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Vietnam collection (lessons plus)
18 Dec. Boston Globe - Vietnam and Victory.
Quote:
Some claim that the US strategy of ‘clear and hold’ had largely defeated the Viet Cong by 1971, and that the same tactics can work in Iraq. But that gets Vietnam wrong, say the war’s historians.
...''National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,'' unveiled Nov. 30...
The document envisions a three-pronged security strategy for fighting the Iraqi insurgency: ''Clear, Hold, and Build.'' It is no accident that this phrase evokes the ''clear and hold'' counterinsurgency strategy pursued by the American military in the final years of the Vietnam War. For months, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius and The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan have reported, influential military strategists inside and outside the Pentagon have been pushing to resurrect ''clear and hold'' in Iraq, claiming that the US effort to suppress the Viet Cong was actually a success.
...the idea that the strategy that beat the Viet Cong could work in Iraq elides a fundamental question: Did ''clear and hold'' actually beat the Viet Cong? For most historians of the war, not to mention for those who fought on the winning side, the answer is no. And the lessons for Iraq are far from clear.
...In sum, where Sorley paints a picture of in-depth village-level deployments between cooperating American and Vietnamese units, combined with economic aid, building villagers' loyalty and sense of security, Elliott and Hien paint a picture of indiscriminate firepower driving villagers off of their land, creating an atomized and demoralized, but controllable, population. This, presumably, is not the new strategy the US envisions winning hearts and minds in Iraq.
...Ultimately, it's not necessary to make the claim of a squandered victory in Vietnam in order to argue that ''clear and hold'' was effective, or is the right strategy for Iraq. Even General Hien thinks ''clear and hold'' was superior to ''search and destroy.''
''I wouldn't say 'clear and hold' was a 'better' strategy,'' Hien says-since, obviously, he wanted the United States to lose. ''But it was a more appropriate strategy for the US.''
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Kit Carson Scouts
The Small Wars Journal / Small Wars Council has been given permission to republish several articles from the archives of the Marine Corps Gazette (1916 – 2005).
We have been researching COIN related articles from the Vietnam War era and there is an outstanding selection to choose from. The linked article is the second posted here and on the SWJ Library page.
We enjoin you to post Vietnam-related topics that you would like posted and we will see what we can come up with through a data-base search...
Kit Carson Scouts by Captain William Cowan, USMC. Marine Corps Gazette, October 1969.
Quote:
Immediately west of the main Citadel in Quang Tri City, capital of South Vietnam's northernmost province, lies a small but strongly fortified compound. Built with Marine Corps money and materials, it is defended only by former North Vietnamese regulars and former Viet Cong. Though few Marines know of its whereabouts or purpose, the products of that compound represent a potent asset to the small unit leader operating against Communist forces in the Republic of Vietnam.
It is the 3rd Marine Division's Kit Carson Scout School, staffed by Marines and dedicated to the task of training former enemy to work with units of the 3rd Marine Division. The Kit Carson Scout program was originated and implemented by Marines. It started when the 1st Marine Division decided to use defectors to locate enemy weapons caches and booby traps.
Though they were mostly untrained, their exceptional performance with Marine units was noted in Saigon, and Gen Westmoreland issued a message in September, 1967, directing all infantry divisions in Vietnam, both Marine and Army, to begin using Kit Carson Scouts in conjunction with friendly operations.
In addition, Gen Westmoreland directed that a minimum of 100 scouts per division was necessary to insure effectiveness. The 3rd Marine Division was the first unit in Vietnam to reach that level when the fourth Kit Carson Scout class graduated from the school in Quang Tri City in December, 1967.
The Scouts are known as Hoi Chanhs (generally translated in Vietnamese as "one who has returned"), and their reasons for defection from the VC or NVA differ. Although many are disillusioned with communism or unfulfilled Communist promises of land, money or battlefield glory, most of them return to the Government of South Viet Nam (GVN) control because they are tired of the constant pressure of allied operations and honestly believe they are on the losing side…
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Three Lessons From Vietnam
29 Dec. Washington Post Op-Ed - Three Lessons From Vietnam by Dale Andrade.
Quote:
It's not uncommon these days to hear talk of "lessons" learned in Vietnam and their application to current U.S. conflicts. Unfortunately, most observers have ignored the uniqueness of the Vietnam War, picking and choosing the lessons learned there with little regard for their application to the present.
This is particularly true with the current buzz over the "clear and hold" concept...
Stripped to essentials, there are three basic lessons from the war. All must be employed by any counterinsurgency effort, no matter what shape it takes.
First, there must be a unified structure that combines military and civilian pacification efforts. In Vietnam that organization was called CORDS, for Civil Operations and Rural Development Support...
The second lesson involves attacking the enemy's center of gravity. An insurgency thrives only if it can maintain a permanent presence among the population, which in Vietnam was called the Viet Cong infrastructure, or VCI. This covert presence used carrot and stick -- promises of reform and threats of violence -- to take control of large chunks of the countryside...
Finally, it is crucial to form militias in order to raise the staff necessary to maintain a permanent government presence in dangerous areas. This is the only way "clear and hold" has any hope of working....
In the end America failed in Vietnam, and it is difficult to convince the public or policymakers that there is anything to learn from a losing effort. But the U.S. military did make important headway in pacification, and it would be foolish to let that experience slip away....
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Aren't we....?
"Finally, it is crucial to form militias in order to raise the staff necessary to maintain a permanent government presence in dangerous areas. This is the only way "clear and hold" has any hope of working...."
Good article. Points out some of the blaring gaps we have had in our game plan that have been discussed in several of the threads.
In regards to the use of militias, haven't we replaced that strategy in Iraqi by finally placing Iraqi units to hold areas we've cleared? I know we haven't got enough of them trained to hold every place, but isn't that the path we're on instead of militias?
Seems to me that there are enough divisions within Iraq and a tendency to want to stay with them (religious, secular, tribal, etc) that militias might just make a road block that would need cleared later......
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Militias and the nominal Iraqi Military
http://ebird.afis.mil/ebfiles/e20051228409203.html
Quote:
Miami Herald
December 28, 2005
Pg. 1
Kurds Preparing Takeover; U.S. Exit Strategy At Risk
The U.S. plan for leaving Iraq is in trouble, with more than 10,000 Kurds in the Iraqi army prepared to seize control of northern Iraq for an independent state.
By Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder News Service
KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
This article points out the dangers inherent with militias--some of which are very much still in place.
Best
Tom
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illogical arguments
Mr Andrade’s article, unlike his book, is full of the same errors he accuses others of; that of picking and choosing lessons from Vietnam with little regard to their application to the present.
How he only came up with three basic lessons I’ll never know, but the ones he identifies are not necessarily relevant to OIF and OEF-A as he claims. Additionally his attempts of identifying overarching lessons that must be employed are in fact simply a series of techniques, tactics, and procedures that worked to some degree in Vietnam instead of counterinsurgency principles.
First he calls for a unified (military and civilian) pacification effort. No one will argue that, and of course that is what we’re attempting to get to, but his explanation of CORDS was a poor example. First off he confuses the terms streamlining and inflation when the military takes the program over from the CIA. He also failed to mention that the problem with GEN Westmoreland’s version of CORDS is that he undermined the program (unintentionally) by employing these home village defense force as an offensive force, in effect a back door draft. There is big difference between signing up to protect your family and leaving your family to fight a war that you don’t really understand.
The author’s second lesson is that an insurgency thrives only if it can maintain a permanent presence among the population, so we need to have a Phoenix Program to root it out. First off in all insurgencies we have attempted to identify and neutralize insurgent infrastructure, and granted the Phoenix Program was effective, but then again Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t Vietnam. Phoenix was effective in Vietnam for a number of reasons, but the situations were dealing with in the Middle East are entirely different. First the degree of hostility to Westerners is greater than it was in Vietnam. In Vietnam they embraced a political ideology in hopes of building a more equitable economic system, and that logic could be countered with effective economic carrots and basic security. In the Middle East much of the population hates what we represent and don’t trust our motives. Economic carrots alone may buy some cooperation, but in the end they want us out. Furthermore the insurgents (plural in every sense of the word) don’t have a single unified infrastructure or ideology that we can target, so centers of gravity are numerous and of less value than they were in Vietnam. The bottom line is we’re already going after the insurgent infrastructure.
His final argument is the least logical, and that is stating that the formation of militias is “necessary” to win. I can’t think of any militia groups that have been necessary to defeat an insurgency, nor can I think of any militia groups that have been effectively reintegrated into society after the war, so in effect this option produces armed criminal gangs, some quite dangerous and effective ranging from the drug lords of Burma to the warlords of Afghanistan. If our definition of victory is a united Iraq, I’m not sure how forming militias will get us there?
I like the author’s book, but think he missed the boat with this article.
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Vietnam Lessons That Really Apply in Iraq
4 Jan. Washington Post Letters to the Editor in response to the Three Lessons from Vietnam Op-Ed piece.
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Reasons for war in Vietnam and Iraq broader than critics arguments
One of the letter writers uses the Bush and Johnson lied us in to war argument. This is really weak. The progress toward war in Vietnam was much broader than events in the Tonkin Gulf that may or may not have happened. If the Johnson administration was looking for a causus belli, it did not have to wait for action on the high seas. The North Vietnamese were already in clear violation of the Geneva Accords which prohibited all parties from military activities in Laos. The reason Johnson did not use this as his reason for going to war was his reluctance to engage in Laos where the violation was taking place. Shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have defeated the communist, according to their own historians, but Johnson and McNamara were not willing to use overt force in Laos. By restricting the US to transitory force, i.e. raids by special forces and raids by air craft, and refusing to use a blocking force, they committed the US to a much more difficult war in South Vietnam.
They further complicated the war within South Vietnam by restricting the number of troops below that needed to control the space. Unlike Iraq where the commanders have gotten all the troops they requested, in Vietnam troops provided were always significantly below the amount requested. ( I know about Shinseki's observation of troops needed in post war Iraq, but he was never a commander of operations in Iraq and his statement was made in the context of a wag (wild ass guess) in a congressional hearing and not as a result of analysis by staffers working the problem. The facts are that Gen. Franks and Gen Abizaid got the troops they requested.
The WMD "lied us into war meme" is also weak. First those making it also believed Saddam had WMD, they just were not willing to go to war to remove the threat. Second there were several reasons beyond that for going to war and one of the most important was Saddam's failure to account for his WMD as required by his cease fire agreement in 1991 and by numerous UN resolutions. His failure to account was reason enough to believe he posed a threat. Even after all the work by the Iraqi survey group, much of his WMD is still unaccounted for. Saddam's failure to account put the US in the position of taking the word of a madman or going to war. Apparently the crits would have preferred to take the word of a despotic psychopath.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Merv Benson
They further complicated the war within South Vietnam by restricting the number of troops below that needed to control the space. Unlike Iraq where the commanders have gotten all the troops they requested, in Vietnam troops provided were always significantly below the amount requested. ( I know about Shinseki's observation of troops needed in post war Iraq, but he was never a commander of operations in Iraq and his statement was made in the context of a wag (wild ass guess) in a congressional hearing and not as a result of analysis by staffers working the problem. The facts are that Gen. Franks and Gen Abizaid got the troops they requested.
I wonder if this is because they really don’t see a need for more troops or because they feel pressured not to use more troops. If so they wouldn’t be the first senior officers to tailor their assessment to please political bosses. The fact of the matter is that the number of troops in Iraq has always been unusually small for that type of mission (historical speaking). Also while Shinseki was never a commander there I don’t think his assessment can be dismissed as a guess, the man has vast experience in these types of affairs. For the senior political leadership to dismiss out of hand the recommendations of the Army Chief of Staff shows that their minds were made up about the war and how they would deal with Iraq, decisions which seem to have come back to haunt us all.
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Troop numbers in Iraq
Both the Secretary of Defense and the President have said repeatedly that if the commanders want more troops all they have to do is ask for them, That does not sound like they are being pressured not to ask for them. The commanders have also repeatedly testified before the congress that they did not need more troops. I get the impression that they felt like the smaller foot print to maintain the situation until the Iraqis could take over was their plan all along. They all have been recommending Laurences Seven Pillars which says you need to get the Arabs involved. At this point I do not see any reason not to take the commanders at their word.
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I disagree, after what happened with Shinseki it would have been obvious to anyone what answer the administration wanted to hear with regards to troops levels. That is very obvious pressure to not ask for more troops. Also Laurence is good reading but he was trying start a guerrilla war not end one, just something to think about.
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Troop requests
Stu-6,
The position you are suggesting is that the President, the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Abizid, Gen. Franks and Gen. Casey are not telling the truth. Do you really believe that?
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It's more complicated
Our President is definitely a leader, and while he may or may not harbor private doubts, he can’t afford to air them in public. Can you imagine the impact on our revolution if George Washington aired his serious doubts about our Army’s chances of winning to the common soldier at Valley Forge? Our current national leaders understand the concepts of leadership and loyalty, and obviously have the best interests of our nation foremost in mind when they make decisions, but there is a dangerous flip side to this also that can lead to poor decision making despite everyone’s best intentions.
I’m not pretending to be a sociologist or a psychologist, and definitely welcome the opinions of those who are better versed in these fields than I am, but as a long time observer of human behavior (like the rest of us) I think there are factors that weigh on our decision making and perceptions that prevent us from being as objective as we would like, and these are very prevalent in the military service. Two relevant factors I think are relevant are Group Think and loyalty.
Group think is when a group shares a certain view of the world, and if you don’t share it you may very well find yourself outside the group, such as GEN Shinseki did. GEN Shinseki’s analysis about several things ranging from the Stryker Bde concept to the amount of forces needed in Iraq to conduct stability operations were correct based on his well reasoned assumptions (his estimate was not a WAG as stated earlier). However, if you assumed like many in the administration that the Iraqis would embrace us and that mankind naturally embraces democracy then GEN Shinseki’s estimates would seem absurd. Can there be two truths? Within the Army there are different positions (or opposing Group Think positions) on this, so we are far from a consensus. Several senior officers state off the record that they think we need more troops, but out of “loyalty” to their chain of command feel morally constrained from going public with their opinions, then there is another Group of officers that sincerely think we need to downsize our forces in OIF, because they believe our presence is the catalyst that drives the insurgency. Both sides can make logical supporting arguments for their cases, but Group Think generally prevents us from honestly considering a view of the world that is counter to our Group. Groups tend to cherry pick intelligence, history, and daily incidents to support their Group’s view. Objective thinking is hard work, because it requires subordinating the ego to logic, and it can be especially hard if you reach conclusions that are counter to your Group’s commonly held perceptions (paradigm shifts).
So we have a combination of loyalty and Group Think that tends to make the truth far from perfect, but that isn’t necessarily the act of lying. In short, I don’t agree with Stu’s statement that our senior officers are under no pressure not to ask for more troops. Group Think and loyalty provide that pressure, and would have a big impact on me if I was in their shoes, because I would think that if I asked for more troops that I would be hurting our President, so I would be very hesitant to do so, even if I really thought that the right answer based on my assessments. The President is not pressuring them, but the influence of Group Think and loyalty is because that is what we perceive as the President’s intent. This is a global phenomenon, not something uniquely American. The old saying about the emperor not wearing any clothes obviously has it roots in long established truths about the way people interact with their leaders. The emperor longs for the truth, but the emperor’s subjects tell the emperor what “they” think he wants to hear.
Another old saying that should be considered is that truth is the first casualty of war. Probably all of our nation’s leaders throughout history had to painfully decide when to lie to the American people for national security purposes. It is a challenging ethical question for a democracy and a nation that is built on its values more than anything else. There is a big difference about lying about having sex with that woman and lying about what the NSA is doing. One is self serving and the other serves to protect the nation, or so we think, but in so doing are we threatening the constitution we swore to defend? No easy answers that I can see, so Charlie Mike (or continue mission)
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Group think and force to space
Bill raises some interesting points about group think. It is interesting that when Schartzkoph was asked if he had all he needed he had no difficulty in asking for more. It is not really a question of whether Shinseki or Franks and Abizaid were right on the number of troops needed, it is really a question of what is the best way to get to that number. For reasons that appear sound to me, Abizaid and Casey thought that the best way to get to the force to space ration needed was through training Iraqis and making them responsible. This was a decision that obviously lengthened the time it took to suppress the enemy in western Anbar where US forces were frustrated by having to buy the same ground more than once. I think they were concerned that if the US supplied that force it would result in two problems. The first is greater resistance to US occupation than Iraqi occupation. The second is the Laurence point, if you do not get the Iraqis involved in their own defense, they would have been content to let us do it for a longer time. I think there is a third element also working based on advice from Israel and that relates to the matter of intelligence. Initially when the more troops issue was raised the command's response was that they did not need more troops, they needed better intelligence. It appears that they wound up getting better intelligence when they got more Iraqi troops involved.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Merv Benson
Stu-6,
The position you are suggesting is that the President, the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Abizid, Gen. Franks and Gen. Casey are not telling the truth. Do you really believe that?
That is not even close to what I am suggestion. What I am saying is that there is obvious pressure on those involved not to ask for more troops and that may be influencing their actions. In fact I think that is a very high probability, but I have not accused anyone of not telling the truth as they see it . . . yet.
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I dont think anyone here is suggesting that our leadership has been dishonest; however, it is difficult to understand how every after-action report you read written from someone other than a general officer or think-tank states that we lack the appropriate numbers of infantry. While the number of troops necessary in Iraq may in fact only be 150,000; it needs to be 150,000 ground combat forces, and not 35,000 infantry or provisional infantry and 115,000 support personnel to include all members of the National Guard. If New York City maintains a police force of nearly 30,000, then surely a congruent amount of infantry is needed in Iraq. It is all about expectations. If you cannot secure your own border at home, should anyone expect that we can do it in Iraq? If you cannot stop drugs and other contraband from freely flowing around the US, can we expect to stop the flow of bombs and weapons around Iraq?
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Vietnam...
US Army Center of Military History - Reorganizing for Pacification Support - study by Thomas Scoville.
Quote:
This study describes the background and implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's decision in May 1967 to create a civil/military organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development; Support--CORDS, to manage US advice and support to the South Vietnamese government's pacification program. It focuses on the years 1966*68 when the organization was conceived and established, and it relates events both from the perspective of government leadership in Washington and the US mission in Saigon. Over these years, the organization changed three times, culminating in CORDS. Each change is examined with special emphasis on the role of important officials, such as General Westmoreland, Ambassador Komer, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and President Johnson.
Parameters - Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification Policy - article by Frank Jones.
Quote:
From Komer’s arrival in Vietnam in May 1967 through the end of the pacification program in February 1973, two leading authorities on this subject, Richard Hunt and Thomas Scoville, credit Komer, who left Vietnam in November 1968, and his successor, William Colby, later Director of Central Intelligence, with making CORDS largely successful on several levels.
First, Komer integrated the organization effectively into the US Mission and Westmoreland’s headquarters, thereby promoting healthy working relationships with Bunker and Westmoreland and helping CORDS not only survive later changes in military and political leadership but improving, as was necessary, US military-civilian coordination and programs under a single manager. Although the US military contributed the bulk of the personnel, funding, and resources, civilians held numerous policymaking positions as well as serving as field advisers, thereby improving cooperation between military and civilians...
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Final fate of Father Hoa of Vietnam?
In another group I mentioned Father Hoa in Vietnam. Somebody asked if I knew of his final fate - I do not. And, I haven't found anything on the web that might indicate what happened to him or the other "fighting fathers" after the fall of Saigon.
Does anybody here know any details on this subject?
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Vietnam's Forgotten Lessons
11 April Washington Post commentary - Vietnam's Forgotten Lessons by Richard Cohen.
Quote:
...We all know the cliche about generals fighting the last war, but in Iraq it is not the tactics that were duplicated -- certainly not compared to the Persian Gulf War -- but the tendency of the military to do what it was told and keep its mouth shut. Shelton, who retired in 2001, cannot be blamed for this and maybe no one but Donald Rumsfeld can, but the fact remains that the United States fought a war many of its military leaders thought was unnecessary, unwise, predicated on false assumptions and incompetently managed. Still, no one really spoke up.
Now, some have -- although from retirement. In recent days, three former senior officers have called for Rumsfeld to be sacked. The most recent is Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who does not stop at faulting Rumsfeld but blames himself as well. "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda," he writes in a Time magazine article this month. He joins Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who commanded the training of Iraqi security forces and who has also called on President Bush to fire Rumsfeld. "President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once," Eaton wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece.
The third retired general is Anthony Zinni, a four-star Marine with vast experience in the Middle East. (He was Bush's Israeli-Palestinian negotiator for a while.) He goes further than (merely) recommending Rumsfeld's political defenestration. He also strongly suggests that something is broken in the American military, that its priories are misplaced. Too many senior officers put their careers first and candor or honesty second. One who did not, the then-Army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, was rebuked by Rumsfeld and his career essentially ended. After that, the brass knew that the path to promotion was to get with the program. They saluted Rumsfeld and implemented a plan many of them thought was just plain irresponsible...
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Recycling myths
Cohen recycles the Shinseki myth. The General served his full term before retiring.
Cohen also tries to make a comparison between McNamara and Rumsfeld which fails when faced with the facts. McNamara turned down requests for troops and Rumsfeld did not. Rumsfeld has said tht he was prepared to provide 400,000 or more troops for the Iraqi operation, but that General Franks and General Abizaid told him they did not need that many.
I am not being critical of that judgement on their part, but if you are going to criticize the decision on the number of troops, it should be focused on the General's decisions and their rational and not on some mythical restrictions by the President and Secretary of Defense who have consistently said that the troops levels are a decision made by the commanders. If you have any doubt on this, just read the Prolog to Tommy Franks' book American Soldier.
I think guys like Cohen know they could not win a debate with the generals so they keep hacking away at a strawman argument.
Having former generals second guessing those who succeeded them is nothing new. Many have made a career of it on TV. Cohen just likes Zinni et.al. because they reinforce his prejudice. There are a lot of former generals out there who probably support the decisions of Franks and Abizaid, but because of that fact their opinions are not news.
In case you are not aware of the arguments for the smaller number of troops, there are several including an offensive based on a rapid advance that disorients and overwhelms the enemy. More troops would have made this much more difficult because of the logistical support train needed for the additional troops. Winning in three weeks pretty well confirms Franks' judgement on that point. In terms of troops needed after major combat operations, Abizaid wanted to have the Iraqis take over the combat space as soon as possible. When the Iraqi Army disintegrated during the war, rebuilding became a major task, with several blips along the way. However, the new Iraqi Army is taking shape and taking over much of the battle space and is giving the force to space ratio needed to make the insurgency less effective.
There is obviously more to it than I can summarize in this space, but if you read Franks book you will not regret it.
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Re: Myths
There are so many contradictory points out there. In his book, Cobra II, General Trainor expresses the view that CENTCOM was micro-managed by Rumsfeld and the civilians in OSD, and that the low troop levels were pushed on Franks. So what is the truth? Don't know what your sources are, Merv, perhaps you do know the answer. But with all due respect, unless you were there, I don't see how you can say what the truth is regarding this question given that several credible sources say completely different things. The more important question is whether more troops would have limited or prevented the insurgency. I think that the vitriol and bad faith on the part of the media and anti-war politicians has prevented this important debate from taking place. The conversation should focus on that so that we can better our game for the next round.
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General Franks and his Centcom staff are my source
Please read the Prolog to General Franks' American Soldier. It is not even arguable. I would also add that General Pace confirmed the issue on troops levels in a press briefing today. Trainor may be relying too much on his NY Times co author. His assertions are clearly refuted by the statements of Franks and his component commanders. If you get further into the book, Franks lays out his reasons for his requested force levels. At no time does he suggest that he got less than what he asked for.
I would add that even Sen. Kerry backed off the Shinseki myth when reporters confronted him with the facts during the 2004 campaign.
BTW, the Trainor book also seriously misstates the events surrounding the flap over Gen. Wallace's purported statements concerning whether there was adequate wargaming on dealing with the Fedayeen. They also overlook the rather clever way the Centcom staff found to deal with the Fedayeen. I base this last comment on the excerpt of the book I saw in the NY Times that dealt with that kerfufle.
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Top General Disputes Criticism Against Rumsfeld
12 April Los Angeles Times - Top General Disputes Criticism Against Rumsfeld.
Quote:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, facing calls for his resignation by three retired senior officers for his handling of the Iraq war, received a full-throated endorsement Tuesday from the U.S. military's top general, who insisted that "this country is exceptionally well served" by Rumsfeld's leadership.
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed accusations from retired top officers that Rumsfeld had forced the uniformed military into an invasion plan they didn't fully support.
"We had then, and have now, every opportunity to speak our minds, and if we do not, shame on us because the opportunity is there," Pace said at a Pentagon news conference. "The plan that was executed was developed by military officers, presented by military officers, questioned by civilians as they should, revamped by military officers, and blessed by the senior military leadership."
Pace's remarks, the most pointed on the Pentagon's leadership since he assumed the chairman's post in September, were prompted by a series of highly critical articles and interviews in recent weeks by former generals who were directly involved in the war or who served in top positions...
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The Chiefs had signed off on Franks' war plan before it was presented
CNN's report on Pace's statments includes the following:
Quote:
Rumsfeld said Newbold "never raised an issue publicly or privately when he was here that I know of." Pace also said he was unaware of any objections Newbold raised.
Pace said plans for the invasion were significantly overhauled between the time Newbold retired and the day American troops crossed the Iraqi frontier in March 2003.
He said members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed on to the war plan presented by Gen. Tommy Franks, then-commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, before it was presented to Rumsfeld and President Bush, and top officers had "every opportunity to speak our minds."
"And if we do not, shame on us, because the opportunity is there. It is elicited from us, and we're expected to," Pace said. (Emphasis added.)
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South Korea, Not Vietnam, is the Parallel for Iraq
12 April St. Paul Pioneer Press commentary - South Korea, Not Vietnam, is the Parallel for Iraq by Robert Killebrew.
Quote:
Standing in the center of bustling Seoul in Thanksgiving, I found it hard to believe that 53 years ago the city was a pile of rubble, the ruined capital of a ruined country. The full scope of the Korean War is forgotten by many today, eclipsed by memories of Vietnam. But at this time of war and occupation in Iraq, South Korea's story is worth remembering as a case of American nation-building that worked.
To many in 1953, South Korea was an unlikely winner of the savage civil war that had ranged up and down the Korean peninsula for three years. More than a million South Koreans died, and the survivors were reduced to aimless crowds of refugees.
There are, of course, many dissimilarities between the Korea of 1953 and the Iraq of 2006; history repeats itself only in outline, not in detail. But the similarities are also striking... Some in the West in 1953 doubted that Asians brought into the modern world only recently could master democracy and free-market economies. A half-century later, we hear echoes of this regarding Middle-Eastern people.
The U.S., essential ingredient: Certainly South Korea's emergence wasn't easy; it wasn't until 1992 that a truly democratic government was voted in. Meanwhile, though, the country had become a modern state in every other sense, and its progress today would have been almost unimaginable to Westerners in 1953. Iraq, with its comparatively enormous advantages — above all, its oil wealth — may well make comparable or even better progress.
The essential ingredient has been American steadfastness. The role of the United States and its allies in the liberation and development of South Korea is a story so taken for granted that it is sometimes forgotten at home...
Great Britain, France, Turkey and other allies served with us under a U.N. mandate during the war. An American military garrison remains in Seoul. After three years of combat, allied and South Korean forces fought the Chinese and North Korean armies to a standstill and then faced a long, tense standoff. Billions of dollars were spent. Behind the armies, modern South Korea emerged.
Because Americans are famously impatient, we sometimes fail to give ourselves credit for the stick-to-itiveness that it takes to do great things. But in hindsight, all our greatest accomplishments have taken more time than we realized at the start. American democracy took two centuries to reach universal suffrage. Defeating communism took decades and a number of wars — including the one in Korea...
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Transcript of Gen. Pace's remarks on planning for Iraq war
Here is the full transcript of remarks that the above news articles discuss.
This is a brief excerpt:
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Let me just give you Pete Pace's rendition of how the process worked building up to Iraq. First of all, once it became apparent that we may have to take military action, the Secretary of Defense asked Tom Franks, who was the commander of Central Command, to begin doing some planning, which he did. Over the next two years, 50 or 60 times, Tom Franks either came to Washington or by video teleconference, sat down with the Secretary of Defense, sat down with the Joint Chiefs and went over what he was thinking, how he was planning. And as a result of those iterative opportunities and all the questions that were asked, not once was Tom told, "No, don't do that. No, don't do this. No, you can't have this. No, you can't have that." What happened was, in a very open roundtable discussion, questions about what might go right, what might go wrong, what would you need, how would you handle it, and that happened with the Joint Chiefs and it happened with the Secretary.
And before the final orders were given, the Joint Chiefs met in private with General Franks and assured ourselves that the plan was a solid plan and that the resources that he needed were going to be allocated. We then went and told the Secretary of Defense our belief in Tom's plan and in the resources, and I know for a fact, because I was there, that when the Joint Chiefs were called over to the White House, several of the questions that the president asked specifically were about our understanding and belief in the plan, and whether or not the amount -- proper amount of resources had been allocated. He did that both with us, just the Joint Chiefs, and then again when all the combatant commanders were in from around the globe well before a final decision was made.
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This description is consistent with Gen. Franks description of the process. As I have pointed out before in the Prolog to his book Gen. Franks has the transcript of each component commander telling the President and Secretary of Defense that they had everything they needed for the mission.
There are probably enough people invested in the myth of "Rumsfeld did not give them enough troops" that it will keep popping up. However, a more constructive debate would involve asking the commanders why they chose the makeup of the force that they did, instead of assuming something that clearly is not so.
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While I have and will continue to trust and obey the orders of those appointed over me, and thus have no reason not to believe or doubt the integrity and moral courage of the senior leadership of our military, General Krulak once told me that "perception + truth = reality." Based off this formula, the truth may not be a clear cut as we would like. However, as all of us know that have participated in an planning session, "you dance with the girl you brought," or the girl your boss tells you to dance with; thus if all the commanders knew that asking for more troops was akin to asking where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, you develop courses of action consistent with assigned forces.
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Rumsfeld Rebuked By Retired Generals
13 April Washington Post - Rumsfeld Rebuked By Retired Generals by Tom Ricks.
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The retired commander of key forces in Iraq called yesterday for Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders who have harshly criticized the defense secretary's authoritarian style for making the military's job more difficult.
"I think we need a fresh start" at the top of the Pentagon, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, said in an interview. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork."
Batiste's comments resonate especially within the Army: It is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld...
Batiste said he believes that the administration's handling of the Iraq war has violated fundamental military principles, such as unity of command and unity of effort. In other interviews, Batiste has said he thinks the violation of another military principle -- ensuring there are enough forces -- helped create the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal by putting too much responsibility on incompetent officers and undertrained troops...
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White House Defends Rumsfeld's Tenure
14 April Washington Post - White House Defends Rumsfeld's Tenure.
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The White House came to the aid of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, rebuffing calls from several retired generals for his resignation and crediting him with leading the Pentagon through two wars and a transformation of the military.
"The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period in our nation's history," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at a briefing. He went on to read long quotations from the nation's top military officer, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, praising Rumsfeld's dedication and patriotism.
The defense of Rumsfeld is a perennial exercise for the White House whenever a fresh round of Rumsfeld-must-go demands arise on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in Washington. The difference this time is that those insisting that the secretary should step down are recently retired flag officers who appear to reflect widespread sentiment among people still in uniform...
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Retired General's Call Puzzles Rumsfeld Aides
14 April Washington Times - Retired General's Call Puzzles Rumsfeld Aides.
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Of the smattering of retired generals who have called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign, none has surprised the Pentagon's inner circle more than retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste.
Gen. Batiste commanded the 1st Infantry Division, responsible in Iraq for the hot spots of Tikrit and Samarra, north of Baghdad. On a chilly December night in 2004, he introduced Mr. Rumsfeld to his soldiers thus: "This is a man with the courage and the conviction to win the war on terrorism."
A Rumsfeld aide said that when the two talked privately, the general voiced no complaints on how Washington, or Mr. Rumsfeld, was waging war...
Five retired generals hardly constitute a groundswell among what the Pentagon estimates are 9,000 active and retired generals and admirals. But Pentagon officials fear there will be more such calls against Mr. Rumsfeld.
The list now reads: Gen. Batiste; Gen. Riggs; retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, who opposed the Iraq invasion from the start; Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton.
"I was particularly taken aback by Batiste," said Larry Di Rita, a senior Rumsfeld adviser. "It seemed very contrary to the interaction I saw in Iraq."
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Dead-end Debates
13 April National Review commentary - Dead-end Debates: Critics Need to Move On by Victor Davis Hanson.
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Currently there are many retired generals appearing in frenetic fashion on television. Sometimes they hype their recent books, or, as during the three-week war, offer sharp interviews about our supposed strategic and operational blunders in Iraq — imperial hubris, too few troops, wrong war, wrong place, and other assorted lapses...
Imagine that, as we crossed the Rhine, retired World War II officers were still harping, in March, 1945, about who was responsible months during Operation Cobra for the accidental B-17 bombing, killing, and wounding of hundreds of American soldiers and the death of Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair; or, in the midst of Matthew Ridgeway's Korean counteroffensives, we were still bickering over MacArthur's disastrous intelligence lapses about Chinese intervention that caused thousands of casualties. Did the opponents of daylight bombing over Europe in 1943 still damn the theories of old Billy Mitchell, or press on to find a way to hit Nazi Germany hard by late 1944?
More troops might have brought a larger footprint that made peacekeeping easier — but also raised a provocative Western profile in an Islamic country. More troops may have facilitated Iraqization — or, in the style of Vietnam, created perpetual dependency. More troops might have shortened the war and occupation — or made monthly dollar costs even higher, raised casualties, and ensured that eventual troop draw-downs would be more difficult. More troops might have bolstered U.S. prestige through a bold show of power — or simply attenuated our forces elsewhere, in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and Europe, and invited adventurism by our enemies. Too few troops were the fault of the present Administration — or the chickens that came home to roost after the drastic cutbacks in the post-Cold war euphoria of the 1990s.
"Troop transformation" has become equally calcified. We know the script. Pensioned Army and Marine generals appear ever more ubiquitously to assure the public that we have near criminally shorted ground troops. They alone are now speaking for the silenced brave majors and dutiful colonels stuck on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq with too few soldiers — as their four-star Pentagon brass sold out to Mr. Rumsfeld's pie-in-the-skies theorists in Washington.
Maybe — but then again, maybe not. The counterarguments are never offered. If hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in sophisticated smart shells and bombs, drones, and computers, to ensure far greater lethality per combatant, then must traditional troop levels always stay the same? How many artillery pieces is a bomber worth, with ordinance that for the first time in military history doesn't often miss? Has the world become more receptive to large American foreign bases? Or depots to housing tens of thousands of conventional troops and supplies? And did lessons of the Balkans and Afghanistan prove the need for far more ground troops and traditional armor and artillery units?
The point is simple: Somewhere between the impractical ideas that the U.S. military was to become mostly Special Forces on donkeys guiding bombs with laptops, or, instead, a collection of huge divisions with tanks and Crusader artillery platforms, there is a balance that the recent experience of war, from Panama to the Sunni Triangle, alone distills. And it isn't easy finding that center when we had enemies as diverse as Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.
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Generals Defend Rumsfeld
15 April Washington Times - Generals Defend Rumsfeld.
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Several retired generals who worked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yesterday decried calls for the secretary's resignation from other retired officers.
President Bush repeated his support for his point man in the war against terrorists.
"I think what we see happening with retired general officers is bad for the military, bad for civil-military relations and bad for the country," retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Mr. Bush, said in an interview with The Washington Times. He said he would elaborate his views in an op-ed essay.
"I'm hurt," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, who was deputy commander of U.S. Central Command during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and briefed Mr. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
"When we have an administration that is currently at war, with a secretary of defense that has the confidence of the president and basically has done well -- no matter what grade you put on there, he has done well -- to call for his resignation right now is not good for the country," he said.
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Generals Break With Tradition Over Rumsfeld
16 April New York Times - Generals Break With Tradition Over Rumsfeld .
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This week, as the chorus of retired generals demanding Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation grew larger and louder, Gen. Peter Pace stood beside the embattled defense secretary and did what some experts say is his military duty.
"As far as Pete Pace is concerned, this country is exceptionally well-served by the man standing on my left," General Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. "Nobody, nobody works harder than he does to take care of the P.F.C.'s and lance corporals and lieutenants and the captains. He does his homework. He works weekends, he works nights...
Critics of Mr. Rumsfeld, who agree with the former generals who have derided him as wrongheaded and arrogant, may see General Pace's endorsement as fulsome flattery...
But the comments by General Pace of the Marines were more than a public plug for a boss under fire. Scholars who study the armed forces say they were a public restatement of a bedrock principle of American governance: civilian control of the military.
"This is what the chairman of the joint chiefs is expected to do by tradition and law," said Dennis E. Showalter, a military historian at Colorado College who has taught at the Air Force Academy and West Point. Short of submitting his own resignation, General Pace had little choice but to offer a public show of support, Mr. Showalter said.
"If he had not spoken out, he would have been making a very strong statement," he said.
The idea that civilian leaders, as representatives of the people, should have the ultimate say in how the country's military power is wielded dates to colonial resentment of British rule and is embedded in the Constitution.
Tensions between civilian leaders and the military brass are routine and occasionally erupt into public view. But the principle of civilian supremacy has never been seriously challenged; the last plotters of a military coup d'état in American history were disgruntled officers faced down by General George Washington at Newburgh, N.Y., in 1783.
In fact, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribes court martial for any commissioned officer who "uses contemptuous words against the president, the vice president, Congress, the secretary of defense" or other federal or state officials.
That prohibition, of course, does not forbid serving officers from speaking candidly in private when asked for advice on military matters. Some of Mr. Rumsfeld's critics also fault General Pace and others for not being more forceful in questioning the guidelines put forward by Pentagon civilians that have kept American forces relatively lean in Iraq, and which led to the quick disbanding of the Iraqi Army.
Neither does the prohibition on "contemptuous words" apply to retirees. And the propriety of the onslaught of attacks on Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership from recently retired senior military leaders, including some who served in Iraq, is a matter of intense debate....
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Behind the Military Revolt
16 April Washington Post commentary - Behind the Military Revolt by Richard Holbrooke.
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The calls by a growing number of recently retired generals for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have created the most serious public confrontation between the military and an administration since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951. In that epic drama, Truman was unquestionably correct -- MacArthur, the commanding general in Korea and a towering World War II hero, publicly challenged Truman's authority and had to be removed. Most Americans rightly revere the principle that was at stake: civilian control over the military. But this situation is quite different.
First, it is clear that the retired generals -- six so far, with more likely to come -- surely are speaking for many of their former colleagues, friends and subordinates who are still inside. In the tight world of senior active and retired generals, there is constant private dialogue. Recent retirees stay in close touch with old friends, who were often their subordinates; they help each other, they know what is going on and a conventional wisdom is formed. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who was director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the planning period for the war in Iraq, made this clear in an extraordinary, at times emotional, article in Time magazine this past week when he said he was writing "with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership." He went on to "challenge those still in uniform . . . to give voice to those who can't -- or don't have the opportunity to -- speak."
These generals are not newly minted doves or covert Democrats. (In fact, one of the main reasons this public explosion did not happen earlier was probably concern by the generals that they would seem to be taking sides in domestic politics.) They are career men, each with more than 30 years in service, who swore after Vietnam that, as Colin Powell wrote in his memoirs, "when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons." Yet, as Newbold admits, it happened again. In the public comments of the retired generals one can hear a faint sense of guilt that, having been taught as young officers that the Vietnam-era generals failed to stand up to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson, they did the same thing...
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Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics
16 April New York Times - Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics.
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The Defense Department has issued a memorandum to a group of former military commanders and civilian analysts that offers a direct challenge to the criticisms made by retired generals about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The one-page memorandum was sent by e-mail on Friday to the group, which includes several retired generals who appear regularly on television, and came as the Bush administration stepped up its own defense of Mr. Rumsfeld...
The memorandum begins by stating, "U.S. senior military leaders are involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process in the Department of Defense." It says Mr. Rumsfeld has had 139 meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the start of 2005 and 208 meetings with the senior field commanders.
Seeking to put the criticism of the relatively small number of retired generals into context, the e-mail message also notes that there are more than 8,000 active-duty and retired general officers alive today...
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The Good Fight, Done Badly
16 April New York Times commentary - The Good Fight, Done Badly by David Brooks.
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...Donald Rumsfeld, who graduated from Princeton in 1954, was of this type. Athletic, heroic, he never met an organization he didn't try to upend. He made it to Congress in the early 1960's and challenged the existing order. He was hired by Richard Nixon and quickly reorganized the Office of Economic Opportunity, slashing jobs and focusing the organization. He wrote to Nixon that he would upset the education bureaucrats and destroy "their comfortable world."
As his career went on, he took his streamlining zeal to the Pentagon, and then to G. D. Searle & Company, where he dismissed hundreds of executives, spun off losing businesses and streamlined the bureaucracy.
Rumsfeld's style appealed to political leaders who were allied with the corporate world, but hostile to self-satisfied corporate fat cats. Nixon loved Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, the rebel in chief, quickly hired him.
On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumsfeld held a town meeting in the Pentagon that almost perfectly summarizes his career. There is an organization that threatens the security of the United States, he warned. "With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas." The adversary is close to home, he concluded: "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."
Anti-Organization Men like Rumsfeld value the traits needed to mount frontal assaults on vast bureaucracies: first, unshakable self-confidence; second, a willingness to stir up opposition and to be unmoved in the face of it (on the contrary, to see it as the inevitable byproduct of success).
Anti-Organization Men tend to love fast-moving technology for the way it renders old structures obsolete. They tend to see themselves as event-making characters who exist above their organizations, or in a tightly organized renegade band. Rumsfeld wrote his own rules, and many of them sing the glories of disruption: "You can't cut a swath through the henhouse without ruffling some feathers."...
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Judge Rumsfeld by His Successes And Failures
15 April Gateway Pundit blog - Judge Rumsfeld by His Successes And Failures.
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Before Abu Ghraib was known as a prison of barking dogs, nadedness and pyramiding but was a slaughterhouse where thousands of innocent Iraqis were executed under the Saddam Regime...
Before there were democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq...
Before documents were released showing links between Saddam and Al Qaeda...
Before feminists were so Anti-Jew...
Before the Butcher of Baghdad was given a smackdown as he was dragged from his spider hole...
And, after all of this was accomplished with record low military casualties, civilian casualties and military fatalities...
The mainstream media has been after Donald Rumsfeld...
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Gen. Myers Says Critics of Rumsfeld Out of Line
17 April Washington Times - Gen. Myers Says Critics of Rumsfeld Out of Line.
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Retired generals who are criticizing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's prewar planning are out of line and need to remember who their boss is, top military and civilian officials -- including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- said on yesterday's political talk shows.
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers said yesterday that the behavior and comments from six generals is "inappropriate" for military officers...
"It's inappropriate because it's not the military that judges our civilian bosses. We'd be in a horrible state in this country, in my opinion, if the military was left to judge the civilian bosses, because when you judge Secretary Rumsfeld, you're also judging the commander in chief, because that's the chain of command, and that's just not appropriate," Gen. Myers told ABC's "This Week" program.
The generals -- four from the Army and two from the Marine Corps -- now say the defense secretary intimidated senior officers and "meddled" in war plans that, they say, resulted in "poor war planning" after Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was deposed. The retired generals said Mr. Rumsfeld lacked ground troops and failed to foresee the insurgency in Iraq by al Qaeda terrorists.
Gen. Myers said the generals did not question the prewar plans, and went a step further by saying that any military officer would be derelict in his duty if he did not voice his concerns...
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A General Disgrace
19 April Los Angeles Times commentary - A General Disgrace by Max Boot.
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The American officer corps tried to blame the fall of Saigon on their civilian masters. If not for political restrictions — in particular, no invasion of North Vietnam — the U.S. would have won the war. So argued the late Col. Harry Summers in his celebrated 1981 book, "On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context." That was, at best, a gross oversimplification.
As then-Maj. Andrew Krepinevich showed in "The Army and Vietnam" (1986), the U.S. defeat could be attributed in large part to the inappropriate, firepower-intensive strategy adopted by the Army. In the absence of a better counterinsurgency doctrine, not even occupying all of Vietnam, as the French had once done, would have won the war. If the generals wanted to know who was to blame for their defeat, Krepinevich suggested, they should have looked in the mirror.
His analysis is now widely accepted, yet we are in the early stages of another stab-in-the-back myth in which officers line up to blame their civilian bosses for the setbacks we've suffered in Iraq. In the last few weeks, six retired generals and counting have called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
As it happens, I agree with their advice. As I first said on this page two years ago, I too think that Rumsfeld should go. But I am nevertheless troubled by the Revolt of the Generals, which calls into question civilian control of the armed forces. In our system, defense secretaries are supposed to fire generals, not vice versa.
The retired generals, who claim to speak for their active-duty brethren, premise their uprising on two complaints. First, many (though not all) say we should not have gone into Iraq in the first place. Former Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold calls it "the unnecessary war," and former Gen. Anthony Zinni claims that "containment worked remarkably well."
That is a highly questionable judgment, and one that is not for generals to make. They are experts in how to wage war, not when to wage it. If we had listened to their advice, we would not have gone into Kuwait or Bosnia or Kosovo.
Their second complaint — about how the war has been fought — is more valid. There is no doubt that the president and his top aides blundered by not sending enough troops and not doing enough occupation planning. But what about the blunders of the generals?
To listen to the retired brass, the only mistake they and their peers made was not being more outspoken in challenging Rumsfeld. But that's not the picture that emerges from the best account of the invasion so far: "Cobra II" by veteran correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor. They present copious evidence of Rumsfeld's misguided micromanagement. But they also show that Gen. Tommy Franks, the top military commander, was guilty of major misjudgments of his own...
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The general mess
There is no evidence that civilian leadership turned down any troop request for Iraq. There is abundant evidence that civilian leadership asked the military if they had what they needed for the war in Iraq and if they were satisfied with the plan that Centcom had put together. It wasn't just Gen. Franks who developed this plan. His component commanders were assigned by the Joint Chiefs and they all signed off on the plan. Events have demonstrated that no additional troops were needed through Phase III of the plan which ended with the liberation of Iraq. It is the Phase IV part of the plan that should be the focus of the debate. The person primarily responsible for that part of the plan has been Gen. Abizaid, yet his name never comes up in this debate nor his rationale for his "small footprint" strategy.
It should also be pointed out that the "not enough troops" chorus has not suggested that the US should have waited till it could get more troops into Afghanistan where even fewer troops were used to liberate that country. And, where fewer troops have been needed for Phase IV operations. Logic, history and terrain all suggest that Afghanistan should be the location of the strongest insurgency, but that has not been the case. The insurgency there is even weaker than the weak insurgency in Iraq.
It is time to move this debate from the civilians who approved the plan the military came up with and have an honest debate about the virtues or lack thereof of the "small footprint" strategy during Phase IV.
It is my view that the best way to defeat an insurgency is by having a force to space ratio that prevents enemy movement and denies sanctuaries. Clearly we did not have a force sufficient to do that initially. We attempted to make up for this by focusing on getting actionable intelligece on the enemy. In the meantime we force our troops to buy the same real estate more than once, becuase we did not have enough troops to take and hold areas. The creation of the Iraqi army has had a positive effect in both getting actionable intelligence and in having enough force to take and hold an area and deny enemy movement.
While H.R. McMaster is credited with writing the bible on generals speaking out, his most important work in the Iraq war was his innovative liberation of Tal Afar with the help of Iraqi forces. That is the model the military should be looking at, instead of his book on the history of the joint chiefs of the 1960's. It also shows that civilian leadership did not get in the way of his using his best military judgement in taking effective action in Iraq. Did any of the complaining generals suggest such a plan while they were in Iraq? If so, was it rejected by civilian leadership? I think the evidence is pretty clear.
BTW, Boot is still clinging to the assertion that the insurgency in Vietnam was successful. History shows that after the failure of Tet, the insurgency never had a chance to topple South Vietnam. Conventional warfare was needed to conquer South Vietnam after the Democrats cut off funding for the South Vietnamese and refused to let the US use its air power to stop the communist conventional attack.
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Editorial, Commentary & Blog Roundup
It's Solitaire for Rummy - New York Daily News Editorial
The Generals War - Wall Street Journal Editorial
Growing Calls for Rumsfeld's Dismissal - Financial Times Editorial
The War Against Rumsfeld - Chicago Tribune Editorial
Retired Summer Soldiers - Washington Times Commentary
Generals Put Us On Slippery Slope - Seattle Post-Intelligencer Commentary
Why Are They Speaking Up Now? - Washington Post Commentary
Wrong Debate Over Rumsfeld - Washington Times Commentary
Court of Inquiry - Real Clear Politics Commentary
David vs. Goliath in Washington - New York Post Commentary
A General Disgrace - Los Angeles Times Commentary
A Case for Accountability - Washington Post Commentary
Seven days in April - Washington Times Commentary
Listen to the Brass - Washington Post Commentary
Political Hothouse Perennial - Washington Times Commentary
Roots of the Uprising - Washington Post Commentary
Public Criticism of Rumsfeld Says it All - Boston Globe Commentary
Why America's Generals Out For Revenge - London Times Commentary
Rumsfeld's Job Security - New York Post Commentary
Generally Speaking... With Hindsight - Washington Times Commentary
The Good Fight, Done Badly - New York Times Commentary
Behind the Military Revolt - Washington Post Commentary
A General Misunderstanding - New York Times Commentary
An Officer Responds To David Ignatius - Real Clear Politics Commentary
Rumsfeld Staying Put - Real Clear Politics Commentary
Dead-End Debates - National Review Commentary
Why Didn't Generals Resign? - Chicago Sun-Times Commentary
Reconcilable Differences - National Review Blog
The Troubles of Donald Rumsfeld - Belmont Club Blog
The Incoherence of the Former Generals - Prairie Pundit Blog
Jack Kelly on the Rumsfeld Flap - Irish Pennants Blog
Donald Rumsfeld and the Media, A Bitter Love - Gateway Pundit Blog
Ignatius Makes A Case About Rumsfeld - Captain's Quarters Blog
Judge Rumsfeld by His Successes And Failures - Gateway Pundit Blog
Rumsfeld and the Generals - ZenPundit Blog
Dear Generals: Please Stop, Immediately - The Adventures of Chester Blog
The Rumsfeld Detractors - Washington Times Commentary
Why Bush Should Keep Rumsfeld - Real Clear Politics Commentary
The Generals are Revolting - Real Clear Politics Commentary
Rumsfeld Must Resign - Baltimore Sun Commentary
Railing at Rummy - New York Post Commentary
Sour Grapes and Cheap Shots - Washington Times Commentary
The Generals' Dangerous Whispers - Washington Post Commentary
A 4-star Defense of the Republic - Los Angeles Times Commentary
The Anger At Rumsfeld - Real Clear Politics Blog
Former President Ford Defends Rumsfeld - Washington Post
Generals’ Complaint Arrives Too Late - Boston Herald Editorial
They Put Our Side in Danger - Miami Herald Commentary
It's About Time We Focus on the Enemy - Chicago Tribune Commentary
All-Star Shame - Washington Times Commentary
Honor in Discretion - Wall Street Journal Commentary
What Generals Have to Say Matters a Lot - Miami Herald Commentary
Batiste: Why Rumsfeld Must Leave - Houston Chronicle Commentary
Good Thing Civilians Direct Generals - Houston Chronicle Commentary
Generals' Revolt Still a Hot Topic - Irish Pennants Blog
Footprints in Iraq - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Commentary
Generals May Need to Stage Retreat - Philadelphia Inquirer Commentary
Rumsfeld's Pentagon - Washington Times Commentary
Rage at Don - Wall Street Journal Commentary
Behind the Revolt - Washington Post Commentary
A Dereliction of Duty - National Review Commentary
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Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld
23 April New York Times - Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld.
Quote:
The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.
Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.
To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.
The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.
"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."
An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: "The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, 'We cannot do this mission.' They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers" who might otherwise have stayed in uniform.
One Army colonel enrolled in a Defense Department university said an informal poll among his classmates indicated that about 25 percent believed that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, and 75 percent believed that he should remain. But of the second group, two-thirds thought he should acknowledge errors that were made and "show that he is not the intolerant and inflexible person some paint him to be," the colonel said...
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CORDS / Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future
March - April issue of Military Review - CORDS / Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future by Mr. Dale Andrade and Lieutenant Colonel James Willbanks.
Quote:
As the United States ends its third year of war in Iraq, the military continues to search for ways to deal with an insurgency that shows no sign of waning. the specter of Vietnam looms large, and the media has been filled with comparisons between the current situation and the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War. Differences between the two conflicts are legion, but observers can learn lessons from the Vietnam experience—if they are judicious in their search. For better or worse, Vietnam is the most prominent historical example of American counterinsurgency (COIN) - and the longest - so it would be a mistake to reject it because of its admittedly complex and controversial nature. An examination of the paci*fication effort in Vietnam and the evolution of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program provides useful insights into the imperatives of a viable COIN program...
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Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory
March - April Military Review - Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory by Major Ross Coffey, US Army.
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According to the National Strategy, weekly strat*egy sessions at the highest levels of the U.S. Government ensure that Iraq remains a top priority. At the operational level, the “team in Baghdad—led by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey—works to implement policy on the ground and lay the foundation for long-term success.” Each of the eight pillars have corresponding interagency working groups to coordinate policy, review and assess progress, develop new proposals, and oversee the implementation of existing policies. The multitracked approach (political, security, and economic) to counterinsurgency in Iraq has historical parallels with the Civil operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program of the Vietnam War era. established in 1967, CORDS partnered civilian and military entities engaged in pacification of Vietnamese rural areas. The program enhanced rural security and local political and economic development and helped defeat the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. Significantly, CORDS unified the efforts of the pacification entities by establishing unity of command throughout the combined civil-military organization. Lack of unity of effort is perhaps the most signifi*cant impediment to operational-level interagency action today. The victorious conditions the National Strategy describes might be unachievable if the interagency entities present in Iraq do not achieve unity of effort. To help achieve unity of effort, Multi-Force–Iraq (MNF-I) and the nation should consider adopting a CORDS-like approach to ensure integrated action and victory...
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Rumsfeld Continues to Come Under Fire
24 April Financial Times - Rumsfeld Continues to Come Under Fire.
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Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, on Monday came under more fire after another retired general joined the growing list of retired brass gunning for his resignation.
Retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, a three-star general who retired in 1997, told Fox News that Mr Rumsfeld was not capable of leading the Pentagon effort in Iraq. He is the eighth former general to call for Mr Rumsfeld to step down.
“When I look at where we are in this war to date, and imagine where we could have been if the right number of troops had been put in at the right time and had been employed correctly, then I think we need new leadership,” said Lt Gen Van Riper. “If I was the president, I would have relieved him three years ago.”...
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No More Vietnams
8 May issue of the Weekly Standard - No More Vietnams by David Gelernter.
Quote:
... The Vietnam analogy has been part of the Iraq war story since the fighting started (in fact, since before it started). The Bush administration often deals with its critics by ignoring them. This time it can't. Too much rides on the president looking these critics in the eye and telling them: Damned right this is Vietnam all over again. Only this time we will not get scared and walk out in the middle. This time we will stand fast, and repair a piece of the American psyche that has been damaged and hurting ever since we ran from Vietnam in disgrace way back in April 1975.
Of course any citizen is welcome to criticize the conduct of any war--tactfully, without giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Maybe we are doing things all wrong in Iraq. But those who launch the Vietnam analogy at the administration are lobbing heavy artillery for a different reason. They are predicting (with obnoxious schadenfreude) that Iraq will turn out like Vietnam in the end: We will proclaim ourselves beaten, give up, and go home. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we will do the intelligent and humane thing and surrender...
Not many nations get a second chance to show the world and themselves that they are serious after all, that their friends can trust them and their enemies ought to fear them. There is no way we can atone for the blood and death we inflicted (indirectly) on South Vietnam by abandoning it to Communist tyranny. That failure can never be put right. But we can make clear that "No More Vietnams" is a Republican slogan. It means that we will never again go back on our word and betray our friends, our soldiers, and ourselves....
Most wars bog down in hard fighting at some point or other. When that happens, America must be able to trust itself not to run away. George Washington and his men did not run away after General Howe took Philadelphia for the British in September 1777, and Washington's counterattack on Germantown failed in October, and the brand new American army had to settle into miserable, freezing winter quarters at Valley Forge. Every American schoolchild used to know what Valley Forge meant: Stand firm and fight, no matter how terrible things are. The Union army did not run away in the fall of 1862, although Lee and Jackson had won a huge Confederate victory at Second Bull Run, and Lee had crossed the Potomac into Maryland and was threatening Washington, Baltimore, and (again) Philadelphia, and was expected to capture all of Maryland and a crucial railroad bridge in Pennsylvania--which would just about cut the Union in two. But Lincoln and the Union did not give up.The Confederates didn't run away either. Their cause was wrong, but they stood up heroically and fought till they were crushed to bits.
Nor did the American army run away 80 years later in the spring of 1942, although the Pacific fleet had been smashed at Pearl Harbor, Manila had been evacuated, Bataan had surrendered after a desperate, starving defense--and then Corregidor had surrendered too. But MacArthur promised that Americans would return to liberate the Philippines, and that's just what happened...
Those that think that "no more Vietnams" means that cowardice is the better part of wisdom don't know their Vietnam history either. There are many important lies in circulation about Vietnam, like counterfeit $50 bills that keep resurfacing. Those who held these views during the war itself weren't liars; in most cases they were telling the truth as they understood it. But decades later, it requires an act of will to keep one's ignorance pristine...
Much more, follow the link above and read on...
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Vietnam Lessons for Iraq
30 April Washington Times commentary - Lessons for Iraq by Robert Turner.
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Today marks the 31st anniversary of that shameful day Col. Bui Tin led a column of North Vietnamese tanks into Saigon to complete the military conquest of South Vietnam. It didn't have to happen, and many contemporary critics of our involvement in Iraq are drawing the wrong "lessons" from that experience.
One of the most common myths is that President Johnson took America to war without congressional or popular support. Actually, Johnson sent combat units to Vietnam pursuant to a 1964 statute approved by a margin of more than 99? percent of Congress (which, on its own initiative, more than tripled his appropriations request) -- and Johnson's Gallup Poll approval rating shot up from 55 percent to 85 percent.
Another widely accepted misconception is that the war could not have been won. To be sure, there was a learning curve associated with guerrilla tactics, and the arrogant incompetence of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara -- who ignored the consistent warnings from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA that his strategy of "gradualism" could not win and was actually encouraging the enemy -- cost a lot of lives.
But, as Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis observed last year in Foreign Affairs, historians now acknowledge we were winning the war by the early 1970s. Even more remarkably, this is admitted by Col. Bui Tin and other former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officials. Their only hope, in the final years, was that Jane Fonda and the American "peace" movement would persuade Congress to pull the plug, which it did in May 1973. In a very real sense, a misguided Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Indochina...
But now that our troops and national credibility have once again been committed, we get a replay of the Vietnam mantra: The president "lied" to trick us into going to war, our soldiers are committing "war crimes," and we must stop this immoral, illegal war now. Virtually no one truly objects to the fact that the National Security Agency is monitoring communications between al Qaeda operatives abroad and people inside this country, but many become frightened when critics tell us this means the president believes he can monitor any American's private phone calls at will. Despite conclusions to the contrary by the unanimous Senate Intelligence Committee, the Silberman-Robb Commission, the Butler Commission in Great Britain, and even The Washington Post (Joseph Wilson "was the one guilty of twisting the truth"), critics still argue we knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and that was the only justification for the war. (As the war began, I wrote a 15,000-word legal defense that barely mentioned the WMD issue).
I don't know whether we should have gone into Iraq. But that is not the issue we face. We made that decision, by an overwhelming consensus, and the issue is whether we will once again abandon those we have pledged to help. Will America let Saddam's henchmen -- reinforced by Abu Musab Zarqawi and other al Qaeda elements -- drive us out of the Middle East? That's a very different question, and in answering it we ought to keep in mind some of the real "lessons" of the Vietnam tragedy.
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My Lai
For those of you with an interest, I turned up this old Congressional Research Service report on My Lai: Issues Underlying the My Lai Trials - June 18, 1971
The report also takes a look back at the Sand Creek Massacre during the Indian Wars and two cases from the Philippines - a US incident when fighting the Moros, and the Japanese during WWII.
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Thanks!
Thanks for posting this. I had a chance some years ago to pick up a copy of the original Peers report regarding My Lai, and have been kicking myself ever since for not doing so. Unlike the Congressional report, there was a great deal of background material with the original report. Another interesting take on these issues can be found in Self Destruction written by an Army officer using the pen name Cincinnatus.
Instead of Sand Creek, perhaps they should have used the Marias River in 1870. I know this is quibbling after small bits, but Chivington had made it clear from the start that he was going to attack ANY Indians he came across, for a number of reasons (at least one of which centered around his own political ambitions). The Marias, on the other hand, comes closer to the My Lai scenario (IMO, anyhow). Still...an interesting piece.
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The rest of the story
Interesting, but it left out that a short time later Pres. Nixon ordered him removed from the stockade and placed under house arrest. Some time in late 1974 he was paroled by the Sec. of the Army. He later married the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Columbus,Ga. And I believe he is still there.