Rumskull defense #2: There has to be trust.

Overview

This defense is related to the concerns over a palace revolt. In an April 13, 2006, Washington Post article, Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina who writes frequently on civilian-military relations, said "I think it flatly is a bad thing," and went on to explain that

he worries that it could undermine civilian control of the military, especially by making civilian leaders feel that they need to be careful about what they say around officers, for fear of being denounced as soon as they retire.

"How can you prosecute a war if the military and civilians don't trust each other?" Kohn asked.

Has the possibility of retired officers denouncing civilian leadership arisen only now? This has never been a possibility before now? Of course it has been a possibility.

Moreover, any "civilian leader" who will not or cannot say some things around officers for fear of being denounced does not have the necessary backbone to be leading the military in the first place.

And that brings us to Kohn's question. Apparently the professor feels that it is only the civilian leadership which cannot trust the military officers. It is just as apparent that he has ignored the possibility that indeed the retired generals do not trust Rumskull and some of the other civilians in the Pentagon. Indeed, he seems to dismiss as impossible that the military officers have reasons to distrust Rumskull and the other neocons running DoD.

For those of you keeping score at home, here are a few reasons to distrust the civilian leaders:

• Shinseki is ridiculed.

You can read more about this in More on Wolfowitz and the blunders of the Bush administration and all of the posts list in the Cosmic Wheel Index under the topic heading of "Shinseki, Eric," but here is a synopsis.

Eric Shinseki was Chief of Staff of the Army when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25, 2003. Shinseki commanded the occupation forces in Bosnia, so he had experience in such matters. When asked about the troop requirements for any occupation of Iraq, Shinseki in part answered as follows:

We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so, it takes significant ground force presence to maintain safe and secure environment to ensure that the people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.

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I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. Assistance from friends and allies would be helpful.

And how did Wolfowitless respond two days later? He did not even wait to be asked a question before he went after Shinseki's estimates:

If I might digress for a moment, Mr. Chairman, from my prepared testimony, because there has been a good deal of comment—some of it quite outlandish—about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq.

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But some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.

(emphasis added). As James Fallows put it in "Blind Into Baghdad," "This was as direct a rebuke of a military leader by his civilian superior as the United States had seen in fifty years."

Of course, Shinseki was right, and that fact was bloody obvious as soon as the occupation began. Actually, it was bloody obvious before the war ever started, but now I am digressing.

Indeed, by May 22, 2003, Wolfowitz was saying that the U.S. experience in Bosnia could prove helpful in Iraq. So, it turns out that once the facts showed that Wolfowitless was wrong, he conceded that maybe the experience of Bosnia--and thus the experience of Shinseki--was to be followed. And did I mention that Wolfowitless had ZERO experience in command, combat, post-war occupations, or any kind of military service?

As reported by Knight Ridder, Rumskull piled on by leaking "word of Shinseki's replacement 15 months before Shinseki was due to retire, both embarrassing and neutralizing the Army's top officer." By the way, while Rumskull was a Navy pilot, he never saw combat, and, although he was Secretary of Defense under Ford, he never had to be in charge of a war or its planning.

This is an example of how the completely inexperienced civilian leadership disregarded the experience and knowledge of a military commander--who turned out to be right--and then denigrated that commander publicly. So, what's not to trust?

• Rumskull scraps the original war plan.

Shinseki's correct projection about force size is particularly poignant when viewed in light of the changes made in the initial war plan. The Knight Ridder article referenced above tells this story.

Bush, Rumsfeld and other top officials insist that their military commanders were given everything they requested, and Franks wrote in his book, "American Soldier," that Rumsfeld supported his war plan. Technically, that's accurate. However, three top officials who served with Franks at the time said the plan was the product of a lengthy and sometimes heated negotiation between the Central Command and the Pentagon, in which Rumsfeld constantly pressed Franks and other senior officers to commit fewer troops to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld's opening bid was about 40,000, "a division-plus," said three senior military officials who participated in the discussions. Bush and his top advisers finally approved the 250,000 troops the commanders requested to launch the invasion. But the additional troops that the military wanted to secure Iraq after Saddam's regime fell were either delayed or never sent.

So, the military commanders wanted many more troops, and Rumskull--the civilian leader with no experience at planning a war and occupation--made the commanders change those plans. As a result, we did not have enough troops in Iraq to control the place after Saddam was defeated.

• The insurgency was ignored.

To be fair, the blame for this does not rest entirely with the civilian leaders, for Tommy Franks is partly responsible. With that in mind...

As I said in Disagreements among military commanders over the war resurface,

As the coalition forces were on the way to Baghdad, intelligence officers and the commanders on the ground said that the Fedayeen and other paramilitary forces, not the Republican Guard, were the major threat and needed to be taken out instead of passing them by and proceeding to Baghdad. However, Tommy Franks and the Pentagon decided otherwise. And that turned out to be a mistake.

The New York Times article I cited contains more details.

The paramilitary Fedayeen were numerous, well-armed, dispersed throughout the country, and seemingly determined to fight to the death. But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, General Franks and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as little more than speed bumps on the way to Baghdad. Three years later, Iraq has yet to be subdued. Many of the issues that have haunted the Bush administration about the war — the failure to foresee a potential insurgency and to send sufficient troops to stabilize the country after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled — were foreshadowed early in the conflict.

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After Nasiriya, Lt. Col. Joseph Apodaca, a Marine intelligence officer in that critical first battle, drafted a classified message concluding that the Fedayeen would continue to be a threat. Many had sought sanctuary in small towns that were bypassed in the rush to Baghdad. The colonel compared the Fedayeen attacks to insurgencies in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Colombia, and warned that unless American troops went after them in force, the enemy would continue their attacks after Baghdad fell, hampering efforts to stabilize Iraq.

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Even before the war, Mr. Rumsfeld saw the deployment of United States forces more in terms of what was needed to win the war than to secure the peace.

With the tide in the United States' favor, he began to raise the issue of canceling the deployment of the First Cavalry Division — some 16,000 soldiers. General Franks eventually went along. Though the general insisted he was not pressured to agree, he later acknowledged that the defense secretary had put the issue on the table. "Don Rumsfeld did in fact make the decision to off-ramp the First Cavalry Division," General Franks said in an earlier interview with The New York Times.

(emphasis added). Here is a case of the military commanders in the field being ignored and overruled by Rumskull. And Rumskull was wrong, and the insurgency blossomed. But what about Franks? Franks was not a field commander, and Franks was not going to oppose Rumskull. Remember how Shinseki was treated. And then there's the fact that Franks gave in to Rumskull's desire to not deploy the First Cavalry Division.

• Planning for the post-war period

There is so much to say about this, and I have in fact already said a lot. Go to the Cosmic Wheel Index subheading of "Planning for the post-war period" under the "Iraq" topic heading. Those posts will explain the following: 1) the planning for the post-war period was strictly a Department of Defense show; 2) the military commanders had nothing to do with it; 3) official campaign planning doctrine said planning for the post-conflict stage had to be included; and 4) according to that official doctrine, the overall plan had to be designed to meet the ultimate goals as established by the National Command Authorites--the President and the Secretary of Defense--and that would be Bush and Rumskull. You know, the civilian leaders of our military.

Thanks to the utterly stupid and horrendous lack of planning for the post-war period, we are still in Iraq three years later, the place is still a mess, and our troops are still getting killed.

• Lack of armor

I have written extenisively about the lack of armored vehicles in Iraq. The posts are listed in the Index under the "Armor for our troops" subheading under "Iraq." I will provide a summary here.

As discussed in Rumsfeld, armor, and reactions: Part 1, when the issue of armored vehicles became too great to be ignored, Rumskull said some really boneheaded things when quizzed by a soldier:

"You go to war with the Army you have..."

I will start with the comment that has received the most attention--"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Now I know that I am nothing but a freedom-hating, smart-ass heathen civilian, but it seems to me that when you choose to go to war and when you choose the time that you go to war, you should not go to war until you have the army you want.

Vehicles can still be blown up.

Rumskull talked about how every effort was being made to armor vehicles, and then he said, "And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up." Why the hell did he say that? It seems like he was basically saying "Why are you soldiers so concerned about armored vehicles? You can still get blown up, so quit your whining." He was there to pump up morale, and these comments certainly don't measure up to "Win one for the Gipper."

The Pentagon Humvees

Rumskull closed with something that got applause and showed what a neat guy he is: "The other day...I looked outside the Pentagon and there were six or eight up-armored humvees. They’re not there anymore. They’re en route out here, I can assure you."

That's great, Don, but why were they at the Pentagon in the first place instead of in a war zone where our troops are getting killed? And why did it take until November 2004 for you to get them en route to Iraq?

In Part 3, I concluded there was a high probability that the powers that be knew about the need for more armored vehicles well before the effort was made to increase production.

The official company line is that there was no way to know that Iraq would require such a huge peacekeeping operation after the war, the only reason there is a need for armored vehicles is that the insurgents starting using roadside bombs, there was no way to foresee the effective use of roadside bombs, and the need for armored vehicles was not discovered until August/September 2003.

This post shows that 1) anyone could have foreseen that the peacekeeping operation would be huge; 2) before the war the CIA predicted the use of guerrilla tactics on rear area units (that use unarmored Humvees and trucks); 3) experiences in the major combat operations (which ended May 1, 2003) indicated that attacks on unarmored vehicles would occur; 4) no one was surprised when we faced such attacks during major combat operations; and 5) training for roadside bombs have been part of military war games since 1993.

In other words, the "basic explanation" does not have credibility, which in turn means that the "production and capability" explanation is weakened because while the lag time between demand and ability to ramp up production could not be avoided, that effort could have and should have started long before September 2003.

UPDATE: Back in Part 2, I said "remember that the shift of up-armored Humvees began in July 2003. I will explain the importance of that fact in a subsequent post." Here's the explanation. As shown above, Gen. Whitcomb said that the need for armored vehicles was identified in August 2003. If that was really the case, why then did the shift of up-armored Humvees begin in July 2003?

Part 4 addressed Rumskull's comment that "you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up" and showed that even makeshift armor on a Humvee had saved lives. I ended that post with "Yo, Don...why don't you go over to Iraq and tell the troops again how it won't matter if they have armored vehicles?"

In Don't take my word for it..., I quoted the late David Hackworth:

Had a decent chunk of that dough been spent on the right stuff – supporting our troops – our warriors wouldn’t have fought in Korea in 1950 with World War I gear or be slugging it out in Iraq in scrounged “hillbilly armor” and told to go to war with the Army we have and to suck it up.

But of course, there is no reason why our military commanders should distrust the civilian leaders just because the troops are getting killed because of a lack of proper eqipment, right?

And I haven't even addressed the body armor issue.

Conclusion

The military commanders--including the seven retired generals who have called for Rumskull's resignation--have plenty of reasons to distrust the civilian leaders in the Pentagon. What I have presented here does not come close to telling the whole story. I find Professor Kohn's analysis to be so shortsighted as to be almost meaningless, and his implication that it is only the civilian leaders who have to worry about not trusting the military commanders is just plain stupid in light of the facts surrounding the Iraq war.

The foregoing analysis is relevant because of the building drumbeat for war with Iran. Unless changes in leadership occur, any such war would be promoted, planned, and run by the same civilian leaders that brought us the Iraq war and its aftermath. There are many reasons why the present military commanders would distrust that civilian leadership. Moreover, there is little or no reason for the American public to trust these neocon civilian morons. In my opinion, if there is to be war with Iran, Rumskull and his buddies should not be in charge of it. Somebody has to do something to stop these idiots or get them out of office. As I said in Some thoughts on retired generals calling for Rumskull's resignation, "The views and voices of these retired generals are important because there apparently is almost no one else with any credibility or authority willing to speak up and try to get Rumskull out."

Then again, a Rumskull resignation might not matter, for Bush and Cheney will still be in office.