The war in Afghanistan, the war on terror and the coming war in Iraq have given Rumsfeld a powerful ally: necessity. While Rumsfeld gains notice (and notoriety) for his brusque manner and off-the-cuff pronouncements about global affairs, his most important work has gone on behind the scenes, trying to improve the way the military prepares for war. Last week he spoke to NEWSWEEK about his efforts to change the Pentagon “culture” in order to make the military, as he put it, “more agile.”
“Agile” is not a word normally associated with the armed forces. Neither is “flexible” or “creative.” The Pentagon likes predictability and order. Too often, the military has become ponderous and risk-averse. Rumsfeld is trying to change that. He seeks to fashion a senior-officer corps that is willing to test assumptions and look beyond the parochial needs of their individual services. Are the rank and file cooperating? “I’m not having much trouble,” he blithely asserts, though his description of what’s required–in essence, a new mind-set–suggests the difficulty of his task.
No one plans as relentlessly or as carefully as the military. Night and day, armies of colonels beaver away, working up plans for every conceivable contingency. Moving an army (a half-million feet of cargo space for a single armored division) is an extraordinarily complex and cumbersome undertaking, and the military wants to schedule and organize it down to the last minute and the last bullet. In a crisis, the all-powerful combatant commanders like CENTCOM’s Gen. Tommy Franks want to be able to whip the war plan and deployment order off the shelf and slap them on the desk of the secretary of Defense.
The system worked well enough in the cold war, when the American military was preparing to fight the Red Army on the plains of Europe. But it has proved creaky and balky in the age of terror, when the Pentagon needs to move in unexpected ways and use its high-tech edge. “The system was a product of the industrial age, dating back to World War II,” says Rumsfeld. He compared it to a big switch on the wall with only two settings: on and off. Deployments were all or nothing: vast forces, moving out all at once, whether or not they were needed right away or on such a large scale.
Many combatant commanders were perfectly content with throwing overwhelming force at any threat. That’s always been the American way of war. American combat leaders, perfectly reasonably, want to go to war with the least possible risk to their soldiers. The modern model is the first gulf war: almost 700,000 troops deployed, and only 145 killed by enemy fire–not a whole lot more than were lost during Operation Desert Storm to traffic accidents. But America no longer has the luxury of such overkill. The variety of threats from terrorists and failed states with weapons of mass destruction means that the Pentagon has to be constantly deploying for small and large actions all over the world. Just last week, as American forces continued to build up in the Gulf for a possible invasion of Iraq, a force of some 1,500 soldiers headed into combat in the Philippines against a rebel faction with close ties to Al Qaeda.
The off-the-shelf plan for invading Iraq called for sending hundreds of thousands of troops into the Gulf right away. The plan was almost immediately jettisoned. Rumsfeld was not the only critic. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, and the vice chairman, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, have become allies of the secretary in trying to force new thinking. And CENTCOM’s General Franks did not take much persuading to go back to the drawing board, though he continued to insist that his civilian masters not shortchange the plan. But by far the most persistent questioner, say both civilian and uniformed Pentagon officials, was Rumsfeld.
He has vigorously shunned the role of secretary as rubber stamp. He believes in what he calls an “iterative process,” meaning that decisions are arrived at only after surviving a murder board in his office. This represents a power shift in the Pentagon away from the uniformed services, whose dominance had grown steadily after Kennedy-Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” were discredited by the Vietnam War. Before Rumsfeld, the regional commanders would present any war plan to the Joint Chiefs, who would massage the plan and hand it to the secretary as a fait accompli.
For Iraq, the secretary insisted on a more gradual deployment of a smaller, more nimble and flexible force. In part, he wanted a military buildup geared to diplomacy, in order to slowly ratchet up pressure on Iraq. And, in part, he saw no need to send thousands of soldiers away from their families at Christmastime just to sit around in the desert. The deployment order was unreasonably burdensome on the Reserves and the National Guard. In recent years, these part-time soldiers have been called up so often–for conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Gulf–that they have begun to feel like draftees. Rumsfeld ordered the top brass to look for other ways to perform jobs normally carried out by the Guard and Reserves. Example: force protection, or guarding military bases and encampments abroad. In many cases, the military discovered, troops from host countries could stand guard duty instead.
Rumsfeld constantly pushes the military to spend less time “crunching numbers” and more time re-examining the assumptions upon which the numbers are based. Precision weapons–“smart” bombs–allow the Air Force to use fewer warplanes to take out a target. Yet many of the Pentagon’s off-the-shelf bombing campaigns were based on dated notions, that the Air Force will have to constantly revisit targets with old-style “dumb” bombs to make sure they were destroyed. The military believes heavily in redundancy, partly to accommodate interservice rivalries. Rumsfeld prods the services to look for ways to do more with less. He is hoping to free up resources to invest in a new generation of high-tech weapons.
The military is going to be difficult to wean from its old ways. Most generals were comfortable with the so-called Powell doctrine (named after Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the gulf war) of overwhelming force. What if high-tech weapons, relied on by Rumsfeld’s lean-and-mean force structure, don’t work? What if the military is stretched too thin by opening too many new fronts in the war on terror? With the Soviet threat gone, it may make sense to move divisions out of Germany, but sending combat troops chasing after guerrillas in the Philippines brings back ghosts to Vietnam vets. Still, Rumsfeld thinks he is gradually nudging the Pentagon into a new era. “You’re dealing with a great, big institution,” he told NEWSWEEK, “and change is hard. It’s like turning a battleship. You don’t spin it like a speedboat. You have to pick the right people who have flexibility in thinking, who have their eyes on the horizon. The ship is turning; I can feel it,” he says. “At the top and among the junior officers, especially.”
What he doesn’t say is that there is still considerable resistance to his reforms in the middle ranks–the majors, colonels and one- and two-star generals who make up the bulk of the Pentagon bureaucracy. Wartime may make them believers. But the real test will come on the battlefield, when clever or rational approaches confront chaos.
