I'm not saying that people on Futurework could have done a better job but we certainly read the signals better than the mediocrities in Washington. The puff pieces that the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld have on the government sites expose the one sidedness of their experience. They are basically bureaucrats with a certain amount of business experience at the top who took the money and ran back to the place that they loved to hate. Washington, D.C. They spent most of their early life there and are now back for a last hurrah. They are mediocre without Nixon's erratic genius to direct them and with an inexperienced poor little rich boy, they are totally out of their league.
The military mind may not be the most flexible in the world but they do have their expertise. One ignores it at their peril. Truman understood it from the bottom up. One would have thought that Rumsfeld's military experience would serve him better but he seems to need a real leader with the knowledge from experience rather than just the authority of the office. Now would be a good time for Junior to ask Dad a question or two. REH Critics say Rumsfeld plan ignored obvious pitfalls By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON -- Five days into the war, the optimistic assumptions of the Pentagon's civilian war planners have yet to be realized, the risks of the campaign are becoming increasingly apparent and some current and retired military officials are warning there may be a mismatch between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's strategy and the force he has sent to carry it out. The outcome of the war isn't in doubt: Iraq's forces are no match for America and its allies. But, so far, defeating them is proving to be harder, and it could prove to be longer and costlier in American and Iraqi lives, than the architects of the American war plan expected. And if weather, Iraqi resistance, chemical weapons or anything else turns things suddenly and unexpectedly sour, the backup force, the Army's 4th Infantry Division, is still in Texas, with its equipment sailing around the Arabian Peninsula. Despite the aerial pounding they've taken, it's not clear that Saddam Hussein, his lieutenants or their praetorian guard are either shocked or awed. Instead of capitulating, some regular Iraqi army units are harassing American supply lines. Contrary to American hopes -- and some officials' expectations -- no top commander of Saddam's Republican Guard has capitulated. Even some ordinary Iraqis are greeting advancing American and British forces as invaders, not as liberators. "This is the ground war that was not going to happen in [Rumsfeld's] plan," said a Pentagon official. Because the Pentagon didn't commit overwhelming force, "now we have three divisions strung out over 300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing." Asked Monday about concerns that the coalition force isn't big enough, Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke replied: "Most people with real information are saying we have the right mix of forces. We also have a plan that allows it to adapt and to scale up and down as needed." Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 American troops to the war on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days. Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Saddam once the Americans attacked. The officials said Rumsfeld also made his disdain for the Army's heavy divisions very clear when he argued about the war plan with Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander. Franks wanted more and more heavily armed forces, said one senior administration official; Rumsfeld kept pressing for smaller, lighter and more agile ones, with much bigger roles for air power and special operations troops. "Our force package is very light," said a retired senior general. "If things don't happen exactly as you assumed, you get into a tangle, a mismatch of your strategy and your force. Things like the pockets [of Iraqi resistance] in Basra, Umm Qasr and Nasiriyah need to be dealt with forcefully, but we don't have the forces to do it." "The secretary of defense cut off the flow of Army units, saying this thing would be over in two days," said a retired senior general who has followed the evolution of the war plan. "He shut down movement of the 1st Cavalry Division and the1st Armored Division. Now we don't even have a nominal ground force." He added ruefully: "As in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, we are using concepts and methods that are entirely unproved. If your strategy and assumptions are flawed, there is nothing in the well to draw from." In addition, senior administration officials said Rumsfeld and his civilian aides rewrote parts of the military services' plans for shipping U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf, which they said resulted in a number of mistakes and delays, and also changed plans for calling up some Reserve and National Guard units. "There was nothing too small for them to meddle with," said one senior official. "It's caused no end of problems, but I think we've managed to overcome them all." Robin Dorff, director of national security strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., said three things have gone wrong in the campaign: . A "mismatch between expectations and reality." . The threat posed by irregular troops, especially the 60,000-strong Saddam Fedayeen, who are harassing the 300-mile-long supply lines crucial to fueling and resupplying the armor units barreling toward Baghdad. . Turkey's threats to move more troops into northern Iraq, which could trigger fighting between Turks and Kurds over Iraq's rich northern oilfields. Dorff and others said that the nightmare scenario is that allied forces might punch through to the Iraqi capital and then get bogged down in house-to-house fighting in a crowded city. "If these guys fight and fight hard for Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening their resistance at the point of a gun, then we are up the creek," said one retired general. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
