Rumseld ignored Pentagon advice on Iraq-report [Quagmire flashback]

Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly rejected advice from Pentagon planners that substantially more troops and armor would be needed to fight a war in Iraq, New Yorker Magazine reported.

In an article for its April 7 edition, which goes on sale on Monday, the weekly said Rumsfeld insisted at least six times in the run-up to the conflict that the proposed number of ground troops be sharply reduced and got his way.

"He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the article quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon planner as saying. "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."

It also said Rumsfeld had overruled advice from war commander Gen. Tommy Franks to delay the invasion until troops denied access through Turkey could be brought in by another route and miscalculated the level of Iraqi resistance.

"They've got no resources. He was so focused on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart," the article, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, cited an unnamed former high-level intelligence official as saying.

Rumsfeld is known to have a difficult relationship with the Army's upper echelons while he commands strong loyalty from U.S. special operations forces, a key component in the war.

He has insisted the invasion has made good progress since it was launched 10 days ago, with some ground troops 50 miles (80 km) from the capital, despite unexpected guerrilla-style attacks on long supply lines from Kuwait.

Hersh, however, quoted the former intelligence official as saying the war was now a stalemate.

Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said.

"The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the former official said.

The article quoted the senior planner as saying Rumsfeld had wanted to "do the war on the cheap" and believed that precision bombing would bring victory.

Some 125,000 U.S. and British troops are now in Iraq. U.S. officials on Thursday said they planned to bring in another 100,000 U.S. soldiers by the end of April.

The problem with the Tomahawk missiles is they keep landing on Republican Guard positions and the dang tanks and armored vehicles have a serious flaw in that they won't stop until they take Baghdad. The army, in fact any big organization, always has a large number of people who want to do it the way we used to do it. There are always many that predict the failure of the new technologies. They are almost always wrong. But that never stops them from predicting defeat from new methods of accomplishing goals.

Our army before WWII could not see the value of air power. They kicked Billy Mitchell out of the service for saying airplanes could easily defeat battleships. Patton had a hard time convincing the top brass that armor was the way to go. As a result it took us from December 7, 1941 until June 6th 1944 to get the modern forces to invade the coast of France. When world war II started we were still flying biplanes as fighters. It was once the view of the US army that providing troops with semiautomatic firing rifles was bad because soldiers would just waste ammunition.

This time Rummy has made the military use far more modern weapons and methods. It is now obvious that the old infantry, armor, and artillery forces of Saddam are no match for a modern attack.

Iraq is the first time in history that a smaller force has attacked a larger force and easily won. The old belief that an attacking force must outnumber a defending force by 2 to 1 or better has been debunked. That is no longer true.

The modern USA weapons are a force multiplier. It is something the brass promoted by Clinton did not understand. Thank goodness that Bush had Rummy modernized our force. Rummy d kicked out of the military the stuck in the mud men who loved the old ways.

Those that believed in the old ways predicted failure the same way the admirals and Generals of the 1920s and 30s predicted the Battle ship would defeat air power. Back then the army brass was predicting that armor would never replace the infantry. They thought of armoy as a replacement for horse mounted cavalry.

Such beliefs belong on the dust heap of history along with the people who believed you could not win a war with our horse mounted cavalry.

Several good points, but the technical superiority and modern tactics being displayed did not come about instantaneously.

The military has been long involved in an internal struggle, and these developments have been long in the making. The recent book "Boyd" is a great read about some of the rebels within the military that have been shaking its foundations and helping to arrive at the maneuver warfare/smart technology stage that we're now seeing.

The military itself probably deserves most of the credit, not Rumsfeld. No doubt there are many of the old voices still in the military, but they are not in charge, thankfully. Just how much of that is due to Rumsfeld will take years to sort out. What is clear is that the troops have been trained to fight smart like this, which means that it has been in the making far longer than Rumsfeld has been around.

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