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DEFENSE
The General Who Got It Right on Iraq
Los Angeles Times (CA)
December 26, 2004
Author: Frank Gibney; Frank Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin
Institute, is a professor of politics at Pomona College and author of "The
Pacific Century" and other books on Asia and foreign policy.
When Donald H. Rumsfeld swooped down on the Pentagon in 2001 as President
Bush's secretary of Defense, Gen. Eric Shinseki must have looked like a
natural ally to him. Like Rumsfeld, Shinseki wanted to "transform" the
armed services and had announced his plan for changing the Army when he
became chief of staff in 1999.
But Shinseki's notion of transformation differed substantially from
Rumsfeld's. To the new Defense secretary, transformation meant greater
reliance on technology, not troops, to achieve goals; to Shinseki, it meant
more intensified training, featuring highly mobile medium-light brigades of
mechanized infantry capable of a variety of missions.
Their philosophical clash became public when the United States went to war
against Iraq. The preemptive attack relied on overwhelming air power and
deployed a bare minimum of ground troops. Asked by a Senate committee to
estimate the number of troops needed for the operation, Shinseki said
"several hundred thousand." Rumsfeld's office immediately denounced the
number as "wildly off the mark." But the disastrous experience in postwar
Iraq has proved the general right: Security remains elusive because the
numbers of U.S. and coalition forces on the ground are inadequate.
Since his retirement in June 2003, Shinseki has restricted his public
appearances to foreign policy and university audiences. Early this month at
Pomona College, he outlined his policy for a post-Cold War Army equipped to
deal with a multitude of duties.
Here are some excerpts:
* The Army's job: "During the 1990s, we used the Army for many
nontraditional tasks -- humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, wildfire
control and peacekeeping, among others -- but the Army's nonnegotiable
contract with the American people is to fight and win wars. We grow our own
leadership -- thorough troop training is our most vital mission -- but we
need about 180,000 new people each year, so recruiting is a vital task. For
a professional Army, it must not slip."
* The limits of force: "In my time in uniform, the use of force was often
not the preferred solution; neither was it necessarily the first option
considered.... Once the use of force is sanctioned, there's almost no
turning back.... Lethal force involves blunt trauma and surgical strikes,
[which] better describe a military planner's range of options than they do
the effects produced on the ground.... We can pinpoint targets with total
accuracy ... as long as they don't move."
* Military occupation: "If your forces are in Baghdad, you own it. And that
means you own the water, the electricity, the public buildings -- and
public order. If the task is to create a secure environment, troops on the
ground are needed."
* Multilateralism: "Unilateralism as a stated policy is bad. The U.N. and
this country have had our differences, but we need its cooperation and
support."
* Crisis management: "I was personally involved ... in dealing with
explosive crises in East Timor and Bosnia. The U.S. needed to help get
Indonesia right and to link whatever happened in Indonesia to a
comprehensive long-term strategy for the region. In Bosnia, the effort at
peacekeeping took a long time, but after nine years the forces needed there
greatly diminished -- from 20,000 to 8,500. How long would it take to
stabilize Iraq?"
* Threats and complicators: "In the Bush administration's first appraisal
of defense needs, reference was made to 'asymmetric threats transcending
geography.' Little was said about the kinds of 'complicators' that those of
us who lived abroad in the 1990s were watching. These complicators -- the
best term we could find at the time -- included transnational criminal
organizations, international narco-trafficking, the surge in terrorist
incidents involving Muslim extremists and the suspicion of ongoing
proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology. The nagging
question for which the Army had no answers was, 'What happens if the four
complicators merge into a larger transnational threat? Whose responsibility
will it be to deal with that kind of danger?' "
* Force levels. "We need to have enough forces on the ground to deter and
hold crises where they are. You can't fall into the trap of organizing for
specific missions and then being unable to perform other missions when the
conditions change very quickly -- and in places like Kosovo, they can
change in 20 minutes. You may find yourself having to go very quickly,
intellectually and physically, from what was a peacekeeping mission to
fighting a war -- and preparing the troops for this [shift]. And with the
missions multiplying, you cannot go on fighting a 12-division war with only
10 divisions available."
What puzzled many of us who had listened to Shinseki was the contrast
between his emphasis on careful military planning and how shortsighted the
administration was in preparing for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
Before the war, Shinseki's Army planners were not once consulted by
Rumsfeld's office. The State Department's planning proposal for postwar
Iraq was similarly ignored by the administration.
It was a case of an outside group of civilian neoconservatives moving into
the Pentagon and arrogantly taking over the military. Heedless of any
advice to the contrary, Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" attack gained an
apparent quick victory at the cost of postwar policy. Some 20 months after
the fall of Baghdad, Iraq remains in pieces, with anti-American fervor
strong and our military victory tarnished by a stubborn insurgency and the
needless brutalities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
If this is what Rumsfeld's idea of "transformation" has brought us, it's a
pity we didn't try Shinseki's.
Edition: Home Edition
Section: Opinion
Page: M-3
Index Terms: Opinion
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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