Silencing the Reservists
Is Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to remake the Army designed to ease the political pressure during unpopular wars?
By T. Trent Gegax
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Oct. 10 — President Bush and his people have a point. The news in Iraq isn’t all bad. Schools are open and the deck of Baathist cards has dwindled to a bad hand. So why the repetitive bad-news headlines?
THE BUSHIES BLAME the media. But that ignores two painful realities: Iraq is hosting a deadly jihad all-star game and, even more important, the Iraqi war has required the massive mobilization of Army reservists—all those citizen-soldiers who are doing the constable and civil-affairs jobs at the heart of nation-building.
The Army National Guard and Army Reserve are mobilized in numbers not seen since World War II. And reservists are either staying away longer than their families ever imagined or they’re coming home in body bags. We can’t wage a large-scale conflict without them, thanks to a Vietnam-era policy—a strategic check-and-balance—established to prevent politicians from waging war without broad popular support. That you hear growing grousing and, lamentably, mourning coming from reservists’ homes means that the system is working exactly the way it was envisioned by former Army chief of staff Gen. Creighton Abrams.
It became known as the “Abrams Doctrine,” a shuffling of the war machine right after the Vietnam War that made the Reserves an indispensable part of large-scale war. It was a recognition that active-duty soldiers are relatively rare among the general population, found only in insular, mostly Southern military-base towns; whereas reservists are woven into the fabric of the country’s car dealerships, professional firms and farm towns. It may be unfair, but whatever happens to reservists ripples further than the fates of active-duty soldiers. The Abrams Doctrine “was designed so that the Army couldn’t get involved in sustained operations without the Reserves,” says Renee Hylton, historian for the National Guard Bureau. “By doing that, the politicians could never play with the military again like they did in Vietnam. If they had used more reservists in Vietnam they would’ve been a lot more serious about military power and spent more time building political support.” At the time, President Johnson bucked when urged to tap the reserve ranks for more troops. They would’ve been better trained than draftees and the war would’ve come to resolution faster “because you don’t call them up for long periods of time for unstated goals,” Hylton says. Instead, he drafted kids who were poor and unconnected. After the war, Hylton says, “the senior leadership said, ‘We can’t let this happen again’.”
True to predictions, reservists in Iraq are making their voices heard in Washington. “Many of us have written to our congresspersons,” Capt. Blaise Zandoli, a civil-affairs reservist posted in Kirkuk, said recently after the Pentagon doubled the reservists’ mobilization time.
“All of us are completely bitter about what has happened.” Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, last month wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that said “patience is beginning to break” for families of reservists. Rep. John Murtha, the normally hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania, has begun voicing similar concern. But the White House’s “global war on terror” can’t operate without the Reserves—the National Guard supplements the infantry and the Reserves provide support services. They’re people—Midwestern farmers, young rural poor from the South, Eastern lawyers—who thought they’d pad their income in exchange for training one weekend per month, two weeks each summer and maybe a six-month peacekeeping tour in the Balkans.
Now, Secretary Rumsfeld wants to rebalance Abrams’s check-and-balance. While the administration tries to fit the ongoing war in Iraq into a more attractive frame, Rumsfeld is trying to reframe the way the nation wages war. The Pentagon calls it “rebalancing” the Army (one element in its overall military “transformation” project). It ain’t easy.
Reshuffling the Army’s organization chart while it’s at war amounts to renovating your house while you’re living in it. Rebalancing means changing the mix of men, women and metal we bring to war to reflect the fact that the United States is more likely to face guerrilla armies and terrorists (“asymmetrical warfare,” in militaryspeak) than it is to face conventional armies with divisions of tanks and organized infantry.
To a degree, it makes sense. Right now there are U.S. soldiers in Iraq doing nothing to rebuild Iraq because they’re only trained to fire artillery, or because they drive gas trucks and only drive gas trucks—and the Army isn’t firing artillery anymore and is using just a fraction of the gas it needed during heavy combat. But because troops are deployed in divisions, they come home that way, too. Rumsfeld wants to break down divisions—the Third Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division look to be first up—and deploy brigades that bring to battle only what’s relevant to the task at hand. In other words, he wants to downsize “big Army” into something more akin to nimble Special Operations units. (That’s why he tapped retired general Peter Schoomaker, former head of the Special Forces, as chief of staff of the Army.)
Critics—including Congress and some military officers—are asking whether this downsizing would simply make it easier for the United States to rush to war. Rumsfeld’s proposed “rebalancing” would convert the most heavily used reserve jobs (military police, civil affairs, psychological operations) into active-duty Army positions. That would effectively reduce the number or reservists—and the number of complaints—needed for full-scale military operations.
Rumsfeld says he’s trying to be fair. “You end up calling them [the Reserves] up over and over,” he said during a question-and-answer session on Sept. 25, “and that’s not fair to their families, and it’s not fair to their employers, and we’ve got to fix that.” But his plan will blunt the Abrams Doctrine. It will also, notes the brass in charge of the Reserves, blunt the skills of future civil-affairs soldiers because as reservists, civil-affairs soldiers hone their craft when they’re demobilized and working their law-and-order and government jobs back in the United States.
Rumsfeld’s “rebalancing” is a five-year plan. So it won’t fix the Bushies’ immediate political problem. But it might grease the skids for America’s next war. |
