|
US rebellion
over missile shield
Ed Vulliamy in New York Sunday July 15, 2001 The Observer As the United States prepared the trial launch of a rocket system due to form part of the controversial Son of Star Wars defence screen last night, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld - master of the plan - was facing a rebellion among his own military chiefs and in the US Congress. Rumsfeld's senior generals and Republican party leaders are angry that he and a politically-appointed clique are taking decisions over the National Missile Defence screen and other reforms. Pentagon sources report that senior military commanders, cut out of the decision-making loop, met recently to raise questions about Rumsfeld's strategy. General Gordon Sullivan, former chief of staff of the Army last month called the direction of Rumsfeld's reforms 'imprudent'. Most critics of the missile defence project say the US arsenal should be offensive not defensive. Others point to what they claim are insurmountable technological difficulties. But in the Pentagon, objections concern control over the next generation of weapons. To secure his reforms, say officials, Rumsfeld has taken the helm with little or no consultation with traditional military figures. He has employed a corps of right-wing strategic thinkers headed by Andrew Marshall, chief of an obscure Office of Net Assessment, who has been charged with an 'immediate, comprehensive review of our military'. To oversee this shift, Rumsfeld is to set up a Crisis Co-ordination Centre overseen by his own office and with little input from the military. It will be answerable to him and his old friend and protg Vice President Dick Cheney. One signpost of the new direction was the directive that the US military should no longer measure its capacity by the traditional yardstick of being able to fight two simultaneous theatre conflicts. The directive is unpopular not only with Army generals who fear losing up to 10 entire divisions, but with Senators and Congressmen whose vote base relies on employment in defence-based industries. Among those is the Republican leader in the upper house, Trent Lott, whose fiefdom of Mississippi contains some of the Navy's largest shipyards and old-style 'pork' contracts. An aide in Senator Lott's office says that he feels left 'in the dark' by defence reviews. The defence industry is itself unhappy, say Ullman and Donnelly, because the kind of research that Rumsfeld urges is expensive, requiring vast capital investment, rather than the production line and 'brink-of-deployment' hardware that brings quicker business and profits. |
