Three Retired Officers Demand Rumsfeld's Resignation

25 September (26 Sep Edition) Washington Post - Three Retired Officers Demand Rumsfeld's Resignation by William Branigin.

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Three retired military officers who served in Iraq called today for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, telling a Democratic "oversight hearing" on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon chief bungled planning for the U.S. invasion, dismissed the prospect of an insurgency and sent American troops into the fray with inadequate equipment...

In testimony before the Democratic Policy Committee today, retired Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 and served as a senior military assistant to former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, charged that Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration "did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq."

He told the committee, "If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents."

Joining his call for Rumsfeld to resign were retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who was responsible for training Iraq's military and police in 2003 and 2004, and retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who served in Iraq in 2004 and helped establish bases for the reconstituted Iraqi armed forces...

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I've never heard of Batiste or Eaton but I am reading Hammes book right now. I wonder how long it will be before the far right labels them a traitors, cowards, shameless opportunists, etc and the far left tries to embrace them with out having any clue what they actually said other than Rumsfeld and resignation. The whole thing will get lost in the political infighting. I support OIF but I am no Rumsfeld fan. Sometimes I think that it is pure stuborness that keeps him in office more than anything else.

SFC W

Eaton is a POS!! He had Benning so screwed up they had to put a BG in Command.
He screwed up the training in Iraqi.

BMT

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Originally Posted by BMT

Eaton is a POS!! He had Benning so screwed up they had to put a BG in Command.
He screwed up the training in Iraqi.

BMT

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Please, the SWC is not a place to drop one liners without an explanation and a tie-in to the thread's topic. Thanks BMT.

There's some discussion of MG (Ret) Eaton and his time in Iraq over on the blog RofaSix, which also has a number of links to varying opinions of the guy....

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Originally Posted by BMT

Eaton is a POS!! He had Benning so screwed up they had to put a BG in Command.
He screwed up the training in Iraqi.

BMT

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There were failures at every level BMT. But Rumsfeld has to take the lion's share of the blame for the current situation, not General Eaton. From everything I've read so far, General Eaton lacked clear guidance, was hinderd by a CPA that had no strategic objective, and that he did not have the resources necessary to complete the task. In fact, I have yet to find ONE book that claims post combat Iraq was properly planned for. Everything I've read describes an OSD that borders on being inept, and an OSD that can't get out of it's own way. From the evidence so far, I cannot in good conscious disagree with that.

I cannot dismiss what these generals have to say. What active duty general would dare speak out knowing what happend to General Shinsecki and SA White? I don't think Rumsfeld need resign yet, but he's going to have to break his silence. He should accept the responsibility for the situation and make some bold decisions regarding our future efforts in Iraq because the current effort is not getting the job done.

The officer Corp and civilian leadership has a lot to awnser for in Iraq, its true. We have done a bad job in many different areas. But, most have made desicions on what they thought was best and tried to go foward to complete the mission that we were handed. If these gentlemen feel that they were given a bad mission or were not given the support they needed, then they can and should speakout. Wheter you disagree or agree, it is important to listen to all sides of an arguement. Personal attacks and pot shots, 90% of the time don't mean a thing. I respect some of these men as fellow proffessionals, and will make my own judgement on what they think. Maybe Rumsfeld should go, or maybe he should stay and we should refocus in on the current conflict. Whatever you think thats fine. But, to ingnore these men, espiecally Col. Hammes, is wrong, dead wrong.

No comment on Benning. I can say that CMATT was a nightmare, and the use of Institutional Training Army Reserve people was a mistake that set us back 9 to 12 months in Iraq. As far as MG Batiste, my issue is he really won't come out and say who was putting pressure on him not to ask for more forces, or who was denying him forces, my guess is that it was at the level below SecDef. When 1st ID RIP/TOA'd with 4th ID, 4ID units were directd to conduct Right Seat/Left Seat rides of the unit AO's down to the squad/section level. Usually the Army only does this at the company and above level. The 1st ID guys really didn't have good situational awareness of what was going on on the ground. They pretty much said "we have been in and out of the Balkan's for ten years and we received the power point briefing". I have to question the climate in a unit that would allow that subordinate units to be so cavalier going into the Tikrit area. as far as COL Hammes, I think he has a really good grasp of Maoist insurgency and how it is evoiving in the information age. My concern with COL Hammes book, is that it is at best a book on insurgency and counter-insurgency in the information age. My concern is that many people are taking Hammes' work is a definitive answer to the war we are fighting, I don't think that it is a definitive work, and I do not think that Hammes would argue that his book is the definitive work for GWOT. Just my $.02 cents which is suffering from poor exchange rates.

And now that General Schoomaker's refusal to submit an 08-13 POM has hit the airwaves, what impact might that have on Rumsfeld?

I tell ya, I try not to be a Mondy morning quarterback. But with the luxury of hindsight I do find it difficult to make any excuses for Rumsfeld and other key leaders both civilian and military.

This country was not prepared for this war, that is clear. I think that maybe President Bush could be doing a much better job at describing what we are up against, how long it will take etc, in detail. Seems like when he has done that on occassion he gets a bump in public approval ratings. Maybe he should do it more.

29 September post at the Westhawk blog - Mr. Rumsfeld’s Gamble Comes Due.

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It seems apparent that U.S. ground forces are finding it very difficult to maintain the current pace of overseas deployments and combat operations. Well thought out deployment plans are fraying at their edges; the Army is now making frequent changes to deployment schedules in order to maintain troop levels in Iraq...

Secretary Rumsfeld, an avowed Transformationist, continues to resist any permanent additions of conventional ground combat formations in the U.S. military. As a Transformationist, he believes that technology, air power, and local proxies will substitute for U.S. infantrymen and armored vehicles. And he believes that this moment is the last peak in the demand for conventional Army and Marine Corps battalions. Mr. Rumsfeld is expecting a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq, perhaps starting next spring. Recruiting and building more battalions at this moment only will result in these units uselessly taking up barracks space, while also absorbing funding that could better be spent on transformational technology like FCS...

Now the decision point is the spring of 2007. If Mr. Rumsfeld’s gamble succeeds, that is, if he can reduce, say by mid-2008, the U.S. commitment to Iraq from today’s 15 brigades to 5, then the Army and Marine Corps’s current rotation crisis will have passed. The Future Combat System will be on its way, resulting, in the hopes of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army leadership, in a far more useful, deployable, expeditionary, and sustainable Army. Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army will have avoided a dramatic lowering of the standards for soldiers and avoided creating useless old battalions, sinkholes, in their views, of wasted money.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s gamble could fail. All of the previous targets for reducing the U.S. ground commitment to Iraq have failed – there is no reason to assume the spring 2007 target will fare any differently. Should the gamble fail, the Army and the Marine Corps will be forced to maintain their frenetic rotation schedules. But we should expect that the brigades so rotated will be missing more and more of their most experienced leaders and will be going back into battle with less and less essential training. The effects of these trends would then show up on Iraq’s streets and in Afghanistan’s mountains.

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This whole argument about adding brigades or even divisions is entirley pointless unless they are planning a substantial increase in pay. Some people want to blame congress or Rumsfeld for refusing to increase the size of the Army but that whole argument is predicated on the idea that the Army is turning down large numbers of qualified applicants because there is no room for them. That is most decidedly not the case. I definitely not against a bigger Army but I just don't think it's possible right now, not without a substatial change in pay. That's a shame to. I have been in the Army for the last fifteen years and can't imagine doing anything else.

SFC W