One of the facts apparent in two recent Iraq War chronicles, Cobra II and Fiasco, is that Rumsfeld is a micro-manager who used the Iraq War to prove a pet theory: fewer troops could do the work of many. This obsession was not simply gratuitous; Rumsfeld believed that the long force build-ups required by the Powell Doctrine would restrict US freedom of action in dealing with foreign threats. This may be true, but why develop the capability “on the job” in the centerpiece effort in service of the preemption doctrine? Why employ this technique when the goals were so ambitious? It is not as if this were a campaign of simple regime change, the installation of pre-determined leaders, such as the US installed in Panama during Operation Just Cause. The Iraq Campaign was supposed to accomplish a massive social revolution from without in a country the size of California with a population of 24 million. Is this the time to experiment with limited forces?
Worse, it’s clear that planners spent so much accommodating Rumsfeld’s ridiculous troop level mandates that there was little time left for post-war planning. Rumsfeld more than any other figure ordered and cajoled military planners into cutting back troop levels. Planners literally spent the better part of a year submitting and resubmitting troop level plans for the Iraq War.
Rumsfeld’s distrust of the State Department cut its personnel out of the Iraq planning process, leaving a small military command with only three months to be stood up and plan for post-war needs. This challenge was made worse because Tommy Franks and others continued to rely upon the deus ex machina of international peace-keeping troops and state department help, even after their own plans had excluded them. And, without any specific basis in fact, planners consistently assumed the Iraqi regime’s institutions and military would remain both intact and available to the occupying authority, even though a great deal of modern experience–Lebanon 1982, Vietnam 1975, Afghanistan 1979–suggests that conventional forces and regime figures are the most likely groups in a society to become refugees after a foreign conquest.
Rumsfeld, Franks, and others in the administration had little experience with the demands of peace-keeping and occupation. They looked with disdain on the “nation-building” efforts of the 1990s, but they responded by wishing away all of the unique challenges of nation-building and peace-keeping. Consider that. Nation-building has long been criticized by Republicans precisely because it is manpower-intensive, ambiguous, and difficult. But Rumsfeld responded by simply pretending these weren’t challenges at all, announcing before the war, as if it were obvious, that fewer troops would be needed for occupation than the war itself, even though all recent experience (indeed all historical experience since at least the Civil War) suggests the precise opposite.
Rumsfeld is right that the US military needs to move away from the Cold War model to fight the war on terror. However, effective transformation means likely greater numbers of culturally-attuned infantrymen, civil affairs troops, MPs, and special forces, and fewer heavy forces and high-tech weapon systems. US superiority over the conventional forces of every nation on earth is now indisputable. But America’s modest overall troop levels, technology-focus, and discomfort with sustained ground operations are all products of the old Cold War Air-Land Battle concep. Rumsfeld, far from being a visionary, is a throw-back to the interregnum between WWII and Korea, where many generals, in particular from the air force, thought that ground war and conventional war in general would become a thing of the past, made obsolete by the technological weapon par excellence, the nuclear bomb. The two major post-WWII conflicts of the US military–Korea and Vietnam–should remind us that a manpower-intensive capability to fight high-intensity and counterinsurgency war remain important, in spite of freuqent claims that technology has rendered such affairs obsolete.
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Three years ago, I attended a baby shower, where, unlike any baby shower I’d been to previously, I actually heard quite an interesting story. People were discussing inept management at Coca Cola, where many of the guests had worked. The host then went on to describe what he considered to be the most egregious case of management ineptitude he had ever encountered.
After graduating with an MBA, our host had joined a pharmacutical manufacturer in Chicago. The company was having difficulty meeting its monthly sales targets, and the CEO repeatedly instituted price cuts at the end of each month, in order to try to hit the quotas. My host said that he and his colleagues, most of them young execs, had tried over and over again to explain to the CEO why this was a terrible strategy, because the drugs they sold at the end of each month only ate into the orders from the following month, that it wrought havoc with their production and shipping schedules, because orders were negligible during the first 3 and a half weeks of the month, then skyrocketed in the final few days, and that all their customers had caught on to the fact that there would be price reductions at the end of each month, just compounding the problem.
However, the CEO was a loud-mouthed know-it-all who would not tolerate what he saw as their carping negativity. Our host also said that the concepts they were trying to maker clear to the CEO were easily undertandable by any mediocre first year business student.
The company was definitely head for financial crisis, but fortunately, it held the patent for NutraSweet, and the CEO had political connections in Washington. Thus, as one of those 11:00 pm amendments to a unrelated bill, he was able to get the company’s patent for NutraSweet extended for several more years. This, and this alone, saved the company from bankruptcy. Today, the now ex-CEO is widely regarded as a brilliant, iconoclastic executive who reorganized the company and put it back in the black. Our host finally said, “You know, I’m surprised none of this has ever come out, because the guy’s name was Donald Rumsfeld.”
He went on to say that Rumsfled had only been made CEO of the family-held company as a result of his friendship with the family, that Rumsfled was without doubt the most inept manager he had ever worked for or been associated with, and that it “terrified” him to think that this country’s defenses were in such hands. He finally said that he himself had voted for Bush ,and his comments had nothing to do with politics, it just chilled him to imagine Don Rumsfeld at the helm of the Dept. of Defense. Like I said, this was the most interesting baby shower I’ve ever been to.
That’s some baby shower. I thought the issue with Nutrasweet was FDA approval and not a patent extension. Are there any reported sources of his “management incompetence”?
Incidentally, I wouldn’t be the least big surprised if that story were true.
It’s possible that the issue was in fact FDA approval. The guy who told the story had been, I believe in his 20s when he worked for Rumsfeld, and by the time I met him, in 2003, he was probably in his late 40s or even early 50s. Plus, since I heard this story three years ago, I could be fuzzy on this detail as well. However, I feel confident that I remember he gist of the thing, particularly about the disasterous sales discount strategy, quite well. Our host also said that in fact Rumsfeld is quite a convincing speaker, in that he sounds articulate, and confident in his judgments, but afterwards you sit down and analyze the numbers, and realize, once again, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.