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When the wheels fall
off
By Keith Andrew
Bettinger
WASHINGTON - The United States' two
forays against Iraq have served as showcases for the US
military's constantly evolving tactics and technology.
Operation Desert Storm of early 1991 illustrated
battlefield revolutions: for the first time spectators
could witness bombs dropping into chimneys and
precision-guided missiles exacting a terrible toll on
the hapless Iraqi military, keeping civilian deaths low
- relative to previous conflicts. Then again in 2003 the
world watched while the US Army rolled over its Iraqi
opposition.
The results of both conflicts were
all but preordained. Thanks to superior training and
resources and an overwhelming technological advantage,
the broad US-led coalition in 1991 and the much narrower
"coalition of the willing" in 2003 were able to make
short work of an adversary that was formidable on paper.
However, these stunning military triumphs obscure the
parts of the story that are less interesting to the
prime-time crowd.
The rest of the story lies in
what happens after the major shooting stops, and in
behind-the-scenes evaluations of military performance
used to assess the effectiveness of the billions of
dollars the US spends on defense and the future
direction of its military. There is serious debate
within the Pentagon over two major issues: what physical
assets should comprise the US military for the new
millennium, and how the armed forces will adapt to the
challenges presented by the non-traditional types of
conflict they are increasingly being called on to
participate in.
A soon-to-be-published official
history by the army's Combined Arms Center at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas (a "quick history", in the words of
one Fort Leavenworth official), and obtained by The New
York Times sheds some light on Operation Iraqi Freedom
and some of its unpublicized flaws. The Times offered a
tantalizing peek at the report's findings: "Tank engines
sat on warehouse shelves in Kuwait with no truck drivers
to take them north. Broken-down trucks were scavenged
for usable parts. Artillery units cannibalized parts
from captured Iraqi guns to keep their howitzers
operating. Army medics foraged medical supplies from
combat hospitals. In most cases, soldiers improvised
solutions to keep the offensive rolling."
The
article goes on to describe logistical failures that
threatened to cripple an entire armored division and
communications blackouts that forced soldiers to
communicate with cellular phones and e-mails. These
anecdotes might seem more appropriate in describing the
Iraqi army, but they are indicative of greater problems
and deeper faults within the Pentagon.
The
Combined Arms Center report is based on interviews with
nearly 3,000 personnel and on more than 100,000
documents. A buzz already surrounds the history, and it
is sure to create waves in the Pentagon that will ripple
throughout the army and trigger questions from Congress.
The report was ordered last year by former army chief of
staff General Eric Shinseki, who retired in June.
Shinseki frequently butted heads with Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld in arguments that represented
the growing gulf between the civilian leadership of the
armed forces, appointed by President George W Bush in
2001, and the career officers who worked their way up
the chain of command. Although initially compatible,
Rumsfeld's plan for a mobile, scaled-down military was
so radically different from Shinseki's vision of an army
to meet the needs of the 21st century that the two
drifted apart.
The new report is bound to be
controversial because it provides support for many of
the positions held by Shinseki before he retired in
ignominy. All branches of the service had been preparing
for war in Iraq since the 1990s; the war games were part
of routine contingency planning, and didn't indicate an
imminent invasion. According to army procedure, they
developed a Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data
(TPFDD) plan, an extremely intricate master plan
detailing the movements of each and every unit and the
"logistics tail" (the supply of fuel, spare parts, food,
etc) needed to keep that unit operational. This plan
initially called for an invasion force of about 400,000,
including support personnel. The original plan also
envisioned the US leading a broad coalition, much like
Operation Desert Storm.
However, Secretary
Rumsfeld began reviewing the TPFDD in November 2002,
trimming the number of personnel to about 75,000. These
modifications were part of a new kind of operational
thinking by Rumsfeld, who reportedly views the army
planning process as cumbersome and inefficient, hobbled
by bureaucracy and mired in old-style management. The
army, on the other hand, views the planning as necessary
to prepare for any contingency and essential to ensuring
victory. James Fallows, in a lengthy Atlantic Monthly
article describing the process, wrote that "making
detailed, last-minute adjustments to the TPFDD was, in
the Army's view, like pulling cogs at random out of a
machine". He quoted one inside source thusly: "The
generals would say, 'Sir, these changes will ripple back
to every railhead and every company.'"
The new
army report as well as reports from other service
branches (still in the pipeline) could severely damage
Rumsfeld's influence and standing among members of
Congress and the military intelligentsia. Fallows
describes a process in which Rumsfeld haggled with
generals over the TPFDD like an accountant examining a
company's books, scrutinizing every deployment. Critics
of Rumsfeld are sure to seize upon the report as an
example of reckless leadership and a shallow
understanding of how the military works. It will be easy
game to point to a causal link between Rumsfeld's
line-item vetoing of units and the myriad failures and
difficulties faced during the war (which are detailed in
the army's history) and subsequent occupation.
The army's history could be referred to as the
Revenge of Shinseki. Though commentators initially
predicted a compatibility between the two leaders, the
relationship between Rumsfeld and Shinseki deteriorated
rapidly over modernizations and weapons programs such as
the Crusader artillery unit and the Stryker combat
vehicle. Rumsfeld's strategic vision for the military
also won him no friends among Shinseki and other
reform-minded generals. In addition, Rumsfeld and his
deputies made no real attempt to hide their disdain for
Shinseki and his ilk. Rumsfeld engaged in tactics that
observers called "dirty"; he announced Shinseki's
replacement more than a year before the general's
retirement, for example.
The acrimony between
the two and the attitude Rumsfeld brought to the
department led to some uniformed men referring to him as
"the enemy". US News and World Report described the
relationship at Shinseki's retirement: "Rumsfeld's
in-your-face approach rankled Shinseki, a quiet general
who tried not to make waves. The general was even
publicly rebuked by Rumsfeld's staff for telling
Congress it might take hundreds of thousands of troops
to secure post-Saddam [Hussein] Iraq, a prediction that
looks even more correct." The day after Shinseki's
remarks to Congress, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz issued a statement that Shinseki's estimates
were "wildly off the mark".
Shinseki drew fire
from conservatives as being a holdover of the
multilateralism of the [former President Bill] Clinton
years, an approach to international conflict that,
according to them, was failed and flawed. Shinseki, who
was appointed by president Clinton in 1999 to a
four-year term, argued that the army should be
reconfigured to be more effective at peacekeeping
operations and to be more flexible and versatile for the
various types of collective actions facing an active and
relevant United Nations. His outlook and vision
reflected the belief that nation-building would become a
core component of the army's mission.
While both
leaders agree that the old Cold War-style army is
obsolete, Rumsfeld has described his focus more as
"winning the peace", rather than keeping it. Rumsfeld's
vision for the future is a sweeping one: he sees a
smaller, more mobile army used in conjunction with a
greater reliance on "smart-weapons" technology and
precision strikes from afar. His backers refute as
expensive and inefficient the overwhelming-force
doctrines advocated by Secretary of State Colin Powell,
a former chairman of the joint chiefs, and Norman
Schwarzkopf, commander of US forces during Desert Storm.
They pointed to the US victory in Afghanistan as support
for their views; the National Review reported that
Shinseki insisted that 50,000 troops would be needed to
destroy the terrorists and the Taliban, whereas
Operation Anaconda and subsequent undertakings have
employed far fewer men. The unstable and violent state
of Afghanistan in the aftermath of major hostilities,
however, raises serious questions about the long-term
effectiveness of the Rumsfeld approach.
One
conspicuous flaw, exemplified in different ways in both
Iraq and Afghanistan, is how the armed forces function
as part of a coalition. Operation Anaconda in
Afghanistan was able to use fewer US personnel because
it relied on allies in the Afghan anti-Taliban Northern
Alliance and counted on them to establish an orderly,
centralized government to fill the vacuum left by the
vanquished Taliban. Now those allies have become
regional warlords whose vision for Afghanistan differs
starkly from that of the US. In Iraq, the imperative for
invasion argued by the president and his aides alienated
nations the army would have liked to count on for
support, thus the scaled-down force arrived at by the
bargaining in the Pentagon was confronted with tasks
that taxed its resources. Rumsfeld's new armed forces
would specialize in winning the peace, but other nations
are needed to assist with tasks associated with
peacekeeping and nation building. Although the pledges
of assistance from other nations in Afghanistan provided
hope for this approach, the aftermath of Iraqi Freedom
has revealed its weaknesses.
How will the report
be used by the factions within the Pentagon? Shinseki's
defenders will likely point to it as a justification and
an indictment of the civilian leadership. Rumsfeld, on
the other hand, might use it in his case for further
reform in the army, beating the drum for radical
changes. He may suggest that the history is merely a
product of the old army - a result of the moribund
culture that now more than ever needs a reorientation
for today's missions. In an interview with Fallows of
the Atlantic Monthly, Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy Douglas Feith explained that Rumsfeld's "big
strategic theme is uncertainty. The need to deal
strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict
the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits
on our intelligence".
This chaos theory of
management probably holds some promise for a directional
orientation for the army. However, Rumsfeld's
interference in the planning process seems to cripple
the army as it functions now. Fallows concludes in his
article that Rumsfeld's "embrace of 'uncertainty' became
a reckless evasion of responsibility ... he was not
careful about remembering his practical obligations.
Precisely because he could not foresee all hazards, he
should have been more zealous about avoiding the ones
that were evident - the big and obvious ones the rest of
the government tried to point out to him."
It is
clear that the new army history of the Iraq war presents
no surprises: all of the difficulties and problems
depicted in it were brought up in the planning stages of
Operation Iraqi Freedom. A report prepared before the
commencement of hostilities by Conrad Crane and Andrew
Terrill for the Army War College drew on historical
examples to provide guidance for war in Iraq. In the
introduction, the report advises that "to be successful,
an occupation such as that contemplated after any
hostilities in Iraq requires much detailed interagency
planning, many forces, multi-year military commitment,
and a national commitment to nation-building".
The report points to recent post-conflict
scenarios the US has been involved in and claims they
are all characterized by poor planning. The past problem
scenarios also anticipate specific areas that will tax
the military - policing, civil affairs, transportation -
and the report asserts that an exit strategy must
include political stability, which in itself is a
daunting challenge. The report pointed to Desert Storm
for lessons and predicted that Ahmad Chalabi, now part
of the US-installed Iraqi leadership, and the exiled
Iraqi National Congress leaders would encounter a great
deal of resistance in Iraq. The report also cautions
military leaders to plan for the long haul and not to
overestimate support from civilian agencies.
The
rosy scenario that the civilian leaders depicted before
the war was not justified by the expectations of
military leaders. The history will show that the many of
the assumptions on which Operation Iraqi Freedom was
predicated were inaccurate. While not mentioning
Rumsfeld explicitly, it will be a short logical leap to
link the failures of the operation to the defense
secretary. In an election year for a president who sees
many of the assumptions upon which his decisions have
been made crumbling, these revelations may have serious
implications not only within the Pentagon, but also on
the election.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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