Three Retired Officers Demand Rumsfeld's Resignation

[SSG Rock]

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.

[SWJED]

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

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.

[Uboat509]

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