Rumsfeld Redux

National Journal
February 18, 2012

The Pentagon’s new strategy sounds awfully familiar. That’s because we’ve seen it before.

By James Kitfield

Pentagon’s budget, as advertised, touts a new strategic vision — and a major reorientation of U.S. military forces. It anticipates a reduction in ground forces, a withdrawal of heavy Army units from Europe, and a shift in the military’s focus toward Asia. Above all, it favors agile (and, therefore, more easily deployable) special operations forces and the advanced air-and-space power that makes them so lethal.

President Obama’s budget request last week? No, this blueprint is nearly a decade old, and the vision behind it belongs to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “There really is a ghost-of-Rumsfeld feel to the new Obama strategy, because the administration has come to realize something that Rumsfeld initially grasped, which was that the number of U.S. troops or ground units ultimately matters less than how mobile and lethal they are,” says Dan Goure, a defense analyst and vice president at the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit research organization. As the Obama administration adopts a similar template, it might help to understand how the Rumsfeld vision and legacy went so disastrously wrong.

It’s easy to forget just how determined Rumsfeld was to use the quick victories — against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s army — as catalysts to transform the U.S. military. His “Global Posture Review” of 2004 envisioned a more deployable force based in the United States, so he wanted to bring roughly half of the forward-deployed ground troops home from Europe. In Asia, the focus would shift from permanent U.S. bases to “forward operating sites” and base-access agreements, emphasizing flexibility. Rumsfeld, who lavished special attention on the relatively slow-moving Army, even brought Gen. Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to become the first Special Forces-trained Army chief of staff, hoping to infuse the service with an expeditionary ethos as he broke it down into more-modular and interchangeable pieces.

But Rumsfeld allowed that vision to blind him to what was actually happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. He developed a thoroughbred quarter horse trained for the race of regime change, and stood by as it was yoked to the tedious plow of stability operations and nation-building. His lean force couldn’t stabilize those fractious countries and fight manpower-intensive counterinsurgency wars. “Essentially, Rumsfeld’s ‘revolution in military affairs’ failed because he allowed the mission to exceed his vision,” Goure says.

Rumsfeld failed to deliver an entire Army division he had initially promised to commanders in Iraq; for years he declined to increase the number of ground troops, even after back-to-back combat deployments threatened to break the force; and he steadfastly refused to change course or tactics even as Iraq slid toward all-out civil war. Meanwhile, his uncanny penchant for infuriating allies (“The mission will define the coalition”; “Old Europe” versus “New Europe”) led many of them to suspect the proposed withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe was actually aimed at neutering NATO.

When Robert Gates succeeded Rumsfeld in 2006, he excoriated the Pentagon bureaucracy for preparing for future wars rather than winning the current ones. “Rumsfeld is like this tragic figure out of Greek literature, because he had what in some ways was a brilliant vision…. [But] his ego wouldn’t allow him to adjust the strategy or question his own assumptions,” says Steven Metz, a professor of National Security Affairs at the Army War College. “The strategic objectives changed in Iraq from regime change to establishing a democracy, and Rumsfeld essentially just threw up his hands and let others shape the war.”

Now that the Defense Department has resurrected much of Rumsfeld’s agenda, Pentagon officials are likely to confront many of the same tensions and risks. Pulling troops out of Europe will inevitably make managing NATO — already a shaky alliance — more difficult. New military-access agreements with nations such as Australia, the Philippines, and Singapore give America a presence in Asia, but in a crisis the administration could find these agreements to be less dependable anchors than actual U.S. bases. And transforming the force during a period of post-conflict austerity will be much harder than doing so during a period of skyrocketing wartime defense budgets.

Perhaps most important, by planning to cut 100,000 ground forces as it increases the size of (and reliance on) special operations forces, the Pentagon sends an unmistakable signal about the wars it thinks it will fight in the future. It obviously does not foresee long, manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns. “Much of [the Rumsfeld plan] is strategically sound, just as it was before the Iraq war put those initiatives on the back burner,” says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “But you run the same danger of designing a force for the kind of war you want to fight. As Secretary Rumsfeld discovered, the enemy gets a vote in that.”