Thank you for the review of the book, and I certainly won't buy it. On a serious note, I see Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz as the worst team to ever inhabit the Pentagon. Abu Muqawama had a post recently on Wolfowitz saying that they "didn't anticipate the insurgency." He is a liar, viz. Shinseki and Zinni.
Let's bifurcate Iraq into two wars, the war to overthrow the regime (weeks), and the subsequent insurgency. I could go a while discussing what I feel regarding the initial invasion, and perhaps will later. But many Soldiers and Marines perished while Rumsfeld cracked one-liners in press briefings to show how quick he was with a word.
But while this humor was going on, boys died and lost limbs, and the war went South in a COIN campaign that they were told about beforehand. They both have blood on their hands. May we ever speak of their names with scorn and derision. And may their last memories be of Fathers and Mothers weeping for their lost children, and wives weeping for their lost husbands. As to the one of the points that you mention, John Noonan at OpFor had what I believe to be the most succinct and hardest hitting analyses of the Rumsfeld era that I have seen.
http://op-for.com/2006/11/the_opport...f_failure.html
To some, his leadership was inspirational. To others, he was the guy who was single handedly dismantling a force that had barely survived eight years of Clinton-era defense cuts. The name for the pain was Transformation, Rumsfeld's baby. The Pentagon's "bridge to the 21st century." And before September 11, it sounded and felt pretty slick. A lighter force, with emphasis on flexibility, technology, and force multiplication. Maximum effect, minimum loss cheered supporters.
In Afghanistan, Transformation was looking pretty good. A couple of hundred SPECOP warriors exploited our new, network-centric approach to warfighting and accomplished what the much-feared Soviet juggernaut could not. Who needs tanks? Who needs divisions? One foward air controller with a horse, a laptop, and a MILSTAR uplink to a B-52 could now do the heavy-lifting of an entire mechanized brigade.
And that's when Transformation blasted off. The Air Force started delivering Raptors and Global Hawks while BRAC cut our fighter force by 20%. Money poured into the Army's Future Combat Systems, the Marine led V-22 procurement, and the Navy's new Littoral Combat Ships. New tankers for the Air Force, new EELV heavy lift rockets to facilitate our budding space weapons program, a new class of aircraft carrier and a new class attack sub. All very useful weapon systems, but all very expensive weapon systems.
Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to get the Transformation concept over that final, sizable high-cost hurdle. Afghanistan was mostly asymmetric, fought almost exclusively at the platoon and company level. OIF was Transformation's real test. State v. State conflict, a real army -albeit ill-equipped and poorly trained- to prove the mettle of the new force. And again, Transformation worked. Less troops, higher tech did the job. Mission accomplished.
And like a Shakespearean tragedy, Rumsfeld's bold new vision for a brave new military collasped at the height of its success. The insurgency dug-in, and with each IED blast another hole was punched in the Transformation concept. Billion-dollar B2s flew helpless overhead as suicide bombers and roadside bombs took the lives of troops who lacked armor on their Humvess and on their bodies. 100 dollar bombs killed 100,000 dollar weapon systems. The highly touted, highly financed UAV force could only watch as car bombers exploded Iraqi marketplaces. What we needed was more troops. What we got was more gizmos.
Transformation has failed us in fighting the Iraqi insurgency. It takes troops to sustain an occupation. When you are trying to win hearts and minds, heartless and mindless technological gadgets can't win the day. Victory takes boots on the ground. It takes Soldiers and it takes Marines. And, as Iraq has proven, it takes a hell of alot of them.
And that may be the deep dark place that this Long War is forcing us to visit. Terrorists only stop terrorizing when they are dead ...
So there you go. I could go for hours discussing my disdain for him, but I will sign off now and revisit later.
Best,
HPS
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