Nation & World 6/16/03
We have met the enemy. . .Why the Army's big win in Iraq could mean trouble inside the Pentagon
By Mark Mazzetti - US NEWS
If the victors are meant to reap the spoils of war--not to mention the bragging rights--then someone needs to tell the U.S. Army. Troops from the nation's largest military service dashed hundreds of miles through the Iraqi desert, reaching Baghdad in just three weeks. Vice President Cheney called it "one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted." But not many Army generals are in the mood for chest thumping. Quite the opposite, in fact: Army officials insist that the Iraqi military was a hollow shell and that the outcome was never in doubt.
The generals are not being modest. With the war over, the Army's mission has shifted from pummeling enemy troops in Iraq to protecting its flank from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Billions of dollars are at stake. Rumsfeld is already hard at work on an official review of the war, and the generals suspect that he will use the exercise to tear down the Army they built. They fear that the service could end up a victim of its own success: It took only one of the Army's heavy divisions to take down Saddam Hussein's regime, and Rumsfeld's blueprint for future wars might demand they do it that way again. "Rumsfeld is like the football coach who is so confident of victory that he puts only 10 players on the field to prove a point," says one Army official. "Our fear is that he's going to play the whole season like this."
Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has preached the gospel of military "transformation," which, translated from bureaucratese, means the use of precision-guided weaponry, special operations forces, and long-range air power to defeat enemy forces. That, however, used to be the mission assigned to hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground forces. The question, then, is what to do with all that infantry and armor. As the Pentagon studies the lessons learned from Iraq, many defense experts believe Rumsfeld finally has the clout to remake a military still organized as it was during the Cold War. "All of the dynamics are pushing the Army towards real change," says one joint strategic planner for the Pentagon. "Rumsfeld's going to take on the Army first."
Army officials see Iraq as the exception, not the rule. The dash to Baghdad stretched supply lines to their breaking point. Despite the wholesale dismantling of Saddam's military, generals still argue that Rumsfeld's determination to keep the invasion force small put U.S. troops at unnecessary risk in the event something went wrong. And, they add, a larger force would have allowed the United States to bring order to the chaos of Iraq after Saddam's regime toppled. "It should come as no surprise to anyone," says Thomas White, who was recently ousted by Rumsfeld as Army secretary, "that it takes far more people to win the peace than it does to win the war."
Cleanup crew? What's at stake, potentially, is the Army's historic mission as a combat force. Most observers doubt that Rumsfeld will make drastic cuts in the Army's size, currently at 490,000 troops. That's because the force is already straining to meet a range of war-fighting and peacekeeping commitments around the globe. Ever since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the Army has kept busy, primarily with peacekeeping operations such as those in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq. Familiar threats remain: Washington still relies on 37,000 troops to defend South Korea from North Korea's million-member military, though last week the Pentagon announced it would redeploy those now in the demilitarized zone.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the Pentagon relied more than ever on air power to dispatch third-rate militaries. Thousands of Army troops were used in the post-conflict phase. Rumsfeld may now push to transform large parts of the Army into a glorified constabulary force, which defense expert Andrew Krepinevich defines as "unglamorous troops called in to clean up after the party's over." Such troops might deploy to war zones at the same time as combat troops, so peacekeeping operations might begin right away to avoid a repeat of the disorder in postwar Baghdad.
The war in Iraq also bolstered the case for remaking the way the Army is structured. The 3rd Infantry Division, the lead attack element in the ground war, took on Iraqi troops not as a single division but as three smaller combat teams. Firepower typically controlled at the division level, such as heavy artillery, was integrated into the smaller units. Based on that experience, the Pentagon may try to reorganize the U.S. Army into smaller, brigade-size groups of about 3,000 soldiers, rather than massive 15,000-person divisions. The leaner units would be modeled on Marine Expeditionary Units and would be expected to deploy more quickly to global hot spots. Doing away with cumbersome headquarters staff and pre-positioning equipment close to the battlefield would make the units more agile.
That strategy dovetails with Pentagon plans to overhaul the basing of American troops around the globe. Rumsfeld intends to take forces from large permanent bases in Germany and South Korea and move them into smaller "hub" bases closer to emerging threats.
Incoming. As he remakes the Army, Rumsfeld may also try to cash in some big-ticket weapons, including the troubled Comanche helicopter and four Stryker Brigades, the mobile units of wheeled vehicles the Army sees as an alternative to heavy armor. But after some heavy Abrams tanks were disabled by rocket-propelled grenades in Iraq, some Rumsfeld allies say the Stryker vehicles are too vulnerable. "It's too heavy to be an airborne system, and it's too light to be a heavy combat system," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, a civilian panel that advises Rumsfeld.
The Army must face these challenges without a soldier at the top, since no successor has yet been named to Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who retires this week. Shinseki and Rumsfeld have had a famously frosty relationship, and several Army officials say that with Rumsfeld at the helm, the post of chief of staff is not exactly coveted. As one Army officer puts it: "Anyone who steps into the job is going to have to be pretty damn thick skinned."
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