Frank Kagan has a good piece in the LA Times that notes how Rumsfeld’s commitment to transformation blinded him to the unique challenges of counter-insurgency in Iraq:
For the problem with Rumsfeld was not his flawed managerial style, but his flawed understanding of war. Early in his term, he became captive of an idea. He would transform the U.S. military in accord with the most advanced theories of the 1990s to prepare it for the challenges of the future. He was not alone in his captivity. As a candidate, President Bush announced the same program in 1999 ââ¬â long before anyone thought Don Rumsfeld would return as secretary of Defense. The program, quite simply, was to rely on information technology to permit American forces to locate, identify, track and destroy any target on the face of the Earth from thousands of miles away. Ideally, ground forces would not be necessary in future wars. If they were, it would be in small numbers, widely dispersed, moving rapidly and engaging in little close combat. This vision defined U.S. military theory throughout the 1990s, and it has gone deep into our military culture. Rumsfeld’s advent hastened and solidified its triumph, but his departure will not lead instantly to its collapse. . . .
The war in Iraq threatened military transformation. It was expensive and sucked scarce defense resources away from transformational programs. It was manpowerintensive and hindered Rumsfeld’s efforts to reorient the military away from a focus on land power. It was intellectually distracting; counterinsurgency has little to do with transformation. Here Rumsfeld’s virtues became his greatest vices. Instead of recognizing the danger of losing Iraq, he remained committed to transforming the military to meet undefined future threats, spending billions of dollars preparing to fight Enemy X in 2025.
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“This vision defined U.S. military theory throughout the 1990s, and it has gone deep into our military culture.”
It did not go as deep into the US Military culture as the author would like to think. Throughout the late 90′s and into the 21st century there were many, many uniformed and ununiformed personnel whow were calling this transformational thinking very flawed.
There are still many who are attacking it…from the battlelines over the Stryker to the Air Forces monopoly over the battlespace.
Iraq, in all of it’s glory and pain has done a lot to tear apart this RMA and transformatin talk. Everything from infantry centric operations to the use of armored formations in MOUT have show that the entire premise was off.
Not that I anticipate many AARs or any major lessons learned from this…but the RMA and tranformational theories have been quietly destroyed. But in todays military culture…once you buy something you are stuck with it…so we can expect certain weapon systems to stay around awhile.
There have been some quite tranformations though…and even in the face of stupidity like the Brigade centric UA non-sense there have been some good things…like the psuedo-regimental system being experienced by the 3rd ACR and 3rd ID.
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This month’s New Yorker has a somewhat related article: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061120fa_fact
JFK’s foreign policy used to be called “Cold War and Counter-Revolution”. That freaking liberal elitist called for the formation of the Green Berets, and the US waging “counter-revolution” by supporting “Democratic” elements in third world countries. That of course, begat us Vietnam, and the economic “stagflation” of the 70′s and 80′s, which Reagan was supposed to have led us out of. It’s horrifying to most
real and older conservatives to see how much Rumsfeld’s ideas echo the kind of lunacy that JFK espoused, that led us to the quaqmire in Vietnam. There is only 1 authentically American foreign policy, and that’s “Mind Yer Own Business”. Roach, you keep forgetting that. That is unless you are a “Kennedy Liberal” pretending to be a conservative. Shades of Andrew Sullivan?