Rumsfeld wanted to get rid of all artillery or just the Crusader Weapon System?
I think the political fight was over the Crusader, but the thinking underlying it was that artillery was obsolete.
“While it might have been a terrific weapon for the set-piece battles it was designed for—against massed Soviet forces in the flats of Central Europe—the Crusader figured to be of dubious use in short-lead-time maneuver warfare in faraway mountainous places like Afghanistan. And so the Army will have to make do with its Gulf-War-era howitzers, with their much slower rate of fire, eventually to be augmented by a precision-guided round, as well as various planned mobile surface-to-surface rocket systems.”