Posted on 03/20/2008 7:24:49 AM PDT by Delacon
For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.
All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.
But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.
Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.
Iraq just didn't have to be this hard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
You're going to have to look elsewhere for the cause of that. Although it surely contributed, spending on the war, and the whole DoD budget is a still only a small part of the total federal spending bill. Hint: Entitlements. In FY 2001, the last Clinton budget, Defense spending was 2.9% of GDP, while entitlements were 10.9%. By FY2006, defense had skyrocketed up to 3.1%, while entitlements had oozed up to 11.9%. The *increase* in entitlements spending was more than the total FY 2006 DoD budget, less the war on terror spending. Add that in, and the numbers are close, the increase in entitlements is about the same as total military spending.
From the Heritage foundation, April 2007:
The U.S. government is running a large budget deficit, and the principal reason is the growth in entitlement costs, not increased defense funding since 9/11. Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped. In 1970, military spending totaled 7.8 percent of GDP—almost twice the 4.1 percent of GDP spent on the big three entitlement programs. Today, defense spending has fallen to 3.9 percent of GDP while entitlement spending has more than doubled to 8.8 percent of GDP.
(Numbers don't quite agree because they include different, things. The 8.8% of GDP is presumably only for those Big Three programs, while the numbers from FY2001 and FY2006 include all entitlements.)
Another source of the inflation, which is about to get even worse, is the various "bailouts" of the real estate/mortgage companies, which the Fed and the Administration attempted to solve by throwing money at them.
I wasn’t aware he had that extensive a resume but surely you have to agree that the role he took in writing this article was that of an opinion journalist and not as a historian. Its a question of style.
Yes, I agree with you. Shinseki was right about the need for 250,000 soldiers on the ground in Iraq at the outset of the war.
good point... no need to bring over 250,000 troops to have them subject to weapons of mass destruction... that would have been disasterous and possibly detrimental to victory...
those who think the war on terror was mishandled are in my opinion, wrong.
jmo.
teeman
We had roughly 150,000 total force there with the exception of the delayed 1st Inf(?) Div which had to change its route because of Turkey’s refusal to help.
At the time, US Army strength stood at about 470,000. Obviously, the combined force included all services, so we’d include the Marine Expeditionary forces and all the ground support from the Navy and AF.
Just guessing, but I’d say that Shinseki made the promotion list for his first star under the first President Bush.
The indirect costs of the Iraq war are enormous. There is no financial system or banking system in Iraq today, so nearly all financial transactions are done in U.S. dollars -- mostly cash (which is why the Federal Reserve stopped publishing the M3 statistics). This means the U.S. has basically absorbed a 51st state with California's population, Detroit's business climate, and all the social/ethnic stability of Rwanda.
THAT is why the value of the U.S. dollar has declined so much in recent years.
There was a very interesting story posted here on FR a while back about some fascinating angles to this whole issue. The article cited several cases in which prominent Iraqi "tribal leaders," political figures and even former Ba'athist Party officials were buying real estate in places like the United Arab Emirates with U.S. cash that had been spread all over Iraq as part of the post-invasion "rebuilding effort."
1. Peters has been attacking the Bush administration since the early days of the Iraq conflict when the troops temporarily bogged down in a sandstorm (while inflicting heavy casualties on the charging Republican Guard). He has raised to an obsession his hatred of Rumsfeld.
2. Peters is the journalist who most hyped Abu Ghraib “torture,” thereby undermining U.S. war efforts, mostly for his own craven purposes, and subjecting American and Bush to worldwide condemnation. Peters proclaimed that these atrocities were a stain on all our soldiers past and present, that we are all responsible for the deviant conduct of a few reprobates.
3. Shinseki’s recommendation to increase our troop strength in Iraq to “several hundred thousand” was an off-the-cuff remark to Sen. Levin and never presented to the Joint Chiefs. It was interpreted by Russert as 300,000. In short, Shinseki had no plan, and he is certainly not the father of the surge, which peaked at 168,000, about the same number Rumsfeld's generals had deployed before some drawdowns began.
4. Shinseki was the general, who in the name of equality, downgraded our special operations forces. Recall the “black beret” controversy?
5. Few SecDefs have been as well prepared for their jobs as Rumsfeld, owing to his previous experience as SecDef under Ford, his navy fighter-instructor gig, his CEO stint at Searle, and his commission's study of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. in the late 1990s. The MSM, while attacking Bush as too dumb, attacked Rumsfeld for being too smart.
6. Military leaders with experience know it would be foolish to commit all reserves in one theater, especially when North Korea, Iran and China were testing U.S. resolve and capacity to respond to other crises.
7. The preferred solution to the deployment problem of long rotations were a burden on soldier families. To go to 300,000 would require a return to the draft, which only a few Democrats advocated (Rangel), primarily to increase the intensity of the antiwar resistance.
8. I do give credit to the MSM and Peters, however, for they have proved that, if one promotes a dubious set of "facts" often enough over a sufficiently long period (The Big Lie?), even well-informed FReepers will begin to doubt their own judgment.
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Chaplain. You are correct.
The only other thing I would add is that much of the difficulty stems from a particular advocacy concerning strategic power that had been growing in acceptance with politicians starting with the administration of George H. Bush.
The U.S. Air Force had been pushing the idea that conflicts could be fought almost exclusively with dominant air power (and long-range ordinance) and that we only needed a smaller land component (Army and Marine Corps) to “mop up” after the air forces (Air Force and Navy) had pummeled the enemy into submission. The advocates of this idea used the first Gulf War and Kosovo as evidence to support their assertion. (Note: previous U.S. military doctrine was that fire power (air, naval, long/short range missiles) supported land forces as coordinated and needed by the land component commander)
The Army and Marine Corps offered that the only true strategic forces were land forces because until you put a flag in the ground you have not won anything. Also, the short history of air power showed that devastating air power often did not achieve the effects they were thought to have. Even after mind-boggling drops of ordinance enemy forces would suffer only a fraction of the casualties we thought because they learned to entrench.
Politicians from both parties jumped on board with enthusiasm because the theory was that we could fight and win with almost no casualties. DoD budgets reflected the growing acceptance of the concept, with the Army budget annually coming in a distant fourth in DoD funding... behind the Defense Nuclear Agency (Air Force, Navy, Defense Nuclear Agency, Army). The Marine Corps portion of the Navy budget also kept shrinking.
Donald Rumsfeld (and NeoCons in general) drank the kool-aid in a big way and had no use for the Army, and especially its pesky generals and high-level civilian authorities who disagreed with the entire concept. The Army was effectively muted and sent off to the back room by his DoD.
Hence, when the conflict kicked off with “Shock and Awe” it was expected that within days the whole thing would be over. There was no need for post-war planning because the will to resist would be completely destroyed. The Army and Marine Corps would simply mop up.
The fatal flaw in the theory, in this case, was that the land component was too small to lock down the country and prevent the insurgency from starting. We had won the campaign but not planned for winning the war. The holes in the Swiss cheese were too large and the would-be insurgents were able to get started. If we had gone in with overwhelming land power (sounds like the Weinberger Doctrine) we would have likely prevented the insurgency or at least got to where we are today years earlier.
Unfortunately, the failure of this concept overshadows the fact that President Bush was, and is, absolutely correct in his vision for defeating radical Islamic terrorism. He was simply not well-served by his strategic planners and has suffered the political consequences of that error.
However, I do specifically remember this column from November of 2006 in which Peters laid out his reasons why he had soured on the military effort in Iraq:
On another note . . . Rumsfeld is one of the few people in this whole story who actually had any credibility whatsoever -- even after his departure. I've rarely (if ever) criticized him on this war even if he was ultimately responsible for its oversight. Quite simply, he was the right man for the wrong job in this case. In the early days of the Bush administration he was appointed Secretary of Defense for one specific purpose: To streamline the U.S. military both financially and operationally. He was the perfect guy for that job, mainly because of his military pedigree, his age (and accompanying lack of long-term political aspirations), and the fact that he was independently wealthy. This made him the ideal "bad guy" when it came to clashing with government and cutting off funds for useless military projects whose sole purpose was to provide financial benefits for various states, Congressional districts, etc.
The problem with the Iraq war was that this administration truly believed that it could be fought and won with this "downsized military" paradigm. And THAT was what will ultimately be remembered as the point on which the whole thing was completely botched.
To continue my thought... There are any number of documents from the several military war colleges that discuss the “Rumsfeld Doctrine” (to coin a phrase.. otherwise known as Rapid Dominance or Shock and Awe) as the replacement for the “Weinberger” and “Powell” Doctrines. I offer this from the Army War College publication PARAMETERS (article written by Donald Chisholm, Professor of Operations in the Joint Military Operations Department of the US Naval War College) :
The Risk of Optimism in the Conduct of War: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/03winter/chisholm.htm
SNIP
“The advocates of Rapid Dominance believe that these factors, taken together, mean that “overwhelming or decisive force,” as advocated by former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell, is going to be neither possible nor desirable, and a different approach is therefore required.”
SNIP
“Rapid Dominance offers powerful enticements, bound to appeal to high-level defense decisionmakers. It exploits the US technological advantage over potential opponents in information and precision weapons. It employs lighter forces, more readily deployed using less lift. It emphasizes air over ground forces. It promises to achieve military objectives at higher speed and lower cost than through the use of overwhelming force, with fewer casualties (ours and theirs, military and civilian), and with less damage to the adversary’s physical infrastructure, lessening post-conflict expenses.”
SNIP
“...the theory’s assumptions about the US ability to instrumentally manipulate the will of its adversaries reflect a fundamentally optimistic approach to the conduct of warfare.10 The problem with optimism in any endeavor, but with especially profound consequences in war, is that it “restricts anticipation of error, minimizes its probability, and leads to the concealment of both its occurrence and the severity of its effects.”11 Under a regime of optimism, errors may accumulate without recognition to a level that ultimately negates our ability to respond effectively, or requires a cost we may be unwilling to pay. Given the long lead time in the development of weapon systems and force structures, compounded by the dual problems of sunk costs and opportunity costs, in the domain of armed conflict this may translate to an unnecessary loss of blood and treasure if not actually to losing the war.”
You said: “those who think the war on terror was mishandled are in my opinion, wrong.”
Excuse us for failing to recognize you as the greatest military mind since von Clausewitz.
My only question is why have you not sought a position as a senior planner within the Pentagon?
I’m in total agreement with you.
Overwhelming force was the purpose for the large contingent that Shinseki recommended.
One would have expected Powell to go to the mat over the concept, but he was surprisingly docile throughout this whole thing. He seemed to have lost his voice.
I think that is just evidence of how much those who advocated military strategy during the Reagan Administration were marginalized by the new wave of Rapid Dominance advocates. They had total buy in.
I also believe Powell succumbed to the State Department culture.
I have little doubt that Powell’s stature was such that if he had insisted on overwhelming force that he would not have been contradicted.
And it would have hurt nothing.
Obviously, any long term rotation at the same level of troops would not work, but the idea behind the overwhelming force would have been to win and get it over with.
The rotational war is a tragic concept handed down to us from Vietnam. In the long run it is politically disastrous to keep a war seething because of the ability to rotate troops out after they’ve served their year.
Better the total mobilization of WWII. It forces the nation to identify what it wants to accomplish.
Foes of the Bush administration described the recent calls by six retired generals for Donald Rumsfeld to resign or be fired as “growing military pressure” for him to do so. These retired generals claim he should go for, among other things, ignoring the advice of senior military leaders and bungling the global war on terror in Iraq with poorly planned war-fighting strategies and post-Saddam planning efforts. We strongly disagree.
Like former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, we do not believe that it is appropriate for active duty, or retired, senior military officers to publicly criticize U.S. civilian leadership during war. Calling for the secretary's resignation during wartime may undercut the U.S. mission and incites individual challenge to the good order and discipline of our military culture. At best, such comments may send a confusing message to our troops deployed on dangerous missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. At worst, they can also inspire and motivate the evil forces we seek to defeat.
Since our nation's founding, the principle of civilian control over the military has been a centerpiece of our system of government. Under our constitutional system, it places elected and appointed government leaders in charge. American soldiers are bound by this tradition to subordinate themselves to civilian authority. We give advice but it is ultimately up to civilian leaders to make key strategic and policy decisions. Unlike many other democracies, this is one important reason why we have never been ruled by the military, and have been the most successful country the world has ever seen.
Some critics suggest that the calls by the six retired generals signify widespread discontent in the military with Secretary Rumsfeld’s leadership. It is preposterous for them to suggest that this small group represents the views of the 1.4 million men and women serving on active duty or the 7,000 retired generals and flag officers who respect, understand and appreciate the established American tradition of the military being subordinate to civilian control and direction.
Moreover, despite the frustration of the current situation in Iraq, military morale remains high, as evidenced by the high re-enlistment rate of active-duty forces. This fact belies the contention that there is rising military discontent.
The notion that Secretary Rumsfeld doesn't meet with, or ignores the advice of, senior military leaders is not founded in fact. During his tenure, senior military leaders have been involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process. In addition to the Senior Level Review Group, Defense Senior Leadership Conference, and Quadrennial Defense Review, in 2005 Secretary Rumsfeld also participated in meetings involving service chiefs 110 times and combatant commanders 163 times. Gen. Myers correctly describes these meetings as “very collaborative” with a free flow of information and discussion. Gen. Tommy Franks, U.S. Central Command Commander during the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, echoes Gen. Myers’s comments and supports Secretary Rumsfeld as collaborative in the decision-making process. Gen. Franks has stated recently that he is a tough collaborator and demands sound thinking and recommendations from the senior military leadership and staff.
Much of the acrimony expressed by Secretary Rumsfeld’s military critics appears to stem from his efforts to “transform” the military by moving to a joint expeditionary force that is lighter and more mobile in nature to meet the nation's current and future threats. Many senior officers and bureaucrats did not support his transformation goals — preferring conventional weapons of the past like the Crusader artillery piece and World War II war-fighting strategies, which prove practically useless against lawless and uncivilized enemies engaged in asymmetric warfare. It unfortunately appears that two of the retired generals (Messrs. Zinni and Newbold) do not understand the true nature of this radical ideology, Islamic extremism, and why we fight in Iraq. We suggest they listen to the tapes of United 93.
Despite criticisms, Mr. Rumsfeld is arguably one of the most effective secretaries of defense our nation has ever had. Under his watch, the U.S. military has been transforming; it brilliantly deposed Mullah Omar's barbaric Taliban regime (Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary) and Saddam Hussein's ruthless Baathist regime, freeing 50 million people from oppression and placing the countries on democratic paths. With these actions, terrorists have been denied secure home bases. These are a few key factors why terrorists have been unable to attack the American homeland again. The policy and forward strategy implemented by Secretary Rumsfeld has taken the fight to the enemy as did the nation in World War II and the Cold War.
Some, like Generals Zinni, Newbold, Eaton, Batiste, Swannack, Riggs and others, may not like Secretary Rumsfeld’s leadership style. They certainly have the right as private citizens now to speak their minds. Some may feel that he's been unfair, arrogant and autocratic to some senior officers. But those sentiments and feelings are irrelevant. In the end he's the man in charge and the buck stops with him. As long as he retains the confidence of the commander in chief he will make the important calls at the top of the department of defense. That's the way America works. So let's all breathe into a bag and get on with winning the global war against radical Islam. In time the electorate, and history, will grade their decisions.
— Greyhawk, http://www.mudvillegazette.com/archives/004423.html
COMMENT: Don't be too quick to tie success or failure to one person. Sometimes events on the ground must run their course before certain actions can be taken; i.e., Iraqi tribal leaders had to sustain severe population losses before they could switch loyalties to the American "invasion" force. In a fluid situation, the winning side is the one that adapts most effectively. No one could have done that better than Rumsfeld so I reject the characterization that he simply wanted to win the war on the cheap. There is no evidence to sustain your argument.
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a bit defensive are we?
you are entitled to your opinion as i am mine... you may think i am wrong and worthy of name calling and humiliating... i just think you are wrong. no dehumanizing or humiliating. just the difference between the two of us. i argue with the intent on dealing in facts, you tend to argue with more opinion...
“Excuse us for failing to recognize you as the greatest military mind since von Clausewitz.”— i did not seek the recognition, but you are excused and i thank you for it.
“My only question is why have you not sought a position as a senior planner within the Pentagon?”— i feel they are doing an excellent job: toppled saddam’s regime, destroyed the insurgency, tied up alqaeda so they could not strike us at home, showed the world we are diligent, effectively battled against a death cult with minimum casualties...
no, no need to apply for position... your concerns come from mistakes being made in war... but you fail to realize the enemy always gets a say in whatever is tried. iraq is a success and continues to show why bush, rumsfield, and cheney knew and know what they are doing.
the politicians blow in the wind... powell, pelosi, reid, clinton, obama... the war needs to be continued.
teeman
and yes i still believe you are wrong.
You said: a bit defensive are we?
Nope. I believe I fall more into the Patton school of war: “Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”
I don’t believe in being defensive.
your patton boots could not have crushed the numerous jihadists out there without the majority of them either, and not in any specific order:
1) not participating in theater, because softer targets were more appealing
2) leaving iraq because situation was hopeless
3) more likely to disperse to other areas more friendly because of increased numbers
4) open to the use of wmd to of which they would have likely have been according to intelligence reports at the time and not hindsight.
5) increase in jihadists because of collateral damage
6) there is no number six
your attacks are unwarranted. you bully. you cannot defend your position so you attack the character of your opponents. you have bitten on the idea that because the media says iraq is a failure, you fall in line with it.
you cannot see the forest for all the trees in the way.
you criticize as though you are infallible and believe in time of war everything should go as planned.
the war to change regimes in iraq went a month.
the peace plan would have been implemented, but then a new war emerged, with an insurgency sponsored by iran and syria and the al qaeda group. you believe it is one war, but it is not.
there were and are different conflicts being waged.
i am glad we had people in place to execute this the way they did, or the body count would have been greater and the damage inflicted on the enemy less.
jmho
teeman
1. My dad expressed frustration over the conduct of the Vietnam war because of its focus on body counts. Do you see this as part and parcel with strategies like “shock and awe” that don’t emphasize the taking and holding of land?
I would make a correction to part of your question before answering it. “Shock and Awe” does emphasize the taking and holding of land, it just strategizes that you can take land by heavily pounding the enemy into submission with air bombardment and long range missiles to eliminate their will to resist. Small, light, highly mobile land forces then move in to exploit that success and seize the area of operations. To answer the other part of your question, the media’s morbid obsession with body counts during the Vietnam War, and the resultant mindset of Americans that they will quickly stop supporting military operations that produce large numbers of US casualties, was a major factor in the development of the “Rapid Dominance” strategy.
2. That it one of the reasons we failed in Vietnam?
No. Vietnam was a political failure not a military failure. Military strategy at that time was to seize and control militarily objectives (land). The US military never lost anything to North Vietnam or the Viet Cong, and the combination of bombing in North Vietnam and military operations in South Vietnam brought the north to agree to ceasing hostilities. The US would not invade, and easily defeat, North Vietnam for fear the Soviets and or Chinese would become involved. The seizing and then leaving of captured areas was more a frustration to the troops than a significant tactical error since the North Vietnamese never could defeat US troops in battle. The ultimate victory by the North Vietnamese occurred because of the weakened US presidency that occurred when Richard Nixon resigned. The communists correctly believed that there was no way President Gerald Ford had the political capital to recommit US forces in South Vietnam to drive the communists back. So in many ways you can blame the communist conquest of South Vietnam on ...ta da... liberals in Congress.
3. I seem to recall reading that aerial bombardment during WW2 was seen as a failure in its goal of breaking German wartime production(didn’t the Brit that headed that up from the UK end lose his job), my sources are lost to me or I have them wrong. Do you agree it was a failure?
One of the problems with aerial bombardment is that, without troops on the ground in that area, they enemy can just re-build. An example would be airport runways. If you capture it with ground forces it can no longer be used by the enemy, but if you just put holes in it they can fix it. The same goes with destroying production facilities. They can rebuild or shift to other facilities. But I would disagree as to the failure of the WWII air strategy. It did what they wanted it to do. It was a war of attrition, and over time the Allies were able to wear the Germans down and deplete their capability to wage war in both materiel and troops.
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