RMA/Andrew Marshall/Donald Rumsfeld/Iraq 2003
I just finished reading an interesting article about Rumsfeld, Marshall, the RMA and the Iraq invasion in 2003. According to the article (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200.../061120fa_fact), the precursor to Rumsfeld's push for our military transformation to a smaller, lighter force-which ultimately led to the mess we have today in Iraq-came in the form of Andrew Marshall, a long time Pentagon guru. It seems that Rumsfeld misinterpreted what Marshall was calling for, or at least didn't implement it properly, and in the process of trying to transform our military-almost broke it. What if Rumsfeld hadn't misimplemented Marshall's plan-where would we be today? Or what if Marshall hadn't been brought in with the new Bush administration in 2001. Any implications obvious to anyone? Granted the author points to other factors which led to this mess but was the RMA or its misimplementation as much to blame as this article suggests? Is marshalls RMA the way to go given what we know now?
Marshall had been there for years; his
clout waxed and waned but he long preceded the Bush administration. He was supported by ADM Art Cebrowski (LINK) -- who also preceded Rumsfeld. Your link didn't work for me but since it's in the New Yorker, it's likely to be superficial and incorrect. You might want to Google around on Cebrowski, Marshall and the much maligned and much misunderstood 'transformation.' It isn't nearly as simple as the media portrays it.
IMO Marshall had, like most people, some good ideas and some not so good. So did Cebrowski. So did Rumsfeld. The ideas of all of them had little real bearing on attacking Iraq and the planning that went with that.
Thanks. I read it. Generally fairly accurate
but I'm not sure what the point of the article happened to be...
Confirms essentially what I said above; "IMO Marshall had, like most people, some good ideas and some not so good. So did Cebrowski. So did Rumsfeld. The ideas of all of them had little real bearing on attacking Iraq and the planning that went with that."
This quote from the article sums up the largest contributor to the problems in Iraq:
Quote:
"General Jack Keane, then the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff and one of Rumsfeld’s most trusted advisers in the force, flew to Iraq and was chagrined that the 3rd I.D.’s briefings failed to focus on containing the spreading disorder. But Keane later reflected that Blount’s troops could hardly be blamed. “They were ill-prepared—they weren’t educated to do it, and they weren’t trained to do it, and they weren’t expecting to do it,” Keane said, of the unit’s impromptu policing mission..."
I'd add that the comment addresses the 3d ID but it effectively applies to almost all the Army and Marine units in Iraq at the time. Quite simply, nobody had ever trained for it so no one knew what to do so they did what people tend to do in that situation. Nothing. That allowed a series of fights to get a toe hold and political malfeasance from Bremer upward added fuel to the fires. All that has nothing to do with transformation.
To translate that into a direct answers to your questions, IMO, 'transformation' had little real impact on the Iraq operation.
Transformation ala Marshall has some good and bad ideas; we should adopt -- and mostly have adopted -- the good ideas and ignore the bad ones. Many will not see fruition for several years. Some will end up being discarded because of technological advances or political foolishness. Some that were dropped will be picked up by a future SecDef and tried at some cost before being dropped.
Transformation background
'Transformation' of the Army considerably predates Iraq or Marshall's arrival in the administration, and was not initially aimed at COIN per se.
In late summer of 1999 I was at Fort Knox, minding my own business, when then-MG B.B. Bell called a muster alert of the Armor community leadership to discuss 'transformation'. We were to select an 'off-the-shelf' light armored vehicle to be the centerpiece of a new 'medium-weight' maneuver unit. The vision encompassed a brigade-sized element that could be deployed by C-130, could operate shortly after rolling off the back ramp, and would depend on a highly developed situational awareness to fight and survive. Labeled the Intermediate Brigade Combat Team (IBCT), it was intended as a stop-gap for the next decade or so until fully developed technologies could be integrated into a future custom-built Unit of Action. Oh, and we would bring back the black beret.
The impetus, as MG Bell explained, was our problems in the Balkans, from the Sava River to Apaches in Albania to the Russians at Pristina. Shinseki, Abrams, Bell, and others had suffered through our consistent inability to move with any agility in that theater and wanted an Army that was better suited to difficult terrain and capable of operational maneuver. Thus, we had to lighten up, both in terms of vehicle size and in terms of organizational size. In order to do that, we incorporated just about every buzz-word extant at the time: accelerated decision making, improved situational awareness, just-in-time logistics, network-centric operations, etc.
For the next four years, the Armor Center was consumed by transformation. Our 'off-the-shelf' vehicle became the Stryker, the IBCT morphed into the SBCT, and the FCS appeared on the horizon. More importantly, those with a desire to get ahead or get resources jumped on the transformation bandwagon. Bell earned a third and fourth star - despite never having commanded a division - by becoming an ardent supporter of Shinseki's concept. By 2002, the Army had begun to believe its own press clippings, though we had not yet actually cobbled together a workable organization or developed the mature technologies that transformation depended on. Nevertheless, we trumpeted our agility, deployability, and our relevence.
When OIF loomed - and this is my own second-hand opinion, as I was operating far from the corridors of power - the Army's bluff was called. I think part of Rumsfeld's problem with the Army leadership, and Shinseki in particular, was that all of a sudden he was hearing a different story from the transformation narrative he had been fed. The same guys who had been briefing how more could be done with less were all of a sudden admitting that the emperor was still pretty much naked. He saw this as cold feet and backsliding rather than a blunt admission that we weren't quite ready to operate as advertised.
Rumsfeld was and is a smart guy. He did some good
as SecDef and he also did some harm. One of his problems was that he was a smart and successful guy -- that leads to the ego overwhelming common sense -- and the added fact that he was absolutely clueless about the Army; what it did and how it did it; about land warfare (and in 2003 had no knowledgeable land warfare adviser around; Myers sure didn't qualify...) and probably also had a mild Navy and aviator bias led him to make a lot of dumb mistakes about the Army.
There's nothing as cost-ineffective as a Rifle or a Tank Company in peacetime; Rumsfeld had the vision that the Army was still running thousands of troops around cutting grass and painting rocks as they had been when he was a young Flight Instructor -- he was never an operational aviator -- so he was checklist and metric happy...
I don't know if he was, as rumored, the one who insisted on trashing the TPFD but he obviously allowed it and that was one of many really dumb decisions on the way in.
