Nickdfresh
10-28-2004, 05:37 PM
Last night I stayed up way past my bed time. After the jubilation of the Red Sox great victory, I was flipping around the channels and turned found pictures of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It was the local PBS affiliate replaying Frontline. The title and subject was “Rumsfeld’s War.”
Frontline recounted the past 30 or so years of America’s post-Vietnam Army, which was damaged by the conflict by rampant drug-abuse, ill-discipline, and low morale. Vietnam also sapped funds and planning time for the U.S. Army’s planned reorganization for 1970 in which the Army was to refocus on threats and plan how it will equip the force and fight for the next five-to-ten years or so as it had done in 1960 & 65'. Vietnam prevented this until 1976, or the beginning of the Carter Administration (even though many credit Reagan for rebuilding America’s armed forces, Presidents Ford & Carter had much to do with it).
Among the post-Vietnam reforms was the institution of programs at academies and schools to foster the “intellectualization” of senior Army commanders and Generals. Among the tenets of this is that the commander must be well versed in military classics from Sun-Tzu to Von Clauswitz. Based on this, the Army also came up with a doctrine that basically states that the U.S. should only fight wars with overwhelming superiority, speed, and only with the vast support of the American public. Conflicts were either high-intensity (total armored warfare) or low-intensity (counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency). The latter were to be fought only when in the absolute and dire interests of the nation was at stake.
Three Army Generals that came of age at this time were General Colin Powell ret. (now Bush’s Secretary of State and chief Rummy foil in the internal Bush Admin. blood-feuds), former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki ret.(marginalized by Rummy for saying what he believed), and former Secretary of the Army, ret. General Thomas White (fired for defending Gen. Shinseki’s comments during a phone call from Rummy).
The United States, after September 11th, went into Afghanistan. Not with large numbers of ground troops or armor (as the Soviets did), but with spies and commandos.
Pentagon planning for this had been delayed because the military was hesitant to go in fearing another debacle akin to the Soviet experience of 1979-1989. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet come up with a plan of his own-beating a chagrining Rumsfeld to the punch. The CIA would send in operatives to support the Northern Alliance (who had lost their own leader in Masood in a suicide bombing planned by Bin Laden only two days before 9/11, the bombers posed as journalists and their “camera” was packed with semtex. A red flag something big was happening that was missed by the Bush Administration). CIA paramilitary operatives would procure weapons and guide in U.S. airpower. Rumsfeld countered with a modified plan to augment CIA with Special Operations Forces and small numbers of other ground troops.
The effect exceeded even the most rosy planning scenarios. Kabul fell in a matter of weeks and the N. Alliance rolled with old Russian tanks throughout the country. But Bin Laden escaped to Tora Bora and eluded a net cast by our side-changing allies and the few U.S. Special Forces operatives there.
Buoyed by success of such a small number of troop, Rumsfeld, who apparently harbored a hard-on for Iraq very early on, along with fellow Neo-“conservatives,” Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz all began spoiling for the long dreamt about Iraqi invasion. In fact Wolfie wanted to go into Iraq before Afghanistan!
The Army was again hesitant to fight. They feared not the Iraqi Army, a shell of its former self, but the numbers of troops needed to conquer, secure, and transform a country under occupation. Rumsfeld thought this was another piece of entrenched, reactionary Army thinking. Rumsfeld was hearing from the Neocons that in fact Iraq was like Afghanistan, a paper tiger waiting to be folded.
In came ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a maverick and critic of the Pentagon’s high command. He has written several books detailing the military’s intransigence overall, impressing Rumsfeld who was trying to “Transform” the military into a force where technology and mobility replaced large numbers of troops. The brass had said Iraq would require at least 560,000 troops to adequately secure and rebuild. Macgregor ‘laughed” and said the Iraqis, like the Taliban, could be defeated with a much smaller force of about 50,000 troops utilizing special op’s and airpower, conveniently ignoring the fact that the U.S. already had a long standing foe of the Taliban and ally, on the ground in Afghanistan. Rummy was tickled my Macgregor’s optimistic outside-the-box thinking. Rumsfeld also had a long standing grudge with Gen. Shinseki over their concepts of “Transformation” according to ret. Marine General and analyst Paul Van Riper on PBS.org:
(PBS Q.) The argument between Gen. [Eric] Shinseki, Secretary [of the Army Thomas] White, and Donald Rumsfeld -- what was the debate about?
...I don't know what the difficulty was. My belief is Mr. Rumsfeld came in believing he could pay for high-tech weapons, particularly some of the things in terms of missile defense, space-based systems, by cutting two more divisions out of the Army. So his idea of transformation, I think, was pare the Army down in terms of the force structure, use the money for high tech. (Rumsfeld’s ideas are) Professionally unschooled.
The feud between Shinseki and Rummy came to a head when testifying before Congress, Gen. Shinseki was asked how many troops he thought it would take to secure Iraq. After a brief moment of silence in which Kinseki looked very uncomfortable and hesitant, he said he thought is would take “several hundred-thousand” troops to take and occupy Iraq.
Rumsfeld was furious and shutout Shinseki of day-to-day planning. Rumsfeld, right after hearing Shinseki’s opinion, called Sec. of the Army White to ask, “why would (Gen. Shinseki) say something like that?!.” White replied because he really believes it and he is compelled as a public servant to give his honest, best answer before Congress. White was fired soon after. General Tommy Franks was brought in and gave his best estimate: 300,000 troops to take Iraq. He was later brow beaten down to go along with the Neocons, but refused to sign off unless troop levels were over 100,000.
Neocons vs. Powell: The battle for Bush’s Soul:
Sec. of State Colin Powell was of roughly the same school as Gen’s Shinseki and Sec. Of the Army White. But he was aware enough that he got into several contentious, nasty scraps with Vice Pres. Dick Cheney. Powell, of whom many have said will quit his post if Bush is re-elected, essentially asked Junior, “you’re not believing this, right?”(That we should go into Iraq with what amounts to a skeletal force). Initially, believe it or not, Powell had Bush’s ear. But it was clear that the Neocons had him outnumbered. Powell, along with his ally Undersecretary Richard Armitage, was increasingly isolated and Junior gradually began to repeat the Noecon mantra that Saddam will do us in if we don’t stop him. Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that he talked about invading Iraq only four days after Sept. 11 (even before we dealt with al-Qaida or the Taliban!) while Rumsfeld asked the chief advisor on terrorist issues, Richard Clark, if he thought we should bomb Iraq. Clark was stunned and reminded Rummy that the attack probably originated in Afghanistan. As we know-the rest is history. The Neocons got their way. We invaded Iraq and the Iraqi Army quickly dissolved. Too few U.S. troops were there to fill the power vacuum that erupted, resulting in massive looting, crime, and an implacable insurgency. Terrorists now have a forum to live out their fantasy of giving the U.S. a humiating bloody nose in its own “Afghanistan” like the jihadists had done to the Soviets in 1989.
Are these the people we want in our halls of power? Is this the way to fight terrorism? The Bush administration is rife with arrogant incompetents. Rummy, Wolfie, Condi, Cheney?-These clowns, these hacks...are these jokers that the American people trust to secure our borders and defeat terrorism. This Administration lacks accountability as-well-as common sense. Driven by ideology and not reason, they have potentially drowned out the War on Terror in the swampy quagmire that has become of Iraq.
Vote for these guys? You’ve got to be fucking kidding! You do not reward incompetent employees with four more years of guaranteed employment. While John Kerry is not perfect, he at least offers a ray of hope. He offers the rational, both reason and contemplation as opposed to the illogical, ideological rationalizations of an arrogant self-serving gaggle of clowns that lack any sense of accountability.
Kerry/Edwards offer hope whereas Bush/Cheney offer only fear and implosion.
That is why I am a Republican voting for John Kerry.
Will there be a Draft or is it just rumor. I don’t know, but according to many former Department of Defense officials:
(Gen., U.S. Army-Ret.), Secretary of the Army, 2001-2003.
…Is the Army broken?
"Yeah, I think so. We're on the brink. We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year. Every other force that we've ever done this with, going back to the Vietnam period to something comparable, has been a draftee conscript force.
So what we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ... The Army is people; it's not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, "A soldier's not in the Army; they are the Army." And the quality of the soldiers [has] been the enormous advantage we've had since the volunteer force was put in place, and the quality of the noncommissioned officers corps.
Well, that is a married Army, among other things. You may recruit soldiers, but you retain families. And I think we're all concerned that we are teetering on the brink here and that if we can't get to a lower operational tempo, or at least have some point in the future that we can set our sails against where it might occur, that the Army on the manpower side's going to come unglued.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/ (http://)
Frontline recounted the past 30 or so years of America’s post-Vietnam Army, which was damaged by the conflict by rampant drug-abuse, ill-discipline, and low morale. Vietnam also sapped funds and planning time for the U.S. Army’s planned reorganization for 1970 in which the Army was to refocus on threats and plan how it will equip the force and fight for the next five-to-ten years or so as it had done in 1960 & 65'. Vietnam prevented this until 1976, or the beginning of the Carter Administration (even though many credit Reagan for rebuilding America’s armed forces, Presidents Ford & Carter had much to do with it).
Among the post-Vietnam reforms was the institution of programs at academies and schools to foster the “intellectualization” of senior Army commanders and Generals. Among the tenets of this is that the commander must be well versed in military classics from Sun-Tzu to Von Clauswitz. Based on this, the Army also came up with a doctrine that basically states that the U.S. should only fight wars with overwhelming superiority, speed, and only with the vast support of the American public. Conflicts were either high-intensity (total armored warfare) or low-intensity (counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency). The latter were to be fought only when in the absolute and dire interests of the nation was at stake.
Three Army Generals that came of age at this time were General Colin Powell ret. (now Bush’s Secretary of State and chief Rummy foil in the internal Bush Admin. blood-feuds), former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki ret.(marginalized by Rummy for saying what he believed), and former Secretary of the Army, ret. General Thomas White (fired for defending Gen. Shinseki’s comments during a phone call from Rummy).
The United States, after September 11th, went into Afghanistan. Not with large numbers of ground troops or armor (as the Soviets did), but with spies and commandos.
Pentagon planning for this had been delayed because the military was hesitant to go in fearing another debacle akin to the Soviet experience of 1979-1989. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet come up with a plan of his own-beating a chagrining Rumsfeld to the punch. The CIA would send in operatives to support the Northern Alliance (who had lost their own leader in Masood in a suicide bombing planned by Bin Laden only two days before 9/11, the bombers posed as journalists and their “camera” was packed with semtex. A red flag something big was happening that was missed by the Bush Administration). CIA paramilitary operatives would procure weapons and guide in U.S. airpower. Rumsfeld countered with a modified plan to augment CIA with Special Operations Forces and small numbers of other ground troops.
The effect exceeded even the most rosy planning scenarios. Kabul fell in a matter of weeks and the N. Alliance rolled with old Russian tanks throughout the country. But Bin Laden escaped to Tora Bora and eluded a net cast by our side-changing allies and the few U.S. Special Forces operatives there.
Buoyed by success of such a small number of troop, Rumsfeld, who apparently harbored a hard-on for Iraq very early on, along with fellow Neo-“conservatives,” Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz all began spoiling for the long dreamt about Iraqi invasion. In fact Wolfie wanted to go into Iraq before Afghanistan!
The Army was again hesitant to fight. They feared not the Iraqi Army, a shell of its former self, but the numbers of troops needed to conquer, secure, and transform a country under occupation. Rumsfeld thought this was another piece of entrenched, reactionary Army thinking. Rumsfeld was hearing from the Neocons that in fact Iraq was like Afghanistan, a paper tiger waiting to be folded.
In came ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a maverick and critic of the Pentagon’s high command. He has written several books detailing the military’s intransigence overall, impressing Rumsfeld who was trying to “Transform” the military into a force where technology and mobility replaced large numbers of troops. The brass had said Iraq would require at least 560,000 troops to adequately secure and rebuild. Macgregor ‘laughed” and said the Iraqis, like the Taliban, could be defeated with a much smaller force of about 50,000 troops utilizing special op’s and airpower, conveniently ignoring the fact that the U.S. already had a long standing foe of the Taliban and ally, on the ground in Afghanistan. Rummy was tickled my Macgregor’s optimistic outside-the-box thinking. Rumsfeld also had a long standing grudge with Gen. Shinseki over their concepts of “Transformation” according to ret. Marine General and analyst Paul Van Riper on PBS.org:
(PBS Q.) The argument between Gen. [Eric] Shinseki, Secretary [of the Army Thomas] White, and Donald Rumsfeld -- what was the debate about?
...I don't know what the difficulty was. My belief is Mr. Rumsfeld came in believing he could pay for high-tech weapons, particularly some of the things in terms of missile defense, space-based systems, by cutting two more divisions out of the Army. So his idea of transformation, I think, was pare the Army down in terms of the force structure, use the money for high tech. (Rumsfeld’s ideas are) Professionally unschooled.
The feud between Shinseki and Rummy came to a head when testifying before Congress, Gen. Shinseki was asked how many troops he thought it would take to secure Iraq. After a brief moment of silence in which Kinseki looked very uncomfortable and hesitant, he said he thought is would take “several hundred-thousand” troops to take and occupy Iraq.
Rumsfeld was furious and shutout Shinseki of day-to-day planning. Rumsfeld, right after hearing Shinseki’s opinion, called Sec. of the Army White to ask, “why would (Gen. Shinseki) say something like that?!.” White replied because he really believes it and he is compelled as a public servant to give his honest, best answer before Congress. White was fired soon after. General Tommy Franks was brought in and gave his best estimate: 300,000 troops to take Iraq. He was later brow beaten down to go along with the Neocons, but refused to sign off unless troop levels were over 100,000.
Neocons vs. Powell: The battle for Bush’s Soul:
Sec. of State Colin Powell was of roughly the same school as Gen’s Shinseki and Sec. Of the Army White. But he was aware enough that he got into several contentious, nasty scraps with Vice Pres. Dick Cheney. Powell, of whom many have said will quit his post if Bush is re-elected, essentially asked Junior, “you’re not believing this, right?”(That we should go into Iraq with what amounts to a skeletal force). Initially, believe it or not, Powell had Bush’s ear. But it was clear that the Neocons had him outnumbered. Powell, along with his ally Undersecretary Richard Armitage, was increasingly isolated and Junior gradually began to repeat the Noecon mantra that Saddam will do us in if we don’t stop him. Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that he talked about invading Iraq only four days after Sept. 11 (even before we dealt with al-Qaida or the Taliban!) while Rumsfeld asked the chief advisor on terrorist issues, Richard Clark, if he thought we should bomb Iraq. Clark was stunned and reminded Rummy that the attack probably originated in Afghanistan. As we know-the rest is history. The Neocons got their way. We invaded Iraq and the Iraqi Army quickly dissolved. Too few U.S. troops were there to fill the power vacuum that erupted, resulting in massive looting, crime, and an implacable insurgency. Terrorists now have a forum to live out their fantasy of giving the U.S. a humiating bloody nose in its own “Afghanistan” like the jihadists had done to the Soviets in 1989.
Are these the people we want in our halls of power? Is this the way to fight terrorism? The Bush administration is rife with arrogant incompetents. Rummy, Wolfie, Condi, Cheney?-These clowns, these hacks...are these jokers that the American people trust to secure our borders and defeat terrorism. This Administration lacks accountability as-well-as common sense. Driven by ideology and not reason, they have potentially drowned out the War on Terror in the swampy quagmire that has become of Iraq.
Vote for these guys? You’ve got to be fucking kidding! You do not reward incompetent employees with four more years of guaranteed employment. While John Kerry is not perfect, he at least offers a ray of hope. He offers the rational, both reason and contemplation as opposed to the illogical, ideological rationalizations of an arrogant self-serving gaggle of clowns that lack any sense of accountability.
Kerry/Edwards offer hope whereas Bush/Cheney offer only fear and implosion.
That is why I am a Republican voting for John Kerry.
Will there be a Draft or is it just rumor. I don’t know, but according to many former Department of Defense officials:
(Gen., U.S. Army-Ret.), Secretary of the Army, 2001-2003.
…Is the Army broken?
"Yeah, I think so. We're on the brink. We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year. Every other force that we've ever done this with, going back to the Vietnam period to something comparable, has been a draftee conscript force.
So what we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ... The Army is people; it's not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, "A soldier's not in the Army; they are the Army." And the quality of the soldiers [has] been the enormous advantage we've had since the volunteer force was put in place, and the quality of the noncommissioned officers corps.
Well, that is a married Army, among other things. You may recruit soldiers, but you retain families. And I think we're all concerned that we are teetering on the brink here and that if we can't get to a lower operational tempo, or at least have some point in the future that we can set our sails against where it might occur, that the Army on the manpower side's going to come unglued.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/ (http://)