likes of Donald Rumsfeld in important positions, I pray that we never have a chance to find that out the hard way.

However easy the conquest of Iraq, Rumsfeld’s personal failings were quite evident. I took Mr. Auster’s posting as an opportunity to comment on them.

For years, the U.S. has favoured hi-tech remote warfare capabilites to the virtual exclusion of all else. The Army as been gutted to make way for new warplanes and aircraft carriers. Should it come as a shock that when the situation calls for real troops on the ground we don’t have them?

The thread above this one contains a discussion of the anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian views on standing armies. This site exists in part, as I understand it, as an attempt to express a traditionalist conservatism which does not fall prey to Jeffersonian “utopianism” on foreign policy and more specifically supports the war in Iraq as essential to U.S. national security. It is equally essential, of course, that we avoid signing up for neoconservative adventures in remaking the population of the world at gunpoint into lobotomized consumers, a goal which would be undesirable even if it were not impossible.

To steer between these undesirable extremes, the U.S. military should be used forcefully but infrequently, in the interest of the people of the United States. The war in Iraq meets these criteria in a way which interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Liberia do not.

The spectacular speed and success of the Iraq campaign (and our previous victory in Afghanistan) speak for themselves. Because the U.S. is the technological and economic powerhouse of the world, it seems obvious to me that we should make use of these strengths, and equally it seems obvious to me that large government bureaucracies like the Army would be threatened by change.

What would additional troops in Iraq do? What would a larger army be for? Neoconservatives want larger armed forces because they have ambitious plans to use them all around the world to do things U.S. troops can’t and shouldn’t do.

What an interesting analysis by DR. I think I agree with everything he says, except at the end. I myself do not have a set view on what we should be doing right now in Iraq, partly I think because there hasn’t been a full debate on it; the Administration has not laid out an entire plan and defended it, especially in the face of the prospect of ongoing guerilla and terror attacks. But one could certainly argue that the occupation and pacification of Iraq—however many troops it takes—is as indispensable to U.S. national security as was the overthrow of the Hussein regime, since otherwise the Ba’athists could come back into power and everything we’ve gained could be lost. But I have been asking Bush supporters, what would such pacification require, if the terror opposition continues? There must be a much fuller public debate on this. One reason there hasn’t been a better debate is that the opposition to the president is so hysterical and irrational, that the president’s side hunkers down into a defensive mode instead of thinking and speaking clearly.

Clark Coleman’s comments are on point. There is, however, an interesting historical detail to be added to his account of the F-111 matter; namely, that the final choice of the contractor for that disaster was dictated not by rational criteria but by blackmail. Officials of the winning company had learned of President Kennedy’s relationship with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also his conduit to the Mob and to businessmen who were giving JFK bribes…. We will not hear about this, you can be sure, on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination!
Alan Levine

“The spectacular speed and success of the Iraq campaign (and our previous victory in Afghanistan) speak for themselves.”
Posted by: DR on September 9, 2003 09:03 PM

and the blood soaked earth of those unjust wars also speaks.

This column says much of what I said above, except he does it for a living:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/090903D.html

The James Pinkerton article linked above is way too long for what he has to say, and fails to come to a clear point. I kept reading and reading to see how he would come down on the debate between the Weekly Standard (more U.S. troops in Iraq) and Secretary Rumsfeld (Iraq must take care of their own security), and then, at the end of this long article, all Pinkerton provides is a sermon on the need for constructive debate:

“There’s nothing wrong with a healthy debate about Iraq policy, or any other aspect of national defense. On repeated occasions, Rumsfeld himself has demonstrated a willingness to mix it up with reporters and even his own Pentagon colleagues over matters of national defense. But there’s constructive debate, and there’s destructive diatribe. Those on the Right who see the world differently from Rumsfeld might be wise to sheath their sharpest rhetorical swords, if they wish to regarded as “friendlies” within the overall Bush coalition.”

Do we really need to read a lecture from a former Bush 41 staffer to neocons telling them to watch their manners or be thrown into outer darkness? This is about as “insider” as one could get.

DR wrote:

“What would additional troops in Iraq do? What would a larger army be for? Neoconservatives want larger armed forces because they have ambitious plans to use them all around the world to do things U.S. troops can’t and shouldn’t do.”

I just want to repeat, we don’t know that that’s true. The immediate issue is what do we do in Iraq. The Weekly Standard is seeking more troops there because they think it’s necessary, not because they want to use U.S. troops all over the world (though they do). This echoes the debate before the war. People opposed the war because they distrusted the neocons’ overall agenda, and so failed to grapple with the actual Iraq issue. It seems something similar could be happening here. People are opposing the neocons’ demand for more troops in Iraq because they distrust the neocons’ larger agenda, and so are failing to grapple with the actual issue of what our needs are in Iraq.

Pinkerton’s opinions and solutions don’t especially interest me. I simply wanted to draw attention to his framing of the argument: Rumsfeld wants fewer troops because he wants Iraqis to rule Iraq, Bill Kristol wants more troops because he wants to rule Iraq.

Given that the thread began with an article from The Weekly Standard, it seems unfair to complain about the source of this link.

I wasn’t criticizing the source of the article, but the article itself, which seemed to me not to come to a clear point despite its length. We obviously need more debate on these issues.