Funmurphys: the Blog

We Just Disagree

Donald Sensing and Jason Van Steenwyk look at the same Frederick Kagan article on Donald Rumsfeld and the war and have different views on it's correctness. I think Jason presents the better arguments that Rumsfeld isn't as bad as he's made out to be.

Two quick interjections of my own -- I think it's wrong to claim that:
"The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America's military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong."

The simple truth is that transformation of the Army is to fight the current war --the war against Islamofascism -- not some far off war in the future. It's just that it takes time, and is in fact harder to transform while fighting, but it is necessary.

And I for one am getting a little tired of the whole "Shenseki warned us we'd need a lot more troops" for the simple reason that Shenseki's intent wasn't an honest assessment but just another in a long list of deliberately setting the requirements too high for action to occur. The Army doesn't have the manpower to sustain the force levels Shenseki said it would take to take and hold Iraq - it can barely sustain the levels we are using.

He and his Army predecessors always required too much and threw up too many roadblocks throughout the Clinton presidency and so the Army never took action -- it was the Navy and Airforce in successful actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Navy in fruitlless cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afganistan. In Kosovo, when finally ordered to send in Apaches, the Army fiddled around with force protection and training issues long enough to keep their precious helicopters out of harm's way. When Shenseki told the Bush adminstration his ridiculous estimate of the manpower and time requirements for any action in Afganistan, that was the end of Shenseki's influence and the end to inaction. And if Shenseki was such a brilliant guy, why didn't he push transformation in 1998 instead of WWII redux?